The Spanish Flu isn’t well represented in the Western literary canon—in fact, a November 2017 article by Patricia Clifford in Smithsonian Magazine asked “Why Did So Few Novels Tackle the 1918 Pandemic?” Perhaps it was forgotten as the United States’s attention moved on from the Depression to World War II, and then to a new society of affluence that doubted such plagues could ever touch it again. Though major writers from Porter’s era who took on the 1918 pandemic include the likes of Willa Cather, William Maxwell, and Thomas Wolfe, Pale Horse, Pale Rider likely leads the pack in terms of modern-day readership; Clifford quotes scholar Catherine Hovanec, who calls Porter’s book “perhaps the best-known fictional account of the epidemic."
It helps that it is an extremely readable novel. Many would be tempted to call the ultra-slim Pale Horse, Pale Rider, only fifty pages long in my small-type Library of America edition, a long story or even a novella—a term Porter hated. Still, its inclusion in the 1965 Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter surely helped that volume win both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is central to the way critics and audiences have read and understood Porter, in part because it is so closely tied to dramatic events in her own life. Porter was born Callie Russel Porter in 1890 in tiny Indian Creek, Texas, near Brownwood. She grew up mostly in Kyle; Texas State University now maintains her childhood home as a historic site and venue for literary readings. As a young newspaper reporter recently transplanted from Texas to Denver for a job at the Rocky Mountain News, she fell so gravely ill with the 1918 flu that funeral arrangements were made for her ahead of time. She detailed her near-death experience in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, describing it as a “nearly pure autobiography.”
It’s hard to imagine that certain passages of Pale Horse, Pale Rider could have been written by someone who was not a survivor of the worst the 1918 flu had to offer:
Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.