Books: On the Run

THE SEVEN WHO FLED—Frederic Prokosch—Harper ($2.50).

Listen. There is only one victory possible for a man—that of having lost with a certain dignity of heart, at least, and nobility of spirit. That is all, that is all, and it will always be all!

When a huge, innocent-eyed, pockmarked Russian exile named Serafimov came out alive after his flight across China, those words expressed all that he had distilled out of his experience. Expelled with six other Europeans by the Bolsheviks from “the very middle of Asia,” later held in custody in Aqsu. Serafimov had spent a winter in a particularly colorful environment of Asiatic depravity, had fallen in love with a haggard Russian prostitute and, having finally touched the lowest depth of despair and loneliness, had attained a lasting state of grace by strangling a companion fugitive.

This week Serafimov’s violent adventures and mystical strivings, together with the equally searing experiences of his six companions, formed the substance of an imaginative, intense volume that won the eighth Harper Prize Novel competition ($7,500), seemed likely to impress readers as the most unusual selection thus far.* The work of Frederic Prokosch, 28-year-old author of The Asiatics (1935) and The Assassins (1936), The Seven Who Fled is distinguished by its sensuous imagery, queer plot and elusive symbolism, as well as by a tantalizing, ambiguous philosophical message which will leave most readers wondering if they have got Author Prokosch’s meaning straight.

Like the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, who were united through the device of having them tumble to their death together when an Andean bridge collapsed, the characters in The Seven Who Fled are strung together only through the accident of their common expulsion, the similarity of their final nihilistic verdict on human affairs.

When Soviet machinations in revolution-torn Sinkiang province brought an order to get rid of all “questionable” foreigners, the roundup produced seven individuals as mysterious as Serafimov, who traveled together until further machinations caused a further splitting up of their ranks. Serafimov’s victim was a fastidious, ratlike Belgian named Goupillière. A murderer himself, Goupillière’s face was “as subtle as a woman’s, as ambiguous as a thief’s,” since it was divided by an ugly scar left when a mistress had tried to kill him with a pair of scissors. Through the months of their captivity in Aqsu, he subtly goaded Serafimov to madness, yet achieved his own spiritual tranquillity at the moment Serafimov’s fingers closed around his throat.

A tall, ascetic English explorer named Layeville, most understanding one of the lot, came to a more agonizing end than the others. Plunging on alone into the Kuenlun Mountains of Tibet, he was trapped in a snowstorm, endured 30 days of unspeakable physical horror before he found peace as he lay dying in the snow, surrounded by the ice-coated corpses of his guides. Sick, decadent La Scaze, a rich Frenchman, voluptuary, onetime author, remained in Aqsu to recover from fever. Inert and drugged through most of his stay, he awakened when he saw a flawlessly beautiful native girl, who died of cholera the day after he got her. When the plague caught up to him he met his death crying ecstatically, “I am purified.” His beautiful Spanish wife had abandoned him when he collapsed with fever. Heading for Shanghai in the company of a Chinese fur merchant, she exhausted her last will power in fleeing from her host’s insidious attentions, was easily hypnotized by her next Chinese escort, who sold her into prostitution: a fate which left her spiritually clear-eyed, “inexplicably passive and serene,” for the first time in her life.

Strangest feature of The Seven Who Fled is not its gutter transcendentalism but its combination of vivid physical descriptions and wild poetic fantasy. Reading in part like a travel book, it is at the same time peopled with characters who are all amateur philosophers as well as men of action, who expound their beliefs, analyze themselves and the contemporary world in ringing phrases as they commit murder, double-cross each other, go down racked with disease, vice, unspeakable spiritual torment. Readers may question the allegorical significance of Author Prokosch’s tale, may feel that his situations are too farfetched to be credible. But they are likely to admit that his people are real human beings, that his mountains are really cold, his deserts really hot enough to cause camels to go mad, to make stones look as though “they must burst and bleed away.”

* Previous winners: Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, Anne Parrish’s The Perennial Bachelor, Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers, Julian Green’s The Dark Journey, Robert Raynold’s Brothers in the West, Paul Horgan’s The Fault of Angela, H. L. Davis’ Honey in the Horn.