Ship of Fools

Following the toil of twenty years, Katherine Anne Porter published her one and only novel in 1962 on the heels of her fame as a short story author. It became the number one bestseller in fiction for that year. Her inspiration was a similar cruise and the fellow passengers she observed while traveling from Mexico to Germany in the 1930s. Her novel serves to capture the rampant prejudices and attitudes of the time among people from different nations and circumstances, in the years of the Great Depression leading up to World War II and the Jewish Holocaust.

In his earlier novel "Howards End", E.M. Forster explicitly implored us to "only connect". In "Ship of Fools", Katherine Anne Porter depicts a world that does the inverse as if to show more underline the point. It is very simple to dismiss this as 500 pages of nothing more than unlikeable people being cruel to one another, without considering if that's fully intentional and what can be learned from it.

Is there nothing likeable about the artist Jenny, who knows she needs to get out from under her boyfriend's thumb and somehow cannot? About Freytag, who stands up for his Jewish wife even in her absence? About Elsa Lutz, the unfortunate girl who dreams hopelessly of finding love? Or what about Mrs. Hutten, who has a brilliant and penetrating mind of her own but feels obliged to live in her husband's shadow? Certainly even these characters have their low moments, but again that's part of the message.

Why are none of these people making an effort to actually know one another? The answer lands frighteningly close to what we habitually do in our own lives. Isn't it easier not to get involved, not to care, to judge without knowing? After all, look what happens when we try. Porter shows us barriers we may meet with: racism, misogyny, ageism, prejudice against other social classes. All of them are defence mechanisms against fear of the other, whichever 'other' they've chosen to designate.

Everyone on the ship fears being call upon to empathize, certain they would never be empathized with themselves. Jenny almost says it, when David asks what she's crying for. "Everything in the whole world. That lets you in, somewhere ..." All it does is hurt those who show empathy, exposing themselves as the weak, the vulnerable, the foolish. It becomes a contest to see who can make whom display it, and for what. They are horrified when given one another's confidences, as if being handed poison. Nobody wants to summon the empathy being called upon. Take Mrs. Treadwell, when she does not want to understand too much about Mr. Freytag's life and circumstances: "There was no cure, no comfort, tears change nothing and words can never get at the truth. No don't tell me any more about yourself, I am not listening, you cannot force my attention. I don't want know you, and I will not know you. Don't try to come nearer."

Disdain of others, dislike, even cold hatred, are used as a means of self-preservation. Perhaps they don't want exposure to how small and self-involved their problems are in the grand scheme. Why does nobody understand or appreciate the enormity of what they are going through? It's a certainty that blinds them from understanding anyone else, or even wanting to understand. There are examples in plenty of this dismissive behaviour in the novel, in the acts of racism, righteous religious differences, Mrs. Rittersdorf's diary entries, on and on. Mrs. Schmitt feels it happening: "One man's desire must always crowd out another's, one must always take his own good at another's expense. Or so it seemed. God forgive us all." And yet she behaves no better.

Where will it all lead? On a literal level, the ship leads them to Germany which in that time period was the epitome of all the problems here on display. On a literary level, we should look at Ric and Rac who place themselves "outside of humanity" with their utter disregard for anything and everything, the symbol of what at least most of the adults are striving for. On the outside, at least. On the inside they are also these children, but huddling and shivering in their bunks with no where safe to turn. Vulnerable, and afraid of that vulnerability.

The best novels hold up a mirror to show us what we are. We don't have to like it, but let's at least acknowledge what not liking it means. show less

Assorted characters meet on a ship sailing from Veracruz to Bremerhaven in 1931, a not uncommon plot device but unique in this instance in that on the ship of fools, there really are only fools. No happy endings here, none of the warm fuzzies of the movie version, just a group of deeply unpleasant people one would hope never to meet individually, let alone collectively.

Porter divides her passengers into 3 rough groups: American, Spanish and German. The Americans are by and large the most human of the groups: the lovers Jenny and David lacerating each other with their unreal expectations, the genteel widow Mrs. Treadwell who would be happy ‘if not a soul looked at her for the (entire) voyage’ and the drunken racist, Denny.

The show more Spanish, represented in the main by a zarzuela dance company being deported from Mexico and medical students traveling from Cuba to France have made an art form of cruelty and are larcenous, jeering and rude. ‘They had a way of sitting together and without warning they would laugh dreadfully, with mirthless faces… always laughing at somebody.’ Included in this troupe are Ric and Rac the 6 year old twins, psychopaths shaped by the cruelty of their parents, evil ‘to the egg of their souls’, who spend their time on board torturing animals and indulging in incestuous sexual play.

The worst of this pack, however, are the Germans, with their surface veneer of respectability barely disguising the fascism and anti-Semitism below the surface. As front men for the cause we have Herr Rieber, a pig faced man with a nose like a snout, and Fr Spockenkieker who embodies ‘to the last trait and feature everything most positively repellant in womankind’. With these two characters Porter is guilty of stereotyping but it is in her other more respectable Germans that we find the roots of the Holocaust: Herr Freytag who is married to a Jew but keeps quiet so as to maintain his seat at the Captain’s table. Fr Rittendorf who believes ‘it is an offense against morality to overlook or condone insolence in an inferior’, the Huttens who live in an ivory tower of intellectual superiority and the ship’s doctor Schumann – perhaps the most decent person on board – who nevertheless chooses the path of least resistance and sidesteps all political confrontation.

Nor does Porter spare the Jews. Lowenthal, her token Jew, is uncharitable to the core and riddled with his own equally ugly prejudices; definitely not the ‘hero of a Cause’ but rather the sort of Jew other Jews don’t like. Freytag’s in-laws in Germany are not much better, attacking ‘him from all sides at once, some of them with open contempt, or a genuine personal dislike’ because he has made a mixed marriage.

Racism aside, Porter also gives us a healthy dose of 1930’s sexism. David is in the process of destroying Jenny’s self-confidence right down to the colors of her clothes and her style of painting, and the dance troupe is merely a front for a thriving ring of prostitution. But it is left to the Germans to give us a real taste of the pre-war marriage ethic. Women are ‘children of a larger growth’. ‘All associations between women, even of the most casual and passing kind were unnatural, morbid by nature, hotbeds of complicity against men, leading to divisions between husband and wife… A woman’s loyalty must not, cannot ever be (therefore) to her own sex, but to her men… above all, and before all, to her husband.’ The German females on board accept this as an article of faith, as do the Spanish dancers, handing over their hard earned money without question to their pimps. In fact the only woman who puts up any show of emancipation is the American girl, Jenny, and being a passenger on the ship of fools, even she makes a very poor showing of it.

Porter’s central theme therefore is man’s inhumanity to man and each group expresses this either through the personal or the political. Her prose style is excellent – she is a Pulitzer Prize winner – and yet one moves from page to page with all the squirming pleasure of an evening’s viewing of ‘Melrose Place’ or ‘Dynasty’. show less

Jenny glanced around and said, “Everybody looks tired. It’s just the same as we were in Veracruz, or in Havana. We all remember we’re strangers and don’t like each other. We’re all on our way somewhere else and we’ll be glad to see the last of each other. God, I’d hate to think I’d ever get even a postcard from anybody on this ship again, as long as I live!”

And, that, my friends, is precisely how I felt about this book. I despised every single passenger, not a sympathetic human being among them; there was nothing that really resembled a plot; and it was at least twice as long as was necessary, due to constant repetition.

I tried reading this many years back and abandoned it before I had given it any real chance. It was show more a finalist for the National Book Award. I assumed the problem was mine. Having now read all 500 pages, I had it right the first time. show less

A German ship, loaded with deported sugar cane workers from Cuba, a supposedly anarchist Condesa from Cuba, medical students from the closed university in Havana, a Troup of zarzuela dancers doubling as pimps and sex workers, and various travelers from Mexico leaves Veracruz for Bremerhaven in 1931. Everybody hates Jews and, for the most part, each other. They're at each other's throats night and day, and it's most delicious to read.

Ship of Fools, a novel by Katherine Anne Porter, was published in 1962 on April 1 (April Fools' Day). It is the tale of a group of disparate characters, from several different countries and backgrounds, who sail from Mexico to Germany aboard a mixed freighter and passenger ship. In her note prefacing the novel Porter notes that :

When I began thinking about my novel, I took for my own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity. It is by no means new -- I am a passenger on that ship. (p. 1)

The ironic epigraph for the first section of the novel, from Baudelaire, is "Quand partons-nous vers le bonheur?". On the very first line of the novel, however, we see a truer sign of what is to come, as the show more port city of Veracruz is described as "a little purgatory'. Soon the ship that sails becomes just that for the passengers in this complex tale. The ship is populated with a grand complement of passengers (so many that the publisher thoughtfully included a listing of characters preceding the novel proper, xi - xiii). While the majority are Germans there are Americans, Swiss, Spaniards and others, including the masses in steerage.

Porter deftly weaves the stories of each of the several couples and individuals who can each be seen as on a journey into hell as their passions simmer during the voyage. Episodes are encapsulated within the frame of embarkation and disembarkation where characters are presented in their interactions with one another during the voyage, and histories and relationships of several dozen are explored extensively. It takes less than a month in the year of 1931, but the end of the decade and the war it will bring seems to be foreshadowed in some of the tensions that develop during the story.

While leavened with comic moments, it was the presence of love and death and, unfortunately, not a little inhumanity that impressed me the most. The pessimism sometimes seems to be overwhelming and her satire suggests the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity". The sum of the multiplicity of moments and personal details is a tapestry of life that results in a great novel. show less

The German ship, called the Vera, is making a trip from Veracruz, Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany, carrying first class passengers of various citizenship and an "underclass" of prisoners, revolutionaries and the poor. Katherine Anne Porter modeled the novel after her observations on an ocean trip she took in 1931.

The cast of characters is somewhat large, and although there was a list at the front of the book, I found making my own list with a few more notes on each helped to keep them straight at first. But Porter's prose is so vivid it gives life to each one and soon the list was not necessary. I felt like I knew them.

But it's not warm, fuzzy feelings, though. Ethnic prejudices and class snobbery are all too evident throughout the show more novel: the condescension of first class toward the steerage travelers, the nationalism of the German travelers, and the public ostracizing of the Jews. Young readers may wonder, knowing the horrors of World War II to come, how such blatant talk could have been so common. In this regard, the "Ship of Fools" might be read as a cautionary tale. show less

A bunch of horrible people take a transatlantic voyage from Mexico to Germany, treat each other horribly, and end the voyage nearly as horrible as when they first arrived.

Okay, if you haven’t figured it out from my synopsis, I did not like this book. I suppose I understand why it is so revered. The details and the characterizations are excellent. There is a build to what I saw as the climax (the night of the big party) that is slow, deliberate, inevitable, and revealing. But I cannot care about any…any of these people. They are pathetic, mean, spiteful…they are not characters I care enough about to want to invest my time. (And I did invest my time; trust me.) Occasionally, I would start to become interested in a story thread, and show more then realize that interest was of the “train wreck” variety. And, upon the realization, I would again recognize that I just didn’t care.

Perhaps the most interesting portions of the book are those that speak of the rampant racism that was occurring in the times this book was set – 1931, between the wars. And, it being a German ship, you can imagine just how much hatred is spewed for anyone who falls outside the racially accepted norms. This reflects a little too painfully on the times we face today.

But, even those insights were no match for how much I detested being a part of these people’s lives.

(Mind you, that isn’t going to stop me from now watching the movie. It will be interesting to see how it all gets translated.) show less