Frederic Prokosch - The Seven Who Fled

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.