From Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
In April 1928, Katherine Anne Porter wrote to her sister from New York:
My book is grand if I do say so, only it isn’t out yet. I’ll get it in proof in a few weeks, however. I was supposed to have it done last fall, and again this spring, and so of course I’ll make it only a year late—good time for me—in September. You’ll all get copies, and I hope you hear of it in every newspaper, for they’re planning to advertise it like a circus.
Porter had just moved from Salem, Massachusetts, where she had been finishing up research for that first book, a biography of Puritan leader Cotton Mather. Despite the cheerful progress report to her sister, the truth was she didn’t have much (if any) of the book done—and there was certainly nothing that would be ready to be “in proof in a few weeks.” Porter’s publisher, who had advanced her a total of $600 in anticipation of a twice-postponed fall release, had already prepared the jacket and advertising for a book that didn’t exist.
“Now I find myself having elected to do a thing that requires merely a constant exercise of my merely surface abilities,” she wrote in her journal, “and have got myself into an emotional state over it that keeps me from working, and I find myself drifting again to a condition of inertia and apathy, a desire to give up.” She never did finish the biography. Instead, she turned again to fiction and over the next half decade, while traveling from New York to Bermuda to Mexico to Europe, she finished the nine tales that would make up Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935).
Among those tales was “Theft,” a brief story inspired by several enervating encounters and affairs she endured during the course of the year she was supposed to be completing the biography. We present it as our Story of the Week selection, along with an introduction detailing the relationships that troubled her—and her complicated feelings of responsibility for their occurrences.
