Speech After Long Silence

SHIP OF FOOLS (497 pp.)--Katherine Anne Porter--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6.50).

The year is 1931. A German passenger-freighter, the Vera (the name cruelly suggests "truth") sails from Vera Cruz, bound for Bremerhaven. It is. of course, a floating metaphor, no less effective because it is obvious: the "ship of the world, bound for eternity," as the author explains at the outset.

Ship of Fools is a study in despair. The despair is not relieved by the usual dilu tions; it is not the giddy gloom of youth -"the world is bad (but I am young)," nor is it the envy of faltering age -- "the world is good (but I am old)." And al though the novel is a bitter distillate of all the wonderful skill that made Kather ine Anne Porter's reputation in the '305, it avoids the smugness of the satisfied satirist -- "the world is disgusting (but I am clever)." In fact there are no personal obtrusions, nothing of the gracious, 70-year-old Southern gentlewoman who in the 20 years since her last book has seemed to occupy herself chiefly with be ing a charming chatterer at literary gather ings. Her testament is objective and her verdict is unemotional: the world is a place of foulness and fools.

In 1931 the foulness was the rise of pride-injured German nationalism, and the fools were the onlookers to whom it seemed merely an unimportant local nastiness. This is the specific burden of Novelist Porter's Ship, and the author directs the passengers of the Vera brilliantly as they play out their assigned charades.

A Slipper's Heel. At first, the ship's souls seem a normally various lot--some promising; some, like the Prussified captain, obvious pigs; others, like Herr Graf, a sick, querulous religious fanatic so far beyond the usual range of the mind's eye that at first look they seem irrelevant.

What is demonstrated in fascinating incident and mordant detail as the Vera rolls to Bremerhaven is that they are pitifully identical: they are human, and thus, the author translates, they are pathetic, contemptible fools.

There are degrees of this human condition, but no exceptions. Herr Freitag, for example, is a handsome young German businessman whose beloved wife is a Jewess. He married her knowing that German prejudice would strain their love, and he prided himself on accepting bigots' slurs as honorable wounds. Yet he enjoys being unambiguously gentile as he travels alone on the Vera, and when his secret is discovered, his great love clots into a barely swallowable obligation. Mary Treadwell, a 45-year-old American divorcee, seems decent. But before the trip is finished, Mrs. Treadwell, in a frenzy of sexual deprivation, has made neat half-moons all over the face of a fellow passenger with the heel of her dancing slipper. Herr Glocken, a meek hunchback, seems inoffensive; his transgression is to hope to be thought a man, and he wears a necktie gaily painted with the words "Girls, Follow Me." They Endure. Author Porter has the subtlety to make the wicked as weak as the good. Captain Thiele dreams of being able to machine-gun the lower classes in the name of authority, but cannot deal with a disturbance in the dining room. Six Cuban medical students, determined to be outrageous, have shocked no one; "they are just their parents' bad dreams." The other characters are more mature; they are their own bad dreams. A pair of six-year-old twins throw a pet dog overboard to hear it splash; a man drowns saving the dog and is thought a fool; a nightmarish party ends in a bottle fight and a grotesque, failed seduction. But the great tension of the allegory is not the result of events, but of their orchestration.

Unsought meanings are avoided; minor climaxes are exactly that, no more. When the Vera reaches Bremerhaven, its passengers disembark not much the worse for wear, no less fools. Presently other passengers, not different in any important way, will take their place, and the Vera will steam on.

Novelist Porter's implication is clear, and it is the larger import of her extraordinary screed: all passages of the world's voyage are dismal, and the entente of ignorance and evil is forever in command. It is for this sentence of perpetual gloom that the novel's art and intent might be assailed. Optimists can object that matters are not always so bad and that the caricatured figures with which the author depicts the attitudes of three decades ago are not full-bodied enough to stand up for eternity. So it may seem in healing daylight, but Katherine Anne Porter is marvelously skilled in evoking darkness at noon.

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