AN EXTRAORDINARY LITERARY LETTER ABOUT THE PROCESS
OF WRITING “SHIP OF FOOLS”
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER. American essayist, short story writer, novelist; wrote “Ship of Fools”.
Typewritten Letter Signed, Katherine Anne Porter, three densely typed pages, on blue paper, quarto, August 18, 1958, Outpost Inn, Ridgefield, Connecticut. With corrections in her hand. To Mr. Clemons.
“I am towards the end of the triple-copy stage with my Ship of Fools, which began as a diary on board ship August 22, 1931, from Vera Cruz Mexico the Bermerhavn Germany. What those passengers have become since would startle them. It even startles me sometimes. It is like everything I do, based on actual events and real persons and just how and where it becomes absolute fiction I simple am unable to say; but it is fiction and nothing else by now, I even based one of the characters very lightly on myself, but she got away long ago – was indeed one of the first to escape. In fact I have now become all of the people in the book, the fat man in the cherry colored shirt, the captain the bridge, the drowned man, the hunchback, the Jew, poor obstinate David, all of the women I’m sure, as well as the ship’s cat and the sea-sick bulldog, and sometimes I have the oddest illusion that I am the ship, too.
“[Y]ou may know by now that writing so far as money goes, is as chancy as the Irish Sweepstakes-and the minute I get to the last page of this job, at which I am now so utterly exhausted and in such rebellion at my self-enslavement I can hardly hit the right keys any more; sincerely I don’t give a damn what becomes of it or what anybody thinks of it, just so I never have to read it again! I am on my 322nd page, written from top to bottom and to bath margins – about four hundred twenty five words to the page, every one of them hand-picked, you might say; yet plenty of them I stop to think about, and reject, and find another that nearly pleases me for the moment, and I dare not keep the mss. near me. As I finish a batch I mail it to my editor, otherwise I’ll never finish. Yet it is strange, for I really want to write, I can’t imagine life without it, and when I do write it is always at top speed, and as my husband once remarked, with my hair on fire.
“It’s the long pauses between these outbursts that take up the time, and I need a lot of time to do all sorts of other things while I brood; but my present editor is rapidly losing his mind, so I took drastic steps also to find utter freedom to do nothing but this one single thing until its finished.
“I gave up my house – lease expired – on Roxbury Road at the end of July, and I don’t get to the University of Virginia until the first of September – one full divine month I am stopping here at this country Inn. Breakfast in bed, the only place I enjoy it, up and to work by 9, solid work until three, a good lunch, and back to work about five, and stop for supper between 8 and 9. Well, my notion of the Earthly Paradise!
“Well, I had never meant to write a novel, I was and am a short story writer and that is simple another métier, a different thing altogether. Yet I am glad I wrote this novel; the material ran away with me, and I have never been able to shorten it or hurry it or do anything but go on with it when it was ready to go, and I could make time for it.
“And now, I must get back in my imaginary world which seems quite as real to me as the one I am manifestly in!”
Katherine Anne Porter, who is best known for her essays and short stories (for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966) began writing her only novel, “Ship of Fools”, at Yaddo (an artists’ community on a 400 acre wooded estate in Saratoga Springs, New York) in 1941. She wrote the first and last fifty pages at Yaddo, and continued writing it, as if she herself were on a long voyage, off and on over the next two decades, with breaks as long as five years at a time.
In this letter Katherine Anne Porter proudly relates: “I have some good writing friends who have read quite a lot of this manuscript and they will not believe that it was done that way. Two of them are extremely good writers as well as critics, and they declare on honor they cannot find any seams.”
When it was published in 1962, Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year. Sales of the book, together with the sale of the movie rights, gave Katherine Anne Porter the financial security she would not otherwise have enjoyed as a teacher at various universities.
The ship of fools allegory has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. It depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction. Katherine Anne Porter’s version, set in the autumn of the year 1931, was seen as an attack on a world that allowed the Second World War to happen.
The recipient of this letter was probably Walter Clemons, a young writer (at the time of this letter) who, like Katherine Anne Porter, was from Texas. Katherine Anne Porter was known for her generosity in assisting younger artists.
COMPLETE TEXT OF LETTER:
“Outpost Inn / Ridgefield, Connecticut / 18 August 1958 / Dear Mr. Clemons:
“Maybe we’ll be able to swap books by then, for I am towards the end of the triple-copy stage with my Ship of Fools, which began as a diary on board ship August 22, 1931, from Vera Cruz Mexico the Bermerhavn Germany. What those passengers have become since would startle them. It even startles me sometimes. It is like everything I do, based on actual events and real persons and just how and where it becomes absolute fiction I simple am unable to say; but it is fiction and nothing else by now, I even based one of the characters very lightly on myself, but she got away long ago – was indeed one of the first to escape. In fact I have now become all of the people in the book, the fat man in the cherry colored shirt, the captain the bridge, the drowned man, the hunchback, the Jew, poor obstinate David, all of the women I’m sure, as well as the ship’s cat and the sea-sick bulldog, and sometimes I have the oddest illusion that I am the ship, too. Well, here it is getting towards the end of August again, twenty seven years and three books later, and a second career of reading and talking in Colleges and Universities to support the first, – you may know by now that writing so far as money goes, is as chancy as the Irish Sweepstakes-and the minute I get to the last page of this job, at which I am now so utterly exhausted and in such rebellion at my self-enslavement I can hardly hit the right keys any more; sincerely I don’t give a damn what becomes of it or what anybody thinks of it, just so I never have to read it again! I am on my 322nd page, written from top to bottom and to bath margins – about four hundred twenty five words to the page, every one of them hand-picked, you might say; yet plenty of them I stop to think about, and reject, and find another that nearly pleases me for the moment, and I dare not keep the mss. near me. As I finish a batch I mail it to my editor, otherwise I’ll never finish. Yet it is strange, for I really want to write, I can’t imagine life without it, and when I do write it is always at top speed, and as my husband once remarked, with my hair on fire. It’s the long pauses between these outbursts that take up the time, and I need a lot of time to do all sorts of other things while I brood; but my present editor is rapidly losing his mind, so I took drastic steps also to find utter freedom to do nothing but this one single thing until its finished. I gave up my house – lease expired – on Roxbury Road at the end of July, and I don’t get to the University of Virginia until the first of September – one full divine month I am stopping here at this country Inn. Breakfast in bed, the only place I enjoy it, up and to work by 9, solid work until three, a good lunch, and back to work about five, and stop for supper between 8 and 9. Well, my notion of the Earthly Paradise! I used to work that way at Yaddo, I wrote the first fifty pages and the last three of this book there in two months, the summer of 1941; Then I was interrupted by unhappy personal concerns and didn’t do anything until the next year, and it has been stopped and broken into and left for five years at a time with an unfinished line; taken up again in the middle of a sentence and carried on; and now I am copying into the same paragraph lines written from notes made twenty five years ago, and passages written ten years ago, and things written last month and something else I just thought of a minute before; I have some good writing friends who have read quite a lot of this manuscript and they will not believe that it was done that way. Two of them are extremely good writers as well as critics, and they declare on honor they cannot find any seams .. Well, I had never meant to write a novel, I was and am a short story writer and that is simple another métier, a different thing altogether. Yet I am glad I wrote this novel; the material ran away with me, and I have never been able to shorten it or hurry it or do anything but go on with it when it was ready to go, and I could make time for it. It is nearly impossible to explain this to a man who has to explain to the business department why he can’t seem to wring a book out of me. But he really has got one now, though he still doesn’t quite believe it because he hasn’t seen the last page yet. He is a very nice man-Seymour Lawrence at Atlantic Press – a naturally impulsive, eager, perhaps even impatient man, who has been so entirely friendly and patient and encouraging and hopeful, I feel it is just not fair to draw out his ordeal a minute longer than I have to, a body can get a real psychic damage from being forced to be too good and too virtuous for too long a time. I am afraid he will just explode, so I am hurrying like mad now. The thing is finished, and it is the only novel I shall ever write, so I may as well let it go; I do know how the oldfashioned authors felt when they wrote Finis Laus Deo and laid down their worn-out quills.
“Your own feelings at the point are very right and normal, I hope you’ll be glad to hear. And it happens one time or another with every book as it comes. I expect to revive later, and view my own work with horror and dismay and plan to go live somewhere else under an assumed name. That will pass, I assure you. You will wonder at yourself, and go through it all again with the next one. You know, I have been trouping the college and University circuit for twenty years, reading my own stories or talking about literature and allied subjects- which is everything under sun- and I still tremble with stage fright the last five minutes before going on! No hidin’ place down here, is what I’m trying to tell you! As if you didn’t know.
“Thank you for reading my stories and the odd fragments of the novel, and for your good and very welcome praise. I think so well of your gift and the way you are going, and have such faith in your future, – saw your first published stories and “found” them for myself,- it makes me very happy to know that you read my work and believe in it. Naturally we all of us want as many readers as we can get, but it still does make a great difference to know we have the confidence of the kind of reader we long for .. if you really did spot me at the Theatre de Lys that afternoon, (I was wearing a conspicuously large grey draped felt hat, of which I was very proud, I hope you did see it and like it!) I wish you had spoken to me; people do, utter strangers in the street who never wrote a line in their lives (as we use the term) and I should have been glad to see you. Well, the play did move up town to that ill-fated Jan Hus- never without a play, and never without a failure, I believe the saying now is about that house. The young producers who took it over also made it over to a wonderful degree, and it got better and better, and clearer and more touching all the time; the young ones got stronger and more confident and they gave the minor characters more to do, and so by hook and crook and fine words from such assorted persons as Red Warren and Tennessee Williams and Saroyan, they kept it alive for fifty performance in all, and went down with all hands on deck, flags flying and the band playing. What I am really saying is, that the understudies had never had a chance to show what they could do. So they played the very last performance one Sunday evening – January 12th I see by my calendar-no ticket sale, but contributions for the Actors’ fund, and I was told they had the best house and took in more money than any other performance. I found this spirit and freshness of feeling and just good conduct under fire so appealing it makes me merry to remember it even now. The original cast sat in the audience and applauded – don’t you like this story? I do, and its all true. The young producers drove from new York to my Roxbury Road hermitage to tell me all the last things, and bring me beautiful album filled with all available souvenirs of our venture – even programs and tickets as well as all the review and wonderful photographs of scenes.
“I haven’t seen Jarrell’s collection, but shall when I go through New York. I do remember “Rothschild’s Fiddle” and God knows it is heart-breaking. But then, wringing your heart when not engaged in breaking it was Chekov’s specialty. I am still amazed at the widely spread critical opinion that Chekov was a “light writer.” But then, so was Colette all those decades. Have you read “Sido”, or “My Mother’s House”, or “L’Etoile Vesper”? I don’t think this last has been translated yet. So much for critics, most of them. Don’t let them trouble you.
“I’ll be in New York sometime during the day of the 28th August, but I must shop that afternoon. – 29th but I have to spend it at the hairdresser and the photographer-Editor wants new photograph for his publicity. (And oh, yes, my original title was Ship of Fools, but they persuded me to change it at Harcourt’s.. when I went to the Atlantic Monthly Press I took back my first title, the only one I wanted.) 30th, so far, I am free. I leave at five, first of September for Virginia. Yes, if you are in New York, I’d like for us to have at least a little cocktail hour. I’ll be at the Winslow, 55th and Madison. Please call me there, and leave a message if I am out. And now, I must get back in my imaginary world which seems quite as real to me as the one I am manifestly in!
Sincerely yours,
Katherine Anne Porter
Price: $12,500
This item is associated with the following category in our inventory:
- Literature – American
- Women
