Voices

Frederic Prokosch began as a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was an imaginary account of a man hitchhiking across the Asian continent. Praised by T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Mann, the book earned its young author a reputation as a stylist. But while Prokosch kept publishing, he was not much read; by the 1940s, he had moved permanently to Europe, keeping aloof from what he called the “middle-class and fancy dullness” of mid-century American letters.

In 1982, Prokosch briefly returned to the literary limelight with Voices, a memoir framed by evocations of his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France but mostly composed of short chapters in which he ventriloquizes the myriad famous figures he met. Voices, too, was a bit of a fantasy. But if he did not in fact meet all of these figures, he manages to convince us that he listened to their cadences more closely than most. Whether he is playing a tennis match with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall’s wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W. H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his humor and melancholy, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir, long out of print and long overlooked.