A Modern Inferno

Few distinguished reputations in contemporary American letters are based on slenderer evidence than that of Katherine Anne Porter—some twenty-odd short stories, with perhaps a novelette or two among them, and an assortment of critical essays. Indeed, there might be some who would insist that Miss Porter’s reputation is based less on solid artistic achievement than on a self-created and perpetuated legend of it. Now I don’t suppose there’s a “literary person” in the United States who hasn’t known for some time that Miss Porter was writing her first novel, though some seem to have been privileged to know it longer than others. (Writers, of course, no longer simply kiss and tell in diaries and letters; they do it at the round-table—and on tape too.) But after twenty years a-borning, the novel, Ship of Fools, has now appeared; and it will doubtless be accorded all the respectful attention to which Miss Porter’s reputation entitles it.

Ship of Fools is concerned with the voyage of the North German Lloyd Vera from Veracruz to Bremerhaven, August 22 to September 17, 1931, calling at Havana, Tenerife (Canary Islands), Spanish, French, and English ports. And Miss Porter has quite literally assembled all sorts and conditions of men on board “this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity,” as she calls it in a prefatory note. (Her source for this image is a fifteenth-century German moral allegory by Sebastian Brant, first published in Latin as Stultifera Navis in 1494.) And she has provided at the beginning a helpful dramatis personae (indeed, one is needed)—all the way from Captain Thiele, through assorted Germans returning to the Fatherland, a Swiss hotelkeeping family, an American divorcee, a chemical engineer, “Bohemian” artists, a Spanish dancing company, a Condesa being deported from Cuba (for political reasons), Mexican priests and a newly-wedded pair, and Cuban medical students going to study in France, on down to the “eight hundred and seventy-six souls” in steerage being deported from the Cuban sugar-fields back to the Canaries and various parts of Spain.

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Robert Drake

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Few distinguished reputations in contemporary American letters are based on slenderer evidence than that of Katherine Anne Porter—some twenty-odd short stories, with perhaps a novelette or two among them, and an assortment of critical essays. Indeed, there might be some who would insist that Miss Porter’s reputation is based less on solid artistic achievement than on a self-created and perpetuated legend of it. Now I don’t suppose there’s a “literary person” in the United States who hasn’t known for some time that Miss Porter was writing her first novel, though some seem to have been privileged to know it longer than others. (Writers, of course, no longer simply kiss and tell in diaries and letters; they do it at the round-table—and on tape too.) But after twenty years a-borning, the novel, Ship of Fools, has now appeared; and it will doubtless be accorded all the respectful attention to which Miss Porter’s reputation entitles it.

Ship of Fools is concerned with the voyage of the North German Lloyd Vera from Veracruz to Bremerhaven, August 22 to September 17, 1931, calling at Havana, Tenerife (Canary Islands), Spanish, French, and English ports. And Miss Porter has quite literally assembled all sorts and conditions of men on board “this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity,” as she calls it in a prefatory note. (Her source for this image is a fifteenth-century German moral allegory by Sebastian Brant, first published in Latin as Stultifera Navis in 1494.) And she has provided at the beginning a helpful dramatis personae (indeed, one is needed)—all the way from Captain Thiele, through assorted Germans returning to the Fatherland, a Swiss hotelkeeping family, an American divorcee, a chemical engineer, “Bohemian” artists, a Spanish dancing company, a Condesa being deported from Cuba (for political reasons), Mexican priests and a newly-wedded pair, and Cuban medical students going to study in France, on down to the “eight hundred and seventy-six souls” in steerage being deported from the Cuban sugar-fields back to the Canaries and various parts of Spain.