pale horse pale rider by katherine anne porter

Miranda watched the door where he had disappeared for quite a while, then closed her eyes, and thought, When I am not here I cannot remember anything about this room where I have lived for nearly a year, except that the curtains are too thin and there was never any way of shutting out the morning light.

He left it, though, I saw him.”Īdam moved about searching the tables and the mantelpiece. “Where is it, the prescription?” asked Adam. The doctor tapped my chest and left a prescription and said he would be back, but he hasn’t come.” I was at the telephone once, for Bill told me he would send an ambulance and have me taken to the hospital. “No,” said Miranda drowsily, “but I think I have been asleep all day. I called Miss Hobbe here and she said you were in bed and couldn’t come to the telephone. I called the office and they told me you were not coming in today. They kept me longer than I expected, I was late. I was called back suddenly to camp for a lot of inoculations. She was very vain as a beauty and just as vain as a writer, and this latter vanity perhaps accounted for a good deal of the waiting and stalling, a stalling filled with romantic diversions. She was dilatory perhaps, but the completed work as we now have it does not reveal any deformation of character, and indeed is quite expansive enough in theme and achievement to satisfy the claims of her high reputation. Sometimes she claimed to have written certain stories at one sitting, but it is known that many were started and abandoned, taken up again and made into something new.

Everything necessary seems at hand: language and scenery, psychology and memory, and a bright esthetic intelligence that shapes the whole. The writing is not plain and yet it is not especially decorative either instead it is clear, fluent, almost untroubled, one might say.

It is not easy to define the purity of style. Katherine Anne Porter, from the first appearance of her stories, made her mark, impressed other writers, by the way she wrote. Albert Pinkham Ryder: The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), 1900

Pale horse pale rider by katherine anne porter