Books: Plausible Echoes

NIGHT OF THE POOR — Frederic Prokosch— Harper ($2.50).

In his two 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?

Night of the Poor is the answer to that question. Like The Asiatics its only plot is a record of travel, but this time the traveler is a 17-year-old boy bumming his way south from Wisconsin to his home in Texas. Tom starts out with his friend Pete, a mindless blond giant with curly hair on his chest who almost immediately mag netizes a colored farm girl, troubles Tom’s flesh by getting as far as taking down her dress before he remembers to send Tom away. This scene, equal parts Steinbeck and Pierre Louys, is followed by a touch from James Oliver Curwood when Pete kills a farmer in hand-to-hand fight. The story then swings quickly to mild Faulkner ; Tom loses Pete but finds Lucy, a wild little girl who runs away with him because “dad’s got so he’s queer with me.”

Tom resembles the hero of The Asiatics in his magic immunity from hunger, accident, fatigue. When Tom loses Lucy he knows he’ll see her again simply because Lucy is going to Texas, too. A 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 exact. The great struggles do not lie in the individual, they lie in the land, they are tribal and regional, and can’t quite be put into words. . . .”

But as readers accompany young Tom through the night 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 burns at night in Texas is gas, not oil. Through the whole book, despite its fluency and literary skill, runs a vitiating imprecision. Prokosch’s words on America seem to apply as well or better to his own writing:

“The sense of defeat moves very swiftly, it has no time to become tragic and explicit, and therefore suffering never quite becomes spiritual. No state is ever an end in itself, is ever scrutinized and preserved. [People] do not know the true meaning of wisdom, of evil, of peace.”