FLAYING EXPERIENCE
Johnson, Lucy
Flaying Experience Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter. Atlantic-Little Brown. 497 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson I am thinking about all the things people everywhere do to make each...
...By the time the first debarkations start at Tenerife, we know each person's faults and petty strengths so well that Miss Porter can almost trick us into entering into the vengeful spirit of a con-game farewell party given by the Spanish dancers...
...Anti-Semitism and other prejudices against religions, nationalities, and classes, tangles of love and hate, conflicts between the young and old, marriages held up by the thinnest of crutches, all of the seven deadly sins, and much more, alone and in combination, are presented in the most intimate and personal terms...
...Her triumph is in making the reader feel that he, too, is a passenger...
...Old patterns of cruelty are repeated and flourish like mold in the rich culture of enforced fellowship...
...They smacked their lips and said, 'Ja, ja...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson I am thinking about all the things people everywhere do to make each other miserable—," Katherine Anne Porter has one of her miserable characters say...
...The novel has no plot except one: to make the reader an accomplice to all that goes on in the narrative...
...family, and a Swede...
...2-1962...
...Perhaps the reason for her success is indicated in a note in which she says, "I took for my own this simple, almost universal image of the ship of this world...
...And within seconds this solidarity starts eroding in the strong current of egotism...
...Sample copies of old issues on request...
...I am a passenger on that ship...
...At the first meal after the man is exiled to a table with the one Jew on board, and after the pretensions of a group of low Spanish dancers who dare sympathize with the victory of the captain's table are deflated, "The ring was closed solidly against all undesirables, ally as well as enemy...
...As more travelers leave at Vigo and Boulogne, and the ship puts in at Bremerhaven, the passengers go through a decompression chamber of ebbing tensions before taking up "real" life ashore, a life which will surely be essentially the same, if a less concentrated, agony as life at sea...
...Look, the big trouble is, nobody listens...
...During the embarkation, a large number of people join the ship in Mexico and in Cuba: Germans, Spanish, Mexicans, Americans, Cubans, a Swiss "KENNEDY'S FARM NOSTRUMS" and "PAKISTAN — An American Colony" featured in The Western Socialist, No...
...Reading Miss Porter's only novel is a flaying experience...
...Each comes aboard with his own complex of tensions vibrating within himself...
...Miss Porter's instrument of exposure is a deftly shattering irony...
...Gradually, as the ship leaves land and the outside world behind, the passengers set up new lines of contact...
...I don't quite know how Miss Porter has managed to keep our fascinated attention fixed upon a shipload of ordinary people whose "collusion with evil is only negative, consent by default . . . half asleep and refusing to be waked up...
...These tensions are made up of individual weakness, prejudice, indifference, selfishness, narrowness of vision, insecurity—all so uncomfortably familiar, so intrinsically, har-rowingly human...
...On the ship of life each fool is both victim and torturer...
...Only at his own risk may he smile at the vanities of the voyage, for Ship of Fools is, bitterly, "too true to be funny...
...Mail $1 for 8-issue subscription, including above, to 11 Faneuil Hall Square, Boston 9, Mass...
...AH the faces were relaxed with sensual gratification, mingled with deep complacency: they were, after all, themselves and no one else: the powerful, the privileged, the right people . . . they fell to being charming to each other . . . making a little festival to celebrate their rediscovered kinship, their special intimate bonds of blood and sympathy . . . they set an example of how superior persons conduct themselves towards each other . . . they exchanged toasts all around...
...Their humiliation of the captain and their spiteful imitations of the other passengers ("almost too true to be funny") are mere introductions to a saturnalia in which the passengers violently receive their just deserts from each other in the most maliciously satisfying ways—if a little too patly...
...The voyage of a German freighter-passenger ship—twenty-seven days in 1931 from Veracruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany—divides itself, as all ocean journeys do, into three parts, embarkation, the time at sea, and debarkation...
...In Ship of Fools we listen and watch with such intensity of involvement that every poisoned arrow, shot across the barricades of isolation that surrounds each character, both lands in our own skin and, by being shot, diminishes us by its human cruelty...
...A marvelous scene climaxes an episode in which a German, traveling alone but discovered to have a Jewish wife, is expelled from the all-Aryan, all-German captain's table...
...Surely, the master stroke in a masterly book is its shape and the use made of this shape to involve the reader totally...
Vol. 26 • May 1962 • No. 5
