Ny Times Book Review of Ship of Fools

Whatsoever the problems were that kept Katherine Anne Porter's Transport of Fools ⁱ from actualization during the past 20 years, it has been leading a charmed life ever since it was published belatedly last March. In nearly a single vocalization, a little cracked and breathless with excitement, the reviewers appear that Miss Porter'southward long-awaited outset novel was a "triumph," a "masterpiece," a "work of genius . . . a momentous work of fiction," "a astounding, rich, and delectable book," a "literary issue of the highest magnitude." Whether it was Mark Schorer in the New York Times Book Review delivering a lecture, both learned and lyrical, on the source, sensibility, and stature of the novel ("Call it . . . the Middlemarch of a afterward twenty-four hour period"), or a daily reviewer for the San Francisco Call Bulletin confessing that "not once [had] he started a review with then much admiration for its author, with such critical impotence"—in the end it came to the same thing.

Riding the crest of this wave of acclaim, Ship of Fools fabricated its fashion to the top of the best-seller lists in record time and it is notwithstanding there as I write in mid-September. During these four months, information technology has encountered well-nigh as piffling opposition in taking its identify among the classics of literature as it did in taking and property its place on the best-seller lists. A few critics like Robert Drake in the National Review, Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, Granville Hicks in the Sat Review, and Howard Moss in the New Yorker, wound upwardly by proverb that Ship of Fools fell somewhat short of greatness, only only after taking the book'southward claim to greatness with respectful seriousness. Some of the solid citizens amid the reviewers, like John Chiliad. Hutchens, found the novel to be tedious and said and so. Here and there, mainly in the hinterlands, a handful of independent spirits such as Marie Louise Aswell suspected that the book was a failure. But who was listening?

Prominent among the circumstances which have helped to make a run-away best seller and a succès d'estime out of this massive, unexciting, and saturnine novel was the aura of interest, partly sentimental and partly deserved, that Miss Porter's long struggle with it had produced. Near of the reviews begin in the same way: a distinguished American brusk-story author at the age of seventy-1 has finally finished her first novel afterwards 20 years of working on it. Equally this bespeak was developed, it tended to found the ascendant tone of many reviews—that of an elated witness to a unique personal triumph, about as though this indomitable septuagenarian had not written a volume, but had done something even more remarkable—like swimming the English language Aqueduct.

The more sophisticated magazine critics approached the novel mainly in terms of the expectancy that Miss Porter's previous piece of work had created. In Marker Schorer'south words, Ship of Fools had been "eagerly awaited by an entire literary generation," which may overstate the matter but does point to the fact that over the years Miss Porter has become one of the representative figures of the heroic days in modern American letters—"the stylist of the 1920's to the concluding," to quote John Chamberlain's review. For the survivors of her literary generation, likewise as for many members of a later i, this has given her something of the aforementioned appeal that Mrs. Roosevelt enjoys amongst Democrats. Miss Porter'southward reputation is especially strong in the academy where she has taught off and on over the years and where her stories have been studied with special zeal and affection.

In short, the objective involvement that Miss Porter's previous piece of work had inspired usually contained an element of reverence, and in reading the reviews, i had the feeling that about anybody in the academy and in New York literary circles (where, as Fourth dimension put information technology, this "gracious. . . Southern gentlewoman" has long been a "charming chatterer") was either awed by or pulling for her—specially those "in the know" who were aware of the troubles that she had had in writing her novel.

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If the outset paragraph of the reviews was likely to dote in i way or another on Miss Porter, the 2nd was likely to dote upon the universal dimensions of her new book. By and large, this universality was demonstrated by quoting the Preface: peculiarly Miss Porter'due south statement that at the center of her design is nil less than the "paradigm of the ship of this globe on its voyage to eternity." However grandiose the merits might seem, the reviewers accepted it without question and lauded Ship of Fools as a novel whose theme "is the human race," equally a "parable of a corrupt faithless world," as "a great moral allegory of man's fate," so forth. That the only real sign of apologue in Ship of Fools is provided past the Preface (there are a few other details—the German send's name is "Vera," etc.) and that the novel, if it is anything at all, is a straightforward and grimly realistic business relationship of a voyage from Veracruz to Bremerhaven in 1931, that the characters are drawn as literally every bit one could imagine, that the surface of the writing is completely univalent—none of this stopped whatsoever of the more than enthusiastic reviewers from finding themselves in the presence of a bully symbolic vision of human life and destiny. Equally Dayton Kohler, an English professor writing in the Richmond (Va.), News Leader, put it, "Ship of Fools is an attempt to face the mystery of existence. . . . Hither in microcosm is the world human has made."

Some other feeling repeatedly expressed by the reviews was that the return of Miss Porter had ended a winter of general discontent with recent fiction. At one level, this feeling took the class of an impatience with the genial popular novel that neatly solves the problems of its characters. Nonetheless, a number of other reviewers were less inclined to express their gratitude for Send of Fools by repudiating kitsch than past repudiating their image of what passes for serious fiction today. In their desire to behold over again the "solid" novel that they had been deprived of by the idiosyncracy, morbidity, and super-subtlety of serious contemporary fiction, such reviewers were inclined to meet in Ship of Fools a somewhat different book from the ane Miss Porter had actually written. If Transport of Fools does non accept a "flimsy plot" (Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel), this is only because it does not have any plot at all. If information technology has no "case histories" (Winston-Salem once more) its bandage of characters nonetheless includes a dipsomaniac (Herr Baumgartner), a nymphomaniac and drug addict (La Condessa), a religious maniac (Herr Graf), ii paranoids (Herr Rieber and Herr Löwenthal), ii child psychopaths (Ric and Rac), and—transfixed by their frustrations, compulsions, and illusions—a dozen or more thoroughgoing neurotics. Similarly, 1 needs to read only the outset ten pages to come across that Miss Porter re-creates "persons and events on their own terms" (Chicago Sunday-Times) about as much equally her title would indicate. For these reasons, among others, the novel has very little power, "rugged" (Newsweek) or otherwise, and its "myriad insights" (Newsweek again) all lie along the same fixed line of vision and impart much the same judgment of human experience.

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Yet it is not hard to see what these reviewers had in mind. Send of Fools suggests many of the qualities of the traditional "solid" novel that has virtually dropped out of sight in recent years. Like the 19th-century classics, information technology comes at life in a straightforward and comprehensive way, while at the same time it shows itself to be a very mod novel in its form and sensibility. In that location are many characters and they all have the uncomplicated distinctiveness, bordering on caricature, that allows the reader to keep them straight, and to know where he is with each of them. Miss Porter's steady, articulate notation of the strongly marked and typical manners and attitudes of her German burghers, pedagogues, and naval men, of her American natives and expatriates, of her Hispanic priests and revolutionaries, aristocrats and peasants, thus provides the sort of large-scale social inventory that used to be one of the leading features of the major novel. Though she has dispensed with the erstwhile-fashioned elaborate plot, she does concoct an almost continual movement of the narrative among the characters which serves much the same purpose as complicated plotting once did: information technology brings different classes (in this case nationalities) and types into relation and into the kind of revealing patterns of specific connexion and conflict that can have on a big public significance. And tied as the novel is to crucial historical events such as the worldwide depression of the 1930's and the coming of fascism, the over-all effect is that of a novelist, as confident in her sense of moral order as Dickens or Balzac, creating the private history of an age.

Seen, then, from a respectful distance, Ship of Fools tin easily look like the real thing come up dorsum over again—a spacious, resonant, self-bodacious novel that the reader can settle down with instead of the highly mannered, oblique, claustral novel of recent years, confined to the university or the suburb or a vaguely specified limbo, equivocal if not hostile toward normative values. At the aforementioned time, the unconventional anecdotal construction eliminates the Victorian furniture of an elaborate and artificial "story" and gives Ship of Fools a lean, functional, modern wait that accords with its distinctly contemporary Weltanschauung. In other words, it is a book not only for the coffee table but for the room whose main betoken of taste is the well-upholstered Danish armchair and the impress from Picasso'south Blueish Period.

All of which provides a few of the more than obvious reasons why Miss Porter was able to win over about 80 per cent of the reviewers and presumably the hundreds of thousands of readers whose currents of sense of taste the reviewers both directly and mirror. The other reasons are more than subtle. Virginia Pasley, volume editor of Newsday, a Long Island daily, remarked that the novel's lack of an firsthand story interest and its "incisive indictment of humanity" would put off many readers. "It was not written to please. It won't," she ended. Yet Miss Pasley was completely incorrect—for many of the reviewers chose to recommend Ship of Fools precisely for the two reasons that she had dismissed it as a possible best seller. Indeed, the reception of the novel seemed a practiced deal less like another gathering of the philistines than a massive deed of aspiration—even of conversion. It was seized upon both as an opportunity to move the level of popular literary appreciation up a full notch, and to declare, once and for all, that life has come to be every bit unsatisfying and immoral equally Miss Porter so "considerately" pictures it to be.

The efforts at literary enlightenment turned mainly upon the discussions of the novel's action—the absenteeism of a developing narrative, of whatsoever observable dividend of suspense, cumulative involvement, or reversal of expectations that results from the highly episodic structure and the panoramic treatment of the characters. At that place was a skillful deal of talk most "the interplay of graphic symbol" taking precedence over "the strategy of plotting," of "vibrant tension" rather than mere "suspense," of the author'southward "vision of chaos" and employ of "thematic structure." All of which indicated that a half century later the innovations of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Isle of mann, et al., the idea that the happenings in a novel are far less significant or fifty-fifty moving than the underlying pattern, normally symbolic, to which they point, appears to have filtered downwards into the popular literary mind. Simply the result of this theorizing was to shift the ground of word well-nigh immediately from the novel's narrative qualities to its themes, which led nigh of the reviewers to overlook its crucial weaknesses as a novel.

The chief such weakness is that no effective principle of modify operates on the activity or on the main characters or on the ideas, and hence the book has virtually no power to sustain, complicate, and intensify either our intellectual interests or emotional attachments. Several reviewers have compared Send of Fools to Mann'south The Magic Mountain but the comparison immediately discloses the differences between a plot of ideas that changes with the development of the central figure and a collection of incidents that are strung forth a few themes. In The Magic Mountain, in that location is an order of development whose nature is uncertain and problematic as the central figure, young Hans Castorp, passes through a series of intellectual and spiritual influences that resumes much of the cultural history of pre-World War I Europe. The wearisome, subtle transformation of Castorp's consciousness holds the diverse episodes together and too provides for a kind of intellectual suspense that merges with the drama of character. In Ship of Fools there is little such drama or suspense, for no character or idea is kept open long enough to provide for them. As Marie Louise Aswell noted in her review, Miss Porter'southward narrative technique betrays at virtually every indicate the paw of the unreconstructed short-story writer. Over and over once more she isolates a unmarried point of significance in an incident (peoples' failure to communicate, their self-deception, their emotional barrenness, moral bestiality, intellectual folly, etc.) and i or two salient traits in a graphic symbol (Denny's bigotry and prurience, Mrs. Treadwell'southward boredom and indifference, Captain Thiele's childish authoritarianism, Fraulein Spöckenkieker's stridency, etc.). As a result, the personages on the ship soon become predictable, and when their behavior is not merely repetitious, it is usually bootless and inconsequential, leading to no significant change or complication and merely further illustrating i or another of the themes of human hunger, bestiality, or evil. The sense of sameness spreads like a yawn and, as one of the characters remarks herself, "this voyage . . . must undoubtedly be described as somewhat on the dull side."

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The 2nd type of missionary work that was washed by the reviewers centered around Miss Porter's characters. In general, two claims were made in behalf of this boggling collection of inveterate boors, malcontents, and moral cripples, who are mixed in with the grosser pathological cases. The first was that they were all superb creations ("whatever one or two of which," as Louis D. Rubin remarked, "would exist the making of a lesser writer'south reputation"); the second was that they are, individually and collectively, ourselves.

The favorite characters of the reviewers appeared to be La Condessa and Dr. Schumann. The erstwhile, with her young men and her drugs and her wise heart is footling more a stock theatrical vox crooning or shrieking in the wilderness inhabited by the fallen ladies of literature. Dr. Schumann—for all that he is supposed to exist the main effigy who experiences the truth of the substantial reality of evil past virtue of his sober, humane intelligence and his corrupting passion for La Condessa—is too enfeebled by a weak eye and a prudish malaise to have much force either every bit the victim or raisonneur of human'southward sinfulness. Also this good gray doc becomes not a trivial absurd during the course of the banal romance—a kind of higher literary lather opera—that he and La Condessa are given to act out:

. . . oh practise you know what information technology is, coming then late, and then strangely, no wonder I couldn't understand it. It is that innocent romantic love I should have had in my girlhood! . . . Well, here nosotros are. Innocent beloved is the nearly painful kind of all, isn't information technology?

"I have non loved y'all innocently," said Dr. Schumann, "but guiltily and I have washed you groovy wrong, and I have ruined my life. . . ."

"My life was ruined so long agone I have forgotten what information technology was like before," said La Condessa. "So you are not to have me on your mind. . . .I shall find a way out of everything. And now, now my dearest, let'southward kiss again really this fourth dimension in broad daylight and wish each other well, for information technology is time for u.s. to say good-bye."

"Death, death," said Dr. Schumann, as if to some presence continuing to ane side of them casting a long shadow. "Death," he said, and feared his heart would flare-up.

The other ii characters that tended to be singled out for special praise by the reviewers were the two American women, Jenny Brown and Mrs. Treadwell. What the reviewers sensed, though tended to sentimentalize, is that both women possess an intermittent autonomy, denied to the other characters, past virtue of a special fund of feeling that Miss Porter has for them. Jenny, an embittered and hollow version of the earlier autobiographical heroine (Miranda in "Old Mortality" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," Laura in "Flowering Judas"), is shown in the grip of a personal despair whose forcefulness is sufficient to shake her alive from time to fourth dimension, so that she becomes something more than than the stereotype of the liberated American and reveals something deeper and less anticipated than her foolishness. To a lesser extent, this is too true of Mrs. Treadwell, an emotionally fragile divorcee with the rest of her life to kill. Otherwise, the characters lead lives on the ship that are tightly confining past the baleful vision of human folly in which they are suspended, by the item disfigurements, both personal and cultural, that they are fashioned to reveal. Different Dante's Brunetto Latino, or Chaucer's Pardoner, or Shakespeare's Angelo, or Stendahl's Sansfin (Miss Porter was compared to these and other masters past the reviewers in hailing her understanding of human nature), her figures are caricatures of moral infirmity and every bit such accept just so much to reveal. Afterward 50 pages they are predictable; after a hundred they are less revealing of homo nature than they are of Miss Porter's design and sensibility.

In fact, once the characters begin to be brought into relation or to accept their innards exposed at all, the attentive reader can smell the formaldehyde of an overdetermined simulation of existent experience. Thus Frau Rittersdorf comes aboard the "Vera." Her beginning act is to take over the lower berth, though she has been assigned an upper; her second human activity is to place in vases "ii enormous floral offerings she had sent herself" with cards from 2 male admirers. Afterwards dressing and ogling herself, she opens her diary and writes:

Then in a way, allow me acknowledge, this adventure—for is not all life an run a risk?—has not ended as I hoped, yet nothing is changed for indeed I may however see the all-guiding Will of my race in information technology. A German woman should not marry into a dark race. . . . There are the fatal centuries in Spain when all as well insidiously Jewish and Moorish claret must certainly have crept in—who knows what else?. . .

Elsewhere on the ship, Herr Rieber is already defending German honor and frolicking with the shrieking Lizzi Spöckenkieker ("How he admired and followed the tall thin girls with long scissor-legs similar storks striding under their fluttering skirts, with long narrow anxiety on the ends of them"); William Denny is leering at two "Chili Queens"; and David Scott, Jenny's cold-hearted lover, is instancing his hatred of her and his horror of life ("In that location was no identify, no place at all to go"). In one stateroom, Frau Baumgartner is taking out her hostility to her husband (a helpless alcoholic and hypochondriac) on their sickly little male child, whom, despite the intense Mexican oestrus, she has kept dressed in a heavy leather cowboy costume. ("Mayn't I just take off my jacket?' he persisted hopelessly.") And nearby, the supernaturally pedantic Professor Hutten is lecturing to his wife about their bottlefed bulldog Bébé ("We need not wait for any radical alter in his organic constitution"), while "in circular maternal tones" she croons to the dog: "Don't call back your niggling Vati and Mutti are deserting you lot, my precious one."

And so it goes for the next 460 pages, with only a few time-outs for an act of relative candor, dignity, or decency. All of which is supposed to institute a true picture of man nature, and so information technology was generally taken to be.

This is the near remarkable characteristic of the reviews. One wonders which of those hapless or cruel grotesques Mark Schorer (who said that "It will be a reader myopic to the point of blindness who does non find his name on her rider listing") institute to correspond himself, or what qualities Louis Auchincloss ("how easy it would be for anyone to plow into even the nigh repellent of these incipient Nazis") would own upwards to that brings him so close to Herr Rieber with his clownish lust and serious wish to throw the steerage passengers into gas ovens. Moreover, i wonders why then many of the pop reviewers ("Katherine Anne Porter has seen all of usa plain") took equally gospel the almost sour and morbid indictment of humanity to appear in years.

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There is reason to suspect that something more than than reviewers' cant was involved here, for the willingness of the reviewers to see themselves in Miss Porter'due south characters bears a remarkable resemblance to the reaction of the American press to the disclosures of the Eichmann trial last year. Bypassing the specific circumstances that had produced and empowered an Eichmann, about of the editorial writers hastened to phrases like "man'southward inhumanity to man," which complanate all political and moral distinctions, not to say the purpose of the trial itself. And in the mood of moral malaise that the trial seems mainly to accept inspired, information technology manifestly became increasingly easy to assert that nosotros are all Adolf Eichmann, which immediately transformed Eichmann from a very special kind of 20th-century political figure into only one more than example of the imperfectibility of man.²

Mostly, Send of Fools was read as another cursory in the same abstruse trial of mankind, vaguely centering upon the Nazi treatment of Jews. "In 1931 the foulness [of the world] was the rise of pride-injured German nationalism. . ." (Time) . "To the author, anti-Semitism of any description is just one form of humanity'due south general failure to perceive the commonness of all humanity." (Newsweek) . In some cases the reviewers were proceeding on the basis of a statement Miss Porter made in 1940 that the stories collected in Flowering Judas were part of a "much larger programme," whose ultimate purpose was "to understand the logic of this royal and terrible failure of the life of human being in the Western world." Just they were as well reading the novel. That Miss Porter has no use for her Germans is perfectly clear, and in almost every case they are seen to be well along the road to Nazism (the volume is prepare in 1931). But since she has no more utilize for most of her Mexicans, Swiss, Americans, and Spaniards, the road to Nazism soon becomes indistinguishable from the general highway to hell that runs down the middle of her novel, forth which the various characters clown, scheme, or stagger. The only ability of active evil is given to the troupe of Spanish dancers; in the main, the Germans merely sit nervously at the Captain'due south table and speak their unlike varieties of Aryan cant while they bolt their food and look for chances to devour each other. There is no sense at all of the force of that monstrous romanticism, of the potential for agile evil in the character of High german nationalism, with its commitments non only to the purity of lodge but to the purity of anarchy and self-immolation. In his contempo novel, The Pull a fast one on in the Cranium, Richard Hughes understands these matters far more securely than does Miss Porter. Hughes, likewise, sees the ludicrous pretensions of the early Hitler and his cohorts, merely he also grasps not only the mythos just the energy of that "insane idealism" of hatred and beloved that created Lebensraum and death camps. It is the argument of Send of Fools, indeed the main theme of the volume as Dr. Schumann states it, that most people'southward "bunco with evil is but negative, consent past default," and that it is the "mere mass and weight of negative evil [which] threatened to rule the globe." This last may be merely Schumann's own proto-fascist proclivities but information technology is difficult to distinguish his attitude from that of the writer who has been speaking through him. In any event, Miss Porter's theme of man'southward paltry sinfulness one time translated, say, into the figures of Captain Thiele and Herr Rieber produces merely a bilious stuffed shirt whose fantasies of violence come from American gangster movies and an impotent buffoon who eventually cavorts effectually the send in a babe bonnet. The threat of "the terrible failure of the life of human being" that lurks at the Captain's table is far less that of genocide than of sloth and gastritis.

This insistence upon a "general failure" of humanity creates not only a feeble portent of Hitler'southward Germany but in time a brutally indiscriminate one. Among the Germans on lath the "Vera," in that location is none more wretched and repulsive than the Jew Julius Löwenthal, with his whining, puny hatred of the goyim; with his lack of curiosity, much less passion, for anything in life save kosher cooking and the opportunities to brand a killing off the Catholics; with his trend to spit disgustedly into the current of air. A caricature of Jewish vulgarity, Löwenthal is otherwise coldly reduced to an abstract tribal paranoia. Thinking himself snubbed by Helm Thiele, he broods for hours:

He wished for expiry, or thought he did. He retired into the night and airless ghetto of his soul and lamented with all the grieving wailing company he plant there; for he was never lonely in that place. He . . . mourned in one voice with his fated people, wordlessly he bewailed their nameless eternal wrongs and sorrows; and then feeling somewhat soothed, the inspired core of his beingness began to search for its aboriginal justification and its ways of revenge. But it should be slow and secret.

In brief, this successful peddler to the Catholics is the phase Jew of the modern literary tradition whom other Christian writers of sensibility (amid them T. S. Eliot) take dragged out of the ghetto to correspond the vulgar and menacing dislocations of traditional social club:

My business firm is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill,
the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled
in London.

Far from exerting any understanding of or sympathy for Löwenthal—which he might have claimed if only because of the far from "nameless wrongs and sorrows" that he and his people volition soon take to face in Deutschland—Miss Porter uses him in a situation whose implications are both historically misleading and morally fell. At the dramatic center of the novel—both in terms of placement and by beingness the only conflict in the book that affects whatever appreciable grouping of characters—is an incident in which Herr Freitag, Miss Porter's other well-intentioned merely ineffectual German, is removed from the Captain'southward table because information technology has been discovered that his married woman is Jewish. He is then seated with the isolated Löwenthal, who immediately begins to persecute him and his absent wife:

She's the kind of Jewish girl that makes disgrace for all the rest of us. . . I never laid a finger on a Gentile woman in my life, and the thought of touching one makes me sick; why tin can't you Goyim exit our girls alone, isn't your own kind adept enough for you?. . . Be ashamed, Herr Freitag—when you wrong Jewish girls, you incorrect the whole race. . . .

While Löwenthal baits him, Freitag thinks, "Here it comes again, from the other side. . . . I tin't sit down here either." And indeed the hostility toward him that he has also found in his married woman's circle, along with the contempt he receives from his swain Germans, has the force of making him repent of his matrimony and renew his identification with the mentality and destiny of the Fatherland.

Thus, the historical significance that Ship of Fools is designed to possess—and all of its particular of national and cultural traits equally well as its supposed symbolic resonance are cypher if not pretensions to such significance—becomes a matter of implying that the fate of Germany and its Jews reduces to the come across of two particularly obnoxious breeds of inhumanity, with the decent but weak German language liberals caught in the middle, where they get the victims of their ain milder impulses toward evil.

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Such an implication (and there is little to complicate, much less correct it, in the course of the novel) bespeaks not only a failure of historical agreement, only what is more inexcusable for a novelist, it indicates a failure of consciousness, a glib refusal to acknowledge any of the imponderables of Löwenthal's fate:

All he wanted in the world was the right to exist himself, to go where he pleased and do what he wanted without any interference from them [the goyim]. That no race or nation in the earth, nor in all human history had enjoyed such rights fabricated no difference to Herr Löwenthal: he should worry about things none of his business.

And the trifling attitude that lies behind the treatment of Löwenthal is simply one case of Miss Porter'southward compulsive trend to simplify and shut her characters and issues, to look down upon life from the perspective of a towering arrogance, antipathy, and disgust.

Information technology is just here that the reviewers went most astray in reading and puffing the novel. Equally some of the cleverer ones saw, Ship of Fools is not a novel of activeness or grapheme or ideas, only one that is held together and given significance by its point of view, that is to say past the presence and pressure level of Miss Porter'southward sensibility. Even so, the personal aura of Miss Porter, that nosotros began past noting, was particularly protective in this respect, for it guarded her against direct criticism of the main weakness of the book—the spirit in which it was written. To approximate this spirit was inevitably to judge the "gracious . . . gentlewoman," "the distinguished humanist" of acquaintance and reputation. The better critics—such as Stanley Edgar Hyman and Stanley Kauffmann—stopped merely short of doing so. The others spoke of Miss Porter's "compassion" and "concern," "candor" and "objectivity," "wit" and "humor." The critic who went to greatest lengths to define and exult over Miss Porter'southward sensibility was Marking Schorer:

There is goose egg (or most nil) harsh in her book. There is much that is comic, much fifty-fifty that is hilarious, and everything throughout is always flashing into brilliance through the illumination of this groovy ironic style. At the aforementioned time, most everything that is comic is simultaneously pathetic . . . moving to the point of pain, nearly of heartbreak. No, all that is conceivably harsh in this book is its magnificent lack of illusion about human nature and especially the human being sexual relationship. Fifty-fifty that is not actually harsh because all the abrupt perception and unsparing wit is exercised by an imaginative sympathy that is non withheld from even the greatest fool, not even from the Texan oaf, Denny, whom the gracious Mrs. Treadwell, suddenly outraged beyond endurance, beats into insensibility with the precipitous heel of her lovely golden slipper.

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The remarkable affair about this passage, from what must have been the about influential review of the book, is that it does not contain a single discussion of critical truth. There is simply nothing funny most Ship of Fools and its pathos is represented by the type of artful corn that was quoted some pages back in connection with La Condessa and Dr. Schumann's relationship. Seldom does anything "wink into brilliance," for the "not bad ironic style" of the author who wrote "Noon Wine" no longer belongs to Miss Porter. Nether the cold, polish plaster of her prose is not a "magnificent lack of illusion about human nature," but an alternately smug or exasperated or queasy hostility toward most of the behavior she is describing. This takes incessant trivial forms of showing upward and putting down her characters, and almost whatever passage of clarification or dialogue brings out some of them. As I said before, Jenny Brown is ane of the few characters that her author has whatever feeling for; nonetheless not fifty-fifty she is immune to escape from Miss Porter'south subtle, habitual snideness:

She hesitated then spoke the word "soul" very tentatively, for it was one of David'south tabus, along with God, spirit, spiritual, virtue—especially that one!—and honey. None of these words flowered particularly in Jenny's daily oral communication, though now and so in some stray warmth of feeling she seemed to demand one or the other; only David could not endure the sound of any of them. . . . He could translate them into obscene terms and pronounce them with a sexual fervor of enjoyment; and Jenny, who blasphemed every bit harmlessly as a well-taught parrot, was in turn offended past what she prudishly described as "David'due south dingy mind.". . .

My italics underscore the modest jabs, the kind of compulsive cattiness with which Miss Porter's "sensibility" operates. The virtually persistent and revealing example of her "abrupt perception and unsparing wit" is in her relentless comparisons of almost all her characters to a whole menagerie of animals and birds—the idea being that their behavior is at bottom no different from the chain of greedy, malicious antagonism that has been illustrated in the opening pages by the relations betwixt a cat, a monkey, a parrot, and a dog. As for Miss Porter's "imaginative sympathy," one can read the frigid description of the incident Schorer notes in which the "gracious" Mrs. Treadwell, having alternately teased and pushed away a young officer on the ship through a whole evening, and having drunkard herself into a shock in her stateroom, squats over the unconscious Denny. With "her lips drawn dorsum and her teeth set, she crush him with such furious pleasure [that] a sharp pain started up in her correct wrist. . ."

Mrs. Treadwell'southward violence is not directed at Denny so much as at "the human sexual human relationship" she fears and hates and which he, like most of the other characters, embodies in a particularly hideous manner. Miss Porter'south attitude in this respect is most credible in the handling of the Spanish dancing troupe—particularly the two six-year-one-time twins—who are the evil characters in the novel, the focus of most of the speculations about original sin. From the moment they appear on the scene, the girls' "sleazy black skirts too tight around their slender hips . . . their optics flashing and their hips waving in all directions," a sense of fascinated revulsion settles into the tone of the narrative and continues throughout the novel as the dominant strain of Miss Porter'south misanthropy. In its most overt form, it fixates upon the incestuous relations of the ii six-year-old psychopaths, Ric and Rac; upon the malign sexual ability and corruption of the developed dancers every bit they glide about the decks; upon the wildly lascivious Concha teasing 1 of the young passengers nearly to the point of murdering his grandfather in gild to get some coin to sleep with her; upon the sexual relations of the dancers themselves:

Their supple dancers' legs writhed together for a moment like a nest of snakes. They sniffed, nibbled, flake, licked and sucked each other'southward mankind with small moans of pleasure. . . . She saved herself similar a miser in the dull plungings and poundings of those men who were her business organization, and spent herself upon Pepe, who was tricky as a monkey and equally coldly long-lasting as a frog.

Yet, the atmosphere of cold, queasy sexuality, and the accompanying imagery of revulsion, radiates outward from the dancers to condition each of the other sexual relationships. La Condessa croons seductively to Dr. Schumann and he has "a savage impulse to strike her from him, this diabolical possession, this incubus fastened upon him like a bat." Even when the incredibly stuffy Huttens make love, the reader finds himself dorsum with Pepe and Amparo: the aforementioned stressed male violence, the aforementioned abased female satisfaction, the same description of their bodies "grappled together like frogs." Sex activity on Miss Porter's "ship of this earth" is Denny'southward abiding goatish leer; information technology is the chasing of the "pig-snout" Rieber after the "peahen" "Spöckenkieker; it is the "monkey-faced" snickering of the Cuban students and the impassioned confront of La Condessa, "her eyes . . . wild and inhuman as a monkey's"; sex is Jenny's gesture, "unself-conscious every bit a cat," of slapping her inner thigh; it is the Baumgartners' terrifying their child who lies awake in the side by side berth; in sum, information technology is David Scott'due south moment of introspection when "slowly at that place poured through all his veins again that deep qualm of loathing and intolerable sexual fury, a poisonous mingling of sickness and death-similar pleasure."

_____________

This is what Miss Porter's "magnificent lack of illusion" comes to. Her contemptuous and morbid mental attitude toward homo sexuality plays a large part in deflecting her sensibility to its incessant quarrel with man nature and in leading information technology by inevitable stages to a vision of life that is less vice and folly than a hideously choking tedious death. For Miss Porter'southward versions of political action, artistic creation, religious conventionalities, teaching, and then along are no less skewed and embittered than her versions of copulation. Further, this clammy connectedness betwixt sex and evil appears to rule out whatsoever feeling toward her characters other than a nagging exasperated irony, and to remove the possibility of any struggle toward deeper insight. Every bit a result, the consciousness that is operating in the volume, for all its range of view, is standing, so to speak, on a dime, and has petty contact with the sources of imaginative vitality and moral power that renew a long work of fiction.

One tin begin to understand, and so, why Send of Fools—apart from problems of technique and theme—remains so stagnant and repetitive; why there is neither the sense of humor nor the desolation that Schorer raves about; and why in that location is aught either "purple" or "terrible" most Miss Porter's prototype of human being failure. Far from being a profound account of the "ship of this earth on its voyage to eternity," Transport of Fools is simply what it is: an business relationship of a tiresome voyage to Europe three decades agone that has been labored over for twenty years by a writer who, late in life, is venturing, hence revealing, fiddling more misanthropy and clever technique. "Ship of Fools is a piece of work of mechanical art," as Elizabeth N. Hoyt of the Cedar-Rapids Gazette put it—cutting through the sentimental and pretentious obfuscation which has surrounded the novel from the start—"but the soul of humanity is defective."

¹ Atlantic-Little, Brown, 497 pp., $6.l.

ⁱⁱ I am indebted for this point to a study by Midge Decter of American press reaction to the Eichmann trial.

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Source: https://www.commentary.org/articles/theodore-solotaroff/ship-of-fools-the-critics/