Voices

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.

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 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.

Author Biography

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 Labe, and Friedrich H lderlin.

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 Aurelia. She is the senior fiction writer in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.