Boat People

I just read Ship of Fools, circa 1963, Katherine Anne Porter. Strangely, the book I read just before it was Mosquitoes, circa 1927, one of William Faulkner’s earliest novels. Even stranger, the book Ship of Fools reminded me of the most is Death on the Installment Plan, circa 1952, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. All three take place on a boat. Well, at least the first part of the Celine work – I read it in college. It’s a great technique, stuffing everyone on a boat. The author can focus on the characters and their interactions. You can’t go very far on a boat. There’s only so much to describe. Not much to do (none of these are today’s luxury cruise liners). Water is water. Minimal setting. Minimal plot. What’s left, in terms of the story? Characters.

And they don’t look look very pretty. In fact, Ship of Fools is probably the most despairing look at social human interaction I’ve ever read. You won’t find a good egg in this carton. It’s a deep dive into prejudice, social and economic status, class boundaries, ethnic hatred, disconnecting family bonds, and gender wars. The passengers have all boarded in Mexico and Cuba, bound for the Germany of the late 1930s. While the book was published in 1963 (some parts of it earlier), it was the first major work of Porter’s in twenty years. Obviously, she must have spent a lot of time brooding over the human catastrophe that was Nazi Germany. The novel offers an imagined glimpse into the behaviors and attitudes that presage a holocaust. The reader of today can easily extrapolate the attitudes of Porter’s characters and arrive at what happened in Germany, what happens in countries today, and the simmering disdain different classes of humans seem to have for each other. Perhaps what is most horrifying is that the portrayal, to this reader, feels universal, inevitable.

There are no heroes on Porter’s ship. The Europeans hate the Latins (especially the gypsy dancer/acting troupe). The young American couple torment each other. The one Jewish man (who sells Catholic Church furnishings!) barely tolerates the other Jewish man (or maybe he’s partly Jewish and his wife is Jewish, I can’t recall), and neither has any use for the Christians. A son hates his father (for hoarding his money even when he’s almost dying). In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the victims of the coming ethnic cleansing could have been any one of the groups represented, perpetrated by any of the other groups represented. Perhaps this is Porter’s raison d’etre – we are forced to confront the notion anyway that all of us have these little voices of hate in our head, since no character manages to sing above their background noise. All of us create “others” in our minds, and/or act out against these others in real life. No one is absolved. We all carry the potential for depravity even if most of us (hopefully anyway) manage to refrain from making it kinetic.

Death on the Installment Plan, at least the beginning passages I recall, also depicts utter human depravity, with a physical manifestation as well (the boat is tossing and turning and people are puking everywhere). But the difference is that the depravity is cut with humor. It’s so depraved, it’s funny. We tell ourselves this can’t be real. You can’t get through Ship of Fools thinking this is anything but visceral, vivid real life. Think of a Hudson School painting (Thomas Cole, for example, one of my favorites) turning subtly and slowly over the course of the book into a Bosch painting of hell. Of two quotes preceding the start of the novel in the version I read, one uses the word comedy and the other the word humor. I derived none of either.

But I loved this book, even though I needed an infinite tank of oxygen for this deep and disturbing dive. Maybe it’s more appropriate to read as an exercise in social psychology rather than fiction. The only quibble I had with it is the number of characters, so many in fact, it borrows from the gargantuan Russian novels and lists them in the front.

The characters in Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, as the title implies, are pests. They aren’t depraved – they all are similar in social status, if not economic – but that doesn’t stop them from being hostile and mean to each other. But their hostility stems from boredom. They are the gentility. With nothing better to do, they snark at each other behind backs, but at least they keep up appearances. Porter shows hostility and hatred in the raw, laid bare, intimate, every hair in the brush making its mark in every stroke.

The takeaway: Being confined to a boat brings out the worst in the human condition. Think about that next time you gaze into an advertisement for a cruise.