Jonathan Bayliss published Prologos in 1999, after Gloucesterbook and Gloucestertide had both been released. However, there are many indications that this colossal work was decades in the making. Charles Olson evidently read an edition, proclaiming in a 1964 interview that with it Bayliss had "reinvented the English language novel." In Charles Olson in Gloucester, Peter Anastas recalls that Bayliss gave a reading from Prologos in Magnolia in 1962 as a substitute for William Everson, better known as Brother Antoninus. Olson himself mentions this occasion in a speech he gave at Goddard College on April 14, 1962, though he remembers the absent poet being Robert Duncan:
I'm thinking of a man who read in Gloucester the other night, he's been a friend of ours for years and he's a statistical analyst for Gorton-Pew Fisheries, and they had - well, I thought Duncan was going to be in and well, I set up a reading for Duncan and he never showed up and I never heard from him, so I was going to go in and read for him, and [Robert] Creeley and the other people in town thought it'd be better if they asked three other writers, and they did, and this guy read this thing called Prologos. It's the chapter, opening chapter to his novel, and this man believes in Conrad. I mean, he has that feeling for Conrad, and I suspect Conrad is really his master. And this piece of the novel I'm really going to try to get published, it's so, it's so crazy good...
Selections appeared in the Gloucester literary periodical BEZOAR in many of its editions published during the late 1970's.
Obviously Prologos belongs to the Gloucesterman tetralogy. The novel shares major characters with Gloucesterbook and Gloucestertide. It contains the most straightforward explications of Bayliss's concepts of dromenology and the Synectic Method of Diagnostic Correlation, which are repeatedly mentioned but never fully described in Bayliss's other novels.
However, there are valid reasons that Bayliss himself distinguishes the Gloucester works from Prologos, which he claims "created" the trilogy of Gloucesterbook, Gloucestertide, and the projected Gloucestermas. Prologos doesn't refer to people and places using their Gloucesterman identities. The novel uses strange textual tricks (such as parallel texts, copious headnotes and footnotes) and offers alternate chapter-orders for less comprehensive exposure to the demanding system.
A synopsis of the mind-boggling novel is sure to seem inadequate, so an outline of its structure will have to suffice. The action takes place during the 1950's in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Michael Chapman is at once a family man, professional man, and intellectual, and his "trigeometry" is explored on a Palm Sunday during which he takes his wife and three sons from their home in Oakland to San Francisco Zoo and back. Along the way Chapman develops some of Bayliss's most familar themes: the illusion of community; the degradation of culture through economic necessity; and the methods and routes through which civilization freights life, meaning, information, and responsibility.
The book is dedicated "For Geoffrey, Victoria, and Catherine," Bayliss's three children.
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