Reading in the Arroyo: An Occasional Column About Books

It's late October, and this year's curtain between the living and the dead is extra gauzy, maybe even a bit moth-eaten. The surging numbers of coronavirus can make for a daily jump scare, not that we need to go looking in a season that's otherwise frightening in every possible way.

With all the fixation on "these unprecedented times," a phrase that also seems fairly moth-eaten by now, I sought to escape into something instructively scary for Halloween: horror, but make it historical, and maybe with a lesson of sorts. I settled on a literary relic set during a similarly ghastly time—the 1918 flu pandemic, which infected about a third of the world's population in three or four successive waves, depending on whom you ask (just like now!).

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter's 1939 triptych of short novels, reminds us that a pandemic raging across the world is indeed precedented. This one anointed an entire wartime generation with the toll of 675,000 unexpected US deaths—and it happened personally to Porter, a much-forgotten early practitioner of Southern gothic horror.

Born in Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890, Porter already had three divorces under her belt by the time she arrived in Denver in September 1918 as a newly hired reporter at the Rocky Mountain News. In October, she contracted the influenza that was laying waste to World War I soldiers and citizens in Denver. She nearly died. After months of convalescence, she was discharged from the hospital completely bald. Her hair came back snow-white and stayed that way for the remainder of her life.

This near-death experience (truly a scary story to tell in the dark) is central to the final tale in Porter's collection of novellas. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a young theater critic at the fictitious Blue Mountain News named Miranda is enjoying a fledgling love affair with Adam, a soldier bound any day now for the European theatre of WWI, when she contracts the deadly flu virus.

Before her dance with death begins, Miranda's inner monologue crackles with sassy proto-feminist wit. One unpleasant dude at the newspaper with a bad habit of sitting on Miranda's desk is drolly described as "a pursy-faced man, gross-mouthed, with little lightless eyes." Miranda seems to resent the majority of her entitled male coworkers, knowing her theater beat is merely a "routine female job." She and the society columnist, Ye Towne Gossyp, are "considered fools by the rest of the staff—nice girls, but fools." They and other young women are expected to buy war bonds they can't afford and to cheer up the ailing soldiers in local hospitals, knitting socks they don't want to knit and parading around rows of men in beds with baskets of flowers and cigarettes. Porter repeatedly and sarcastically underlines the dull futility of this women's work:

"So rows of young girls, the intact cradles of the future, with their pure serious faces framed becomingly in Red Cross wimples, roll cock-eyed bandages that will never reach a base hospital, and knit sweaters that will never warm a manly chest, their minds dwelling lovingly on all the blood and mud and the next dance at the Acanthus Club for the officers of the flying corps. Keeping still and quiet will win the war."

The novel's whispered conspiracies about just where the 1918 virus originated are all too familiar. The gossip columnist believes it came from a camouflaged German submarine, which surfaced in Boston harbor and sprayed a greasy cloud of germs all over the city. She knows it's true because she "read it in a New York newspaper," an anecdote met with derision by her jaded colleagues, including Miranda. They jeer at the easy swallowing of this fake news. "Towney still reads the newspapers," jabs the sports reporter, reflecting an inbred distrust of the media that's at least 102 years old.

But the real terror in Pale Horse, Pale Rider comes when Miranda herself gets sick. Days bleed into months, Adam is no longer allowed to visit her, and the walls give way to a phantasmagoric ship at the edge of a horrible jungle, "a writhing terribly alive and secret place of death."

Reading Miranda's nightmarish hallucinations, I'm brought back to Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh's recent description in the Los Angeles Times of nearly dying from the coronavirus, when he lost all sense of time and space for several weeks in the hospital and believed he had been beaten by a brick by someone in downtown LA.

This liminal space between life and death is the true Halloween haunt worth dwelling upon this year. Porter's exploration embodies a literary empathy, of truly inhabiting another skin via fiction and resurfacing with all the chills you have channeled in that space. Miranda's ever-changing delusions are transfixing as she battles death, and her evolution toward wellness and normalcy is a process we're all realizing whether we have contracted COVID-19 yet or not. It's somewhat dizzying to think of the century of strife, war and progress ahead of her as she wakes—as so many others have done this year—to find that her beloved has caught the virus from her and died.

This is scary stuff, to be sure. But I like to think the experience of Porter's novel and Miranda's grief can gird our loins for the darker half of this year, which is now upon us—and we're not even dealing with a war (yet). At the end of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a glimmer of light addresses the new, changed world we have waiting for us down this shadowy road.

"Now there would be time for everything," Porter writes.