In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

and Adolfo Best Maugard, visited hacienda Tetlapayac as Eisenstein
shot Maguey. Another group, including John Dos Passos and Hart
Crane (who was sharing a house with Porter for a while), were living
in Mexico City in 1931. It was the editor of the New Republic, Malcolm
Cowley, who had just returned from his trip to Mexico a few months
prior, who convinced Hart to go. In his memoirs Cowley recalls that he
“spoke with enthusiasm about somber landscapes, Baroque churches,
and its mixture of Spanish and Indian cultures.” He also added that “one
heard of sexual customs not unlike those of the Arabs,” which apparently
was enough to convince Hart to change his plans to go to Europe and
come to Mexico (with a Guggenheim Fellowship) instead. 36 When in
Mexico City, the group usually met for parties in the downtown area
or headed to clubs and cheap cabarets. They were often joined by
their Mexican bohemian counterparts, Montenegro, Best Maugard
(who had spent time in Greenwich Village in the 1920s), and Salvador
Novo (all notorious homosexuals). As Kimbrough reported to Sinclair,
“[Eisenstein’s] contacts have been with Greenwich Village artists who
hang around and eat with us and go to cheap Mexican shows. Eisenstein
likes them and thinks they will be of great assistance.” 37 I will return to
these “cheap shows” in detail in the following chapter—for now let us
notice the cast of characters. Frances Toor, who was, as always, at the
center of this crowd, wrote to the New York dealer Carl Zigrosser on
September 2, 1931, “We had a pretty nice gang down here this summer.”
Along with Toor, Katherine Anne Porter was another center of gravity
of the group, and another denizen of leftist circles in both Greenwich
Village and Mexico City; her appeal was due in part to her familiarity
with Mexico from the time she had spent there in the 1920s, and in part
to her deep literary connections. She wrote about Mexico, for instance,
for the New Republic. There was an additional link between Porter and
the Eisenstein crew—Adolfo Best Maugard, an old friend of hers who
greatly infl uenced her life and was in many ways responsible for her
literary and artistic career in Mexico. Porter is a fi gure who deserves a
deeper look.
katherine anne porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a self-proclaimed socialist and feminist
(suffragist) with many connections to Soviet Russia from her time in
New York. She was a friend of Bessie Beatty, the editor of McCall’s and
author of Red Heart of Russia, and Kenneth Durant, who had worked for
ROSTA, later TASS. She claimed to have written many articles for ROSTA
“going all the way” : 111