Pale Horse, Pale Rider’s enduring reputation perhaps stems from Porter’s willingness to look death in the face through a masterfully psychedelic fever sequence set in an overcrowded hospital. Writing for the New Yorker in 1944, the critic Edmund Wilson lauded Porter as “a first-rate artist,” with a literary project both sophisticated and subtle that “may be able, as in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, to assert itself only in the delirium that lights up at the edge of death.”
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Who was also a great writer …
… The Seminal Novel About the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was Written by a Texan – Texas Monthly (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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I have been thinking about the novella, which I have read a couple of times. Yet it represents only the experience of the survivor's delirium, and then loss. One doesn't see what those who cared for the sick saw. Ivan Doig's novel Dancing at the Rascal Fair gives a much smaller space to that epidemic, but again shows us the delirious and grieving, and not the caregivers.
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