One Singer To Mourn

The terminal stages of Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, in which the heroine, Miranda, has contracted the Spanish flu and hovers between life and death for weeks and Porter takes us inside the hallucinatory conscious/unconscious states that Miranda experiences, make one think of Kafka or of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narratives. Except Porter was writing from experience, having herself contracted the Spanish flu and nearly dying of it. A writer with lesser gifts would’ve simply glossed over Miranda’s delirium, but Porter takes us down into them and shows us around a human mind on the border of life and death. 

For Porter, Miranda’s story was “nearly pure autobiography,” since she, too, had been a reporter for a hick newspaper (the Rocky Mountain News) in Denver in 1918, when she was 28. She was swept up in the pandemic that killed close to 700,000 Americans, more than the number of soldiers who died in the Civil War, and she came so close to succumbing to it that the hospital made funeral arrangements for her. 

Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water turning upon itself for all eternity . . . eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders, staring into the pit, thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. I shall not know when it happens, I shall not feel or remember, why can’t I consent now, I am lost, there is no hope for me. Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear. But she could not consent, still shrinking stiffly against the granite wall that was her childhood dream of safety, breathing slowly for fear of squandering breath, saying desperately, Look, don’t be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.

There is a moment in her delirium in which Miranda assents to death, finding herself in a shimmering landscape lit by an eternal morning light where a crowd of people approach her:

Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure identities and she knew them every one without calling their names or remembering what relation she bore to them. They surrounded her smoothly on silent feet, then turned their entranced faces again towards the sea, and she moved among them easily as a wave among waves. The drifting circle widened, separated, and each figure was alone but not solitary; Miranda, alone too, questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy, stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always morning. 

Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly from sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely smiling familiar beings about her, Miranda felt without warning a vague tremor of apprehension, some small flick of distrust in her joy; a thin frost touched the edges of this confident tranquillity; something, somebody, was missing, she had lost something, she had left something trainable in another country, oh, what could it be? There are no trees, no trees here, she said in fright, I have left something unfinished. A thought struggled at the back of her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as if a curtain had fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out. Oh, I must go back! But in what direction? Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running 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 coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand.

Miranda’s feverish hallucinations, both strange and somehow familiar, her nearness to death and her painful and mournful progress back to life reminded me of the Rilke poem, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” in which Eurydice has died and Orpheus follows her into the Underworld and so charms Hades and Persephone with the beauty of his music that he persuades them to allow Eurydice to return with him. But only on condition that, on their journey back, Orpheus must not look at her. If he does, the bargain is nullified. Accompanied by Hermes, on their journey back to the surface world - to life - Orpheus can't resist looking back at Eurydice and - -

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around —,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.(1)


Just as Miranda is awake again, she hears the noise of bells and singing in the streets outside the hospital. The war was over. But her young man, Adam, the soldier with whom she had reluctantly fallen in love, had died of the flu. Porter ends the novel with a defiant flourish:

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.

The ending reminded me of another ending of another defiant and sad novel, Cesare Pavese’s The House on the Hill:

I don’t believe that it can end. Now that I’ve seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: “And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?” I wouldn’t know what to say. Not now at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only the dead know, and only for them is the war really over. (2)


(1) Stephen Mitchell translation.
(2) The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese, translated by R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1968).