Fingernails
Christopher Hawtree
Voices The temptation to read Frederic Prokosch's book, sub-titled 'a memoir', by its index of 475 names should be avoided. Towards the end he confesses, 'I suffer from a malady which is called "total recall". I remember every visual and olfactory detail of an encounter, and the vocal intonations still keep ringing in my ears'. Indeed, if one looks up his meeting with Virginia Woolf and finds her sur- rounded by galley-proofs as she bemusedly answers the young novelist's stumbling, gauche questions it reads like a winning entry in a week-end competition for a Thurber-type non-encounter. 'How do you feel about Dostoevsky?"Today,' she said blandly, 'I have no feelings about Dostoev- sky.' Similarly, back in America he had read Death in Venice as a boy and before long Thomas Mann himself came to visit, setting in train this obsession with the famous, and we learn 'even the back of Thomas Mann had a dark, oaken grandeur. The neck, the ears, the shoulders radiated an invincible solemnity. I sensed that there was a mighty significance in the back of Mann'.
Read properly, however, Voices is both a highly entertaining record of authors and Others caught in characteristic moments and an account of the state of mind in Which Frederic Prokosch wrote his in- teresting, now little-known novels. Above all, it reveals a sense of humour able to ap- preciate the ridiculous both in his own inno- cent seriousness and in those at whom he looked with starry eyes. The early meeting With Mann, still viewed from the rear as the stars began to shine and 'his head rose from his shoulders like a moss-grown rock and the words he was uttering spread from his Skull like antlers', brought visions of the abyss to his adolescent mind. He was in- sPired to write this down as the first of his dialogues. It was to be the beginning of 'a !°n8 and hazardous journey. It was a Journey through the great old cities of the World, through seaports and piazzas, through palazzos and slums. It was a Journey in search of the artist as a hero, as an enigma, as a martyr, as a revelation, and
finally as a fragment of humanity'.
From the ponderous solemnities of youth, Prokosch moved on to be as in- terested by tennis as by books; and by nail- ing down butterflies beside the humans, the two interests meeting towards the end with a Nabokov encounter at Montreux. Emerald Cunard observes of him during the war 'you somehow coax people into saying not what they really want to say but into what they all of a sudden cannot help say- ing. You catch them on the wing. Maybe you have learned it from your butterflies. How wicked if you ever wrote it into a book, how very mischievous!' Sir Thomas Beecham was living in a suite with Lady Cunard at the time, and in a few lines Pro- kosch gives a vivid image of him at one of her tea-parties as Virgil Thomson mentions Gertrude Stein. "Pure drivel," he growl- ed and slammed the door and vanished.' The conversations, sometimes, disconcer- tingly, written down as the subject speaks, bring Boswell to mind: to record 260 words of Gertrude Stein on life, art and style — inspired drivel, perhaps — is miraculous. At one moment he wonders why he is doing it; among the reasons he lists is 'to perform a kind of ritual, to tuck away a living frag- ment, to hide away a human relic, like the fingernail of a saint'.
Despite being telephoned at three in the morning by Lady Cunard wracked by in- somnia and wanting to discuss Racine or finding Auden waddling naked through a Turkish bath, it might seem an enviable ex- istence, one of buttressed idleness. Even though it was a time when travel around the world was possible on a publisher's ad- vance, he was often poor but, more impor- tantly than the encounters, he was trying to write the masterpiece that on the last page he admits has still eluded him.
The cities through which Thomas Mann inspired him to travel were encountered in a library when leafing through an old atlas. 'It was bound in gray buckram and it smell- ed like a mildewy tent.' The names — Lebanon, Syria, Damascus, Transcaucasia , — fascinated him, an inhabitant of one seemed to begin talking to him as he looked down; gradually, in the library, his notes on them grew, evolving into his novel The Asiatics, promptly to be accepted by Chatto and Windus closely followed by even larger offers from T. S. Eliot and Hamish Hamilton. (Faber has just re-issued it in paperback — how one wishes that the series were as well bound and on as good paper as it used to be.) The novel remains extremely readable, a triumph, to use Evelyn Waugh's phrase, of 'vicarious locomotion'; 'your book is much too poetic to be based on vulgar tourism,' E. M. Forster told him. In its luxuriantly adjectival style it suggests much of what was to follow. Gore Vidal has remarked, in a 7000-word review of the memoir published last winter in The New York Review of Books, was his special genius to realise that place approached as if it were character is human since only a human mind can evoke a landscape never before seen on earth except in the author's
mind'; this seems true up to a point, but the lack of sufficient characters interesting in themselves does leave a nagging dissatisfac- tion at the back of one's enjoyment.
Voices abounds in characters, repeated, effective use being made of leading up to them not by name. One could quote from it endlessly (Thomas Wolfe appears to have known about the thin man inside every fat one before either Orwell or Connolly men- tioned it). Dylan Thomas, tipsily picturing himself as a witch, wonders what to add to his simmering cauldron; offal from his con- temporaries is tossed in: 'F. R. Leavis's tail. Yes, he does have a tail. I have it on the best of authorities. He's a devil in disguise. Very tasty it should be, the tail of F. R Leavis, nicely stewed with a dash of vinegar'. Perhaps one should conclude on a more palatable note. Prokosch visits Alice Toklas in 'rooms drenched in an ambience of widowhood and desolation'; in turn the guests praise items of the food: the marmelade de figues, 'I just bought it at the grocer's around the corner'; the cake, 'it's from a small patisserie down the block'; she brightens at the mention of a bouillabaisse, 'we ate artichokes before the bouillabaisse and I felt slightly dubious but the ar- tichokes agreed with Gertrude's sense of severity. Gertrude's sense of severity never failed her when it came to artichokes'. It is a scene, like many in Voices, that might have provoked a snort from Sir Thomas Beecham.
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