Antonieta Rivas Mercado: Katherine Anne Porter's Horror and Inspiration

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Antonieta Rivas Mercado: Katherine Anne Porter's Horror and Inspiration

Darlene Harbour Unrue

Maria Antonieta Rivas Mercado was born in a mansion in Mexico City on April 21, 1900, the second daughter of Matilde Cristina Castellanos de Rivas Mercado, an educated, loose-living beauty, and Antonio Rivas Mercado, a professor at the San Carlos Academy and the distinguished architect who at the request of President Porfirio Diaz created the famous El Angel, the monument to independence, on the Paseo de la Reforma.1 In her early years Antonieta was educated by tutors and governesses and by her parents. By the time she was four she could play classical pieces on the piano, dance well, and read and write in both Spanish and French. When she was ten years old, her mother left the family to live in Paris. By the time Cristina returned to Mexico in 1915, Antonio refused to let her move back into the family residence. Antonieta, who had not seen her mother for five years and already felt abandoned, considered the banishment justified.

Between 1915 and 1917 Antonieta was her father's hostess for social affairs and with his indulgence and encouragement expanded her intellectual and artistic pursuits. Intensely interested in philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Friedrich Nietzsche and writers such as Francois Rabelais and Maxim Gorky, she flouted Catholic Church doc- trine by reading whatever she wanted. She began to hold salons for other like-minded Mexican intellectuals and aesthetes and scandalized the more conventional people in the city. At an amateur gala at which she danced and sang, she met and fell in love with Albert Blair, a young British-born, American-bred engineer who had been educated at the University of Michigan. With Antonio's grudging permission they married within the year.2

Ten years older than Antonieta, the stocky blond Albert had rigid ideas about the proper role of a wife and none of Antonieta's intel-

Darlene Harbour Unrue is distinguished professor in the Department of English, Unversity of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Journal of the Southwest 47, 4 (Winter 2005) : 615-635

616 * Journal of the Southwest

lectual or artistic interests. Of Scottish descent, he was firmly Calvinist, while she was Roman Catholic, even if unorthodoxly so. Blair had been drawn into the Mexican Revolution by two of his Michigan classmates, sons of Francisco I. Madero, who overthrew Diaz in 1910, whereas the aristocratic Rivas Mercado family had benefited from the patronage of Diaz and after his removal had suffered at the hands of brutal peasant revolutionaries. At the time of her marriage Antonieta had little reason to feel sympathetic to the revolution.

The Blairs moved back and forth between Albert's primitive ranch in the state of Durango and an apartment in the Rivas Mercado mansion and immediately confronted the difficulties in a marriage of discordant personalities, symbolized in simple terms by Antonieta's preference for the invigorating society of Mexico City and Albert's fondness for the isolation of the ranch, to which he forbade Antonieta to bring her books. Antonieta was miserable without the stimulation of reading, and the summer after their son, Donald Antonio (Tofiito), was born on September 9, 1919, she fled with him to her father's home in Mexico City, never to live with Albert again.

The Madero Revolution that unseated Diaz and in which Albert Blair fought initiated two decades of upheaval and devastation. Elected president in 1911, Madero was ousted and killed in 1913, a victim of power struggles among factions led by Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and others. In the chaos of civil war Victoriano Huerta claimed the presidency in 1913-1914, and Venustiano Carranza, after ruling the country provisionally for two years, was elected president in 1917. Car- ranza, however, was assassinated in May 1920, and in September Alvaro Obregon was elected to replace him.3 As preparations for the December inauguration were in progress, Antonieta, still wary of revolutionary regimes, stayed out of the political arena and resumed her literary salons and her former social life.

A month before the inauguration, Katherine Anne Porter arrived in Mexico City. She was thirty years old, three times married and divorced, childless, rootless, trying to support herself with freelance writing.4 While living in Greenwich Village in 1919-1920 she had become acquainted with Mexican artists and musicians who in the summer of 1920 encouraged her to go to Mexico, where, they told her, exciting changes were going to be instituted by a newly elected revolutionary president. Intrigued, she collected assignments from several magazines and set out on the adventure.5

Antonieta Rivas Mercado * 617

Katherine Anne Porter was born in a small log house on May 15, 1890, in the frontier community of Indian Creek, Texas. Christened Cal- lie Russell Porter, she was the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter and (Mary) Alice Jones Porter, a genteel, handsome couple, well educated for their time and place, who made their living by farming a piece of land owned by Alice's father. The Porters' third child, a son, had died shortly before Callie's birth, and less than two years later Alice Porter herself died after the birth of her fifth child, another daughter. Harrison then took his four surviving children to Hays County, Texas, to live with his domineering widowed mother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter.6

From 1892 to 1901 Callie lived in the secure dominion of her aristocratic, iron-willed grandmother, who tried to instill her version of Cum- berland Presbyterianism in her grandchildren while entertaining them with romantic tales about her affluent family in antebellum Kentucky and Virginia and grim stories about the hard times in Texas during the Civil War and Reconstruction.7 When his mother died in 1901, Harrison, who had no plan for making a living, set forth with his children on a sequence of long visits with relatives and short stays in rented houses while he picked up odd jobs as teacher, salesman, and farm laborer. Harrison, who valued education, placed his children in school whenever possible, however briefly, and in 1904 scraped together enough money to send his son to a military school and his daughters to he Thomas School, a well-regarded private Methodist educational institution in San Anto- nio.8 Although Callie's single year there was the only sustained formal education she would have, she had been an avid reader from an early age, and by the time she left the Thomas School she was widely read in Dostoevsky, Turgenev, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire, Chaucer, the Brontes, and other "older" writers. During that year she also developed her musical and dramatic talents and began to call herself "Katherine Porter." Soon she was giving her name as "Katherine Anne Porter," aligning herself with her indomitable grandmother.

In 1906 sixteen-year-old Katherine Anne Porter married nineteen- year-old John Henry Koontz, the son of a prosperous Texas rancher.9 Inexperienced, she married with romantic illusions and the comforting expectation that she would have economic security in the Koontz family. Her illusions and expectation were soon shattered. Her husband, who held jobs first as a stenographer with a railway and then as a salesman with a cotton manufacturing company, proved to be parsimonious and physically abusive. For eight years Porter endured his drunken attacks,


during which he threw her down stairs and beat her, once with a hair- brush until she lost consciousness. She feared for her life, but it took her a year to stash away enough money to flee to Chicago, where she worked briefly as an extra in the movies before returning to Texas and divorcing Koontz in 1915. 10 During the nine years of her marriage she converted to the Roman Catholicism of the Koontz family and continued her apprentice writing and self-education, reading five or six books a week and discovering the "moderns" - notably Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce.11

Between 1915 and 1919 Porter contended with poverty, tubercu- losis (in 1915-1917), the failures of her second and third marriages, and a near-fatal bout of influenza in the epidemic of 1918. Her arrival in Greenwich Village in the fall of 1919 followed a year of journalistic writing for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado, during which she formulated an aesthetic theory and sharpened her writing skills.12

In 1920 Katherine Anne Porter and Antonieta Rivas Mercado (she informally had dropped her husband's name) despite many economic differences in their birth and upbringing had significant common experiences. Both had been abandoned in one way or another by their mothers and had been reared by literate, liberal-minded fathers. Both had failed at marriage but were intellectual and multitalented. Both, too, were well-read, independent women who interpreted Roman Catholicism liberally and created scandal by flouting marriage customs in their respec- tive countries. Antonieta, whose Rivas Mercado nose was sharp, was not considered beautiful, but, tall and slender, she had a style and an elegance that dazzled as readily as Katherine Anne's beauty and charm.

In 1920 and 1921, the two women nevertheless walked parallel paths in Mexico City, where Katherine Anne, unlike Antonieta, was instantly caught up in the headiness and idealism of the social revolution. As she wrote her family the last day of 1920,

There are [a] thousand delicious things to tell you,. How one goes to a party at Chapultepec Castle one afternoon and drinks tea and champagne with the President - a former marauding General and in no time at all attends the Lottery ticket sellers ball in company with the greatest Labor leader in Mexico - and many others - and dances until two o'clock with one eyed men, and marvelous carbon colored Indians in scarlet blankets, who dance divinely - and one staggers home in the gray of the morning with vine leaves and confetti in one's hair. And goes that afternoon to a bull fight."13

Antonieta Rivets Mercado * 619

As an expatriate activist she joined the Mexican women's movement as the seventy-ninth member of Consejo Feminista de Mexico (The Women's Council), was occasionally a courier for Labor Secretary Luis Morones (her escort at the inauguration ball), developed a philosophical aversion to Roman Catholicism, and became an outspoken sympathizer with the Indian peons.14

Despite Porter's revolutionary activities and the high- government social life she described to her family, she had been in Mexico only a few weeks before she began to have doubts about the revolution's likely success. An astute observer, she saw cross -purposes in the aims and personalities of the revolutionaries. Two essays she wrote during 1920 and 1921, "Where Presidents Have No Friends," a survey of ambition and betrayal among Mexican leaders, and "The Mexican Trinity," an analysis of the complex political relationship among the Catholic Church, rich hacienda owners, and foreign (especially U.S.) oil interests, reveal her reservations and the reasons for them. She returned to the United States in the late summer of 1921, disillusioned with Mexican politics but still sympathetic to Mexican women and Indian peons and friendly with scientists, such as the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, and artists, such as Adolfo Best Maugard, in the intellectual and imaginative wing of the revolution.15

Porter made her second trip to Mexico in the spring of 1922 at the request of President Obregon himself, who asked her to organize an exhibit of Mexican popular art for transport to the United States and to write a pamphlet to accompany it.16 It was during this visit that she no doubt met Antonieta Rivas Mercado, probably at the studio of Diego Rivera, who had been one of Antonieta's father's students at the San Carlos Academy and had become Antonieta's friend.

Diego fascinated Katherine Anne as "one of the great artists of the world"17 and as the model for characters in stories she was writing.18 She was among those women who went to admire the master at work and mixed paint for him (in some instances a euphemism for sleeping with him), and she routinely joined him and his model, later to be his wife, Lupe Marin, at popular Mexico City cafes such as Los Monotes. Antonieta, too, joined Diego and Lupe at those cafes, and like Kather- ine Anne, through him became friends with other painters such as Jean Chariot, Pablo O'Higgins, Miguel Covarrubias, Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), and Carlos Merida and with expatriates such as Americans Carleton Beals and Frances (Paca) Toor and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.19


There is no possibility that Katherine Anne Porter and Antonieta Rivas Mercado did not know each other well. They traveled in the same set.

In 1922 Antonieta's social conscience took fire, as had Katherine Anne's two years earlier, and like Katherine Anne, she became as pas- sionate about women's rights as she was about literature and philosophy, joining the Women's Council that Katherine Anne had joined in the late fall of 1920. Antonieta wrote,

I think it's generally accepted, that women are "good" and men are scoundrels. I believe that "goodness" is really passivity. The Mexican woman allows herself to be used as a floorboard for masculine license - because basically she's afraid of men. Look at it from her perspective. She's trained to be submissive from the moment she's born. Submissive to her father, submissive to her brothers and all the males around her. As wives, Mexican women tolerate and suffer. As mothers, they suffer and tolerate. I'm con- vinced that only through education will the Mexican woman be exorcised of that passivity which has chained her for generations and generations.20

This was essentially the same position Katherine Anne had set forth in her 1921 essay "In a Mexican Patio."

When Katherine Anne returned to Mexico in 1923 for her third visit in three years, this time to edit a Mexico number for the magazine Survey Graphic, Antonieta already had gone to Europe with her father and son. Although the two women did not see each other during this visit, Katherine Anne had a chance to become acquainted with more persons who were, or later would be, part of Antonieta's group, including Americans Alma Reed, an authority on Mexico,21 and lone Robinson, a young painter who had come to Mexico to study with Diego,22 and the Italian American photographer Tina Modotti.23

In Paris and Madrid between 1923 and 1926, Antonieta increased her intellectual and literary knowledge, had her first affair, published feminist articles, and continued futile efforts to divorce Albert Blair. When she returned to Mexico in 1926 she revived her literary salons and her association with Diego and became intimate friends with Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, an eccentric, bisexual artist whom Katherine Anne also knew and admired.24 Kathryn Blair described Antonieta in 1928 with images similar to those that had swirled around Katherine Anne eight years earlier: "Life took on a new hue, a new accelerated pace.


Antonieta moved from her crowded salons to popular cafes to Manuel's studio to the sawdust-covered floors of dance halls, a life that moved to the sensuous rhythm of rumbas and tangos, fast-stepping danzonesznd the paso doble. She became a devotee of the bullfight and mixed with threadbare intellectuals and women with florid vocabularies."25

In 1928 Antonieta also became part of a group called Contem- poraneos. Advocates for progressive ideas and avant-garde art, they favored Eugene O'Neill, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Andre Gide26 - writers Katherine Anne had discovered in the last years of her marriage to Koontz and during her first Greenwich Village months. Antonieta had family money, especially after the death of her father in 1927, and she used some of it to found El Teatro Ulises, an experimental theater; to establish with Carlos Chavez, a friend of Katherine Anne's, a national symphony; and to open El Pirato, a dance hall, on the premises of the convent of San Jeronimo, once the home of the seventeenth-century nun, mystic, intellectual, feminist poet Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, whom both Antonieta and Katherine Anne lavishly admired and whose sonnet Katherine Anne translated and published in 1924.27

Antonieta was drawn further into the revolutionary government when she was recognized by Moises Saenz, an undersecretary in the Department of Education and another friend of Katherine Anne's, as an extraordinary woman of ideas and given space in the conservatory at San Carlos to work on projects that included introducing poetry, dance, and theater in the public schools.28 She was closer than ever to Diego, who was deeply involved in the Mexican Communist Party. As Kathryn Blair wrote, the sight of the two of them driving down Paseo de la Reforma in Antonieta's Cadillac convertible, a black fur laprobe over their legs and Diego leaning on his painted wooden cane, invited gossip. A tabloid writer asked, "What do the chairman of the Russian Anti-Imperialist League and 'the Muse of the Contemporaries' have in common? Could it be romance?"29 It was similar to a question that had once been asked about Katherine Anne and Diego.30

Throughout the 1920s Porter was thinking about Mexico whether she was there or not. Considered an expert on Mexico, she was often asked to review books on Mexico, and she published essays and stories inspired by what she called her "second country."31 By 1922 she also was working on a novel she tentatively called "The Book of Mexico," an episodic work loosely held together by common setting and themes and incorporating events and characters drawn from the Madero-to-Obregon


phase of the revolution. But the flush of idealism that stimulated her in her first weeks in Mexico in 1920 was long gone and nowhere apparent in her notes for the novel. By the mid- 1920s she concluded that Luis Morones had caved in to self-interest and "done badly."32 Plutarco Elias Calles, Obregon's minister of gobernacion, whom she had admired for his anticlericalism in 1920, she considered not only a corrupt politician but also, as she was to say later, "a quite dangerous thug."33 Perhaps the most interesting change was her revised opinion of Jose Vasconcelos, an intellectual idealist, president of the national university, and minister of education in Obregon's cabinet, who had hired her in 1921 to teach dancing in one of the secular girls' schools he had established. In the early months of 1927 reviewing a book coauthored by him and Manuel Gamio, Porter wrote, "Mr. Vasconcelos . . . professes faith, more especially in the Mexican Indian, and rejects alien paternalism, but preaches a vast religious native paternalism fully as debilitating to his people. Mr. Vasconcelos has an incurable, almost romantic faith in the perfectability of human nature.34 This was severe criticism from one who had tried, and failed, to sustain a similar romantic faith in the revolution.

By 1928 Porter's early pessimistic view of Mexican politics seemed to her to have been confirmed. Many of the revolutionaries she had known in 1920 and 1921, such as Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the socialist leader and governor of Yucatan, had been arrested and shot by firing squads or had mysteriously disappeared. There were so many attempted coups of Obregon that it was surprising he finished his first term in 1924. According to the Mexican constitution, presidents could not succeed themselves, and Obregon was followed by Calles. In 1928 Obregon was elected president again, but before he could assume office he was assassinated, and Calles appointed Emilio Portes Gil interim president.

Early in 1929 Vasconcelos announced that he was running for president. Antonieta met him on Palm Sunday and, enraptured with both him and his political agenda - which included suffrage for Mexican women - she joined his campaign. Soon, despite the fact that he was married and a father, they became lovers.35

In the early fall of 1929 Antonieta went to New York to gather support and money for Vasconcelos. Katherine Anne was in New York at the time too, and they surely saw one another at bawdy cabarets and Harlem nightclubs and in the circle of Mexican and Spanish artists and musicians in which they both moved. They would have socialized with painters Rufino Tamayo (with whom Katherine Anne had once had a

Antonieta Rivas Mercado < 623

romantic entanglement) and Clemente Orozco and also with Gabriela Mistral, who was teaching at Columbia University. Katherine Anne, in fact, had begun drafting a long essay comparing Sor Juana and Mistral, two artistic women who, like her and Antonieta, had been forced to choose between the physical ("ardor for human love, for maternity, for the earth, the world of the senses") and the intellectual ("the world of ideas").36 Both Katherine Anne and Antonieta would have avoided like the plague Alma Reed, who was also in the city and whom Katherine Anne had come to dislike for her exploitation of the death of her fiance, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, briefly Katherine Anne's lover in 1920-1921, and who had offended Antonieta by accusing her of promoting a false, romantic view of Mexico in her attempt to advance Vasconcelos.

Despite the efforts of Antonieta and many others, in December Vas- concelos was declared the loser in a fraudulent election that placed Calles's puppet, Ortiz Rubio, in the presidency.37 A distraught Anto- nieta, whose family money was running out, suffered a nervous break- down that required hospitalization. When she felt able to travel, she took a train to California to meet Vasconcelos, who had fled Mexico in fear of his life. After a few weeks, she secretly entered Mexico, collected her son, and took him to France. The plan was for Vasconcelos to join her there as soon as possible.

Porter had temporarily turned away from her Mexican materials after she began to mine her childhood memories, personal experiences, and ancestral history for her fiction. In 1929, however, she returned to the Mexican material and finished "Flowering Judas," originally imagined as a segment of "The Book of Mexico." The story was accepted by Hound &Horn for its Spring 1930 issue. Shortly afterward, Porter met with editors at Harcourt, Brace to discuss both a limited edition of a collection of her stories, to be called Flowering Judas, and her Mexican novel, which she had re-envisioned and whose title she had changed to "Thieves Mar- ket," a reference to Mexico City's historic, bustling wholesale market, El Mercado del Volador. The result was that in March 1930 Harcourt, Brace offered her two contracts, one for the completed story collection and one for the novel in progress. With advances on both books, Porter went back to Mexico to complete the novel.

Porter should have been feeling good, even ebullient. But she wasn't. Her low state of mind was tied to her approaching fortieth birthday on May 15 and her feelings of failure. Wanting to think of herself as an artist, she had neither made her mark on American literature nor succeeded in


supporting herself with earnings from her writing. In the other way that seriously mattered to her, she had failed at both marriage and mother- hood, feminine ideals handed down from her paternal grandmother and achievements she ascribed to her dead mother.

Once settled in Mexico, Porter, deeply depressed, was unable to make progress on "Thieves Market." She countered her writer's block with frenetic socializing and a romantic relationship with Eugene Pressly, a young American diplomat whom she would marry in 1933. But nothing lifted the darkness that enveloped her, not even the publication of Flowering Judas in September to glowing reviews that established her reputation in the upper echelon of American letters.38 Correspondence with friends and family in the United States disclosed her gloom and cynicism - beginning with her estrangement from her family. "I am the only person I know," she wrote her sister Gay, "who has been so far as human relations go, without a family. ... I know well ... if I had depended on the love of any of you I should be good and dead by now."39 She lamented the commercialization of Mexico and lambasted persons who had once been her friends - Adolfo Best Maugard, Carleton Beals, Paca Toor, Moises Saenz, and especially Diego, who had severely disappointed her by accepting a $22,000 commission from the American Ambassador Dwight Morrow to decorate ("to spoil," she said) Cortez's palace in Cuernavaca.40

Porter remained melancholy and her writing moribund as 1930 ended and 1931 began. In January she wrote Allen Tate, "God knows I cannot get a paragraph to please me these days. . . .I'm terrified . . . and have a recurring dream of Time as a thing past, done forever, I stand in a world in which nothing has changed apparently, but nothing more can come to pass because there is no more Time. And this dream has more horror than any ferocious nightmare filled with monsters, such as we have in childhood."41 Katherine Anne, in fact, had fought some degree of depression most of her life, as had Antonieta, who at the age of fif- teen described her own recurrent nightmare: "I am crawling toward a pit where wild beasts are kept. Their roar is deafening as I come closer, unable to conquer my fear or stop my advance. . . . What drives me toward the pit? Is it because my stomach is empty? William James says that we are the architects of our own fate, but how can I build on this emptiness which sucks me down?"42

Several weeks after Porter's letter to Tate, her life and art changed. On February 12 Antonieta Rivas Mercado dressed herself elegantly in a


black dress and stylish veiled hat, stole a gun, and went to the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. At the altar, kneeling before the image of the crucified Christ, she shot herself through the heart.43

All of Mexico City soon heard details of the suicide: Antonieta had settled in Bordeaux with Toiiito to wait for Vasconcelos to join her. Making plans for collaborating with him on a political magazine, she lived frugally with her young son in a cold boarding house, working on a novel and studying Latin. Finally, after six long months, she received word from Vasconcelos that he was in Paris, and she left Toiiito with her landlady in Bordeaux while she went to meet her lover in a left-bank hotel. She saw a changed and broken Vasconcelos, however. Although he told Antonieta that he loved her, he also told her that his wife and one of his sons were to join him in Paris in a few weeks. Already in despair over the loss of her fortune and over the Mexican courts' refusal to grant her a divorce from Albert Blair, Antonieta had received a final, devastating blow.44 It was Vasconcelos's own gun she stole from a dresser when his back was turned.

In Paris and Mexico City there was considerable speculation on Anto- nieta's motives and state of mind. Was her suicide in Notre Dame an act committed in the most blasphemous way she could imagine and a denunciation of the church? Was it to ensure the damnation of her soul? Or was it, as many chose to believe, a last act carried out in the most sacred place she could find and an abject plea for forgiveness? But what about abandoning her son in Bordeaux? Many people asked how she could have done that. Arturo Pani, the Mexican consul in Paris, broke the news to Vasconcelos and Toiiito and negotiated the child's return to Mexico and his father.45

Katherine Anne, who because of her own battle with depression always reacted strongly to mental breakdowns or suicides of people she knew, must have been thoroughly shaken at the news of Antonieta's death. She would have seen Antonieta's suicide as the result of what she described the summer before as "a horrible distress of mind"46 that had gone to its final extreme. She and Antonieta had suffered in so many similar ways: like Antonieta, Katherine Anne had herself "abandoned" a child, hers through an abortion she had had in Mexico in 1921, and also, like Antonieta, she had had many betraying lovers, including her three husbands, who, like Antonieta's Albert Blair and Jose Vasconcelos, had fallen far short of her illusions and expectations. Ten and eleven years ago she was romantic, idealistic Antonieta's age and in love first with the


revolutionary Felipe Carrillo Puerto and then with the Nicaraguan poet Salomon de la Selva, who had fathered the child she aborted. Katherine Anne knew that despite the rationality she clung to - and that infused her art - there was an aspect to her nature that was as incurably naive as Antonieta's.

It was doubtless Katherine Anne's eerie identification with Antonieta that sobered her and yanked her back from the brink of despair on which she had been hovering for nearly a year. The artist in her, however, had to see the beautiful possibilities in the drama, and she reported suddenly having "the leading thread" of "Thieves Market," which only the month before had been "plotless," with "everything happening at once" and "all the characters immobilized in their entanglement with one another."47 She declared to friends on the third week of February, "After all the hell-raising you can imagine, my book is really going. But going! I must have written one hundred thousand million words, and the manuscript was piling up around me, and yet somehow I COULD NOT get the hang of the thing. That's past, and the thing has a shape. Let me announce the new title and the new plan."48 She was calling it "Historical Present," and it had two parts, a Book of Men and a Book of Women. Like the earlier "Book of Mexico" and "Thieves Market," it was to be set in Mexico between 1910 and 1931. The first part was to be the stories of seven men, and the second part, the stories of seven women. Models for six of the men were Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Luis Morones, Jerome Retinger (an intellectual Polish expatriate and another of Katherine Anne's lovers in 1921), Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros (an artist who was Diego's Communist associate and well acquainted with Antonieta), and Moises Saenz. The seventh male character was "Juan Fulano de Tal," whose surname translates as "Anybody." Models for six of the women were Alma Reed, Mary Doherty (Katherine Anne's close friend who worked for Saenz with Antonieta), Lupe Marin, Tina Modotti, lone Robinson, and Antonieta. The seventh female character was "Juana," a representative Indian maid. All the women except the fictional version of Alma Reed were to be presented as independent women who were innocent victims of imperfect men. Antonieta, whose fictional character was to be called "Antonia," was the center of the circle.

Porter told Malcolm Cowley near the end of February that to save her life she didn't know how or why "the main problems" with her stalled novel "cleared themselves up between four and five o'clock one afternoon a few weeks ago" - a loosely designated time that coincided with


news of the death of Antonieta. "It was like the breaking of a dam," she wrote. "I have been in better health ever since and have energy enough for everything."49

The depression was broken, it is true, but other events interfered with the progress on the novel. Only a few weeks later Porter learned that she had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that would enable her to go to Europe for at least a year. She told herself that she would finish the novel in Europe, and she spent the remaining five months in Mexico surrounding herself with visitors and creating diversions.

The novel was never completed in the form she described to friends at the end of February. But the novel's "leading thread," inspired by the life and death of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, remained intact and reappeared from the 1930s through 1962 in stories, short novels, and Ship of Fools, her only long novel.50 "The Cracked Looking-Glass," published in 1932, is the story of a once -beautiful, no-longer-young, romantic Irish woman who clings to dreams and illusions to compensate for the ordeals of her marriage to an ailing, practical-minded, older man. It was a conflict Porter reversed in "A Day's Work" (1940), in which it is the husband who is a feckless dreamer, and "That Tree" (1934), the story of a ruined marriage between an idealistic poet and a puritanical wife whose drama is played out in Mexico in the declining stage of the failed revolution, a mirror reflection of the marriage of Antonieta and Albert Blair as well as a direct representation of that of Carleton and Lillian Beals, a couple both Katherine Anne and Antonieta considered friends. Hacienda (1934), the long, fictional version of an article Porter published in 1932, is the account of an unnamed narrator's visit to a pulque hacienda to watch a Russian moviemaker film scenes for a motion picture intended to show the success of the revolution. It is ironically apparent, however, that the initial idealistic aims of the revolution have been overcome by the grim realities of its failure, lessons Porter and Antonieta experienced.51

The themes of disillusionment and failed idealism dominate Porter's short novel Old Mortality (1938), the story of Miranda Gay, Porter's most autobiographical character, who with her older sister, Maria, con- fronts the falseness of the romantic legend surrounding their beautiful, dead Aunt Amy, their father's favorite sister, and her handsome, melancholy suitor and short-time husband, Gabriel. Porter also treats the themes in The Leaning Tower ( 1941 ), a story written in the early phrase of World War II and based on her and Pressly's stay in Berlin in the


fall and early winter of 1931. The quixotic ideal here is not love but a romanticized Germany described by Kuno, the German American childhood friend of the protagonist, Charles Upton, who arrives in Berlin expecting to find the realization of idyllic picture postcards Kuno had sent at the turn of the century and discovers instead poverty, hopeless- ness, greed, and desperation. The idealization of places was something Porter understood well. Although, unlike Antonieta, she relinquished her early idealized view of Mexico as a country, all her life she clung to a Utopian view of the village of Amecameca, vowing repeatedly to return and live her life out there.

Ship of Fools, Porter's only long novel, is her most elaborate and sophisticated exploration of the hollowness of romantic idealism. In the mid- 1930s she conceived the novel, based on the voyage she and Pressly made from Mexico to Germany in August and September of 1931, and she worked on it sporadically for nearly thirty years until it was published in 1962. An episodic satire, Ship of Fools, rich in its analysis of humanity and the seeds of totalitarianism, focuses most intensely on the concepts of home and love in all their manifestations. The vast majority of the passengers and crew of the North German Lloyd ship the Vera are going home to Germany. The others are traveling to a place they think will be better than the one they left. The irony is, of course, that in 1931 during the rise of Nazism they are going to the near-collapse of modern civilization.

Love, the illusion of love, the betrayal of love, the perversion of love - all are presented in the novel. The one example of true romantic love on board the ship is that of a bride and groom from Guadalajara, Mexico, on a honeymoon trip to Spain. "Walking in their own Eden," they are fated to learn, Porter implies, that love ensures suffering and that its original purity will be either destroyed or reduced to something much less within the cauldron of quotidian cares and losses.

That romantic love is doomed to failure was a lesson Porter had learned personally over and over, and that idealism is destined to defeat by a brutal reality was a lesson she learned as witness to the revolution in Mexico during the 1920s. A few of her early stories set in Mexico had treated the subject of sentimental idealism glancingly,52 but in February 1931 she suddenly saw the theme in a strong, new light. The life and death of Antonieta Rivas Mercado and her failed love affair with Jose Vasconcelos clarified for Porter what was to be the broadest controlling theme for the remainder of her fictional canon. *


Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, biographical facts about the Rivas Mercado family are drawn from Kathryn Blair's In the Shadow of the Angel, which although slightly fictionalized in imagined dialogue and interior thoughts, is faithful to the facts of Antonieta's history and supported with documents, memoirs, and personal interviews. In Mexico it is considered the definitive biographical saga of the Rivas Mercado family. Kathryn Blair translated Antonieta's words from both published and unpublished works. For information about the relationship between the Rivas Mercado family and Diego Rivera, see also Wolfe.

2. All biographical information about Albert Blair is also drawn from Blair's In the Shadow of the Angel. He is mentioned, however, in Beals's Glass Houses.

3. For a summary of the 1910-1936 Mexican Revolution, see Dulles, Hall, and Hart.

4. Porter's arrival in Mexico is recorded in her daybooks (Katherine Anne Porter, hereafter KAP, Papers, University of Maryland, College Park). For an account of her marriages, see my Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, pp. 40-41, 46, 50, 54, 56-57, 72, 88, 176, and 220.

5. For an account of KAP's time in Mexico, see Walsh. 6. See my Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, pp. 3-17. 7. See KAP, "Portrait: Old South" and my Kathenne Anne Porter: The Life of

an Artist, pp. 12-17. 8. See chapter 4, "Adolescence," in my Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an

Artist. 9. Joan Givner discovered the identity of Porter's first husband and significant

facts about the Koontz family. See Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, pp. 86-103.

10. John Koontz signed a list of abuses against his wife that included these and others. Certified copy of Divorce Judgment no. 19893-C, Katherine Porter Koontz vs. J. H. Koontz, filed 20 May 1915, District Court 68, Dallas County, TX. An autobiographical account of KAP's work for the Essanay Film Manufactur- ing Company in Chicago is included in her papers at the University of Maryland, College Park.

11. KAP, "Reflections on Willa Cather," The Collected Essays, pp. 33-34. 12. See my Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, pp. 59-65. 13. KAP to family ("Dear Darlings"), 31 December 1920, unpublished letter,

KAP Papers, University of Maryland, College Park. Quoted with permission of the University of Maryland Libraries and Barbara Thompson Davis, trustee of the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Estate.

14. See KAP, "The Fiesta of Guadalupe." 15. KAP met Best Maugard in New York in 1919-1920, and he was among the

Mexican artists and musicians who persuaded her to go to Mexico. She had plans to work with him on a ballet for Anna Pavlova portraying the history of Mexico, and they saw one another frequently while she was in Mexico sporadically from 1920 to 1931. He was the model for the character Betancourt in her short novel Hacienda.

630 v Journal of the Southwest

16. In KAP Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park is a telegram from J. H. Retinger informing her that Obregon had appointed her to head the popular art exhibit. More than twenty years ago when I was in Mexico City interviewing persons who had known Katherine Anne Porter there between 1920 and 1931, I met Kathryn Skidmore Blair, whose father, Edgar Skidmore, had been casually acquainted with Porter. Although Mrs. Blair had no firm evidence, she felt sure that Porter also would have known her mother-in-law, Antonieta Rivas Mercado de Blair, whose biography she intended to write. The name meant nothing to me at the time, but as soon as I heard the story of Antonieta I agreed that it was likely the two women had met. A few years after my meeting with Kathryn Blair, I found among Porter's papers at the University of Maryland, College Park, proof that she was well aware of Antonieta and probably knew her personally. More than a decade later I discovered that Antonieta's life and death in fact had had a profound effect on Katherine Anne Porter and her art.

17. KAP to George Sill Leonard, [May-June 1922], incorporated in an article by Leonard, "A Letter from Mexico and the Gleam of Montezuma's Golden Roofs."

18. "The Martyr" was the only story about Diego she completed and published.

19. Gabriela Mistral was the pen name of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. At the time Antonieta and Katherine Anne met her, she had an established reputation as both a feminist and a poet. Her Lecturas para mujereswzs published in 1923.

20. Blair, 515. 21. See Reed's The Mexican Muralists. 22. Robinson in her autobiography, A Wall to Paint On, mentions Antonieta and

her contributions to the artistic and intellectual movement in Mexico (p. 115). 23. See Hooks, who mentions Modotti's acquaintance with Antonieta (pp.

188 and 209) and includes a photograph Modotti made of Antonieta in 1929 (p. 201).

24. KAP to Robert McAlmon, 5 February 1934, McAlmon Papers, the Beinecke Library, Yale University; carbon copy at MD. Antonieta's love letters to Lozano are included in her Obras completas.

25. Blair, 471. 26. With Xavier Villaurrutia Antonieta translated Gide's VEcole desfemmes into

Spanish as La escuela de las mujeres. 27. See KAP, "To a Portrait of the Poet." 28. Kathryn Blair to the author, 15 August 2005. 30. 29. Blair, 478-179. 30. See Lopez, Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter, pp. 62-63. According

to Lopez, it was the painter David Siqueiros, a close associate of Rivera's, who said that Porter had had "an affair" with Rivera.

31. KAP, "Go little book . . ." [preface!, Collected Stories, p. v. 32. KAP to Harrison Boone Porter, n.d. [1928] and KAP, Mexico notes, KAP

Papers, University of Maryland, College Park.


33. This Strange, Old World," 105-6. 34. KAP, "Paternalism and the Mexican Problem" (review of Some Mexican

Problems, by Moises Saenz and Herbert I. Priestly [Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1926] and Aspects of Mexican Civilization, by Jose Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926]); "This Strange, Old World,»p. 53.

35. See Antonieta's uLa campana de Vasconcelos" in her Obras completas. Vascon- celos drew on her chronicle for his own memoirs. See also Blanco and Marentes.

36. Fragments titled "Notes on Two Spanish American Poets" are in KAP Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park.

37. In addition to Blair, see Vasconcelos, Obras completas, volume 4, ElProcon- sulado, 248-53, 265-69.

38. See Hilt and Alvarez for a list of reviews, and the introduction to my Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter for a summary of Porter's critical reception.

39. KAP to Gay Porter Holloway, 10 October 1930, KAP Papers, University of Maryland, College Park.

40. KAP to Ernestine Evans, 3 October 1930, notes from letter, KAP Papers, University of Maryland, College Park.

41 . KAP to Allen Tate, 27 January 1931, Papers of Allen Tate, Princeton Univer- sity Library; carbon copy in KAP Papers, University of Maryland, College Park.

42. Blair, 319. 43. In addition to Blair, see Pani. 44. Antonieta's Bordeaux diary is included in her Obras completas. Vasconcelos

drew on it for his memoirs, where he thinly disguises Antonieta's identity by assign- ing her the name "Valeria," presumably to protect her reputation.

45. See Pani. 46. KAP to Kenneth Burke, 20 July 1930, Kenneth Burke Collection, Penn

State University; copy in KAP Papers, University of Maryland, College Park. 47. KAP to Caroline Gordon, 28 January 1931, Caroline Gordon Papers,

Princeton University Library; carbon copy in KAP Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park.

48. KAP to Josephine Herbst and John Herrmann, 20 February 1931, Josephine Herbst Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University; carbon copy in KAP Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park.

49. KAP to Malcolm Cowley, 25 February 1931, Cowley Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago; carbon copy in KAP Papers at the University of Maryland, Col- lege Park.

50. 1 first studied idealism in Katherine Anne Porter's fiction in the early 1980s, but I did not know then about her relationship with Antonieta Rivas Mercado. See chapter 3 ("Ideals") of my Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, pp. 106-45.

51. The filmmaker in the story was a thinly disguised portrait of Sergei Eisen- stein, and Hacienda, based on KAP's earlier article ("Hacienda"), was an account of her visit to the hacienda where Eisenstein and his crew were filming scenes for what would become Que viva Mexico!.


52. See "Virgin Violeta," "The Martyr," and "Flowering Judas," as well as fragments of stories such as "St. Martin's Summer," which she seemed unable to complete until 1932, when she recast and retitled it "The Cracked Looking-Glass."

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Antonieta Rivas Mercado: Katherine Anne Porter's Horror and Inspiration

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