Pale horse, pale rider done taken my lover away1

“I simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, really,” said Katherine Anne Porter about her nearly fatal encounter with the Spanish flu. “It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.” Years later, in a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, she laid out not just her own traumatic run-in with death, the pale rider, but also a rare literary account of the 1918 flu pandemic in the United States and the unprecedented human loss. For her recollection of the pandemic, Porter had to rely on fragments of memory before her illness and after her recovery. These fragments involved the landlady; her beloved fiancé Adam; and fatal flu in Denver, Colorado, during World War I, which killed many young men needed for battle. “I tell you, they must come for her now or I’ll put her on the sidewalk.” “They can’t get an ambulance, and there aren’t any beds. And we can’t find a doctor or nurse. They’re all busy.” “It’s as bad as anything can be ... all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night.” “Two cherry flavored pills,” “orange juice and ice cream,” “coffee in a thermos bottle.” “The men are dying like flies out there .... This funny new disease. Simply knocks you into a cocked hat.” Porter wakes up from her illness to find that Adam, “tall and heavily muscled in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and flanks,” handsome Adam with “his eyes pale tan with orange flecks in them, and his hair the color of a haystack when you turn the weathered top back to the clear straw beneath,” Adam, who had “never had a pain in his life that he [could] remember,” had died. Porter, the consummate storyteller, used words to express the devastating effects of illness on her life. Across the world, in Austria, Egon Schiele, whose self-portrait graces this month’s cover, in similar circumstances, found no comfort in words, despite his own poetic nature. When his wife was dying of the flu, he was unable to articulate his feelings. In a letter to his mother, he coolly speculated that Edith would probably not survive. But he used art to express his devastation. He made several sketches of his wife during the last 2 days of her life. In these sketches, the lines were fluid and sensitive, the colors subdued, the format understated. All these features, a departure from his usual provocative style, reflected the emotional stability found in his life with Edith. His last work was a portrait of his wife, who died the following day. She was 6 months pregnant. He died 3 days later. Even before his fatal encounter with the flu, Schiele was acquainted with adversity. His early years were marred by a troubled relationship with his mother, poor academic performance, and the loss of his father, a provincial railroad stationmaster, to tertiary syphilis, when Egon was 14 years old. “I don’t know whether there is anyone else at all who remembers my noble father with such sadness.” The elder