[It] is a fact that K. A. Porter was as emotionally involved with the South as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Her love for her South is reflected in her writing. (p. 441)

Some critical comments demonstrate how fatal it can be to overlook K. A. Porter's emotional involvement with her native area. She created a myth from her family history, but she did not mistake the myth for reality. And she did not idealize or sentimentalize the past, yet she made it clear that there is no escape from it. The characters in her fiction see the past for what it is, so they may organize their lives in terms of the actual. And the past provides the standard by which they finally judge, and by which they are judged by the readers. Without knowledge of K. A. Porter's Southern background, it is easy to misjudge the perspective on the past in her fiction. It is only too easy to overestimate or underestimate the biographical elements. The Miranda figure seeks self-definition through her past and present. She rebels against the Old Order; but she is at once a part of the Old Order and apart from it, in the way K. A. Porter herself was. It would be a mistake, therefore, to see the Miranda stories as ending in "isolation and desolation," as claimed by George Hendrick [in his critical biography Katherine Anne Porter]. In a marginal comment, K. A. Porter has pointed out that she meant the stories to end "in an exhilaration of having faced one's destiny—[Miranda] wasn't frightened, wasn't sad, only resolved. A very positive state of being." As a consequence of the "isolation and desolation" interpretation of the stories, Cousin Eve's negative view of the past has been accepted as speaking more of the truth. "In what way?" asks K. A. Porter in another marginal comment, "Is a venomous view any more true than a romantic one? Is hatred more true than love?" Only a complete disregard for her love for the South makes the narrow negative interpretation possible.

A sound knowledge of K. A. Porter's biography could have prevented critics from obvious blunders. (pp. 442-43)

It is commonly held among critics that the closer K. A. Porter worked to the world of her youth, the more successful she was. When "The Fig Tree," a long lost story, was published in 1960, both critics and readers were pleased. But she chose not to restrict herself to the Texas material. Her work does not, however, have to be about the South to reflect and embody the Southern experience. Could Ship of Fools have been written by anybody but a Southerner? As Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has put it [in his The Curious Death of the Novel]: "The way that Miss Porter looks at human beings, the things she thinks are important about them, the values by which she judges their conduct, are quite 'Southern,' even though none of the major characters are Southern" in the novel. In Ship of Fools, as in all her fiction, she faced the present and offered her commentary on it. The comments would have been different if her background had been different. Once she wrote, "Of the three dimensions of time, only the past is 'real' in the absolute sense that it has occurred, the future is only a concept, and the present is that fateful split second in which all action takes place." And what could be more "Southern"?

To K. A. Porter the Southern past was real and not a myth, for a part of Southern history is her own history. (pp. 443-44)