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Some Observations on the Genesis of “Ship of Fools”: A Letter from Katherine Anne Porter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Katherine Anne
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Abstract

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Type
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 1969 , pp. 136 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

ON an introductory page to her Ship of Fools,1 Katherine Anne Porter recalls that she read Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff in 1932, with her European voyage (Vera Cruz to Bremerhaven, 1931) recently behind her.2 Aboard ship she had kept a diary, the source of more extensive notes to be made the next year. The actual composition of the fiction in the form of a working draft began in 1941 at Yaddo.3 Until now inaccessible, a letter4 from Miss Porter to Malcolm Cowley in 1931, seems genetic in its position between the diary and conscious labor on the work. It tends, moreover, to support a reading of Ship of Fools as an apologue6 by felicitous predisposition, rather than as a novel by misguided intention. It has been in great measure by the latter reading that the critical reception of Ship of Fools has been generally unfavorable. The letter, entire, follows:

Berlin, September 25, 1931

1 Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1962).

2 Miss Porter's introduction to Ship of Fools.

3 From a letter to Edward Schwartz, 20 February 1952. Edward Schwartz, “Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Bibliography.” With an introduction by Robert Penn Warren. BNYPL, lvii (May 1953), 211–247.

4 Published with the kind permission of Miss Porter, Mr. Cowley, and the director of the Newberry Library, Mr. L. W. Towner; and with the generous help of Mrs. Amy Nyholm. Letter Copyright © 1968 by Katherine Anne Porter.

5 In a letter to the author, dated 25 March 1967, a photocopy of which is in the possession of the editors of this journal, Miss Porter concurs with this reading of Ship of Fools as I contended for it in “The Responsibility of the Novelist: The Critical Reception of Ship of Fools,” Criticism, viii (1966), 377–388. In the same letter, Miss Porter contrasts it with “the many dreadful interpretations.”

6 Ship of Fools is set in 1931. The passengers of the Vera sail on 22 August from Vera Cruz and arrive at Bremerhaven, 27 days later, on 17 September, after covering an itinerary which corresponds very closely to the actual. The intransigent captain is plainly the type of Captain Thiele.

7 The Waves was published in 1931.

8 This review of a work on Mexico by Stuart Chase seems not to have been published. Miss Porter's tone did not suit the New Republic, of which Mr. Cowley was book editor from 1929 to 1940.

9 Beggars, vicious or maimed, are powerful images in the depiction of Vera Cruz in the opening scenes of Ship of Fools. The maimed beggar is a Brant figure, dealt with in Ch. lxiii of Das Narrenschiff.

10 Mrs. Cowley.

11 Ship of Fools, p. 3.

12 The Modern Collection, the Newberry Library, Chicago.