at sea with katherine anne porter

Katherine Anne Porter's 1962 Ship of Fools is one of my favorite novels, not because it's a particularly life-affirming or uplifting story, but more because it's strongly character-driven and on cruise control like the great boat that carries everyone aboard.  From August to September of 1931, various classes of people of various nationalities are passengers on the Vera, headed from Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany.  World War II and the rise of Hitler are inevitable but not yet in full global force, though on the Vera, Germans like the obnoxious Lizzie Spöckenkieker and Siegfried Rieber freely offer Nazi-tinged attitudes and opinions seemingly every chance they can.  One of the few admirable characters is Dr. Schumann, the ship's physician.  Dr. Schumann displays more professional humanity and empathy than the majority of the other passengers, but even he notes with unhappy detachment how evil comes into being due to a "consent by default...with nine-tenths of us half-asleep and refusing to be waked up."

Porter was exceptionally skilled at short stories and novellas, and Ship of Fools was her first and only major novel. Written over two decades, the final published book weighed in at close to 500 pages.  Initial critical reviews were not quite unanimously glowing, but no one could deny that Porter was an excellent stylist and observer of the human condition.  Ship of Fools was a bestseller and quickly pursued by Hollywood.  And then Ship of Fools the 1965 film came into being, directed by Stanley Kramer and starring the likes of Vivien Leigh, Jose Ferrer, Jose Greco, Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal and Lee Marvin.

I've never felt that the movie really captured the essence of the book, but then maybe that essence isn't something that can be captured.  Michael Dunn, however, was excellent as Herr Glocken, the hunchback, and Oskar Werner was wonderful as usual in his portrayal of Dr. Schumann.  At age 40 or so, he was too young to play a 60 year old and a bit physically at odds with his love interest, Simone Signoret as La Condesa, but he did have Dr. Schumann's "crookedly healed dueling scars on his left cheek" and eyes with "an abstract goodness and even sweetness in them."  Oskar was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, but Porter herself wasn't thrilled with the filmed version.  She nonetheless earned a hefty sum for the movie rights, and I'm sure sales of the book resurged once the film came out.  Not bad for a novel that came about from Porter's own ship of fools journey, which she described as:

...the story of my first voyage to Europe in 1931. We embarked on an old German ship at Vera Cruz and we landed in Bremen twenty-eight days later...I don’t think I spoke a half-dozen words to anybody. I just sat there and watched—not deliberately, though. I kept a diary in the form of a letter to a friend, and after I got home the friend sent it back. And, you know, it is astonishing what happened on that boat, and what happened in my mind afterwards. Because it is fiction now.