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CHAPTER฀TEN฀ NO฀SAFE฀HARBOR Conversations between the Princess and the young acolyte follow a distinct pattern. He expresses his desire for her love; she responds with visionary decrees and another layer of glittering razor-sharp armor. Sexual obsession alternates with physical and emotional wounds. Brief, unconsummated, the marriage ends with her death, leaving a poet singing about “his faithful love, and her unrelenting cruelty.”1 Somewhere near forty years after she wrote “The Princess ,” Katherine Anne Porter published a novel that recalls but far surpasses her early tale in its depiction of love, obsession, and sexual violence. Ship of Fools contains some of her most startling representations of gender identity and most disturbing portrayals of sexual relations. It is a novel about love’s terrible consequences, its setting a ship full of lonely and fearful human beings whose yearning to lose themselves leads them to unworthy and debased lovers. Desire leads to shame; hate repeatedly swallows love; sexual and social nausea manifest themselves in bodily deformity, sickness, and violence. Like “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Ship of Fools employs illness as metaphor for all manner of wrongs. When the ship first reaches “High Sea” at the start of part 2, the novel’s center, it is literally awash in vomit: “Hundreds of people, men and women . . . wallowing on the floor, being sick.” Like “The Princess,” as well, Ship of Fools portrays a young woman artist, less alienated perhaps than Porter’s early heroine, but no less unhappy, still struggling against a hostile, predatory world that refuses to recognize the union of two roles: woman and artist. Many readers view Jenny Brown of Ship of Fools as an autobiographical character, based on Porter at the age of forty-one, when she traveled to Europe by ship from Mexico in the company of Eugene Pressly.2 As a self-portrait, Jenny is troubling, for to this young woman Porter gave all the inner afflictions and outer adversities that had impeded her own long career. 198 N O ฀ S A F E ฀ H A R B O R ฀ ~฀ 199 Perhaps because the novel offers so little good cheer, most scholars have focused their attention on its lengthy, sporadic composition or debated its overall quality rather than paying close attention to individual characters or scenes. The novel was long awaited and critical response was extensive, although mixed; since then readers have been progressively less enthusiastic. In 1992 Thomas Walsh called Ship of Fools “the mediocre work of a writer of short fiction” and described its contents as Porter’s “revenge against the world that denied her the love and happiness for which she yearned all her life.”3 Author of an intellectual biography of Porter, Janis Stout concurs with Walsh’s views, and there are few strong dissenting opinions. The novel’s formal qualities have challenged readers, for it works in short vignettes, shuffling through a thick deck of characters, depicting their interactions in brief, acute, and often distasteful scenes. Critics have attributed its choppy structure and thematic periodicity to Porter’s affinity for the short story; however, it is just as likely that the novel’s iterations are intended to reinforce its central theme. As Porter described it in a detailed letter to Caroline Gordon approximately sixteen years before the book finally reached publication: “My book is about the constant endless collusion between good and evil; I believe that human beings are capable of total evil, but no one has ever been totally good: and this gives the edge to evil. I don’t offer any solution, I just want to show this principle at work, and why none of us has any real alibi in this world.”4 “Endless collusion” finds formal expression in repetition; like riders seated on a Ferris wheel, the characters of Ship of Fools rotate before our eyes, moving in and out of the harsh light of Porter’s vision. In his illuminating analysis of Porter’s evolving intellectual thought, Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism , Robert Brinkmeyer describes the intense conservatism that increasingly characterized her writing from the late forties through the sixties. This “radical hardening and harshening of Porter’s views resulting from her obsession with totalitarianism,” he persuasively argues, underlies the racial and ethnic stereotyping of Ship of Fools and fuels the novel’s repetitive demonstration of the human capacity for evil.5 Brinkmeyer finds the novel atonal: “In the grip of her single-minded ideas that dwelled...

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