companion, and as it gradually grew decrepitnI listened to its tremors with andesolated tenderness, even with tears innmy eyes.” When he attempted to simplifynhis style, he was distressed to find thatn”The threat of ti^e faux naifloomcd overnthe pages like a leer.” No reviewer couldnprovide a more accurate description ofnthe tone of Voices.nThis memoir should have been entillednName-Dropping (Compare Voices:nA Life of Frank O’Connor, also 1983, bynJames Matthews for a sense of the sharpndifference.) The index, for instance, isnnot a conventional one, but an “Index ofnNames.” The names of his fether, mother,nand brother are not in the index. Modesty,nperhaps. But the name of his belovednLatin teacher, Miss Reid, and the namesnof the four professors ^dio left a deepnimpression on him are also missing, asnare the names of Miss Maddison, Mrs.nMarsh, Col. Burkhart, and others. Onlynthe names of the femous he met or refersnto are in the very revealing “Index ofnNames,” Prokosch’s personal A/manacAndeGotha Vbtos is not an autobiogr^hicalnmemoir in the usual sense; the secretnof Prokosch is not to be discovered innany direct way in this book. He mentionsnthat his life has been a desperatensearch for love, but all we leam at thenend is that his friend, Jack, “a saint,” is innEngland. “I looked for ultimate meanings”nis another false lead. If he did, the searchnis not included in this book. The organizingnprinciple of Voices is simply anrecord of the compulsion that drivesnhim to meet the great. As a child henmeets Anna Pavlova and Thomas Marm.nIn Paris it is Gertrude Stein and JamesnJoyce. During college he meets ThomasnWolfe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, RobertnFrost, and Wallace Stevens. At CambridgenUniversity it’s A. E. Houseman, Walternde la Mare, and E. M. Forstcr. Later innEurope, T. S. Eliot, Somerset Maug^iam,nVirginia Wolfe—^and so on. Curiouslynenough, he does not see himself in thencategory of the exalted. (Or does he, andnis he paying back all those who did notn^ee with him?) He poses as the meticulousnreporter of meetings, some so pre­nm ^ M H i ^ a M ^ MnChronicles of Culturensented as to seem fictionally contrived.nWhat is striking from the very beginningnis Prokosch’s fantastic memory.nThe conversations are in quotation marks;nevery word is carefully remembered.nAnd the great person always speaks as ifnhe wishes to be quoted in further smdiesnof him. The method must also puzzlenProkosch, who “explains” it at least 15ntimes. “After he left I went to my bedroomnand wrote it all down, and this was thenfirst of the dialogues that I scribbled feithfullynin my notebooks.” He developedn”an eerie knack of remembering dialogues,nimprinting them on my consciousness.”nHowever, that knack must have fellednhim because he refers later to transcribingndialogues while meeting with the speaker.nE. M. Forster to Prokosch: “Must younwrite all this down? It seems rather brutalnto write the whole thing dovm.” AndrenGide to Prokosch: “Are you writing allnAU Together NownA recent issue of The New Republicnoffers readers two articles on the AIDSnepidemic. One, written by an expert onnimmunology, matter-of-6ictIy explainsnthat “one of the main reasons it became anpublic health problem was the promiscuitynof many gay men.” According tonclinical studies of the victims, “Many hadnhundreds of sex partners a year, andnsome had had more than a thousand.” Innthe other article, a “compassionate” liberalncommentator named John McQuaidne^qiresses first his fervent hope that afternthe public becomes informed about homosexualnpractices “puritanical attitudesnmay give way to the nonchalance that hasnincreasingly characterized sexual moresnin general” and second his delight thatn”the sense of shared vulnerability in gayncommimities has brought about a realnpulling together.” Listed on TNR’s mastheadnas a reporter, Mr. McQuaid evidentlynhas no medical credentials for writing onnnntliis down? Is that an American habit?”nProkosch to Bernard Berenson: “I saidnshyly, Do you mind if I write this down,nMr. Berenson?’ ” Yet on another occasionnProkosch, less in conscious control,ntranscribes with “trancelike accuracy.”nBut at the end of Voices he OV.TIS up tonthe secret we should have guessed allnalong. “I suffer from a malady which isncalled ‘total recall.’ I remember every visualnand olfectory detail of an encounter,nand the vocal intonations still keep ringingnin my ears. But even worse, I hear silences,nthe inaudible reverberations.”nAnd there, as Henry James would say,nyou have it.nLIBERAL CULTURE HnI had several different motives fornwriting down these littie dialogues:nfirst, to develop a certain skill in capturingnnuances of a conversation;nsecond, to preserve a memento ofnwhat the great men had said; and third,nto perform a kind of ritual, to tucknthe disease, which may esqilain v^ hisnpatholc^ is backwards: obviously sharednvulnerability is the gay community’s legacynbecause they were already pullingntogether—800, 900, or 1,000 times anyear. Dn