Das Narrenschiff
Taken the most exciting event of the 20th century and succeeded in making it monumentally boring and profoundly depressing
Katherine Anne Porter found her greatest success at 72. The famed short story writer captured the world’s attention with her first — and only — novel. The New York Times called it “miraculously brilliant,” before it shot up their list to become the year’s best-selling American title.
Set in 1931, the work details the titular ship’s voyage from Veracruz, Mexico to Europe, revolving around the rich and lurid lives of an international cast of passengers. Begun in 1940 as a novella, the work was intended to be – above all else – an allegory for the rise of Nazism, culminating in the Vera’s arrival in Bremerhaven, Germany.
“When I began thinking about my novel, I took for my own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity,” Porter explains, in a brief introduction to the novel. She adds that her own title is a direct translation of Sebastian Brant’s 1494 work, Das Narrenschiff. “It is by no means new – it was very old and durable and dearly familiar when Brant used it; and it suits my purpose exactly. I am a passenger on that ship.”
Ship of Fools would again be adopted as an unofficial title for the Voyage Beyond Apollo, a 1972 cruise from New York Harbor to Florida. Porter was 82 when she boarded the S.S. Statendam, on assignment from Playboy Magazine. A decade after praising her novel, The Times now described the octogenarian as “fragile,” before highlighting the obvious allusion to her best-known work.
She was also in illustrious company, among a guest list that included Isaac Asimov, Norman Mailer, Marvin Minsky and Carl Sagan, with author Arthur C. Clarke, aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun and astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell bowing out shortly before the chilly December 4th launch. Hugh Downs, who’d recently left NBC’s Today Show, served as host for a nine-day floating conference that culminated in Cape Canaveral, to witness NASA’s final Apollo launch.
Less recognizable was the cruise’s 27-year-old organizer, Richard Hoagland. A radio host and author, the massive Star Trek fan would receive some note four years later, for spearheading a letter writing campaign that convinced then-President Gerald Ford to change the first Space Shuttle orbiter’s name from the Constitution (in honor of the bicentennial) to the Enterprise. In the decades that followed, he would gain even more prominence for his NASA conspiracies, regularly appearing on Coast to Coast to discuss coverups ranging from the Face on Mars to the existence of hyperdimensional physics.
His efforts as a cruise organizer, however, fell short. With 650 cabins at their disposal, the Voyage Beyond Apollo attracted roughly 100 paying guests – 40 of whom paid the additional $400 to attend the week’s panels. The Holland America Line lost around $250,000 on the venture, with empty cabins given away to travel agents, executives and fashion editors.
In signature form, Mailer perfectly captured the declining public enthusiasm around the space program, telling an audience that NASA had, “taken the most exciting event of the 20th century and succeeded in making it monumentally boring and profoundly depressing.” The agency, he explained, was entirely too fixed on things like collecting moon rocks, rather than experimenting with space telepathy.
“Science is only one means of gaining knowledge, but it happens to be the most successful in my opinion, fellow panelist Asimov countered. “When you apply the scientific method to the ‘supernatural’ then it automatically becomes natural.”
The event’s agenda rapidly deteriorated. In addition to high profile dropouts, meetings were canceled and panelists often lacked sufficient preparation. One speaker’s young daughter hosted a “whimsical discussion” about lunar rovers.
The crew hosted a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey on the second night, despite Clarke’s absence. As the ship sailed past North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras, the wind made for choppy waters. Passengers rushed to the railings to relieve themselves over the sides. A joint was passed around during the film to ease the seasickness, with the added benefit of enhancing Kubrick’s psychedelic 1968 masterpiece.
“When the lights finally came on, Mailer tottered over the listing floor from where he’d been sitting in the front row,” passenger and journalist Rex Weiner noted in The Paris Review decades later. “Handing back a burnt roach, he thanked us for providing the pot.”
The Apollo 17 rocket launched soon after midnight, the morning of December 7, casting a glow that author – and passenger – Robert Heinlein happily described as an “Incomparably beautiful at night.” Rock gathering or no, it may well have been the one aspect of the voyage that went entirely according to plan.
Even Mailer begrudgingly approved.
Porter, too, was thrilled by the entire spectacle, noting that she had not even witnessed an Apollo launch on television prior to that moment. “It was rather glorious, not frightening at all,” the author explained. “I was very exhilarated. I never saw a light that grew and grew and grew, until it looked like it was going to pour down on your head.”
Sources:
Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter
Caribbean Cruise Attempts To Seek Meaning of Apollo https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/12/archives/caribbean-cruise-attempts-to-seek-meaning-of-apollo-cruise-to-the.html
Of a Fyre on the Moon https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/of-a-fyre-on-the-moon/
A Stowaway to the Thanatosphere: My Voyage Beyond Apollo with Norman Mailer https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/12/31/a-stowaway-to-the-thanatosphere-my-voyage-beyond-apollo-with-norman-mailer/