BOOKS

Voyage to Everywhere

By SYBILLE BEDFORD

SHIP of Fools, Das Narrenschiji, Stultifera Navis: 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—it [is] very old and durable and dearly familiar • • . and it suits my purpose exactly. I am a Passenger on that ship.'* Katherine Anne Porter has written a tremendous novel. It took twenty years. One might pause for an instant to imagine this. Twenty years. The courage, the discipline, the fortitude; the cost of every kind, the pres- sures involved in bearing what must have been at times an almost intolerable burden. And here it is at last, the legend become print: the book has been out (in the United States) for barely half a year and already something of its sub- stance has eaten itself into the marrow of those Who read it. The Great American Novel has appeared; ironically, it has turned out to be a Veal universal novel. The framework is a voyage on a ship of the North German Lloyd from Veracruz to Bremer- haven in 1931, lasting twenty-seven days. The theme is not (as might be said) an icy condem- nation of the human race, but a condemnation of its condition; a clinical exposition, point c.ounterpoint, of the facts of the flesh, the quak- ing of the spirit, the unavailing antics and de- lences against the whole unalterable mesh of fear, lust, greed, decay, private demons, random Inalice, death and alienation. The passengers embark—VI-wild partons-nous vers le bonheur?' at Veracruz. And here at once in a few open- ing pages we have what may well endure as °Ile of the indelible set-pieces of black literature : .ffie gruesomeness and beauty of Mexico, and its blank indifference, the anguish of all jour- neys. The Mexicans of the white-linen class sttariog behind their iced limeades into the square, the shapeless, sweaty, pink-faced travellers trudg- ing from stony-eyed clerk to clerk, from customs shed to office, the cycle of the fish-scrap, rotting banana and small copper coin flung to the crawling deformity, the dog, the Indian, the chained monkey and the cat—here it is the abyss between race and race, comfortable and poor, in_ an and man, man and creature. The travellers each the ship; their anonymity dissolves, the characters emerge, their pasts, their physiques, their worlds. There are some thirty of them, Passengers of the first class, all wonderfully s.eparate, realised, seen, and there are also, as thick, as tangible, what one might call the le:sences, the ship's company of dapper name- officers and fair snub-nosed sailors, the hydra _Cuban students, the steerage passengers, author hundred and twenty-six souls.' The '_i,fhor exercises an uncanny physical compul- 4, 1o upon her readers, we are all, and not only 11 _ her allegorical sense, passengers on that ship: illy isrre read we are always there; we lean against we walk that deck we eat in that saloon * Si-up OF POOLS. By Katherine Anne Porter. (Seeker and Warburg, 30s-) (gross Germanic soup-scoops as well as delicious things: Miss Porter's dichotomous attitude to the food on her ship invites a thesis), we sit in those musty cabins while the men shave and the women let their hair down, we hear them and, above all, we see. The lamentable shape of many of the German passengers, the youth and slen- derness of the Spanish sluts, the huge, rnysteri- ously tormented Swede sleeping with his feet outside the upper bunk, Herr and Frau Professor mopping up after their dog. We see the captain's wattles swell purple in temper and the greasy pores of the unloved Swiss girl. We see them skip and waddle and stride towards one another —on Katherine Anne Porter's ship the people are what they look, and they do as they are. They sleep with each other, or try to (she is a virtuoso of such situations), take virulent dis- likes, band together, score off, snub. A man goes overboard; there are some acts of violence (the least expected of them has a disturbing echo in one of the author's early stories). Some ugly things occur. Every scene, every incident, every interchange, is convincing, alive, is happening,

• has happened before our eyes. When it is over, one stops (if one does stop) and asks, how was it done? how does she do it? With words, evi- dently. Miss Porter's style is elegant and precise; it is straight without being thin, rich without the slightest trace of cloying It is neither colloquial nor baroque, and she never permits herself a mannerism or an idiosyncrasy. In fact, it is a very fine style, put to use with the greatest skill, but this style and her words have a way of vanishing from consciousness and the page while flesh and blood take over.

Miss Porter's contrapuntal theme of hopeless- ness is perhaps most originally sustained by six of her main characters, or rather by three couples. These are: the Spanish twins; the American lovers, Jenny angel and David darling;

and two of the Germans, Herr Rieber and FrUulein Lizzi Spockenkieker. The Spanish twins are six years old. They are dead-end characters (a Katherine Anne Porter speciality), born purely malevolent,- without a spark of anything else, and nothing whatsoever will redeem them. (We are made to believe this.) This little boy and girl, 'as light as if their bones were hollow,' hate all grown-ups, other children, animals, and they make the children in A High Wind in Jamaica and The Turn of the Screw appear rational, amenable human beings. The young American lovers, conscious creatures of good will, enact throughout one irremediable predicament: they cannot love each other in each other's presence. They meet filled with tenderness, remorse; they meet, hate and quarrel. They part, if only for a walk round deck, and once again they melt and hope, And here, too, it is made quite clear that they cannot let each other go, nor ever be at peace together. Herr Rieber is a bouncing, bumptious, genial little German, full of coyness, sentimentality and good cheer, who goes off the deep end on the subject of the master race. There is one notable passage.

Herr Bieber and Lizzi Splickenkieker pranced on to the deck, and Lizzi screamed out. . . . 'Oh, what do you think of this dreadful fellow? Can you guess what he just said? I was saying, "Oh, these poor people, what can be done for them?" and this monster'—she gave a kind of whinny between hysteria and indignation— 'he said, "I would do this for them: I would put them all in a big oven and turn on the gas." Oh,' she said weakly, doubling over with laughter, 'isn't that the most original idea you ever heard?'

- Herr Rieber stood by smiling broadly, quite pleased with himself. . . . Lizzi said, 'Oh, he did not mean any harm, of course, only to fumigate them, isn't that so?'

i did not mean fumigate,' said Herr Bieber stubbornly.

The other Germans on board, who think that_ Herr Rieber, whom they look down on socially, goes too far, are heftily united in their feelings about German blood, their nationalism, their laments over the lost war, their contempt for America (polluted by The Negro) and their terror of and disgust with the smell of the poor, the Spanish rabble in the steerage. When there is some trouble down there, the captain, a bluster- ing bully, behaves abominably out of sheer acquired inhumanity and funk; and there is one very nasty episode indeed, an act of anti- Semitism, not violent and rather more sinister for being aimed at the absent wife of a Christian

passenger, which leaves a mark on the whole voyage.

Ship of Fools will be and has been called anti-German. One might as well say that the book is anti-human. The Spaniards, Americans, Mexicans and Cubans on that ship come out differently, but they do not come out any better. Two out of the limited number—four?—six?—of 'decent' characters are German, Dr. Schumann and Frau Otto Schmitt. Miss Porter took some Germans of the early 1930s as she found them, but surely this choice of nationalities is sub- ordinate and incidental to the main theme of her work? If she had chosen, she might have had her ship captained by a chauvinistic French climber or a jingoistic Englishman with the same ultimate effect.

Faults? Miss Porter believes in the repeated blow, the massed detail. The book might have been even more effective, more stunning, for less length. Bulk, whatever the quality, blunts. Also, there is perhaps rather too much insistence (de- verbalised Huxleyan) on armpits, smells and fat. And we would have been as horrified if she had gone a little more lightly on the grotesques. Did the only Jew on board have to be such an utter wretch? did he have to trade in rosaries? Could we not have done without the actual hunchback on the passenger list? But this comes dangerously near to quarrelling with the artist's vision. (Being not wholly certain about Mrs. Treadwell does not. She is the one main charac- ter over whom the author seems to waver. There is something magazine-y about that lady and her inner monologues.) There is something else that might be looked at as a flaw: the novel remains static, the characters move on tram- lines towards crescendos, not towards develop- ment; there is accumulation, straws on camels'

backs, but no choice, no crossroads, no turning- points. But this is quarrelling with the artist's vision, for the point is that hers is not in terms of classical tragedy or Jamesian decisions: her cards are already stacked, the tableau is the don urn.

There are moments of transport, of otherness. When the boy and the Spanish dancer make love for the first time (the boy having about killed his uncle to get some money to pay the girl and her pimp), the key changes and one is utterly carried away, and it is young and sensuous and good. Then there are the Mexican bride and groom, the lovers who do not speak, who float, silent, hand in hand, past the more solid apparitions. But the Mexican lovers have been left on another plane, they are never substan- tiated and remain, too faintly, a symbol. Perhaps the high moment of the book comes when the whales are seen, three whales flashing white and silver in the sunlight, spouting tall white foun- tains, and the Spanish twins wave their arms in pure ecstasy, and 'not one person could take his eyes from the beautiful spectacle . . . and their minds were cleansed of death and violence.'

But the whales recede. There are no windows after all on that voyage, no wider views, no liberation. Only escapes. Wine, food and loving destroy the body. The intellectuals on board are arid pedants. Religion does not get off the ground; art remains extraneous; pity is self- pity; love the angst-ridden cry of self-love. There is one single italicised passage in the book, it comes towards the end, and it goes:

What they were saying to each other was only, 'Love me, love me in spite of all! Whether or not I love you, whether I am fit to love, whether you are able to love, even if there is no such thing as love, love me!' They will not. Not for long; not enough, 00 that ship there is no help, no hope, no light, 110 change. There will be no message. The best olle can do is to muster a thin form of model.° stoicism, some tenue, behave with a little more dignity than the next person. It is better not to cry in public, not to .wolf one's food, to keell one's waistline, carry one's liquor, for women to wear clothes accordant with their age; there is something to be said for the masculine passion for physical discipline, the German addiction t° duty. . . . It is not the noblest hypothesis abrill,t the voyage; it is one that has been held—o.°' denied—by artists and laymen through centuo,es. Ship of Fools is a sustained version. Katherine Anne Porter has given us a Brueghel; we en° hope, but cannot be sure, that it is less true than a Piero della Francesca.