Grove Koger

As a young man, I was fascinated by writer Frederic Prokosch and his books, particularly The Seven Who Fled, which I bought in a Dell paperback edition soon after its appearance in 1963. Since then I’ve collected and read several more of his books, so I was delighted to review a biography of him—the first and, in all likelihood, the last—for Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal in 2012. Below is a slightly shortened version of that review.

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Robert M. Greenfield. Dreamer’s Journey: The Life and Writings of Frederic Prokosch. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010

In late 1942 Henry Miller sent Lawrence Durrell a letter that urged him to “take a glance at Frederic Prokosch’s The Seven Who Fled. It’s all about Central Asia—a real opium book. And tell me if you recognize any of the places, will you? Most of them I never heard of.”

In describing the novel as a “real opium book”—meaning, presumably, a pipe dream or opium-induced fantasy—Miller was perhaps closer than he realized. The Seven Who Fled was a fantasy all right, although not one produced under the influence of drugs. It was the second novel from a young American writer who, although certainly talented and widely read, had no direct experience of Asia. The places that Miller had never heard of were real enough, but Prokosch had never laid eyes on them.

Born in Wisconsin on May 17, 1906, Prokosch was the child of a classically dysfunctional couple: a rigid, repressive father (noted academic linguist Eduard Prokosch) and a submissive mother. Eduard Prokosch insisted upon absolute silence in his house, dooming his wife’s dreams of becoming a concert pianist. He would later forbid Frederic’s accompanying the family to Europe lest his mildly effeminate mannerisms embarrass them in front of their European relatives. The son chose to retaliate in a manner strikingly emblematic of much of his subsequent behavior. Rather than sit with the rest of his graduating class at Haverford College in 1925, he watched from the audience—dressed as a woman.

Prokosch’s first published novel, The Asiatics, was as much a fantasy as the one that provoked Miller’s enthusiasm. Recounting an impressionable young American’s peregrinations across the Asian continent, it was praised by such distinguished figures as Thomas Mann, who called it a “book which has stimulated, haunted and enthralled me.” With his second, more ambitious novel, Prokosch expanded his cast of major characters to seven Europeans of various nationalities forced to flee the Central Asian city of Kashgar due to the outbreak of civil war in China. Displaying a strong sense of place, a sensuous style, and a preoccupation with passion and art, it, too, earned nearly ecstatic reviews, and went on to win the Harper Prize.

Did Durrell ever get around to reading The Seven Who Fled? I can find no evidence, but it is interesting to speculate what the future author of The Alexandria Quartet would have made of Prokosch’s band of spiritually bankrupt Europeans working out their fates against the vividly realized backdrop of an etiolated Oriental (and Orientalized) landscape.

Prokosch’s reputation declined precipitously after the appearance of The Seven Who Fled. His half-dozen or so succeeding novels were so inferior that his very name on a cover came to guarantee a poor reception, but when he regained his stride, he generally fared no better. His brilliant reimagining of Byron’s life, The Missolonghi Manuscript—which Greenfield calls the “most impressive” of his novels and which should have guaranteed his critical rehabilitation—was greeted with misapprehension.

Exacerbating the problem was Prokosch’s troubling personality. Routinely jealous of the accomplishments of his contemporaries, he was also petty, vain, and reflexively dishonest—the last possibly a result of his having to disguise his sexual orientation as a young man. Virtually everything he had to say about himself seems to have been either an evasion or an outright lie. His most honest self-portrait may appear in his poem “Sunburned Ulysses.” “Loving the unattainable and forbidden, in love with change alone,” Prokosch wrote of the Greek hero (and himself), “He recognized the frightful necessity in the song of the sirens: for he likewise possessed / Flesh fanned easily into fire, and a heart as hard as a stone.”

For years Prokosch was indeed in love with change alone. He spent most of his adult life in Europe, and was frequently on the move. He preferred to be seen in the company of the rich and famous, or, if alone, with a notebook and an ostentatiously large gold fountain pen. He eventually settled in the Alpes-Maritime department of southeastern France, where he died in 1989.

Robert Greenfield must have found it challenging to write engagingly of so dispiriting a life, but for the most part he has succeeded. His account is literate, and he deals even-handedly with his subject’s failings. His five-plus pages of acknowledgements suggest many years of labor. Having wanted to know more about Prokosch since I first read The Seven Who Fled decades ago, I’m grateful to Greenfield for his perseverance.

It’s customary in reviewing a writer’s biography to conclude with the hope that readers will now turn to the writer’s works, and there is no reason to depart from custom in this case. Along with the novels already mentioned, A Tale for Midnight (an account of the ordeal of Beatrice Cenci) and America, My Wilderness (a magical realist journey through the land of Prokosch’s birth) are the works of a major writer, however imperfect that writer may have been as a human being. They deserve reading and rereading.