SOURCE: “‘Mingled Sweetness and Corruption’: Katherine Anne Porter's ‘The Fig Tree’ and ‘The Grave,’” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, May 5, 1988, pp. 111–25.

In the following essay, Titus discusses the relationship between aspects of Porter's life—particularly the death of her mother—and her short stories “The Grave” and “The Fig Tree.”

Earth, my tender, soberly smiling mother, oh fruitful nourisher, oh demonic fury, oh drinker of blood, insatiable devourer of rotting flesh!

[Notes: Mexico 1921, copied Basel 1932]

From 1930 to 1940 was Katherine Anne Porter's most productive decade. Her best work from this time, Old Mortality and the short pieces that make up The Old Order, originated in efforts to write Many Redeemers, a novel rooted in a family history that was half fiction, half fact. Porter drew on several sources as she imagined her novel.¹ She conducted genealogical research, aptly described by her biographer Joan Givner as “typical of her...