The queen of pandemic literature, Motown’s founding father, Shakespeare online, and reader reaction: newsletter, April 24, 2020

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Katherine Anne Porter and American pandemic literature

Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one of the books that many people are turning to in these days of the coronavirus pandemic. So, they should. It’s probably the best of America’s pandemic-related literature.

The autobiographical novel, set in the midst of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, features a heroine Miranda and her soldier lover Adam. Adam is about to be deployed, and the Miranda comes down with a serious case of the flu, one that almost kills her.

Miranda survives, as did Porter, but the ending is not a particularly happy one.

Michael Agresta, writing for the Texas Monthly:

Pale Horse, Pale Rider’s enduring reputation perhaps stems from Porter’s willingness to look death in the face through a masterfully psychedelic fever sequence set in an overcrowded hospital. Writing for the New Yorker in 1944, the critic Edmund Wilson lauded Porter as “a first-rate artist,” with a literary project both sophisticated and subtle that “may be able, as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, to assert itself only in the delirium that lights up at the edge of death.” Source: The Seminal Novel About the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was Written by a Texan – Texas Monthly

Porter, the survivor of a difficult childhood in Texas, was writing for the Rocky Mountain News and living in Denver in 1918 when she was struck with the flu. She barely lived through it. It left her completely bald, and when her hair grew back, it was white — the color that it remained for the rest of her life.

Porter left Denver and went to New York City where she worked as an editor, writer, and ghostwriter, and she got involved in leftwing politics. For the next decade she traveled back and forth between New York City and Mexico, where she worked for a publisher and connected with the political movement of Diego Rivera. She was also part of the movement protesting the execution of anarchists Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists in the Boston area who were convicted in 1921 of a bombing and who died in the electric chair in 1927. One of her last works, The Never-Ending Wrong, published in 1977, was about that protest.

Porter published Flowering Judas, a collection of short stories, in 1930 and an expanded edition, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, in 1935. This second volume won her critical praise and established her as a top-tier member of American letters. Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three short novels, came out in 1939. Porter was noted for her clear, precise writing and disciplined style. Despite the critical acclaim these and other works received, they did not bring her financial stability. Nor did her four marriages, each of which ended in divorce.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Porter wrote articles and commentaries, received grants, traveled widely, and taught at various universities and a visiting lecturer. In 1962, she published her only full-length novel, Ship of Fools, which was both a financial and critical success. The book was made into a movie directed by Stanley Kramer and was the final screen appearance of Vivian Leigh. 

Porter won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1966 for her volume The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.

Porter died in 1980 at the age of 90 in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The state of the bees: making honey

The bees are now well into their first month on the farm. There should be a population explosion inside the hives by the weekend because the first eggs that the queen has laid will be coming out of their cells as brand new worker bees. Eggs take 21 days to develop and hatch.

Outside the hives, the fields are full of crimson clover blooms, something that is not only a fantastic sight for humans but is like a five-course meal for bees. Honeybees make honey by gathering nectar from flowers, but they don’t use every bloom in the garden. Many flowers are constructed so that the nectar is too difficult for the bees to find and extract. Therefore, bees will bypass many flowers and blooms and go to where they can easily get the nectar. Crimson clover is one such plant, and the blooming season is at its peak.

Several years ago, I made a video about the bees’ honey-making process — how they gather nectar from flowers, process that nectar, store it in the cells of the hive, and continue to process it until it becomes the honey that we love. Here’s the link to that video: https://youtu.be/ca3GYPhFmME

The blooming season for bees lasts for the next two months, through May and June. Toward the end of June, we will look inside the hives to see how well the bees have done at their honey-making tasks.

Berry Gordy began Motown with an $800 loan from his family

Not quite 30 years old in 1959, Berry Gordy needed money.

Gordy was from a solid, hard-working African-American family in Detroit —  a family that emphasized discipline and education — but Berry, the seventh of eight children, had not accomplished much in his first three decades. He had been in the Army, which he didn’t like. He had had various jobs, but Berry didn’t care for labor very much. He had tried to make it as a professional boxer, but that turned out to be not his thing. His wife was divorcing him, and he was fearful of losing contact with his children

What he liked was music, and Detroit’s active musical scene was the place he wanted to be. He thought of himself as a songwriter, but the more he learned about how things worked, the more he envisioned himself as a producer. He had an idea for producing records, but he needed money. About a $1,000 would do, he thought. He didn’t have any money, and his friends were unable or unwilling to part with theirs.

After exhausting every other resource, he turned to his family. The Gordy family was not rich, but it had a fund to which every working member was required to contribute $10 a week. The main purpose of the fund was to buy real estate if they needed it; it was not meant to finance wild-brained ideas like producing a record album.

Still, with the family sitting around the dining table one evening, Berry made his pitch for $800 and was hammered with questions, especially from his sister Esther. What had he ever done? What success had he ever had? How was he going to pay the money back? Two other sisters, Gwen and Anna, said they were for giving him the money. A third sister, Loucye, agreed. Esther held out.

Their mother and father, Barbara and Berry Sr., sat in silence. When the children looked at them, they nodded. That left Esther as the lone holdout, and the vote had to be unanimous. Okay, she said, but the first money Berry made had to go toward repaying the fund.

Gordy got his money, but he also learned something valuable. “I knew right then,” he wrote later, “if I ever made money, she (Esther) would be the one I’d get to watch it for me.”

Make money he certainly did. It wasn’t an easy road, but Gordy took his family’s money and turned it into Motown Records. He found and developed talent among Detroit’s African-American community, and as Motown’s reputation grew, musicians from all over the country migrated to Detroit. Gordy was convinced that the strict segregation that had heretofore ruled popular music — there was black music and there was white music — could be overcome. He wanted to sell black artists to white audiences.

Gordy did that by not only controlling the music but also the appearance, dress, and choreography of the artists whose records he produced and promoted. In doing so, Motown Records became and remained the richest black-owned business in America for several decades. Gordy went on to a wide-ranging career that included not only records but also television and movie productions. By 2000 he had divested most of his interests in Motown Records and its progenies.

In 2016, Gordy was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Gordy is currently 90 years old.

See these previous posts about Motown:

Fifty years ago, Marvin Gaye asked What’s Going On?

Please, Mr. Postman