I was a very bad writer to begin with, and I knew it, because I knew what the standard was –– and is, so far as I have been able to learn. But write I would, it was a passion and a compulsion and a long ordeal, but I had no choice. Many times I gave up, and tried very hard to turn to something else. It was no good. Besides my reading, I had no masters or teachers. I never even read a book on how to write, I’m not sure there were any, when I was sixteen. And I got no encouragement from my environment; on the contrary, a bitter and furious opposition from family and the society around me; entirely irrational and personal, it was deep enough to lead to the break-up and shattering of the life I felt hardening around me. I got out of that place as if I were leaving a falling house in an earthquake. And then I faced my little private destiny and took on my work: wrote three novels and burned them; wrote dozens of stories and destroyed them. Worked at various jobs to support myself –– not very good at it, but I lived. Finally, one day –– I was just back from Mexico, when I was about twenty-eight years old, I sat down in a room in an old square in Washington Square South, now disappeared, and decided that I would finish a certain short story, no matter what. It took seventeen days and nights, quite literally: I kept no hours, but ate when I could, and slept a little when I was exhausted. But I finished it, and that battle was fought for good: writing will never be anything but hard work, but I crossed my deepest river then and there…
You might think this was a great how-do-you-do for just a little story, but it was exhilarating, illuminating, one of the most profoundly happy moments of my life. I’ve had some tussles since, and I have loved them. The great good I have had from writing has been just exactly the writing itself. Nobody promised me anything for it; I never expected to have a ‘career.’ I never showed a manuscript to anybody in my life except to the editor I sent it to when it was finished, with one exception. I had written a story in one evening, but I did not trust it. It threw around among my papers for about a year, then I asked a friend whose judgement I trusted to read it… I am still not really capable of judging my own stories. I write them, and I have to trust myself without question; if by now I cannot rely upon my power, such as it is whatever it is, why then, what was my life for?
Of course now I feel my work was not enough, not as good as I hoped it would be, and it is only half-finished, if that. Once I lived as if I had a thousand years to squander, now, I pray for time. I’ve got four books to do yet.
'No Masters or Teachers' [New Voices 2: American Writing Today, 1955]
Use the link below to read about the life and work of North American writer, essayist and journalist KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1890–1980):
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