First Novel

As the architect of her own literary monument, Katherine Anne Porter is the most sparing of designers. The graceful, towering spire of her reputation, unwavering after three decades, rests on three volumes containing but 22 long and short stories--Flowering Judas (1930), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower (1944). Last week at 71, still pretty, witty and as talkative as ever ("It's always been my sin"), Katherine Anne Porter announced that she had placed the massive capstone of her distinguished career: a 160,000-word novel, her first, scheduled for spring publication by Atlantic-Little, Brown. Sighed Author Porter: "It feels like the end of a very prolonged pregnancy."

Though she usually writes at top speed, in a sort of typewriter shorthand later expanded to a first and practically final version, Ship of Fools has been in the making for 20 years--"or 30 if I count how long I thought about it." Based on a diary she kept on a 1931 voyage from Veracruz to Bremerhaven aboard a German ship crowded with Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon and Latin types, Ship of Fools is an oceangoing Grand Hotel, which tells in parable form of the slothful, harmless and irresponsible people who made possible the rise of fascism. "I took for my own this ageless, almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity," she said. "I am a passenger on that ship."

About 18 years ago she wrote the last three pages of the book, a nuts-to-soup course of creativity she customarily follows because "I have to know how it's going to end; beginnings are just like pulling straws." She filled in the rest in "batches and binges" in Baton Rouge, La., Yaddo and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Reno, Denver, Hollywood, Manhattan, Roxbury, Conn., last month finished up in a glass-enclosed sun porch that overlooks the harbor in Pigeon Cove, Mass. by adding 20 words to the final page.

Along the way, excerpts have appeared in at least half a dozen magazines. One publisher finally gave up trailing Ship of Fools while Atlantic-Little, Brown "has received enough outlines and notes to be able to finish it themselves."

Of the past, says Author Porter, peering through the wake of two decades: "I've survived but I certainly haven't flourished. I think Hemingway beat me to it by about twenty paces. Honestly, I am so tired." Tired or not, she still has plans for the future. "I would like to write about two wonderful old slaves who were my grandmother's companions, but someone is always giving a low name to good things and I suppose the N.A.A.C.P. would say I was glorifying Uncle Tomism."

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