Narrative Without Meaning, And the History of a Crime

The jacket blurbs of Frederic Prokosch's latest book proudly advertise the conversion of "one of our finest descriptive writers" into a man who for the first time makes his background subordinate to his action, wastes no time on externals, and turns out a story with a good, vigorous plot. There is no doubt that plot is a fine thing, but in A Tale for Midnight, the author has used it only as a device for holding strings of words together. He was probably more honest when, in earlier works like The Asiatics he made no excuse for his writing save a desire to describe.

Prokosch's style has lost none of its meticulous, almost antiseptic clarity in this story of renaissance Italy, but neither does it seem to have progressed. He has plucked from the history of the world a rather unsavory incident of parricide, researched it thoroughly, and reported it with exactness. The names of the past receive flesh and clothing, and the words they spoke or probably spoke are worked into vernacular and decorated with quotation marks. Aside from this, the author does little more than fill out the recorded incidents with stage direction and plausible detail, and fill in between them with little scenes of his own devising--none of which display any abnormal fertility of imaganation. His language is so lucid that it never obscures any part of the chronicle, but so restrained that he seems to be denying himself a last avenue of self expression in playing with this story, whose outcome is decided from the start by history.

This end, like all of the tale, is grim. There is almost no change of tone and no relief in the story, and in this certainly lies much of its oppressiveness. "Our tale begins in darkness and ends in darkness," Prokosch begins, and he pursues the sordid, the unhealthy, and the cruel throughout the book with what appears to be a devotion to some mistaken ideal of honesty. The only other explanation of his over-frequent descriptions of torture and disease would be an intent to please or attract readers through their sheer sadism.

The last, and perhaps the richest opportunity offered by the retelling of history is that of exploring and trying to uncover the characters of persons whose names have been only that. Here too, Prokosch has fallen far short of what might have been done. We see his figures and hear them, but on the few occasions we are allowed into any of their minds it is only to see briefly what runs on the surface of their thought.

A Tale for Midnight recounts the history of a crime, and does it well. Beyond this it can claim little distinction. Frederic Prokosch is a good craftsman with words in their immediacy, but only that. His book as a whole lacks vitality and meaning.