"Most people won't realize that writing is a craft," Katherine Anne Porter once said. "You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else." A recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for her short stories, Katherine Anne Porter was undoubtedly a master of her craft. As Edmund Wilson observed, "Miss Porter writes English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary American fiction."
In this excerpt from her essay "The Necessary Enemy," first published in 1948 and reprinted in The Collected Essays of Katherine Anne Porter (1970), she employs a series of memorable metaphors in her comparison of the twin forces of love and hate in a marriage.
from "The Necessary Enemy"
by Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
Love. We are early taught to say it. I love you. We are trained to the thought of it as if there were nothing else, or nothing else worth having without it, or nothing worth having which it could not bring with it. Love is taught, always by precept, sometimes by example. Then hate, which no one meant to teach us, comes of itself. It is true that if we say I love you, it may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe. Say I hate you, and the one spoken to believes it instantly, once for all.
Say I love you a thousand times to that person afterward and mean it every time, and still it does not change the fact that once we said I hate you, and meant that too. It leaves a mark on that surface love had worn so smooth with its eternal caresses. Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked . . . hate, the unspoken word, the unacknowledged presence in the house, that faint smell of brimstone among the roses, that invisible tongue-tripper, that unkempt finger in every pie, that sudden oh-so-curiously chilling look--could it be boredom?--on your dear one's features, making them quite ugly. Be careful: love, perfect love, is in danger.
If it is not perfect, it is not love, and if it is not love, it is bound to be hate sooner or later. This is perhaps a not too exaggerated statement of the extreme position of Romantic Love, more especially in America, where we are all brought up on it, whether we know it or not. Romantic love is changeless, faithful, passionate, and its sole end is to render the two lovers happy. It has no obstacles save those provided by the hazards of fate (that is to say,society), and such sufferings as the lovers may cause each other are only another word for delight: exciting jealousies, thrilling uncertainties, the ritual dance of courtship within the charmed closed circle of their secret alliance; all real troubles come from without, they face them unitedly in perfect confidence. Marriage is not the end but only the beginning of true happiness, cloudless, changeless to the end. That the candidates for this blissful condition have never seen an example of it, nor ever known anyone who had, makes no difference. That is the ideal and they will achieve it.
Selected Works by Katherine Anne Porter
- Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930)
- Noon Wine, short novel (1937)
- The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944)
- Ship of Fools, novel (1962)
- The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1970)
Originally published in 1948, "The Necessary Enemy" was reprinted in both The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Delacorte Press, 1970) and Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue (Library of America, 2008).
