Archetypal Woman, Archetypal Germans
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Archetypal Woman Archetypal Germans By Stanley Edgar Hyman In August 1931, Katherine Anne Porter, then 37, sailed from Veracruz to Bremerhaven on a North German Lloyd ship....
...In a 1947 article she described them as the perpetual aggressors of Europe...
...Treadwell, a divorcée on her way back to her beloved Paris...
...Two principal characters emerge, both composites of a number of characters in the book...
...and many others...
...In some moods Jenny sees David as "an albatross around my neck that I didn't even shoot," a "petrified fetus" she will carry for the rest of her life...
...Julius Löwenthal, the solitary Jew on board, is fully as unattractive as the Germans...
...Treadwell is devoted to old-fashioned roses, and her key memory of Paris is going to la Bagatelle to help the moss roses open: "In cold springs they get stuck, poor things, halfway—all you do is loosen one outer petal and there it opens, before your eyes...
...Amparo, a Spanish dancer-prostitute who comes to Mass exuding "a warm spermy odor...
...The other Germans on the boat are only slightly more genteel anti-Semites, prospective Nazis...
...Halloran beating drunken Mr...
...The main dramatic action of Ship of Fools is the wild eruption of a repressed mixture of violence and sex, most of it on the night that the Spanish dancers throw a party...
...But I am afraid that ultimately we are disgusted rather than moved...
...In her later years (the author when she finished the novel), Woman is represented by the book's most captivating character, La Condesa...
...and a silent deadly fight Jenny sees between an Indian man and woman— he stabbing her, she smashing his head with a stone— and equates with herself and David...
...The crucial eruption is gentle Mrs...
...Both are about on the level of ingenuity of seeing life as a Grand Hotel or a Wayward Bus, but Miss Porter's novel is far better than either its simple scheme or its didactic title...
...Frau Rittersdorf meditates on racial mongrelization and euthanasia in her diary...
...Schumann that being a German is "an incurable malady...
...Two early symbols generalize it: the battling of a cat, parrot, dog, monkey and Indian in Veracruz that nastily symbolizes the human scramble...
...Miss Porter's brutal and sadistic Germans are of course tearily sentimental about children and animals: a nasty purser shudders at the thought of the American custom of kidnapping and murdering children...
...The first is The Woman, seen at three stages of her life...
...She made all of them out of herself, where else could they have taken on life...
...She remains almost unaffected by the book's events, and goes ashore with David at the end prepared to "sleep in the same bed for a change...
...All she seems to have changed from the magazine publications is the doctor's name, and I do not doubt that the book's last pages are the ones that Miss Porter wrote in 1934...
...The work outgrew novelette form and, in August 1941, she started writing it as a novel, to be called Promised Land...
...There are powerful scenes throughout the book, and the language is everywhere distinguished...
...About 1934 she decided to turn this diary into a novelette, to follow the three in Pale Horse, Pale Rider...
...As her ship is the Ship of Life, it is with equal patness named Vera, the Ship of Truth...
...Wilibald Graf, a dying man in a wheelchair who believes that he has divine healing powers...
...One of the book's characters, Siegfried Rieber, is an obvious Nazi, threatening to put the Jews and other unfit "in a big oven and turn on the gas," suspecting Jews and traitors to Germany everywhere on board...
...His consort, the ludicrous Lizzi Spöckenkieker, shares his views and parrots his slogans...
...In "The Leaning Tower," her Berlin novelette, she sees the German people as "faces full of hallucinated malice and a kind of sluggish but intense cruelty that worked its way up from their depths slowly through the layers of helpless gluttonous fat...
...Then back in her cabin this friend of moss roses kisses the bloody sandal "in her joy and excitement...
...A detestation for everything German has distinguished Miss Porter's writing for 30 years...
...Treadwell has her 46th birthday on shipboard, and she is suddenly overwhelmed by middle age: "Without any warning at all she felt Time itself as a great spider spinning a thick dusty web around her life, winding and winding until it covered all...
...I sometimes sound more frivolous than I am," she explains...
...It was her first trip to Europe, and she kept a diary of the voyage...
...Treadwell is cruelly pinched by a beggar woman she has refused in Veracruz, and the doctor takes her bruise to be "the result of an amorous pinch.' Much of the tension is developed by Ric and Rac, the six-year-old boy-and-girl twins of one of the dancers, and almost the most vicious children I have ever encountered in literature...
...when Frey tag arrives at his table, Löwenthal welcomes him with "Why can't you Goyim leave our girls alone...
...Jenny is beautiful, vivacious, mad for dancing, quite intelligent, and in some moods very much in love with David...
...How not...
...They call each other "Jenny angel" and "David darling...
...the Captain sees the United States as a gangster anarchy and Germany as a "fatherland of order, harmony, simplicity, propriety, where every public place was hung with signs forbidding this or that, guiding the people...
...The dancers ignore all of this, but when Ric and Rac snatch La Condesa's pearl necklace, which the dancers had planned to steal, and toss it overboard, they are viciously tortured by their parents, screaming and squealing "like a rabbit in the teeth of a weasel," and eventually they crawl exhausted into bed and fall asleep in each other's arms...
...As is her custom, she began by writing the last few pages first...
...In a touching scene, he visits her when she is asleep, kisses her and tells her his love...
...Treadwell beats his face to a bloody pulp with the spike heel of her sandal...
...In youth (the author when she made the voyage or earlier), Woman is Jenny Brown, a young painter sailing chastely with her former lover, David Scott, in a separate cabin...
...in its cruel sequel, she dismisses him and his lumpish passion ruthlessly...
...The other composite character is The German...
...He then passes out, and while he is unconscious Mrs...
...Like her creator, Mrs...
...It is foreshadowed in the first pages when Mrs...
...Professor Hütten disguises his racism with a veneer of scholarship...
...It's just my unfortunate manner...
...The effect she has on the stuffy German ship's doctor, Schumann, is promptly to make him confess that at the age of five he seduced his three-year-old girl cousin, then to make him fall in love with her...
...She leaves the party early, gets drunk in her cabin, and makes up her face like one of the Spanish dancers...
...In Ship of Fools, La Condesa surely speaks for the author in telling Dr...
...She is an elderly Spanish noblewoman with grown children, deported from Cuba for revolutionary activities...
...An introductory note insists on "the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity," and concludes: "I am a passenger on that ship...
...In my opinion the new title, with its pretentious reference to Sebastian Brant's allegory Das Narrenschiff, is the worst of the three...
...When William Freytag is discovered to have a Jewish wife, removed from the captain's table and put to sit with the ship's Jew, all the good Germans at the table glow "with sensual gratification...
...They combine desperate violence toward the rest of the world with incestuous sexual passion for each other...
...La Condesa takes narcotics when she can get them and ether when she cannot, she shamelessly strokes her small, still-lovely breasts in the presence of men, and she has lived her life fully and regrets only "that I did not always make the most of my chances...
...Other than The Woman and The German, the characters on board the Vera are for the most part brilliantly drawn grotesques: the hunchback Karl Glocken, who spends his time dodging people who try to touch his hump for luck...
...In Miss Porter's bitterest irony, their victim, Freytag, is himself a racist who agrees that Jewish blood is tainted...
...Even the violence in her stories—the madam kneeing the whore bloody in "Magic," proper Mrs...
...and Rieber weeps at the sight of cruelty to animals...
...Treadwell's...
...After it everything in the book is anticlimax...
...He is a manufacturer of Roman Catholic religious articles who spits in the presence of a Mass...
...Treadwell is a lady, beautiful, gentle and gracious, although she drinks too much and recalls trying to be a slut to please her husband...
...Finally, in August 1961, 30 years after the voyage, Miss Porter completed the novel, her first, and it is now published as Ship of Fools (AtlanticLittle, Brown., 497 pp., $6.50...
...The essence of Ship of Fools, in short, is a vision of pervasive human animality, covert where it is not overt...
...Halloran in the face in "A Day's Work"—does not prepare for this shock and outrage as Woman and German merge...
...In middle age (the author when she began the novel), Woman is Mrs...
...Mrs...
...Treadwell's door, takes her for the dancer, curses her obscenely and hurts her breast...
...They try to throw the ship's cat overboard, and do succeed in throwing Professor Hutten's bulldog overboard, which results in the drowning of one of the steerage passengers...
...All of them in some details resemble Miss Porter, who is an exceptionally autobiographical writer, and who has written of Willa Cather's characters: "Of course she was all of them...
...Much of it was completed by 1944, and in the years since she has published sections of it, by this time called No Safe Harbor, in magazines...
...It is an overpowering and horrible scene, Miss Porter's ghastly valentine to her native state...
...Jenny has "a priggish little moral earnestness" usually concealed by gay chatter...
...William Denny, a drunken vulgarian from Texas, in pursuit of one of the dancers knocks on Mrs...
...In Miss Porter's imaginative world, there are no good Germans, only a few who are oblivious, like the doctor, or too weak to make any difference, like little Frau Schmitt, who accuses Rieber of anti-Semitism but gets caught up in "the warm wave of blood kinship with her great and glorious race" when Freytag is removed, and eventually concludes: "This was a terrible, evil world and she was helpless in it...
...It has caused nearly all my troubles...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 7
