(Up)rooted Sin in Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine
“They’s things and people…‘nough to drive any man loony. The wonder to me is, more men don’t wind up in straitjackets, the way things are going these days and times.”
–Mr. Thompson, Noon Wine
Before Flannery O’Connor emerged as the unofficial patron saint of Catholic Southern Literature, there was Katherine Anne Porter.
There are reasons why in Catholic circles, at least, Porter is not nearly as well known today as the Hillbilly Thomist. Porter was also quite successful in her lifetime but lived long enough for people to evaluate the larger ups and downs of her career, as opposed to O’Connor, whose career flashed brilliantly and briefly and seemed to hold the promise of greater things to come. As Catholic writers, Porter—a largely lapsed Catholic convert who reverted back to the faith late in life—has not usually been defined in religious terms as explicitly as O’Connor. However, moral themes, misfit characters, and haunting Southern settings also pervade Porter’s work despite her more complicated relationship to them. Porter is particularly concerned with the presence of evil in her modernist short novel, Noon Wine (1937). In this work, she lets the reader consider the perils of failing to address the many visible and invisible ways in which evil becomes manifest in the modern world.
The basic plot of the story is fairly simple: a Swedish immigrant wanders onto a South Texas dairy farm and becomes a hired hand. Over time, Mr. Helton (the immigrant) improves the farm’s conditions so well that he becomes a permanent fixture, doing enough of the work to enable the owner, Mr. Thompson, to enjoy his leisure. This agreeable arrangement works for several years until another unexpected visitor from Helton’s past brings a revelation that changes everything.
A sense of evil pervades Noon Wine and hovers around its characters. Mrs. Thompson suffers various unexplained physical ailments that are also reflected in the farm’s dilapidated state. Her two sons are not only mischievous and difficult but also sources of moral ambiguity, as their mother struggles to discipline them appropriately. As the narrator says early in the story, “[Mrs. Thompson] had a way of speaking about her children as if they were rather troublesome nephews on a prolonged visit.” Meanwhile, Helton may be a good worker, but his foreignness makes him an ominous presence on the farm. At one point, Mrs. Thompson even describes him as a “disembodied spirit.” However, Porter complicates this sense of Helton’s “otherness” by instead leading Mr. Thompson to become the source of his own downfall: evil is coming for—from within—him, and it hits him at home.
Several details in the story’s early stages clue us into this imminent threat. When Helton first arrives at the farm, his foreignness is acknowledged as odd, yet it is contrasted with two Black workers whom Thompson had lost recently: one to murder, the other to prison. As an aside, Thompson mentions, “Neither one of ‘em worth killing, come right down to it.” Thompson’s casual racism does not merely reflect popular attitudes of the time period, but—more significantly—signals the darker forces that will gradually unfold throughout the story. Porter subtly illustrates the habitual presence of at least five deadly sins in Thompson’s personal life: pride (“He was a noisy proud man who held his neck so straight his whole face stood level with his Adam’s apple”), greed (“There was nothing wrong with him except that he hated like the devil to pay wages”), wrath (He frequently “bec[omes] a hurricane of wrath” when interacting with his sons and regularly threatens violence against them), gluttony (Mrs. Thompson reflects on “Mr. Thompson’s weakness for a dram too much now and then”), and sloth (“there were only a few kinds of work manly enough for Mr. Thompson to undertake with his own hands”). Evil, Porter demonstrates, has become rooted in Mr. Thompson’s world to such an extent that it appears ordinary.
Throughout Noon Wine, Thompson is generally portrayed as the protagonist, or at least as an upstanding citizen doing what he can to get by. As the narrator reflects (ironically) from Thompson’s perspective, “Head erect, a prompt payer of taxes, yearly subscriber to the preacher’s salary, land owner and father of a family, employer, a hearty good fellow among men, Mr. Thompson knew, without putting it into words, that he had been going steadily down hill.” This (at least partly) honest recognition of his limitations makes him grateful for Helton’s help on the farm. Still, we never have a sense that the Thompsons are “the bad guys,” and it is easy for us to excuse Thompson’s sins as only minor indiscretions. As their material comforts and familiarity with Helton increase, the Thompsons become more convinced that their lives will only continue to improve.
Porter, however, never lets us remain complacent for long. A sense of foreboding often bristles beneath the surface. We know that something remains broken, even if we can’t quite pin it down. We get glimpses in Mrs. Thompson’s observation of Helton roughing up her boys, in Mr. Thompson’s uncontrollable anger toward his children—in the general sense that what appears “natural” cannot ultimately make for lasting peace. While the Thompsons reap the benefits of Helton’s hard work and his innovative experiments with new equipment, their growing idleness and self-satisfaction dull their awareness mentally and spiritually. As their fortunes shift over the years, and the Thompsons see Helton as “the hope and the prop of their family,” they begin to view him “from a distance they did not know how to bridge, as a good man and a good friend.” Their sons grow up and become responsible enough that Mr. Thompson deludes himself into believing “that, without knowing how he had done it, he had succeeded in raising a set of boys who were not trifling whittlers. They were such good boys Mr. Thompson began to believe they were born that way, and that he had never spoken a harsh word to them in their lives, much less thrashed him. [His sons] never disputed his word.” This failure to see the truth is ultimately what unravels Mr. Thompson’s security in the comfortable life built largely on the back of Mr. Helton.
Porter’s nuanced approach to establishing the morality of her characters makes an ethical interpretation of Noon Wine that much more interesting to decipher. While we gradually learn from Thompson’s later visitor that Helton is no innocent himself (for he is hiding a dark, potentially demented history), he is also human—despite occasional descriptions of him as some kind of malevolent spirit, a force of death. It remains implausible simply to view this as a kind of cultural prejudice when considering Porter’s work through a Catholic lens. For nearly a decade, Helton is a good worker: consistent, effective, responsible. He never causes any trouble for the business or interferes with their daily lives. There is never any sense that he just lies in wait, planning to harm them or undo their success. When evil finally overtakes his story through the revelation from Thompson’s visitor, it is more like Flannery O’Connor’s Displaced Person than the Misfit. However, both Thompson and Helton’s individual sins take root in them in such a way that their effects ripple out, eventually bearing irreparable consequences for those around them. Helton cannot run from his history, just as Thompson cannot overcome “a slow muffled resentment climbing from somewhere deep down in him, climbing and spreading all through him.” In both cases, evil plays a dramatically visible role in the fates of these characters as it can no longer remain hidden.
After the story’s violent climax—which leaves Mr. Thompson claiming self-defense—the fallout of Mr. Thompson’s sins has both personal and social implications. Although formally acquitted, he becomes a pariah as he is left without Helton or any friends in the community, dragging his wife along for long wagon journeys to try and convince his neighbors of his moral fiber. Despite having boasted of his deep roots in the area—saying they go back as far as 1836 after “immigrating” to Texas from Pennsylvania—it becomes clear that Thompson has no friends left. By the end of the story, Mr. Thompson resembles Mr. Helton to an extent, with “eyes hollowed out and dead-looking, his thick hands gray white.” He cannot come to terms with how to take responsibility for his actions, or even to reconcile his own perception of what happened with an objective reality. In the process, his family has turned against him, and he has become untethered from the place that had once been a secure home.
Porter never gives us the sense that these realities are merely the work of external forces or an arbitrary experience in a displaced modern age. Rather, she addresses moral concerns as “exist[ing] in an intricate tissue of paradox,” to borrow a phrase from Robert Penn Warren in an early analysis of Porter’s work. These paradoxes—internal sources of evil leading to external consequences, geographical rootedness leading to a deeper alienation, “moral fiber” being the impetus to a more insidious downfall—are perhaps often more dramatically pronounced in the decades that surround Porter’s work, but her concerns are timeless and universal, addressing the ways that sin can remain ever-present regardless of our circumstances, always threatening to undo us when we become less convinced of its reality. Language of sight abounds throughout Noon Wine for a reason. Porter’s story is ultimately one of vision: how the things we choose to notice reflect the people we become. The subtlety of Porter’s craft also encourages readers to look more closely, to pay attention to the warning signs that could lead to our own fates if we fail to keep watch.
Casie Dodd lives in Arkansas with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in This Land, Dappled Things, and other publications.