"Nine Days To Mukalla" 1953 PROKOSCH, Frederic (INSCRIBED)
$195
PROKOSCH, Frederic
w/ newspaper review by Gore Vidal
[270] pp.
Secker & Warburg
1953
7 3/8" x 5 1/4"
Jacket design by Biro
VG/ VG
Since Frederic Prokosch's success in the original Nineteen Thirties with "The Asiatics" and "The Seven Who Fled," he has continued to fashion in the manner of Petronius and Apuleius a series of picaresque novels, highly imaginative works which owe little or nothing to those novels of manners and of character which have dominated Western literature for over a century. In his latest book, "Nine Days to Mukalla," he has produced yet another variation on his central legend: disaster and flight, anticipation and arrival. The plot's construction will be familiar to his readers. Four people, enroute from India to Europe, crash in an airplane on an island near the coast of Arabia. They are forced to travel overland and by sea to Mukalla, a town from which they will be able to rejoin their civilization. Before the journey's end, however, two have perished; those who survive die, too, in another sense, since they are changed, demoralized by suffering, by disaster, by encounters with fantastic strangers and unfamiliar powers. Yet, despite a great deal of superficial excitement, the drama of their flight is essentially unhuman. They are not men and women, but archetypes whose relationships lack im- mediacy. They are shadows engaged in ritual, their deeds possessing meaning only in relation to the sensuous world, to the natural world at its most implacable a glittering, heightened place of symbol where shadow-figures cross shining deserts yet leave no single mark of passage upon the sand. As in Prokosch's other books, it is not the people but the design which matters: a vision of human beings shipwrecked and forced to flee through hostile country, harried by a nameless enemy, by that "antique horror prowling across the face of the world — half chaos, half intention, half elemental and half human — something which civilized man must battle for- ever; must be killed by or kill.”
AND this horror? This enemy? In context, Prokosch means it to be that will to destruction so remarkable in our race. But, in a larger sense, the amorphic evil which provides the tension In all his works is, finally, the fact of death itself, the grim reward of many journeys, the cold truth beyond Mukalla. His voyagers combat their enemy with the only weapon they possess they live and, living, like Kafka's creatures, they attempt the castle because they must. Prokosch's gifts, specifically, are lyric not psychological-un- usual equipment for a twentieth century novelist. In the one book where he tried for a novel of relationship. "The Idols of the Cave," he failed because he could not manage the psychological counterpoint which has been the main concern of the post-Jamesian novel. Yet, at his best, as in this work, he writes a rich evocative line with which he creates sensuous worlds he has never seen except with the eye of a superlative imagination. Here, once again, he renders that vision which is obsessively his own: the traveler in strange country, the sun- burned Ulysses of his poems, the alien who moves across time, anticipating with a melancholy fascination his last arrival, a private death in some ironically gleaming land.