When Cousin Eva, the spinster suffragette in "Old Mortality," bitterly condemns the family as a "hideous institution," one that is "the root of all human wrongs" and that ought to be "wiped from the face of the earth," she is somewhat consciously oversimplifying, and overstating, her own attitude. Certainly Eva's remarks alone do not adequately convey Katherine Anne Porter's complex views on the subject.

In her stories, the family is always supported in its evil work by other institutions—social, political, and religious. And in her treatment of evil in the family, just as in her treatment of corruption in politics and religion, she always holds an implicit vision of an ideal that has been vitiated, betrayed, or perverted.

But Miss Porter shares with Eva an almost obsessive preoccupation with family life, and with the struggle of the individual to maintain a personal identity—either within the family or, if need be, in anguished rebellion against it. The theme appears, more or less prominently, in almost every one of her stories, early and late. The consistency of her concern with it overrides all ethnic, regional, religious, and economic distinctions…. [All,] for good or ill, carry with them throughout their lives the burden of family consciousness.

For the most part, it is for ill rather than good. As Katherine Anne Porter represents it in her fiction, the lot of man is generally unhappy; her characters' moments of joy are extremely rare—although it ought to be added that the joy is totally convincing when it does occur, and the more to be appreciated for the very fact of its rarity. And, if the family itself is not the root of quite all the human wrongs she writes about, still it is seldom that anyone in her stories is helped by his family to cope with the evils that have their source elsewhere in nature and society. The family situation, either present or remembered, is at least a secondary source of the protagonist's unhappiness in almost all the stories. (pp. 14-15)

Black characters, all of them servants to white families, figure prominently in very few of Katherine Anne Porter's stories. Their personalities and behavior are of interest chiefly in the way that they reflect, and to some extent influence, the lives of the whites.

The portraits of the two ex-slaves, Nannie and her husband, Uncle Jimbilly, in "The Journey," "The Last Leaf," and "The Witness," and the characterization of the black girl, Dicey, who is little Miranda's reluctantly devoted nurse in "The Circus," are memorable both for their individuality and for their insight into the typical psychology of the Negro servant. Implicit in these stories is a trenchant criticism of Southern white paternalism, the conventional, hypocritical pretense of the masters that they regard the blacks as "real members of the family." The "hideous institution," even in comparatively enlightened households like that of Miranda's family, functions at its subtle worst in assigning the blacks to roles that deny them full human dignity. But, possibly just because she, like Miranda, was raised in a way that prevented her from knowing any Negroes during her formative years except on terms dictated by the system of social caste, Miss Porter never attempted a full-scale characterization of a black who is interesting primarily in his or her own right. (p. 40)

Katherine Anne Porter's childless couples are, if anything, even more miserable than the mothers and fathers in her fiction. In the descriptions of their stifling lives together, all the vices of the "hideous institution" are painted in intense miniature.

Typically one or the other is frigid, or impotent, or otherwise sexually deficient; sometimes, it is both. It is clear that some of these spouses sought in marriage a refuge from their families and only find themselves harnessed into a still more oppressive bondage to each other. (p. 46)

In "Rope," [as a typical example,] a young city couple summering in the country fall into a bitter quarrel over the husband's selfish absent-mindedness. On a shopping trip into town, he forgets to buy the coffee that his wife repeatedly reminded him to get. But, indulging an absurd whim, he buys a large coil of heavy rope, for which he has no definable use, and tires himself carrying it on the walk home. The rope, of course, symbolizes the invisible bond of their destructive but probably unbreakable union. They are "at the end of the rope" of their patience with each other; they have "enough rope," with which to hang themselves. But they cannot work free of each other. At the end of the story, exhausted by a long exchange of recriminations, they are temporarily reconciled. But it is plain that they are doomed to resume the quarrel once they have rested. Referred to only as "he" and "she," they have all but lost their personalities in the degrading, continuous struggle that is their marriage. (pp. 46-7)

In the stories that have usually been considered Miss Porter's finest work, the central figures are people whose desperate preoccupation with themselves cuts them off from effective communication with all other human beings. In some instances, a family situation, present or remembered, may be responsible for the protagonist's alienation or provide its particular dramatic circumstances. But whether the setting is a New York rooming house, where the protagonist is a long way from home and alone for most of the time of the story's action, or a Texas farmhouse, with the family present most of the time, the reader's attention is fixed upon a totally private agony. (p. 62)

Especially in the stories about women, it may be in the failure of a sexual union that the fatal pride chiefly shows itself. But sex is ultimately of no greater importance than social class or occupation or level of literacy. What all these characters have in common, from the Miranda of "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" to Royal Earle Thompson of "Noon Wine," is a consuming devotion to some idea of themselves—of their own inestimable worth and privilege—which the circumstances of their lives do not permit them to realize in actuality but which they are powerless to abandon. The idea lives in them like a demon, directing all their thoughts and actions. Whatever it may be in which they invest that most precious and indefinable sense of self—a cherished grievance, a need to justify a fatal action, an ideal of order and mental discipline—they pursue it relentlessly, through all discomforts and deprivations, even to death—and if not to the death of the body then of the spirit, incapacitating themselves not only for love but for the enjoyment of any common good of life, to walk forever among strangers. (pp. 62-3)

Despite their great variety in length, tone, theme, subject matter, attitude, and narrative technique—comedies and tragedies, everything from very short stories to short novels—the works on which Miss Porter built her reputation … are what I would call realistic romances, more or less tightly plotted, in which attention is centered upon the fate of a single personage. With ship of Fools she moved on to something quite different, and left … [most of her old admirers behind].

Actually, many characteristics of the long-awaited "novel"—what I would attempt not to define, but only cautiously to describe, as a tragic satire, basically allegorical in structure, in which many different stories of realistic romance are deliberately aborted, in keeping with the satiric purpose—are anticipated in Miss Porter's earlier work. (p. 112)

The whole action cannot be adequately summarized. The book is a vast complex of many little stories. The omniscient author's view dominates the whole. But, within that framework, many of the characters are presented also as they see themselves and each other. In just under five hundred pages, Miss Porter enters the most private consciousness of more than twenty people—of both sexes, of several different ages and ethnic groups, of widely varying personality types—with totally convincing mastery of attitude and sensibility, of mental idiom, in every case. (p. 119)

The book's central design is thematic rather than narrative. All the stories, as such, are woven into, and become simply parts of, the total pattern of thematic statement….

At one level, Ship of Fools can be interpreted as a kind of prophesy in retrospect of the triumph of fascism in Europe. (p. 120)

Miss Porter shows her keen insight into the kind of unholy collusion of good and evil—of, in Yeats's words, "the best [who] lack all conviction" and "the worst [who] are full of passionate intensity"—that permitted Hitler to firm his alliances with other fascist states for attempted world conquest and genocide, while in Germany itself, in France, in England, in America, in every country of the world, believers in the equality and freedom of man uncomfortably compromised their consciences, and alternately dithered and brooded in ineffectual anxiety…. Miss Porter plays no national favorites in her generally pessimistic representation of modern man and his situation.

There are no wholly admirable characters in the book. They are all fools. (pp. 122-23)

No one, of either sex, or of any race or nationality, is spared—not even the author herself. In her prefatory note on Ship of Fools, Miss Porter wrote: "I am a passenger on that ship." Actually, she is several of the passengers. The Americans Jenny Brown and Mary Treadwell are rather obvious self-caricatures of Katherine Anne Porter, at different ages. But it is an important part of the design that she also invested herself in one of the least appealing of the Germans on the Vera [Frau Rittersdorf]. (p. 125)

What might be called Miss Porter's "denationalization" of her own fictive identity in the book is an important indication of her central thematic concern in Ship of Fools. At one level, as we have noted, the book is about fascism. But the great folly of fascism, the absurd objective of enforcing by political means national and racial standards for membership in the human community, is revealed in Ship of Fools as only one manifestation of the supreme and timeless folly of man in his compulsion to set limits of any and all kinds to his human identity, to circumscribe his human potential. (p. 126)

Caricature is Miss Porter's dominant method in the book. She has developed to near perfection the caricaturist's essential vision of the beast in man. The Huttens as bulldogs, Lizzi Spöckenkieker as roadrunner, Herr Rieber as pig, are a few of many obvious examples. But all the characters, from the least to the most sympathetic and intelligent, are fitted at one time or another with animal masks of varying subtlety.

But the caricature of Ship of Fools is caricature raised finally to the level of tragic myth and mystery. There are many real animals in the book as well as human beings in bestial guise. And the fates of the beasts are intimately involved with those of the humans. (pp. 134-35)

Ship of Fools suggests, perhaps, that the only true moral imperative for man, whereby he can maintain any true faith in the holiness of his humanity, is that he keep asking the unanswerable questions about his creaturely status. But one must hesitate to abstract even that much, even as a suggestion of discursive statement, from the work of art. Katherine Anne Porter portrays her fools, she tells their stories; she presents; she composes. Beyond that, what she does in Ship of Fools with the mystery of human existence that is its central theme—"the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor"—is all that any artist can do, has ever done, with the irreducible complexity of human experience. She celebrates it. (pp. 139-40)

John Edward Hardy, in his Katherine Anne Porter (copyright © 1973 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.), Ungar, 1973, 160 p.