Voices - by Frederic Prokosch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

James Joyce, Viriginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and a multitude of other artistic titans are encountered and ventriloquized in this bitingly funny (and mostly fictitious) memoir by a nearly forgotten literary fantasist.

Frederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch's long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the "middle-class and fancy dullness" of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis, collecting butterflies, and printing deluxe limited editions of poems he admired.
In 1982, Prokosch returned to the literary limelight with Voices--a self-proclaimed memoir framed by his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France, made of short chapters about his encounters with famous figures, whose every word he seems to recall. Voices, too, is a work of fantasy. But if Prokosch's portraits are not strictly true to life, they come alive as few portraits do. Whether he is playing tennis 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 ability to capture these artists' cadences and characters, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir.

Review Quotes

"Prokosch's Voices is an astonishing book." --Simon Leys

"Mr. Prokosch's gift is one which strikes me as astonishing. It is rich and immediate . . . the talent of a real visionary, and often magical." --W.B. Yeats

"I can't think of any other writer who captures the essence of another human being so swiftly and so wickedly." --Kathryn Davis

"Prokosch never taught school; never sought prizes or foundation grants; never played at literary politics. He seems to have been more interested in the works or voices of others than in himself as a person (as opposed to himself as a writer), a characteristic that tends to put him outside contemporary American literature; and contemporary American literature, sensing this indifference to the games careerists play, extruded him entirely from the canon. He was like no one else." --Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books

About the Author

Frederic Prokosch (1908-1989) was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of an Austrian philologist and an American concert pianist. Between 1930 and 1934, he sent handmade booklets of his poetry to dozens of writers he admired, including T. S. Eliot, who later published Prokosch's first novel, The Asiatics. During the Second World War Prokosch was assigned to the American Legation in Stockholm and afterward resided mostly in Europe, first in Italy and later in France, where, in 1972, he retired to a cottage in the town of Grasse, living in almost total seclusion after garnering some unwelcome attention for having forged several valuable "extra copies" of his prewar pamphlets, which had been auctioned off by Sotheby's. In addition to his imaginative memoir, Voices, he was the author of sixteen novels, four collections of poetry, and translations of Euripides, Louise Labé, and Friedrich Hölderlin.

Kathryn Davis is the author of many novels, including Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, The Thin Place, Versailles, Duplex, and Silk Road, and a memoir, Aurelia Aurélia. She is the senior fiction writer in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.