NOON WINE
by Katherine Anne Porter, 1937

Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine was written and published in 1937 and then reprinted in 1949 with the title story and "Old Mortality" in Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels. Its subtitle dates it to "1896-1905" and locates it in a "Small South Texas Town," which parallels the time and place of Porter's own childhood. Such specifics are important in a romantic sense, a confessional grounding of scene and character for what seems almost mythic in its bleak determinism, but they also help explain the story's realistic conviction, its memoirlike persuasiveness.

The main character, Royal Earle Thompson, is a genial farmer resigned to failure and wed to a delicate, sickly former Sunday school teacher and the father of two healthy sons. He is not large enough for tragedy, but he is decent enough to be the center for the heightened pathos required for domestic melodrama. His fatal flaw is a "feeling for the appearance of things, his own appearance in the sight of God and man," a deep concern for "his dignity and reputation." The story involves the arrival of Olaf Eric Helton, a mysterious Swede from North Dakota who becomes the Thompson family's financial savior by dint of his herculean, albeit taciturn, labors over the next nine years. This is one of those trusty plot turns that a writer well schooled in the literature of James, Cather, and Joyce inevitably uses to plumb dark modernist undercurrents, in this case anticipating the bitter Catholic thrashings of Flannery O'Connor's doomed southern gothics.

George Hendrick has noted that Noon Wine grapples "with one of the central problems in Porter's fiction: the efforts of man to cope with evil." The sin-greased wheels of the sad denouement begin to spin into madness with the intrusion of yet another stranger, the odious, money-hungry Homer T. Hatch. He is intent on returning Helton to the mental institution from which he had escaped, and the ethical waters are muddied beyond resolution. There is a dreamlike explosion of violence as Thompson hits Hatch with an ax after apparently seeing him stab Helton, who then runs off, only to be tracked to his death by a brutal posse. The events then roll implacably into ironic complications. Freed by a jury of a murder charge, Thompson is like the peasant protagonist of Maupassant's "A Piece of String." He cannot cease seeking to justify his actions to skeptical neighbors, and in the process he mangles himself into an obsessed, guilt-ridden pariah.

In the end, in true Porter fashion, irony assumes the guise of a pessimistic angel of death, and Thompson finds himself condemned by his own family. His ultimate, inescapable self-destruction and his desperate suicide note leave crucial moral issues unexplained. Porter herself subsequently dismissed her suffering characters with a contemptuous shrug: "There is nothing in any of these beings tough enough to work the miracle of redemption in them." Happily, the art of the story is much deeper than its author's harshly narrow religious vision would intimate. More relevant might be the acute view of Ellen, Thompson's wife, about her husband's savage act and male violence generally. This is shown, for example, when the men restrain the frenzied Swede, whose senseless murder of his brother—Cain-Abel reprised—over a harmonica injects its own moral enigma: "Yes, thought Mrs. Thompson again with the same bitterness, of course, they had to be rough. They always have to be rough."

The title of Noon Wine is derived from the single tune Helton plays on his beloved harmonica, a Scandinavian folk song about the regrets of a worker who drank up all of his wine before the noon break. Its durable power resides in the ethical ambiguities engendered by a frontier context. The story echoes Porter's steady focus on the clash, usually bloody, between primitive and more cultivated outsider forces in her early Mexican stories, especially "Maria Concepcíon." Self-delusion and unconscious impulse are key motivating factors that provide a partial catharsis for the reader. But there is no release from the claws of unavoidable destiny, intimations of original sin, or Adam's crime of having been born human, although the equally powerful "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" would seem to confound any attempt to impose a traditional Catholic interpretation on the story.

The obsession at the heart of Noon Wine and at the pith of most Porter works is the terrible price humans pay for their inherited existential dilemma. Her fiction demands that the reader have the courage to gaze without blinking at the cruelties of a human world and an inhuman universe, the kind of courage she claimed that her fictional people lacked but that she obviously possessed in sardonic abundance.

—Edward Butscher