Frederic Prokosch - The Seven Who Fled

I'm reading The Seven Who Fled several years after learning that J.G. Ballard said he'd always wanted his sentences to sound like Prokosch's. It's sensational. The descriptions are so magnificently wrought and deployed with such effortlessness and finesse. Prokosch himself sounds like he was a bit of a character. Anyway, I'm not sure I want to read anything else because I'm scared it won't measure up.

There's an Art Tatum-like virtuosity to what he writes that is just blowing my mind basically, right now.

Just ordered, ty

harlan ellison says this is his favorite book, i think

wiki says he translated Holderlin and Labe - count me in.

i have a copy of his missolonghi manuscript, a recreation of byron's time in greece in journal form. blurbs from anthony burgess and gore vidal repping his prose stylings (never actually read it though).

going to the top of the list - thx TH.

Wow, this thing has some rave reviews. Such as:

A distinguished novel that is not only an uncommonly beautiful book of prose but a document of and for our time.
-Alfred Kazin

Or

A luminous yet ultimately mysterious book of great power. It encloses, as in a shell, the Seven Deadly Sins, which glow on its pages like the drawings in an ancient manuscript.
-Thornton Wilder

Library has copy of his prior novel, his first, The Asiatics.

i just got the last copy of every prokosch book on the deep web so no use looking there

Ha, I figures somebody would do that.

This rang a bell, and I find I have a copy of The Asiatics which I bought but have not yet got round to reading. Must rectify this.

Where is that Ballard information coming from? All I could find is this very page. Also, entry in les grandes impostures littéraires: https://books.google.com/books?id=_RLaBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT146&lpg=PT146&dq=prokosch+ballard+frederic&source=bl&ots=0h63Vk4plq&sig=8o4nxfeqyU2XxuV1t1l9_SEGLUU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oewXVYqvMMnjsASy7oHYBg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwBw

Okay, just read the first fifty pages of my newly arrived copy- sloppy work, nakh!- and I get the Ballard connection. A few more jaw-dropping blurbs on back I may have to post as well

So, I'm some of the way in, not through the first character section yet though. Going to p much transcribe my notes as is, and then maybe a quick note on the Ballard bit.

There is an odd/surreal immanence to the landscape and anthropomorphism to the animal world (as if vivifying characteristics have all shifted down a level - with main characters shifting up to somewhat allegorical beings).

They crossed the Shara river on their camels, through the weird muddy currents that were so bitterly cold that the camels screamed with anger

landscapes are singleminded, not internally various, and frequently described in terms of glittering jewels, diamonds, and as being fluid and animate. As well as in terms of their features, landscapes are described strongly in terms of their psychological effect, to the extent that the effect is seen to be spiritual. They have very ballardian effects like destroying time, or moral senses of pain, they can be purifying and corrupting.

The character narrative of the first section is defined by a dislike of the sensual, urbane and corrupt (which go together - from Herodotus on, corruption of pioneer characteristics comes from the East, civilisation=sensual and moral corruption.)

I know from the chapter titles that the separate characters each have their own sections and how Prokosch uses that... the extent to which the *character* affects the psychological, stylistic and aesthetic manner, the extent to which Prokosch manipulates that, will probably determine the success of the book for me. - outside of the bulldog drummond/richard hannay genre novel, where the adventure is the thing, this sort of 'disgust with society' is pretty tedious to read.

For instance, will other characters share L's disdain for flesh.
- will they share his oddly interested-but-cursory attitude towards those around him (the abbreviated discursiveness of the people in his caravan's descriptions and stories is slightly odd.
- will things like the landscape be described in the same semi-mystical way?

ie what is character and what intent of author?

guess: he's already shown (through the character admittedly) a habit of suggesting outward appearance does not align with inward manner, so probably being set up for contradictions of L's initial judgments.
but the novel is clearly semi-allegorical - spiritual journeys in a template sense not unlike the pilgrim's progress - as L says 'It was a flight of the spirit, really, as well as a flight of the body'. So we're probably in the realm of a shriving off of the body to achieve individual spiritual understanding.

'Further and further away from the past, deeper and deeper into the future.' <-- I find this sort of thing v appealing personally. reconfiguring of common metaphors of the transcendental physical into new and alarming mechanics - here the progress of the individual, humanity, and all the physical world, as a deep sea dive, further and further away from the safety/understanding of the surface, internal, rather than arrow-like.

This is a writer for whom English isn't his first language - odd that some people have praised his style, but that awkwardness, repetitiveness, is quite potent. the style is hackneyed and debased romantic (suitable to a novel much earlier in the 20th century, possibly even late 19th), but is not, like those books, confined to purple 'patches', the whole is purple, so the effect is slightly different - once your literary senses have adjusted themselves to this new gravity, it allows him some interesting effects - quite difficult to describe. It's like the lack of concreteness means that the spiritual and psychological shifting, like the shifting of the landscape, has meaningful presence. It has a peculiar metaphysics. Again, all hinges on what he does with the others.

The mad llama's speech about the 'Black Faith' is immensely enjoyable. Is this a thing?

So, to add, I'm not sure whether I like this yet (I think so) but I'm into the swing of it now.

didn't get to the ballard bit, but I'm not sure that's exactly right. it's probably correct to the extent that this *isn't* an allegory.

I'm so glad somebody who knows a thing or two is reading this and writing about it! Pretty sure English IS Prokosch's first language though - he was born in Wisconsin

ah, thanks TH, good to know - will go back and take a look at the sentences where i raised an eyebrow.

there's nothing quite like those initial stages of getting to know a book. interrogating it, turning it this way and that.

I enjoyed this description of 'the people of the Tsaidan':

An odd, puppet-like tribe; graceful little hunters of wolves and antelopes; lovers of war and bloodshed; almost imbecilic, utterly heartless; they lived in a secret Middle Ages of their own, told curious tales, believed and feared everything they were told about the world outside, and understood nothing at all

Enjoying this. reminds me of something like wolf solent - that period of writing that brings a heavyweight prosaic melodrama to interior struggles with Love (very much with a capital L):

He knew what love was! In loneliness and secrecy he had discovered the power of Love, its prolonged mystery, its unspoken eloquence, making the whole world - trees, cries of birds, half-comprehended phrases, hours of the day - into its symbols and conspirators.

That's the Englishman Layeville, and his snowfever reverie on England, and his youth, is a great set piece - he passes through the seasons, as life (hardly an innovation I realise), but there's some lovely phrasing in there - 'everything departing, nothing to be done' - and the sudden flock of birds from the ruin as departing memories is very good.

But, as I said above, it is pretty melodramatic - I mean I've got a high tolerance for this sort of thing but even I blench slightly at 'He was alone, alone.' (Feel like Bogie in The Maltese Falcon - 'you don't say.')

The second character, the Russian Serafimov, is a voluptuary. He has similar obsessions to purity and purging as Layeville, but his is heavily sensual - he is deeply aware of his body, of his skin as the element of natural separation, rather than the mind. He is not able to competently realise his sexual urges, and has more than the touch of a Jim Thompson character about him.

The book's central themes (like Wolf Solent) are Love and the sense of sin, or impurity, that seems to bedevil the idealism of Love. That's covert in Layeville, only really revealed in his final visions of remembrance, but for Serafimov it's quite explicit.

And it's this that makes the book odd - I find myself thinking quite frequently 'what's he getting at?' 'why is he writing this book?'

He seems quite heavily reliant on works of the imagination for his local colour - so it feels like a tour of imaginative or fictional types, and that can make it tend towards pastiche or cliche on occasion. I'm not sure about his psychological nuance really either - the physically bear-like russian with the mind of a child (more Bogie).

It feels like the book's distinguished for its strange dream-like topographies, comprising as much psychic as natural geography, and also the types - their fates played like consecutive cards in the book. The cumulative effect feels methodical - there is no Cloud Atlas style interweaving, say - and as a consequence, there's a strong flavour of a slightly ponderous 'look at these types' allegory.

Yet it's all slightly off, which is what makes it appealing. Prokosch has a knack of using an unexpected and really hardly appropriate word in sentences at times, so that again you think 'what's he getting at?' - that was what was probably responsible for my initial feeling that English wasn't his first language. And that effect seems also to be present on a larger, more spiritual level throughout the book.

Fizzles I loved reading this!

The book or Fizzles' post?

I'm the OP ya ding dong!

Damn you, Tracer Hand!

Missed the opportunity for a faux syllogism, such as
1. Of course, I am well aware you were the original poster
2. Even assuming 1), there is a possibility that you might have been meaning you enjoyed Fizzles post and not referring to the book itself, although realistically this possibility only exists for the purpose of comic misunderstanding.
3. Damn you, Tracer Hand!

Thanks TH! I didn't finish it - at the time I got tired the somewhat allegorical-feeling structure plus dreamlike landscapes and wanted to read something else with the mechanical constraints that imply a similarly constraining reality. Regretting it slightly now, and will return to it.

In the early 80s, I think, I read a review of Prokosch's book about his semi-friendship with Auden, apparently awkward for the latter, no problemo for the former, at least as described by James Atlas, who also explained to us boomers that FP got great reviews early on, then gradually disappeared, until this, which incl. "enigmatic personal references in arch, mandarin prose." Not that Atlas didn't come off as possibly dickish as well.