James Purdy, who has died aged 94, wrote outlandish, idiosyncratic novels that did not sell in large quantities but survive, sometimes in print, while many workaday bestsellers are vague memories.
Purdy was vexed by his early struggles, and, although a spry figure on his walks through Brooklyn, maintained a privacy tantamount to anonymity.
Only recently, after six decades’ work, did he lift the curtain on a life whose mid-west beginnings fostered a baroque view of America that bracketed him with southern gothic — where domineering women and immolations are among life’s obstacles.
Purdy was born near Fremont, Ohio, one of five sons of parents of Huguenot and Scots-Presbyterian ancestry. Within a few years his businessman father had departed.
The residual family travelled the state, sometimes staying on the grandparents’ farm. Hard times were worsened by Purdy’s failing to shine at numerous schools, but one teacher did encourage his writing. In 1932 he finally left Findlay high school.
Homosexual yearnings
Much of his feeling for language sprang from the verbal flourishes of characters he discovered by reading the Old Testament during his school days — whose style was not so far from those of the rooming-house denizens of his novels.
Chicago University studies of English literature were interrupted by army service, which he mentioned only later in life: it was pervaded by often unrequited homosexual yearnings. In 1946 he returned to take a Masters at Chicago, and published stories in such magazines as Evergreen.
Teaching funded travels in Latin America, Spain and France; he added Spanish to his many languages (he regularly read Latin and Greek), and was soon steeped in its literature, with a relish for Don Quixote.
On returning to America in 1948, he taught at Lawrence College, Wisconsin, while struggling to find a publisher — ”such a traumatic shock that I can never forgive anybody who put me through it”.
Help came from Osborn Andreas, a businessman with a penchant for Henry James. Andreas produced a private edition of the novella 63: Dream Palace (1956).
Among writers to whom Purdy sent copies was Dame Edith Sitwell. With her bizarre take on life, she was enraptured by it. ”I have read it twice, already. What a wonderful book! It is a masterpiece from every point of view. There can’t be the slightest doubt that you are a really great writer, and I can only say that I am quite overcome. What anguish, what heartbreaking truth! And what utter simplicity. The knife is turned and turned in one’s heart … You are truly a writer of genius.”
Such enthusiasm brought a British publisher in 1957, acclaim and modest sales. Determined to live by his writing, he gave up teaching; bolstered by grants and friends’ support, he worked hard in a small Brooklyn apartment.
The novella heralded his displaced world. Two teenage orphaned boys, Fenton and the dying Claire Riddleway, are very close in a room of their own in Chicago; in becoming the plaything of various roués, Fenton becomes impelled to kill his brother — an act of mercy.
The melodrama is eased by the observation about one couple: ”He was himself every minute, taking more and more away from what was herewith each new sorrow he brought home to her. He became more and more incurable and it was the incurable quality which made him essential to her.”
The novel Malcolm (1959) has a similar spirit. In seeking a vanished father, that 15-year-old is also at the mercy of unhappily married couples with whom he is put in touch by the mephistophelean Mr Cox, who encounters him outside a hotel. As the critic David Daiches said: ”The opening sentence won me over at once. It has the beautifully matter-of-fact clarity of a fairytale (complete with reference to gold), the stark realism of the documentary, and the provocative deadpan of the satire.”
Desperate Housewives
All this anticipates David Lynch or Desperate Housewives. In The Nephew (1961), Cliff’s end in Korea is felt keenly by his small-town spinster aunt and her elderly brother. More realistic, it includes such people as one who ”had lost her left foot in an accident so gruesome nobody had ever repeated the exact details, and she had worn an artificial limb ever since. The accident, so the story went, had changed Mrs Barrington from a spoiled young newly wed into a resourceful and energetic woman of weight and responsibility in the community.”
With Cabot Wright Begins (1965), Purdy worked on a larger, wilder scale. It tells of Bernie Gladhart, sent to Brooklyn by his maneater wife, who detects a bestseller, Indelible Smudge, in the story of Wright, a Wall Street worker and a rapist so successful that 300 fall victim before his capture. This being Purdy, it is no mere chronicle.
Outlandish women surface, and Purdy’s own pent-up frustration at the Manhattan publishing scene brings crude mangling of famous names; more pertinent are such observations as ”like so many men whose main interest in life is making a fortune and then doubling it, he had a more than routine interest in the civil war”.
With Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1968), another rooming-house in depression-era Chicago brings a marvellous game of emotional chairs.
Eustace’s wife moves back in while he takes up with a man, who then goes into the orbit of another one, Daniel Hews, who, when joining the army, is crucified (something similar informs Narrow Rooms, 1976).
Among those left behind is a woman whose abortion of his child is all the more graphic for its elegance (including the explanation that ”amniotic” sac derives from Greek for ”little lamb”).
With Jeremy’s Version (1970), Purdy began a series — Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys — of separate, linked novels inspired by his grandmother’s tales.
This one tells of 1920s events related by an old friend of a family whose troubles were made worse by the discovery of a teenage son’s journal: ”His thoughts became so terrible that they filled even him with consternation.”
There followed The House of the Solitary Maggot (1974) and On Glory’s Course (1984).
Mourners Below — something of a ghost story — prompted Gore Vidal to call him ”an authentic American genius”.
For Vidal, himself given to the fantastic, these novels contained ”lost or losing golden ephebes [youths]”.
Such works as Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1997) continued to do so. Anybody who acquires a taste for Purdy will read them all, and seek out his plays; by their very nature his books cannot be wolfed down in swift succession, which makes them a particular, enduring taste. He eventually realised that. —