Word: prokosch
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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NIGHT OF THE POOR - Frederic Prokosch- Harper...
...previous novels, The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled, Frederic Prokosch has shown a facile imagination and a brilliant hand at silken, vivid prose. Ostensibly a narrative of travel from Syria to China, The Asiatics told of hair-raising adventures, lubriciously glamorous encounters, incredible coincidences and cosmic conversations with the casual air of an article in the National Geographic. More Spenglerian than picaresque, The Seven Who Fled brought together to their mutual doom seven characters symbolic of European races, let them slowly disintegrate with their bewildered sensuality and inter minable talk into the vast oblivion of Asia...
Sharp-minded critics had their reservations about the quality of Prokosch's world picture, still further reservations about his fundamental drive as a prose writer. Like his two books of poetry, the novels suggested a virtuoso's familiarity with English, French and Oriental literature; in places this familiarity became obtrusive, as in one chapter ending of The Asiatics which echoed (beautifully) a paragraph from Baudelaire's Intimate Journals. What would be the result if this young American, born in Wisconsin and educated at Haverford and Yale, turned his imagination to his own country...
...pursued gangster gives him a ride in a big, black Hudson; he lives on an occasional hamburger, sleeps happily in thickets, in barns, on lawns. The little towns of the Midwest, the hitchhikers, lunchroom girls, farmers, high school kids, old people, down-and-outers, all pass by in Prokosch's limpid prose, phantasmagoria hauntingly created but incredible in a landscape sensuously seen, smelt and touched but unrecognizable. It is the same with Author Prokosch's ponderings: relevant, plausible, portentous and flimsy. Aware of the flimsiness, he attributes it to his material: "No crisis or tragedy [in America] becomes...
...when he sees a rape and a lynching, through barren Mississippi and Louisiana into Texas, they may feel that if The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled could be accepted as truth in Oklahoma, Night of the Poor cannot be so accepted this side of Teheran. The language of Prokosch's Americans is a salty, sometimes melodious mimicry, but it rings false too often in such mixtures as "One can't be sure of nothin'. . . ." He speaks of "oil wells burning through the moth-hung night" in Texas, when any Texan could tell him that what characteristically...