Voices: a memoir

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.