SOURCE: “The Upward Path: Notes on the Work of Katherine Anne Porter,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 4, January, 1968, pp. 1–19.

[In the following essay, Baker places Porter's short fiction within a literary context and traces the influence of her time in Mexico on her life and her fiction.]

I

“The Downward Path to Wisdom” is the title of one of Katherine Anne Porter's most characteristic short stories.¹ In it a boy, still almost a baby, comes into an elementary consciousness of himself and the world. He begins to realize that he is a thing apart from other things, something named Stephen; as for the world, he recapitulates an ancient discovery, to the effect that human beings, as such, are bad. “I hate Mama,” he chants as the story closes, “I hate Papa, I hate Grandma, I hate Uncle David, I hate old Janet, I hate Marjory. …” It's a sort of litany that he has made up, not too unreasonably, after some exhausting, vainglorious, and utterly humiliating first adventures, and he chants it to himself with quiet satisfaction, even while he is falling asleep, cuddled against his mother's knee. The story of his experience, admittedly, adds up to a somewhat darkish paradox.

That the path to wisdom has to be like that, downward, is an observation which Heraclitus appears first to have written into the record quite a few centuries ago. This notion, along with an array of similar sentiments, got Heraclitus the nickname “the weeping philosopher”; and because he also said that the downward path is likewise the upward path, the Ancients decided to describe him further as “Heraclitus the obscure,” and taking into account the whole range of his opinions, “Heraclitus the dark.” In the popular simplifications he was a pessimist, an iconoclast, an utterer of impenetrable truths; and conversely a scorner of plain cheap laughable things.

Just such another is Katherine Anne Porter. A maker of darkish parables, a producer of wines as dry as wines ever ought to be, she has proved hard to deal with, except in simplistic terms such as those applied to Heraclitus. For years she was praised by discerning critics as the cleanest, clearest, and as they say of vines, most shy-bearing of the writers of our times: which in my opinion she probably is. Then, after writing the best-seller Ship of Fools, she came to be regarded in wider circles with a certain uneasiness, as being negative, skeptical, prejudiced, formalistic: which in my opinion she is not. She is no more negative, I must argue, no more skeptical, et cetera, than it is very good to be.

I intend to look at her work with the hope of tracing out some of the downward paths (which are also upward paths) that lead to her peculiar wisdom. In order to pin things down as much as possible, I'll make some remarks by way of review of a handful of critical pieces that deal with her and are having their inevitable effect on her repute as a writer.

Two propositions will be of leading importance. One is that Miss Porter is a Modern, a beneficiary of a discipline which has been known as Modernism, just as surely as any of a number of writers who can be grouped together because of their affinities with James and Proust and Joyce. She is akin to Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso. She grew up in a period in which the mastery of an art was held to be a life-long, exacting discipline. It was a period, we can say from this distance, which accepted constraints and past history, as well as freedom and modernity.

The other proposition is that a span of some ten formative years spent living in the bosom of a civilization different from our own, situated on a different level on the anthropological timetable, must have a drastic effect on the development of a writer. To be sure it was common for writers to live abroad in the twenties; it was common too for a number of them to show up in Mexico and to stay there for months or years; but I think few of them ever crept into the genius of an archaic people the way Katherine Anne Porter did at the very beginning of her career, and, to her advantage, never really extricated herself from it.

II

James Joyce's Dubliners, Miss Porter has said, was for her, as a young beginning writer, a revelation. She was contrasting herself, in a little essay on Willa Cather,² with Miss Cather, whose work she admired within limits and whose literary origins she respected while recognizing them as being very different from her own, in that they had nothing of the “modern” implicit in them. For her it was otherwise; she had apprenticed herself in the school of James Joyce, and having acknowledged so much, she instantly excluded Gertrude Stein from it on the grounds that “tricky techniques and disordered syntax” did not properly belong in the category of the art to which she was referring. No, it was quite simply in the art of Joyce's small collection of insights into Dublin lives, with their matchless unpretentious clarity, their evasive surfaces and depths, that she felt she took her start as a modern writer.

Reading through all of her stories again, the old ones along with four that have only now been reprinted in the handsome Collected Stories (1965), leaves me with a fresh sense of the kinship with Joyce. Things ranging from the white palsied hands of the stricken priest in Joyce's first story to the universal snowfall at the end of the last one, have their counterparts on Miss Porter's pages. These are highly emotional things, parts of common human experience, rich sweeping passages in no way tricked up with rhetorical devices, though always true to the irresistible imperatives of art.

In comparison with kinship, I can't take the theory of direct borrowing, as expounded lately, very seriously. A prepossession with influence as evidenced by borrowed details has become a trademark in scholarly studies. It is conspicuous in George Hendrick's useful book-length study, Katherine Anne Porter, in which he assembles bibliographic materials and pertinent excerpts from other critics along with his own running survey of her work. We all will agree with him that Miss Porter probably got a sense of tone from the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which helped her with the story “The Downward Path to Wisdom.” But we will reflect on two things. Joyce adopted the intonations of childhood only to be in a position to change them as his story develops; Miss Porter adopts an intonation in order to sustain it—and to make it uniquely her own as she takes the story around full circle, as is perfectly clear in her reading of it on a commercially issued phonograph record. As for the name Stephen, which is common to both pieces of fiction, rather than indicating dependence on Joyce, or the ordinary sort of derivation from him, it may be standing there as an open tribute to an admired predecessor, a way of saying thanks for things much more important, and much harder to explicate. When it comes to sifting through a text hunting for significant names, puns, images, symbols and so on, the results, to my eye, look grotesque sometimes. I can't imagine by what process of mind Frances, the name of the little girl in the story, would have to be suggested by the country to which Stephen Dedalus exiles himself.

The revelation that came to her with her first reading of Dubliners, Miss Porter goes on to say, could hardly have happened except to a very young writer “with some preparation of mind by the great literature of the past.” Those are my italics; I put them there because I believe the statement is the crux in any effective account of Modernism. In regard to the bearing of some of the great achievements of the past on her own development, Miss Porter has been about as forthright as anyone can be. We can name some of the authors who interested her greatly. But perhaps we can clarify the whole matter most easily by considering first what a preparation of mind by great literature meant, what it consisted in, during the first decades of the century.

Let's consider Joyce and his own preparations. We know from the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that the author of Dubliners, on the verge of exile from home and faith, was ravaged by the spectral grandeurs of Aristotle and Aquinas, fascinated by Latinity in general, and delighted by the songs of the Elizabethans. As for the Elizabethans: “His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk, stood often in the shadow under the windows of that age, to hear the grave and mocking music of the lutenists. …” If we should imagine that not much of this shows in his stories of Dublin, we would be wrong; Joyce's mind stands in the shadow, under Dublin windows, always in the vesture of the doubting monk. We know from Ulysses what other windows his mind stood under. Greek windows, for the main part. And later under the collapsed porticoes of many literatures, in Finnegans Wake, simultaneously. But central to everything else was the epic of the wanderings of Odysseus. No doubt the ultimate preparation of Joyce's mind was to be found in the classics of antiquity.

And so, hypothetically, we may suppose that Katherine Anne Porter also moved from her deceptively lucid stories laid in recognizable backgrounds to the more elaborate and more studiously imaginative projections in Ship of Fools—whose affinities with the literature of the past are also at once recognizable and concealed.

III

In any event she was writing those first stories at a time of fresh responsiveness to the distant past. The head of Nefertiti became almost as familiar during those years as the face of Dorothy Gish, and Louis Armstrong was singing about the joys and sorrows of old King Tut. Troy and Mycenae, and Helen and Menelaus and Agamemnon, became historical fixtures, not merely the stuff of myth. Sir Arthur Evans was digging up the palace of Minos, while Joyce was turning the epigraph for the Portrait of the Artist over in his mind: “Et ignotas animum dimitti in artes”—Ovid's words for Daedalus's determination to escape from Minos's Crete by bending his genius toward unknown arts. Picasso, along with Diaghilev and Cocteau, found himself in Southern Italy in 1917, looking at genuine Greek art, with such profound and lasting effect that eventually he formed the habit of assigning certain paintings of his to Antipolis, rather than to Antibes, where he was officially residing.

Miss Porter's contemporaries and friends were busy establishing their own exchanges with periods removed from their own. T. S. Eliot, who had not yet entered openly into his theological program, was at his best, in my opinion, when he was transposing classicism into an Elizabethan rhetoric that was full of burnished thrones and Ionian red and gold. W. B. Yeats, though no longer young, apprenticed himself to the goldsmiths of Byzantium. Allen Tate began insisting with polite stubbornness on the validity of the later Roman myths. Caroline Gordon studied how to conceal the echoes of Greek tragedy that she was hearing in her head. Yvor Winters met the unmitigated ferocity of the well-known Greek myths face to face, head to head … at exactly the time that he was printing one of Miss Porter's ferocious, bland-sounding stories, “Theft,” in the unhandsome little hand-made magazine called the Gyroscope.

But Ezra Pound is the best case in point. “In Mexico many years ago,” Katherine Anne Porter wrote in 1950, “Hart Crane and I were reading again Pavannes and Divisions, and at some dogmatic statement in the text Crane suddenly burst out: ‘I'm tired of Ezra Pound!’ And I asked him: ‘Well who else is there?’ He thought a few seconds and said: ‘It's true there's nobody like him, nobody to take his place.’”

Looking back from this distance we can imagine that as a bully, a rapaciously well-read and singularly gifted bully, nobody could have taken his place in forcing a certain kind of classicism on a fairly dull literary world. And not by noisy precept alone, but by superb example. In Pound's “Homage to Sextus Propertius” we all shared, in those days, in the recovery of something unexpectedly beautiful, something somewhat similar to Picasso's pen-and-ink Greek drawings, something at once new and old, with none of the stale evils of neoclassicism hanging over it.

Pound's gift consisted partly in recognizing the power of the new and unfamiliar intertwined among the old. In the case of Propertius he was dealing with a poet who was especially well schooled in the pagan elegiac arts and attitudes of the early Greeks; in translating fragments of him he cleared the way for a view of beauties which lay somewhat outside the normal Western Anglo-Saxon experience, but which, once seen, could then be recognized on the pages of more familiar texts; and thus a part of the Odyssey underwent a renewal in “Canto I.” In a word Pound led in a renaissance not simply of pre-Christian literature, but of pre-Classical as well.

Katherine Anne Porter goes on in the essay from which I have quoted to analyze with great lucidity—she is notably intelligent as a critic—the disaster which eventually overtook a great poet. By degrees Pound persuaded himself, she says, really to hate the principal institutions in the Western Anglo-Saxon world, so exclusively had become his dedication to the old Mediterranean world; and along with hatred of institutions, persons. He condemned Jews, but—and this is Miss Porter's main point—he condemned Christians as such just as savagely: he had become a determined polytheist in his heart and mind. Her point is well taken. The root of Pound's belligerence is to be found, I should say, in the utter disillusionment expressed in the lines in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” describing civilization as it looked to him during World War I: “An old bitch gone in the teeth. …”

This topic has considerable bearing on Miss Porter's own work. No one will venture to read much complacency toward our institutions, or toward the persons charged with running them, into what she has to say in her fiction. To the contrary, in her view people would have to seem to be bad, if measured against any abstract standards of good and evil; hoi pleistoi kakoi, as we said, would seem to be nearer to her kind of truth. But if so it must be, then it does not follow that there is in it something to be sodden and truculent about. The Greek phrase is simply an old pre-Socratic observation, attributed to Heraclitus's neighbor, Bias of Priene. It is at once pleasantly Ionian and wisely archaic. Ezra Pound seems to have misused its substance in the same heavy-handed way that he often misused colloquial speech in his informal writings.

Nor ought we minimize the force of the pre-Christian, pre-Classical state of mind on the minds of the Moderns. “The Downward Path to Wisdom” could hardly have occurred as a title without the widespread reevaluation of ancient philosophy that was going on earlier this century. Heraclitean fragments, rescued from scattered ancient texts, assembled and published, made their inevitable impact. The unending flux of things, the tension of the deadly twanging bowstring and the sweetly singing lyre-string—bespoke a more than ordinary knowledge of beauty and destruction, life and death. And on top of all that, there was for once a completely unambiguous disdain for the second-rate. “To me,” Heraclitus said, “one man is ten thousand if he be best.” Standards had become high; and with high standards there always go concomitant risks.

The risks could be observed on every side. Katherine Anne Porter's friend and fellow workman in the arts, Hart Crane, took the risks and succumbed to them. Although cause and effect are difficult to determine here, it appears that for Crane an insight into civilizations earlier than ours—perhaps as depicted in the limp leather Modern Library volumes of Friedrich Nietzsche—may have intensified both his strange new poetics and his destructive Dionysiac raptures; there is still much to be puzzled out about him, as a glance at Morton Dembo's Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge will reveal.

In any event, Hart Crane arrived in Mexico as the guest of Miss Porter in 1931, but soon departed from her company and her conversation and roared away drunk until he found the ship from which he could throw himself off, into the sea, while she was preparing to move on to Europe, patiently reconciling herself to the thirty years of sobriety that it would take to investigate what life would look like if examined closely, as for instance in the microcosm of a ship.

IV

“I write about Mexico,” she wrote in 1923, when she had in fact written very little about anything, “because that is my familiar country.” In 1965, forty-two years later, in the preface of what will have to be one of the two great products of her lifetime, the Collected Stories, she stresses the fact that her first stories were all of Mexico, “my much-loved second country.” Hers was a long engagement to the second country. The reasons she gave in 1923 for her love of Mexico—her home was in South Texas, and her father, having gone down there in his youth, told enchanting tales about the country; she was attracted to the revolution; she wanted to study “the renascence of Mexican art”—are no doubt true reasons as far as they go. But when suddenly in the midst of a sentence she starts trying to say how Mexico actually was for her, she begins revealing the depth, and the very truth, of her attachment:

During the Madero revolution I watched a street battle between Maderistas and Federal troops from the window of a cathedral; a grape-vine heavy with tiny black grapes formed a screen, and a very old Indian woman stood near me, perfectly silent, holding my sleeve. …

The awareness of this second human being, this older other one, silently clutching a sleeve and watching the deadly fighting in the street from another angle of history, will make the great difference in the development of the writer.

“María Concepción,” her first story (1922), relates the multi-colored history of another small but deadly battle, and of the acceptances with which the Indians concerned with it allowed it to terminate. María Concepción murders her rival. But neither the authority of the law nor the mandates of the church will persuade anyone to give evidence against her. To the contrary everyone, including the wayward game-cock she was married to, undertakes spontaneously to protect her. The conflict is between unlovely, black-and-white justice on the one hand, and on the other certain evasive things, like a day full of the golden shimmer of honey bees, like the flamboyant by-play of seduction, the stain of blood on a bright chemise, fields and thorns and nursing infants—passion and timeless pastoral life. Against these latter forces the demands of the former abstractions are not allowed to prevail. The community is content to look on with an ambiguous archaic smile. The necessary lesson of the Oresteia, that justice dare not be left to the discretion of the injured, is for the moment suppressed.

The power of this extraordinary story comes from its insight into what is clearly a pre-Aeschylean mode of ordering the events of life. It heightens the sense of the remote rightness of Indian ways, and of the dry inadequacy that may be more or less inherent in ways opposed to theirs: our ways. We are obliged as readers to see things we take for granted overturned. Nothing momentous is being proved to us of course; nothing like a clear distinction between right and wrong; but then I don't imagine that Aeschylus, in taking the contrary point of view, thought that he was proving anything either. Art is longer than the life of a social doctrine.

The first story gives the pattern for much that is to be found in Miss Porter's fiction, from first to last. And well it should, because the pattern is elemental. María Concepción is another Antigone. Both women can triumph over the almost irresistible mechanism of organized society because, in their weakness and simplicity, they harken back to fundamental imperatives. Justice and social authority, subject as they are to constant hardening, and constant distorting to suit the pleasure of the man or party in power, stand in constant need of apology. Plato worked at one type of apology, Aristotle at another; but not with impeccable success, as Benjamin Farrington has just got through saying quite clearly, with a new pertinence, in a book on Epicurus. Complacency with regard to the best of our devices for keeping order is to bring them gradually to a state of paralysis.

Miss Porter's archaic world has much that is restorative to show to us. Since it is continually a frame of reference for her art, I am going to quote at a little length from the beginning of “Hacienda,” familiar though the page may be. The implications as to the difference between Kennerly and the Indians are what I want to expose to view, and how complex the author's appreciations.

It was worth the price of a ticket to see Kennerly take possession of the railway train among a dark inferior people. … He strode mightily through, waving his free arm, lunging his portfolio and leather bag, stiffening his nostrils as conspicuously as he could against the smell that “poured,” he said, “simply poured like mildewed pea soup!” from the teeming clutter of wet infants and draggled turkeys and indignant baby pigs and food baskets and bundles of vegetables and bales and hampers of domestic goods, each little mountain of confusion yet drawn into a unit, from the midst of which its owners glanced up casually from dark pleased faces at the passing strangers. … Almost nothing can disturb their quiet ecstasy when they are finally settled among their plunder, and the engine, mysteriously and powerfully animated, draws them lightly over the miles they have so often counted step by step. And they are not troubled by the noisy white man because, by now, they are accustomed to him.

Kennerly, in another age, might have been an adventuring tyrannos, like Antigone's uncle, or Plato's friend and disciple, Dion of Syracuse. But the people huddling together among the disorderly fixtures of their households are to be numbered among the poorer voyagers and migrants of any age on any continent, just as the statuettes being dug up in Morelia are of a family with the little clay figures that can be found in Syria. It's a big family of course, but it has its common purposes.

Let's generalize. Let's say as everyone has always been fond of saying, that the world goes through its several ages. I am wondering, however, whether these wouldn't be best described as a sequence moving from the primitive to the archaic to the rationalizing. The primitive is mostly very bad dreams, as Giorgio de Chirico knew and D. H. Lawrence never quite found out; the archaic has its smiling forms, but in the smiles there is often an element of cruelty; the rationalizing, unfortunately, gets itself locked in its arbitrary, often self-destructive ideologies. Art, and writing is an art, may be at its best when it stays more or less in touch with the archaic state of mind, no longer roiled with fears, and not yet deaf to everything except its own program. And of course any deterministic view of things ceases to be fully deterministic when its secret powers are brought to light, and that's somehow to be equated with the role of consciousness in all human pursuits.

It is Kennerly's imprisonment in his program, with the various imprisonments of the others who surround him in theirs, that make up the spiderweb structure of “Hacienda.” The web is at its most visible when it is seen reflected in the eyes of the natives, as observed by the narrator. Once, in The Southern Review, thirty or more years ago, failing to realize this, I said the story seemed inconclusive. Now I do not think so. And I also see Noon Wine, as will come out in a moment, in sharper definition now than I did then.

The poignant reversals of hope which went along with the Mexican revolution are measured in somewhat the same way in several other early stories. Braggioni in “Flowering Judas,” like so many public figures in Miss Porter's work, has suddenly attained the prerogative of rationalizing his preferences publicly and making his rationalizations stick. One can think of him as belonging to the pack of professional patriots, those in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, for instance; unnerving fellows, all of them. But when Braggioni breaks down, he can retreat in tears to the archaic landscape provided for him by his wife. His counterpart's plight, Laura's plight, is that she is able, now and then, and finally in her dream, to begin just barely to see through her own rationalizing, but can do nothing about it. She has no archaic scenes to retreat to, try as she will in her horrible dream to whip something up out of Christian imagery. She is peculiarly alone. She resembles the passengers in Ship of Fools; at sea and finding it hard to go to sleep.

As for the Christian imagery in this story, I think that, contrary too much that has been written about it—see George Hendrick's summary—there is no specific virtue in it. The Judas-betrayal form of Laura's dream seems to me to mean mostly that she has betrayed herself. She has failed to discover an Other one through whose eyes she can see herself; and in particular she goes through the motions of living with the native people, seeing them every day and teaching their children, without seeing them at all.

Certainly a retreat into Arcadia or into the religious visions of childhood, or into Freudian psychoanalysis or anything of that sort, would hardly appear to be Miss Porter's notion of a solution to the problems she brings up. Despite its fine clarity the archaic mode of life eludes those who turn directly toward it, just as the rainbow which was heaven in Miranda's dream quickly eluded her. The value of the knowledge of these things remains, but they themselves have gone. Poor Juan, the great butterfly who married María Concepción, ends by rendering with regrets his eight hours a day, day after day, to his employer. He trends his own downward path to wisdom. Laborious and painful, the life of the rational man.

V

Noon Wine is a tragedy, in the ancient sense of the term, produced and staged according to the norms of modern prose fiction. The norms are used to good effect. The countenance and speech and mentality and heartbeat of Southern Texas are exposed simply and economically, and uniquely; the heartbeat is parallel with and different from that to be heard at other places, Mexico, New York, Germany. … And the story is only one of several that end with death. Yet this one is distinctly tragedy, perhaps for reasons in addition to the perfect objectivity with which the downfall of Mr. Thompson is told.

The house in the story sits among the ragweed, behind a broken gate, as hopeless as a primitive hut in the midst of its garbage heap; and the inhabitants of the house, the man (Mr. Thompson) and the woman and their grubby boys, are as squalid in their day-to-day purposes as savages are likely to be in theirs. But to them comes the stranger, like Demeter or Apollo in the Hymns, disguised. Mr. Helton is no god; he is a pale, skinny Swede; nevertheless he has strange powers, which he conceals, and also a past. He works at redeeming the farmstead, playing a little tune, a drinking tune, Noon Wine, on a mouth organ when he is resting, and showing an ability to go now and then into a glittering rage. In due course—one would hardly be able to say how or when it was taking place—the farm, under Mr. Helton's unnoticed care, takes on a certain order, and begins, for all its rough spots, to make sense; life attains a poise, which I hope it will not be too tiresome of me to call archaic.

Then, after nine years, Mr. Hatch shows up, looking for Mr. Helton. Mr. Hatch is the rationalizing man at his most perplexing. He is the arm, the self-appointed arm, of justice, common law and formal statutes. He has come to get Mr. Helton, because Mr. Helton is a murderer and an escaped lunatic, a dangerous man, carrying a reward for his apprehension. The apprehender, though, as Glenway Wescott has said eloquently in his own way in Images of Truth, is the criminal, rather than Mr. Helton, because the lawful man's crime is a crime against all of humanity, though he has every sanction on his side.

But at the center of the story is that briefly fortunate man, Mr. Thompson, whose farm has been pulled together so miraculously and set running: he murders the intruder, or at least axes him down in the stress of a moment, is brought to trial, and exonerated, and then cannot get anyone to believe that he actually was guiltless. He has no way to relax his efforts to rationalize the inescapable ambiguity of his own conduct, and he detects the heartless rationalizing of others going on, always directed against him. Deep in their minds even his wife and his sons have doubts about him, he has protested so much; and he shoots himself.

The question is, was his use of the axe a justifiable defense of Mr. Helton? or a defense of his own personal interest in retaining Mr. Helton? There is no answer. The worst of answers are those freely and confidently offered when there is none.

For Noon Wine Miss Porter put together some twenty years later an account of what had originally started the story off in her imagination. What she says is of interest not simply for its bearing on Noon Wine but rather more, I think, for its pertinence to all writing, her own and everyone's. Her recollections appeared first in The Yale Review in 1956, after her essays had already been collected in The Days Before, but the article has appeared again in Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction. The part that concerns me most is the following:

I do know why I remembered. …

Why, that is to say, she remembered a shotgun blast, a scream, a nervous horse, a little tune.

I do know why I remembered … and why in my memory they slowly took on their separate lives in a story. It is because there radiated from each one of those glimpses of strangers some element, some quality that arrested my attention at a vital moment in my own growth, and caused me, a child, to stop short and look outward, away from myself; to look at another human being with that attention and wonder and speculation which ordinarily, and very naturally, a child lavishes only on himself.

To look at another human being, really to do so, is a fairly rare occurrence, but it is worth it, frightening though the shock of it may sometimes be.

VI

Using the norms of prose fiction Katherine Anne Porter can be as graphic in her portraiture of folly as were the collaborators in the first Ships of Fools and the artists who made the jostling, crowded woodcuts to illustrate them, and as forceful as the Dante-Doré pages of the Inferno, or the Eramus-More—and Holbein—Praise of Folly. Here is a healthy, corrosive point of view. Like the imagination of those others, all of whom she learned to know well early in her life, hers has implicit in it its impenetrable shadows and blinding shimmers.

Her point of view has provoked dissension, as I said at first. William L. Nance, S.M., in a long, tediously involved book called Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection, stands as spokesman for the not uncommon charge that Miss Porter's work follows a pattern which “is a completely negative one and the view of life which corresponds to it is one of unrelieved darkness.” This study assumes that developments since the passing of Modernism make the austerities of Miss Porter particularly untenable. The idea seems to be that a renewal of faith in generous, loving, optimistic, religious “certainties” has become the rule among good minds during the last decade or two. And it may be so. But the charges against Miss Porter sound very much like a repetition of the charges against Thomas Hardy, and many another; well-intentioned perhaps, but notably imperceptive.

Anyhow, let's consider Ship of Fools. I dislike the thought of stressing “positive” elements in this big, naked, colossal novel; I have no confidence in the distinction between positive and negative as the terms are presently used; but since the range of the book puts comprehensive treatment out of reach, I'll try to count off a few of its accomplishments; which of course in my mind are not negative things. As for its overall effect, it will not reveal itself at a glance. The motion picture conveys a good impression, and is an exceptional film, but it simplifies. The real thing asks the reader to give it a fair share of his reading time.

The events take place in the deceptively slow stages of a very long voyage, complete with the crazed surfaces of embarkation and disembarkation, and the long glazed interval in between. The motion of the book is unique. Each of Miss Porter's short stories has characteristically a motion of its own, an oral and visual progression appropriate to the telling in each case of the story as a straight story. Ship of Fools is a weaving, a tapestry, a book of woodcuts, a Dance of Death, or it may be of Life.

There are many people in it, and like the little knots of people in the short stories they are hardly to be labelled good. They have one failing in common. They are determined to extort acts of love from their fellow creatures, whether they are worthy themselves to be recipients of such acts or not. With this natural rapacity for love, in all senses of the term, they present themselves hopefully to others, while watching almost exclusively for signs of the acceptance or rejection of their hopes.

The well-to-do are “rather self-absorbed,” as Mrs. Treadwell observes about David, while she herself induces in herself her own self-absorbed dreams of days of wine and roses in Paris, in what is transparently both a criticism and a parody of a page in Scott Fitzgerald. The poorer passengers, among them the zarzuela dancers, are vicious in their demands on others; but perhaps no more so in the case of the dancers than their business as prostitutes and pimps demands, and as Dr. Schumann remarks the latter have at least some arts as entertainers that more or less make amends for their evil ways. The really poor human cargo below decks has its saints, but on the whole it remains anonymous, sunk in poverty.

Human beings, these fare-paying passengers, human to a fault. At one place Wilhelm Freytag, being buffeted like everyone else on the ship against everyone else, indulges himself in impatience with human nature.

He had discovered … about most persons that their abstractions and generalizations, their Rage for Justice or Hatred of Tyranny or whatever, too often disguised a bitter personal grudge of some sort far removed from the topic apparently under discussion.

But that sage observation of Freytag's induces also the following sad commentary:

He did not once include himself in it.

And yet it is always possible that the rationalizing man coming so close to other rationalizing men, may begin one day to suspect his abstractions and generalizations and to be consequently just a little bit more thoughtful about parading them. There is always the possibility of seeing things somewhat afresh, without predatory interests, like catching sight of the naked feet of the Indian nursemaid under the skirt of her elaborate traveling dress.

And this ship of fools is full of surprises. These human beings have so many astonishing capacities, so many comical aspects, so much dogged persistence in their natures, that they deserve, in this long range view of them, to be taken with something less than deadly seriousness. It must be pleasantly significant that Ampara and Pepe, whore and pimp though they are, love each other and make love with all of the slow fury and authenticity that a growing boy could dream of; and not only they, but Herr Professor and Frau Hutten in their grief over events that exceeded their powers of comprehension.

It is both pleasant and gently significant that Herr Rieber, when he tries negotiating with the fat purser for a new cabin mate, has to contend with all of the malice and unction of a German ship's officer, only to be given his choice between retaining his present companion, whose Jewish connections offend him, or taking in with him the violent Swede who, although Nordic, threatens to do him violence on the least provocation.

There is a sequence of matchless little scenes in which the zarzuela dancers are selling tickets to their fiesta and lottery, which is a transparent fraud, and the passengers are seeking, each in his own way, to protect themselves. One exchange I think is worth setting down in detail, because it runs counter to the other exchanges and exhibits quite vividly the counter-theme that has continued through Miss Porter's work from first to last.

Manola bowed to little Señora Ortega, bent over her deck chair offering tickets and a shattering fire of explanations. The Indian nurse, sitting near holding the baby, glanced quickly at the tickets and away again, face calm, eyelids lowered. She could not read words, but she could smell a chance-game at a great distance, she knew numbers when she saw them, and bought a fraction of every lottery that came along, because she knew one more thing very well: for her kind, born on the straw mat, barefoot from dirt floor to grave, there was only one hope of fortune—to hit the lucky number, just once! Her dead mother often spoke to her anxiously in dreams: “Nicolasa, my child, listen now to me carefully—listen, do you hear me, Nicolasa? I am about to give you the winning number for the next lottery. Buy the whole ticket, look until you find the seller who has it. He is in Cinco de Mayo street. His name is …” and always as she began to recite his name, the number, the serial, all, her words would run together, her face grow dim, her voice die away, and Nicolasa, waking in fright, would hear herself calling out, “Oh wait, Mother! Don't go … tell me, tell me!” Señora Ortego smiled at the expression on Nicolasa's face. She knew it well, and what it meant. She bought the two tickets from Manola and gave them without a word to the Indian girl, who would have kissed Señora Ortega's hand if she had not instantly taken it back.

And then sometimes the sudden revelation of some rare and surprising polarity in life itself shakes the ship and allows the voyagers for a moment to stand apart from themselves and take a new look out over the horizon. Once, on the occasion of the sea-burial of the selfless little man Echegaray, it was the sight of three whales—“three enormous whales, seeming to swim almost out of the water, flashing white silver in the sunlight, … going south—not one person could take his eyes from the beautiful spectacle until it was over, and their minds were cleansed of death and violence.” At another time it was the discovery of the water-bearers of Tenerife, beautiful tall girls running with water-containers on their heads—these were creatures too who took them out of themselves and set their minds to work on a conception of a circumstance in which bearers of burdens could be lovely, active, and chaste. And then, at the end of the voyage, it was the granite spine of Spain: on that beautiful coast, “after the solid promontory of rock, a great table rising out of the sea. …”

Coming at last under the lee of the ancient rock which is Europe, one passenger, at least one, is able to reconstruct his awareness of another. David creates a truer Jenny for himself; he still has to rely on “the stray stuffs of his own desire”; but his old habitual views and impressions and feelings about her, and about himself, are gone. David and Jenny do improve, once they have arrived, after painful course, at knowing each other a little better.

I would like to think that the days and years in Mexico nurtured Miss Porter's awareness of the peculiar dispositions of world-travelers who find themselves hung up for the moment in a slow boat. But I don't know. Life in Denver or New York, or Texas or Germany or Paris, affords opportunity enough for noticing how passengers behave. Still the absolutely clear definition of so many quick glances at faces and at gestures, and inward at the motions of minds and feelings, seems to come from the oblique angle of some older native point of view, looking with intense interest and some amusement at strangers rushing by.

Notes

1. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, with a preface by the author. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.Katherine Anne Porter, by George Hendrick. New York: Twayne Publishers. Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection, by William L. Nance, S.M. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

2. Reprinted in The Days Before. This collection will be the source of my references to Miss Porter's critical papers, unless I indicate otherwise.