FLU TOOK A TOLL ON PULITZER WINNER PORTER
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Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) (Published as Rocky Mountain News (CO)) – December 20, 2003Browse Issues
- Author/Byline: Mary Winter
- Edition: Final
- Section: Home Front
- Page: 2E
- Readability: 11-12 grade level (Lexile: 1240)
Katherine Anne Porter was, by all accounts, a beautiful woman. Petite and dark-haired, the thrice-married, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist was often described as glamorous. Her signature color, at least when she lived in Denver, was gray. She loved gray sheer stockings, gray gloves (or “gauntlets,” as she called them) and gray, hooded coats. Her perfume of choice was Bois d’Hiver.
Porter was 28 when she landed a reporting job at the Rocky Mountain News. It was fall 1918. War raged in Europe, and the Spanish flu was sweeping that continent as well as America.
As I wrote last week, Colorado’s recent flu epidemic pales in comparison with that one, when at least 2,000 Coloradans died. Denver’s mayor banned all “public assemblages,” hospitals had waiting lists and the names of the deceased appeared daily in the News.
Porter stayed in Denver only 11 or 12 months, but they were tumultuous, tragic months of war and pestilence, and she captures them all in her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, published in 1939. The title is from a Negro spiritual she heard as a child in the Texas cotton fields: “Pale horse, pale rider, done take my lover away . . . ”
The largely autobiographical love story centers on her ill-fated affair with a handsome Lowry lieutenant and her crippling, near-fatal bout with flu.
Porter lived in a two-story brick rooming house at York Street and East Colfax Avenue, now the John Hand building, home of Colorado Free University and Sushi Heights restaurant.
But much of Pale Horse is set in the newsroom of the Rocky, then at 1720 Welton St. The protagonist is a young theater critic, Miranda, a name Porter assumed in all subsequent writings about her real-life experiences. She covers productions at the Orpheum, the Denver Auditorium, the Broadway and the Tabor.
In her year at the News, Porter wrote 81 bylined stories and many more unsigned ones. During the summer of 1919, right before she left Denver for Greenwich Village, she wrote a weekly feature called “Let’s Shop With Suzanne!,” an amazingly contemporary-looking full page filled with drawings of merchandise from Denver stores and tidbits such as “Mais Qui! C’est Exquis! Truly delightful is the Chantilly lace hat shown in the Joslin millinery department. A large hat, with wide brim of lace, into which has been woven the daintiest of brides’ roses . . ..”
Porter concocted this page for the News to supplement her $18 weekly reporter’s salary.
We know these details thanks to a 1961 University of Colorado master’s thesis, Katherine Ann Porter’s Years in Denver, and the helpful folks in the Western-history department at the Denver Public Library who discovered it for me.
In her thesis, Kathryn Adams Sexton, who died in 1995, interviewed such Denver luminaries as the late poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Denver Symphony Manager Helen Black, both of whom were reporters who worked with Porter in 1918.
They recall the News building, its extremely narrow stairway to the second-floor newsroom, its smoky corridors and Underwood typewriters and the Greasy Spoon cafe, all of which Porter writes about in Pale Horse.
Miranda’s love is Adam Barclay, the name of Porter’s real-life paramour. In the story, as in real life, Barclay was at Porter’s bedside on York Street as she battled the flu. About to be shipped overseas, he leaves briefly to get inoculations when an ambulance finally arrives to take Porter to Denver General Hospital.
“A terrible compelling pain (ran) through her veins like heavy fire. The stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a course white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body.”
Porter was admitted to Denver General in early October. She was still there Nov. 11, Armistice Day, when “from the ward of old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing ‘My country, ’tis of thee . . .’ ”
Porter was still in Denver General when she received a letter informing her that Adam had died of flu a month earlier at an Army camp.
Porter survived. But her hair turned white and then fell out. She broke her arm the first time she tried to rise to a sitting position. Flu left her with phlebitis in one leg.
She eventually recovered and left Denver to travel the world and write for leading magazines. She finished her best seller Ship of Fools in 1962 at age 72. She died at 90 in a Maryland nursing home.
In her declining years, Porter was interviewed in Denver about her time here. “They gave me up,” she told the reporter. “The paper had my obit set in type. I’ve seen the correspondence between my father and sister on plans for my funeral. I knew I was dying, . . . but I didn’t die. I mustered the will to live.”
Her eyes welled with tears when she spoke of Adam: “He died. The last I remember seeing him . . . It seems to me that I died then. I died once, and I never have feared death since.”
LIB1
- Memo: RIGHT AT HOME
Mary Winter, a News assistant city editor, writes from her home at mwinte@aol.com.
