Ship of Fools (84 page)

“Good luck,” he said, and Freytag answered with a wave of his hand.

“Just to think, it's all over,” said Jenny. “Soon it will be only a dream. Why did I come here?”

“Because you wanted to go to France and I wanted to go to Spain, wasn't that it?”

“I am a sleepwalker,” said Jenny, “and this is a dream.”

“Dreams are real too,” said David, “nightmares, everything.”

“David, we aren't going to spend our lives together, why are we going on with this?”

“Don't you remember? We aren't ready yet.” He stood beside her and took her hand again, quite composed and certain of his own mood. He watched her eyes beginning to glisten, and he became very touched and gentle with her as he did sometimes when she wept on his account. The sight of her weakness and defeat gave him pleasure like no other.

“Do you know,” he said, falsely, “maybe we shall never leave each other. Where could we go?”

“We'll think of somewhere,” she said, “let's wait.”

“Here we go talking again,” said David. “Let's think of something pleasant.”

“You think of something, David darling,” said Jenny, “something wonderful.”

David leaned with great discretion and a very straight face and whispered, “Tonight in Bremen we'll sleep in the same bed for a change.” Jenny made a slight purring sound at him, and he watched her face grow radiant.

The band played “
Tannenbaum
” at last, and kept it up until the gangplank was down, and the passengers began to descend rapidly and silently. As the musicians were wiping the mouthpieces of their instruments, wrapping up their drums and putting away their fiddles, their mouths were wide with smiles, their heads towards the dock, towards the exact narrow spot where the
Vera
had warped in and cast her anchor. Among them, a gangling young boy, who looked as if he had never had enough to eat in his life, nor a kind word from anybody, and did not know what he was going to do next, stared with blinded eyes, his mouth quivering while he shook the spit out of his trumpet, repeating to himself just above a whisper, “
Grüss Gott, Grüss Gott
,” as if the town were a human being, a good and dear trusted friend who had come a long way to welcome him.

Yaddo, August, 1941

Pigeon Cove, August, 1961

A Biography of Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1966. Her only full-length novel,
Ship of Fools
(1962), was a national bestseller.

Born Callie Russell Porter on May 15, she was the fourth of Harrison and Mary Alice Porter's five children. In March 1892 her mother died two months after the birth of her last child, and Porter's father moved the family from the central-Texas settlement of Indian Creek to his mother's home in Kyle, south of Austin. Porter's time with her grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, became one of the most meaningful of her life, and in early adulthood, Porter adopted her name as a signifier of this time.

Upon the death of her grandmother, the family was left emotionally broken with uncertain finances, hardships that recurred in Porter's adult life. In 1903 her father moved the family to San Antonio, where Porter received the last of her formal education at a private girls' school. Using the training she received there, Porter and her elder sister taught music and drama in Victoria, Texas, the family's next location.

On June 20, 1906, at the age of sixteen, Porter married John Henry Koontz, the scion of a prosperous ranching family, and converted to his religion, Roman Catholicism. This was the first of her marriages, and it lasted the longest. But Koontz was often physically abusive, and in June 1915, Porter finally obtained a divorce.

During the end of her marriage, Porter spent a short time working as an extra at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company in Chicago, but family matters brought her back to Texas and subsequently to Louisiana, where she briefly supported herself singing on a backwoods lyceum circuit. At the close of 1915, while working in Dallas, Porter was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent the following two years in Texas sanatoriums. Her hospitalizations rekindled her interest in writing, and what had started as a hobby during her first marriage turned into a profession.

After her recovery, Porter secured a position at the
Fort Worth Critic
in September 1917 through a friend she had met at a sanatorium, and by September 1918, she had moved to Denver's
Rocky Mountain News
. But in October, she fell gravely ill during the flu pandemic of that year. She emerged from the ordeal frail and bald.

Beginning in the fall of 1919, Porter's inquisitive nature and thirst for knowledge immersed her in the cultural revolutions of the day in New York and subsequently in Mexico, and gave her a firsthand view of Europe speeding toward the Second World War. After Denver, Porter moved to the center of artistic development in New York City's Greenwich Village, which enabled her to move away from journalistic writing, hone her creative skill, and publish the first of her books.

In November 1920, at the behest of friends, Porter moved to Mexico and soon became a high-profile advocate for Mexican art and culture. Her experiences in Mexico provided subjects for her first noted work of fiction,
Flowering Judas
(1930), a collection of six previously published stories.

In August 1931, with the benefit of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Porter left Mexico for Europe—a lifelong dream—with her companion and eventual husband, Eugene Pressly. The narrative in
Ship of Fools
was based on this journey. Porter lived in Berlin, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, before settling with Pressly in Paris in the spring of 1933.

The Paris years, during which Porter started or completed several celebrated works, were some of her most productive. During this period, she also became acquainted with future lifelong friends Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, and Barbara Harrison.

The year 1936 saw the end of Porter's European residence. She returned to the United States, publishing
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
three years later. By this time, Porter had gained a reputation as one of America's finest writers. Her marriage to Pressly was essentially over in 1937, although the divorce was not granted until April 1938, the month in which she began her final marriage, this time to Albert Erskine. Porter and Erskine separated in 1940 and divorced in 1942.

As Porter's literary reputation grew during the 1940s and fifties, her public persona flourished. She published literary reviews, nonfiction pieces, and acclaimed short fiction, including
The Leaning Tower and Other Stories
(1944). She traveled the country for speaking engagements, participated in radio and television broadcasts, took a residency position at the Library of Congress, and worked in the Hollywood film industry. She continued to focus on academia, teaching at luminous universities such as Stanford University and the University of Michigan, and also furthered her craft with other artists at the Yaddo artists' colony in upstate New York. In May 1949 the Women's College of the University of North Carolina awarded her a doctorate of letters, the first of many honorary degrees. It was around this time that Porter struck up a friendship with fellow Texan author William Humphrey. An early champion of his work, Porter enjoyed a close friendship with Humphrey that eventually soured over a professional disagreement.

For Porter, true financial success only came with the 1962 publication of
Ship of Fools
, which was released as a Hollywood film in 1965, just before Porter won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her fame and reputation grew with these combined successes, and she enjoyed her life as a local celebrity in Washington, DC, where she attended White House events during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.

In 1966, as her health began to decline, Porter announced that she would donate her papers, private library, and other personal effects to the University of Maryland, and moved to College Park, Maryland, in 1969. She continued to publish and to make public appearances throughout the last decade of her life.

At the age of ninety, Porter passed away after suffering several debilitating strokes. Her ashes were buried next to her mother's grave at the Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.

In 2002 Porter's childhood home was designated a national literary landmark. In 2006 the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and Porter was featured on a US postage stamp as part of the Literary Arts commemorative stamp series.

Katherine Anne Porter; her paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter; and Porter's younger sister, Mary Alice, circa 1893–1894.

Porter inscribed the back of this photograph: “Aged 14 years, San Antonio, Texas. Photographer, Hegemann, asked my father to allow him to photograph me for a national photography show. He won first prize in the ‘Young Girl Division.' He pinned up my hair and draped me in a black lace mantilla and set me in a fashionable pose and turned me to looking about 18. However it seems to be the only likeness that survived that year, 1904.”

Porter in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1912, during her unhappy first marriage.

Porter in a Fort Worth Little Theatre production in late fall of 1921.