James Purdy
Encyclopedia
James Otis Purdy was a controversial American novelist, short story-writer, poet, and playwright who, since his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee
, James M. Cain
, Lillian Hellman
, Francis King
, Marianne Moore
, Dorothy Parker
, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern
, Gore Vidal
(who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius") A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles
and Paul Bowles
. Purdy has been the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowship
s (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation
(1961), and Rockefeller Foundation
. He worked as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency
.
in 1914. His family moved to Findlay, Ohio
when he was about five years old, where he graduated from Findlay High School in 1932. Purdy’s parents went through a separation and then a bitter divorce in 1930 after his father lost large sums of money in investments gone bad. His mother then converted their home in Findlay to a boardinghouse.
Purdy earned a BA teaching degree in French from Bowling Green State College in 1935 and then studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in English in 1937. After serving in the U.S. Army, Purdy studied Spanish at the University of Chicago (1944–45). He spent the summer of 1945 at the University of Puebla, Mexico, and taught English at the Ruston Academy in Havana, Cuba, in 1945–46. For the next nine and a half years, he taught Spanish at Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin. In the mid 1950's, with encouragement and support from Miriam and Osborn Andreas and the Andreas Foundation (Archer Daniels Midland), Purdy returned to Chicago to pursue writing.
, dubbed “queen of the bohemian artists." His enormous body of work includes many works inspired by his close relationship to Gertrude and her underground salon (which had its roots in the salon of Gertrude Stein.) This American incarnation of the creative salon centerpieced those who were to become the jazz greats Percy Heath
, Sonny Rollins
, Erroll Garner
, Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker
, Max Roach
, and Sarah Vaughan
. This attendance at the all-night, weekend gatherings where bebop and jazz were improvised by these greats (many times with Gertrude at the piano) combined with Purdy’s intensive study as a young boy of the King James Version of the Old Testament
and Shakespeare, made James Purdy the writer he became. At some points Purdy was living in Gertrude’s “ruined” mansion, with members of The Modern Jazz Quartet. The climax in consciousness or event of final realization inside some of the novels stems significantly from Gertrude Abercrombie and the association with these great jazz musicians, and the music and lives they were able to create from their own humble origins. They enabled Purdy to begin to create a voice in literature using his small-town America speech patterns and his worlds of poverty and neglect. His associations with the jazz greats and most especially his meeting with Billie Holiday
, he felt had given him what he needed to turn him from an upstart and lost boy, prone to running wild, to settling down and becoming the world-renowned writer and artist he later became. The association with the painters in Abercrombie's circle of magic realists, Karl Priebe
, John Wilde
, and Dudley Huppler helped strengthen the imagery he used to develop his own literary version of magic realism.
Gertrude also introduced the young student to others in her circle, to Miriam Bomberger Andreas and to the industrialist and literary essayist, Osborn Andreas, both of whom would become extremely significant in Purdy's life and work. His first book, Don't Call Me By My Right Name And Other Stories, was privately published by Osborn with the Andreas Foundation. The title story is based on Andreas' wife, Miriam. His first five books with the exception of The Nephew were inspired by his association to Miriam and Osborn Andreas. His first novel which set forth his own developing style of American magic realism, was praised lavishly by Dorothy Parker
and others of great literary merit. It was for decades a staple of the undergraduate American Literature curriculum of many American colleges and universities.
If Gertrude and the Andreas' inspired James Purdy to become a writer then Dame Edith Sitwell made him a known one. When she received the privately-printed edition, which Purdy had on a hunch sent to her, of Don’t Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories she was convinced she had discovered a great black writer from the story Eventide, which she felt only a black man could write. After requesting more of his work, Purdy sent her his newly published private edition of 63: Dream Palace. Both books were designed by Purdy with his own unique drawings. Upon the additional basis of this new work she had become convinced he was “a writer of genius” and she obtained a serious commercial publisher for his work in England. She would later write the prefaces for the publication of both these works. Her reviews, pronouncements, and assessments of his further works helped him create a coterie of supporters (notably Angus Wilson and Dorothy Parker) both in England and America. Purdy felt he would never have been a known writer without her. “My stories were always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines and they earned if possible even more hostile comments from the little magazines. All editors were insistent that I would never be a published writer.”
From the onset, with his book of short stories, Color of Darkness and through to his final book of short stories, Moe’s Villa and Other Short Stories, Purdy has written the outsider. Much of his early work takes place in extreme poverty, and is located in a small-town, heightened American vernacular. In the beginning of her assessment of him, Dame Edith Sitwell felt he was always writing the black experience without necessarily mentioning race. Purdy’s association with the American black experience is paramount to understanding him as an artist. In addition to his beginnings with Gertrude Abercrombie
, Carl Van Vechten
took him up when he arrived in New York and introduced him to his own important New York circle of black artists, boxers and activists. Langston Hughes
praised Purdy as “the last of the [n-word] writers” for his use of the vernacular. He was seen as a master of different kinds of American vernacular as well.
Purdy was a classicist who could even read some ancient Greek. He maintained an extensive classical library in history, poetry, and drama from the ancient Romans and Greeks. In all his work he instinctively and perhaps unconsciously connects to a tight form of classical structure which is perceived only by those who have become familiar with it. His novel In a Shallow Grave has overt classical references running throughout, as do many others. The main character in his final novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue even considers in her memoir that her entire story has been Demeter descending into Hades in search of her daughter Persophone. His besieged novels which beleaguered his reputation, both Eustace Chisholm & the Works and Narrow Rooms, had outraged the critics. They were merely restating in a modern context the psychology of Dionysis set forth in the accepted
and acceptable play the Bacchae by Euripedes. The outer texture of his work is realistic while in the deeper and more elusive inside he is trailing a mythic almost archetypal flow. It is ancient and begins its worded historical roots in the classics and in the Old Testament. Thus his work can be very American but it is always also universal.
In his compressed dialogue structure too, he was ahead of his time. And much-later writers like David Mamet
, Harold Pinter
, and Samuel Becket (also an admirer) paved the way to the acceptance of works in this "distilled" style which has now become the sine qua non of the modern audience with its very different attention span. His early stories from the 1940s and '30s were, because of their brevity, not even considered short stories at all at the time. They were vehemently rejected time after time by the mainstream magazines causing him almost to give up the notion of ever becoming a writer. Now this brevity of conveying a fullness and richness of experience in what Dame Edith Sitwell called a "marrow of form" has almost become a necessary standard. Both his “distilled” style and his reliance on dialogue to tell his story eluded the normal contemporary reader of his early days. There was an ingrained custom towards a much longer, more expository experience. His roots were in drama. It is a little-known fact that Purdy sstarted writing plays as a child, crafting them to win his elder brother's approval. Purdy would act all the characters in the plays, and play them out using stick-figures, which is consistent with the early origins of Federico Garcia Lorca.
His culturally-counterpointed use of in medias res (beginning his narratives in the middle of things) is extensive. He begins where most writers leave off. This is all part of the "magnificent simplicity" which is woven into all his work. His work, totally against the grain in its day, is accepted without question by the attention span of today.
Gore Vidal indicates further obstacles to his more widespread recognition in that it was impossible to reconcile his work that was labeled and published as “gay” to some of his other works and especially to the Faulkneresque novels based on his ancestors. Even today, as Vidal asserts, it is a problem that needs a solution. Dame Edith Sitwell had recognized this when she stated that Purdy ”has enormous variety".
could not bring himself to print the word "motherfucker" in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace. In 1972, the supposedly liberal New York literary establishment, was outraged by his I am Elijah Thrush. And as late as May 1990, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but the court, hostile to the accuser's position, belligerently decided it was a “work of the literary imagination which had no business in the courts.” Although many readers were scandalized, a solid cadre of distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys
, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dorothy Parker
, and Susan Sontag
, who warmly defended him against puritanical critics. Tennessee Williams
was also an early admirer of Purdy's work.
In January 1966 a famous incendiary manifesto by Stanley Kauffmann
set forth a bluntly damning and prejudicial way of criticizing works by homosexual writers. The article stirred the arts community. This finger in the wind of the so-called liberal critical establishment actually reflected the deep nature of an institutionalized prejudice throughout the media.
All of Purdy's work after Eustace Chisholm would subsequently be met with both great praise on the one side, and stern, vehement condemnation and misunderstanding on the other. In 1967 a year after the publication of the treatise to limit homosexual artists—his shocking, ground-breaking and memorable Eustace Chisholm and the Works -- his “undisguised” bisexual work—was put forth. The novel is dedicated to Edward Albee. The book was a groundbreaking sensation. Purdy recalled in 1993 that he was "burned at the stake" in the New York Times review of Eustace Chisholm.
Critically it was thrown to an interpretation of and by this new Kauffmann assessment (quoted as the source in the review) and was vehemently condemned on all grounds including moral ones. The “noble” hatchet type review followed exactly the policy which had been set forth two years earlier: The attack surrounding the book chilled Purdy’s growing popularity though the book sold more copies than any of his other works.
Enmeshed in this critical outcome and resultant effect on Purdy of the publication of both Cabot Wright Begins and the ensuing novel Eustace Chisholm & the Works was the fact that by the time of publication of these novels all his immediate family, his friends and his supporters had died. This included Dame Edith Sitwell and Carl Van Vechten, his brother who had been a noteworthy actor in New York and very important to his development in literature, Dorothy Parker and John Cowper Powys as well. Thus eliminating all the probable defenders of both him as a writer and the two novels themselves. Osborn Andreas his patron had also died. All these deaths occurred within a two-year period between 1965 and 1967 devastating Purdy's basis of support financially, critically and personally.
"I soon realized that if my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles, it was to be in the future a kind of endless open warfare," James Purdy wrote in an autobiographical sketch in 1984.
At a loss to know how to proceed and with his career seemingly shattered, his circle of literary supporters dead, James Purdy began looking or rather staring at pictures of his long dead relatives for a kind of solace and validation. He began to remember ever more vividly the stories his Indian grandmother told him when he was a child. About eminent people, mostly women, and most often on the outside of a hidebound code of acceptance in the long ago towns of the hill country of Ohio.
In 1968 he began a series of independent but interconnected books (and plays) about the very real, regal and exciting personages his grandmother had bestowed upon, the Sleepers In Moon Crowned Valleys. In his hands they were to become the voices and journeys of an almost mythic people of a uniquely different and undiscovered America. He would follow them in their navigation through life and circumstance. The narratives were something that could be found perhaps in the archives of a historical society in the towns set into the farm country and rolling hills of the Midwest. Through these memories there began to flow also the remembrance of the country vernacular and way of speaking of his great grand parents. He began to create in association with these compelling individuals and their stories a voice that Paul Bowles would call “the closest thing we have to a classical American colloquial.”
Regarding Sleepers in Moon Crowned Valleys Gore Vidal stated in his New York Times essay , “Each novel stands entire by itself while the whole awaits archeology and constitution of a work that is already like no other.”
As part of the series in 1974 he published The House of the Solitary Maggot, which is often regarded as his most ambitious work. It was largely ignored.
In 2005 the novel that had been the impetus to hold Purdy’s reputation at bay for decades, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, received the Clifton Fadiman Award at the prestigious Mercantile Library
. It was presented to Purdy with a stunning assessment of the novel by Jonathan Franzen
. Thus opening the door to a different kind of future assessment for his entire body of work.
Interesting to note his more controversial works had been seen as religious and spiritual allegories and praised many times by the religious right, while they were at the same time being annihilated by the ‘liberal’ critical establishment.
Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as a recent appreciation by Gore Vidal
in The New York Times
Book Review, Purdy's work again enjoyed a brief small renaissance in the first decade of the 2000s. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, "there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork."
Shortly after his death in 2009 a book of plays, Selected Plays of James Purdy including Brice, Ruthanna Elder, Where Quentin Goes and The Paradise Circus, was published by Ivan R. Dee. It focuses on Purdy's playwriting as being his first form of writing since childhood, when he wrote plays for his brother, an actor, to perform. John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: "James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart."
He continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to "banish shame".
He had maintained throughout his career that he was being assessed in terms of the nature of his subject material and not in terms of the value of its content.
Purdy wrote anonymous letters from the age of nine. His first was written to his mother's landlady who, in young Purdy's view, was grasping. Countless thousands have been written since, many now owned by persons who have no idea of their provenance or value, although the style is inimitable. One of his very latest, written when he was 92, to a redactor who had displeased him by moving from New York to Montana, can be seen at http://hermeseta.com/purdyanon.html. This features some of Purdy's drawings, which have attracted some attention.
Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009.
The American composer Robert Helps
(1928–2001), a close friend of Purdy's, used Purdy's texts in two of his works, The Running Sun and Gossamer Noons, both of which have been recorded by the soprano Bethany Beardslee
.
The American song composer, Richard Hundley
, composed many beautiful songs to poems of James Purdy, his friend as well of several decades in New York. Some of his more magnificent works set to Purdy’s poetry like Come Ready and See Me, have been praised as true classics in the medium of the American song.
For nearly 50 years he lived and wrote in a small apartment in a Brooklyn Heights landmarked building surrounded by dozens of framed boxing prints from the turn of the 20th century. The bare-knuckled champs in the makeshift outside rings of their day.
In an autobiographical sketch in 1984, James Purdy stated, "My work has been compared to an underground river which is flowing often undetected through the American landscape."
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
, James M. Cain
James M. Cain
James Mallahan Cain was an American author and journalist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the roman noir...
, Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lily" Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...
, Francis King
Francis King
Francis Henry King, CBE was a British novelist, poet and short story writer.He was born in Adelboden, Switzerland, brought up in India and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and left Oxford to work on the land...
, Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
, Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles....
, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern
Terry Southern
Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...
, Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
(who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius") A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles
Jane Bowles
Jane Bowles, born Jane Sydney Auer , was an American writer and playwright.-Early life:Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland...
and Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
. Purdy has been the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
s (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....
(1961), and Rockefeller Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
. He worked as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency
United States Information Agency
The United States Information Agency , which existed from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to "public diplomacy". In 1999, USIA's broadcasting functions were moved to the newly created Broadcasting Board of Governors, and its exchange and non-broadcasting information functions were...
.
Early life
Purdy was born in Hicksville, OhioHicksville, Ohio
Hicksville is a village in Defiance County, Ohio, United States. The population was 3,649 at the 2000 census.-History:Hicksville was founded by a group of land speculators. Led by Henry W. Hicks, the Hicks Land Company platted the community in 1835 and 1836...
in 1914. His family moved to Findlay, Ohio
Findlay, Ohio
As of the census of 2000, there were 38,967 people, 15,905 households, and 10,004 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,266.3 people per square mile . There were 17,152 housing units at an average density of 997.6 per square mile...
when he was about five years old, where he graduated from Findlay High School in 1932. Purdy’s parents went through a separation and then a bitter divorce in 1930 after his father lost large sums of money in investments gone bad. His mother then converted their home in Findlay to a boardinghouse.
Purdy earned a BA teaching degree in French from Bowling Green State College in 1935 and then studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in English in 1937. After serving in the U.S. Army, Purdy studied Spanish at the University of Chicago (1944–45). He spent the summer of 1945 at the University of Puebla, Mexico, and taught English at the Ruston Academy in Havana, Cuba, in 1945–46. For the next nine and a half years, he taught Spanish at Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin. In the mid 1950's, with encouragement and support from Miriam and Osborn Andreas and the Andreas Foundation (Archer Daniels Midland), Purdy returned to Chicago to pursue writing.
Artistic scenes and influences
Soon after his arrival at the University of Chicago in 1935 James Purdy had met the Chicago painter, Gertrude AbercrombieGertrude Abercrombie
Gertrude Abercrombie was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists," Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work.-Personal...
, dubbed “queen of the bohemian artists." His enormous body of work includes many works inspired by his close relationship to Gertrude and her underground salon (which had its roots in the salon of Gertrude Stein.) This American incarnation of the creative salon centerpieced those who were to become the jazz greats Percy Heath
Percy Heath
Percy Heath was an American jazz bassist, brother to tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath and drummer Albert Heath, with whom he formed the Heath Brothers in 1975...
, Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins is a Grammy-winning American jazz tenor saxophonist. Rollins is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. A number of his compositions, including "St...
, Erroll Garner
Erroll Garner
Erroll Louis Garner was an American jazz pianist and composer known for his swing playing and ballads. His best-known composition, the ballad "Misty", has become a jazz standard...
, Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker
Charles Parker, Jr. , famously called Bird or Yardbird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer....
, Max Roach
Max Roach
Maxwell Lemuel "Max" Roach was an American jazz percussionist, drummer, and composer.A pioneer of bebop, Roach went on to work in many other styles of music, and is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history...
, and Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Lois Vaughan was an American jazz singer, described by Scott Yanow as having "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century."...
. This attendance at the all-night, weekend gatherings where bebop and jazz were improvised by these greats (many times with Gertrude at the piano) combined with Purdy’s intensive study as a young boy of the King James Version of the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
and Shakespeare, made James Purdy the writer he became. At some points Purdy was living in Gertrude’s “ruined” mansion, with members of The Modern Jazz Quartet. The climax in consciousness or event of final realization inside some of the novels stems significantly from Gertrude Abercrombie and the association with these great jazz musicians, and the music and lives they were able to create from their own humble origins. They enabled Purdy to begin to create a voice in literature using his small-town America speech patterns and his worlds of poverty and neglect. His associations with the jazz greats and most especially his meeting with Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing...
, he felt had given him what he needed to turn him from an upstart and lost boy, prone to running wild, to settling down and becoming the world-renowned writer and artist he later became. The association with the painters in Abercrombie's circle of magic realists, Karl Priebe
Karl Priebe
Karl J. Priebe was an American painter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin whose studies and paintings of birds, exotic animals, and African-American culture won him international recognition.- Biography :...
, John Wilde
John Wilde
John Wilde was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker of fantastic imagery. Born near Milwaukee, Wilde lived most of his life in Wisconsin, save for service in the U.S. Army during World War II. He received bachelor and master degrees in art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught...
, and Dudley Huppler helped strengthen the imagery he used to develop his own literary version of magic realism.
Gertrude also introduced the young student to others in her circle, to Miriam Bomberger Andreas and to the industrialist and literary essayist, Osborn Andreas, both of whom would become extremely significant in Purdy's life and work. His first book, Don't Call Me By My Right Name And Other Stories, was privately published by Osborn with the Andreas Foundation. The title story is based on Andreas' wife, Miriam. His first five books with the exception of The Nephew were inspired by his association to Miriam and Osborn Andreas. His first novel which set forth his own developing style of American magic realism, was praised lavishly by Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles....
and others of great literary merit. It was for decades a staple of the undergraduate American Literature curriculum of many American colleges and universities.
If Gertrude and the Andreas' inspired James Purdy to become a writer then Dame Edith Sitwell made him a known one. When she received the privately-printed edition, which Purdy had on a hunch sent to her, of Don’t Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories she was convinced she had discovered a great black writer from the story Eventide, which she felt only a black man could write. After requesting more of his work, Purdy sent her his newly published private edition of 63: Dream Palace. Both books were designed by Purdy with his own unique drawings. Upon the additional basis of this new work she had become convinced he was “a writer of genius” and she obtained a serious commercial publisher for his work in England. She would later write the prefaces for the publication of both these works. Her reviews, pronouncements, and assessments of his further works helped him create a coterie of supporters (notably Angus Wilson and Dorothy Parker) both in England and America. Purdy felt he would never have been a known writer without her. “My stories were always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines and they earned if possible even more hostile comments from the little magazines. All editors were insistent that I would never be a published writer.”
Literary criticism with views on obstacles to wider acceptance
Through all his work, he has dealt primarily with outsiders. Women, blacks, Native American Indians (he was 1/8 Ojibway American Indian), homosexuals (living far outside the conventional gay community) -- literally anyone who could be seen to be outside the circle of “normal” acceptability. Indeed, his final short story, Adeline, written at 92, surprisingly and unpredictably, is a tale of transgendered acceptance.From the onset, with his book of short stories, Color of Darkness and through to his final book of short stories, Moe’s Villa and Other Short Stories, Purdy has written the outsider. Much of his early work takes place in extreme poverty, and is located in a small-town, heightened American vernacular. In the beginning of her assessment of him, Dame Edith Sitwell felt he was always writing the black experience without necessarily mentioning race. Purdy’s association with the American black experience is paramount to understanding him as an artist. In addition to his beginnings with Gertrude Abercrombie
Gertrude Abercrombie
Gertrude Abercrombie was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists," Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work.-Personal...
, Carl Van Vechten
Carl van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.-Biography:...
took him up when he arrived in New York and introduced him to his own important New York circle of black artists, boxers and activists. Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
praised Purdy as “the last of the [n-word] writers” for his use of the vernacular. He was seen as a master of different kinds of American vernacular as well.
Purdy was a classicist who could even read some ancient Greek. He maintained an extensive classical library in history, poetry, and drama from the ancient Romans and Greeks. In all his work he instinctively and perhaps unconsciously connects to a tight form of classical structure which is perceived only by those who have become familiar with it. His novel In a Shallow Grave has overt classical references running throughout, as do many others. The main character in his final novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue even considers in her memoir that her entire story has been Demeter descending into Hades in search of her daughter Persophone. His besieged novels which beleaguered his reputation, both Eustace Chisholm & the Works and Narrow Rooms, had outraged the critics. They were merely restating in a modern context the psychology of Dionysis set forth in the accepted
and acceptable play the Bacchae by Euripedes. The outer texture of his work is realistic while in the deeper and more elusive inside he is trailing a mythic almost archetypal flow. It is ancient and begins its worded historical roots in the classics and in the Old Testament. Thus his work can be very American but it is always also universal.
In his compressed dialogue structure too, he was ahead of his time. And much-later writers like David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
, Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, and Samuel Becket (also an admirer) paved the way to the acceptance of works in this "distilled" style which has now become the sine qua non of the modern audience with its very different attention span. His early stories from the 1940s and '30s were, because of their brevity, not even considered short stories at all at the time. They were vehemently rejected time after time by the mainstream magazines causing him almost to give up the notion of ever becoming a writer. Now this brevity of conveying a fullness and richness of experience in what Dame Edith Sitwell called a "marrow of form" has almost become a necessary standard. Both his “distilled” style and his reliance on dialogue to tell his story eluded the normal contemporary reader of his early days. There was an ingrained custom towards a much longer, more expository experience. His roots were in drama. It is a little-known fact that Purdy sstarted writing plays as a child, crafting them to win his elder brother's approval. Purdy would act all the characters in the plays, and play them out using stick-figures, which is consistent with the early origins of Federico Garcia Lorca.
His culturally-counterpointed use of in medias res (beginning his narratives in the middle of things) is extensive. He begins where most writers leave off. This is all part of the "magnificent simplicity" which is woven into all his work. His work, totally against the grain in its day, is accepted without question by the attention span of today.
Gore Vidal indicates further obstacles to his more widespread recognition in that it was impossible to reconcile his work that was labeled and published as “gay” to some of his other works and especially to the Faulkneresque novels based on his ancestors. Even today, as Vidal asserts, it is a problem that needs a solution. Dame Edith Sitwell had recognized this when she stated that Purdy ”has enormous variety".
Cutting Edge
From the start, his work had often been at the edge of what was printable under American censorship. The major US publishing houses rejected his two early books 63: Dream Palace, and Colour of Darkness, which had to be printed privately abroad. The publishers, according to Purdy, believed that he was mentally insane. Out of the US, GollanczGollancz
Gollancz often refers to the British publishing house Victor Gollancz Ltd.Gollancz, a family name originating from the Polish town Gołańcz , is mainly known as the name of a prominent British Jewish family, including:* Sir Hermann Gollancz , rabbi* Sir Israel Gollancz , scholar of...
could not bring himself to print the word "motherfucker" in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace. In 1972, the supposedly liberal New York literary establishment, was outraged by his I am Elijah Thrush. And as late as May 1990, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but the court, hostile to the accuser's position, belligerently decided it was a “work of the literary imagination which had no business in the courts.” Although many readers were scandalized, a solid cadre of distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys
John Cowper Powys
-Biography:Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys , who was vicar of Montacute, Somerset for thirty-two years, and Mary Cowper Johnson, a descendent of the poet William Cowper. He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also...
, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles....
, and Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
, who warmly defended him against puritanical critics. Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
was also an early admirer of Purdy's work.
In January 1966 a famous incendiary manifesto by Stanley Kauffmann
Stanley Kauffmann
Stanley Kauffmann is an American author, editor, and critic of film and theatre. He has written for The New Republic since 1958 and currently contributes film criticism to that magazine....
set forth a bluntly damning and prejudicial way of criticizing works by homosexual writers. The article stirred the arts community. This finger in the wind of the so-called liberal critical establishment actually reflected the deep nature of an institutionalized prejudice throughout the media.
Cabot Wright Begins and Eustace Chisholm & the Works
Soon afterwards, Purdy set out to write a novel of what he experienced in Gertrude's Chicago scene of the 1930s. This time it was to reflect his fitfully terminated friendship with Wendell Wilcox, a writer of minor achievement in their circle. It would also include a scathing portrait of the department store heir Norman Macleish of the noted Chicago family.All of Purdy's work after Eustace Chisholm would subsequently be met with both great praise on the one side, and stern, vehement condemnation and misunderstanding on the other. In 1967 a year after the publication of the treatise to limit homosexual artists—his shocking, ground-breaking and memorable Eustace Chisholm and the Works -- his “undisguised” bisexual work—was put forth. The novel is dedicated to Edward Albee. The book was a groundbreaking sensation. Purdy recalled in 1993 that he was "burned at the stake" in the New York Times review of Eustace Chisholm.
Critically it was thrown to an interpretation of and by this new Kauffmann assessment (quoted as the source in the review) and was vehemently condemned on all grounds including moral ones. The “noble” hatchet type review followed exactly the policy which had been set forth two years earlier: The attack surrounding the book chilled Purdy’s growing popularity though the book sold more copies than any of his other works.
Enmeshed in this critical outcome and resultant effect on Purdy of the publication of both Cabot Wright Begins and the ensuing novel Eustace Chisholm & the Works was the fact that by the time of publication of these novels all his immediate family, his friends and his supporters had died. This included Dame Edith Sitwell and Carl Van Vechten, his brother who had been a noteworthy actor in New York and very important to his development in literature, Dorothy Parker and John Cowper Powys as well. Thus eliminating all the probable defenders of both him as a writer and the two novels themselves. Osborn Andreas his patron had also died. All these deaths occurred within a two-year period between 1965 and 1967 devastating Purdy's basis of support financially, critically and personally.
"I soon realized that if my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles, it was to be in the future a kind of endless open warfare," James Purdy wrote in an autobiographical sketch in 1984.
At a loss to know how to proceed and with his career seemingly shattered, his circle of literary supporters dead, James Purdy began looking or rather staring at pictures of his long dead relatives for a kind of solace and validation. He began to remember ever more vividly the stories his Indian grandmother told him when he was a child. About eminent people, mostly women, and most often on the outside of a hidebound code of acceptance in the long ago towns of the hill country of Ohio.
In 1968 he began a series of independent but interconnected books (and plays) about the very real, regal and exciting personages his grandmother had bestowed upon, the Sleepers In Moon Crowned Valleys. In his hands they were to become the voices and journeys of an almost mythic people of a uniquely different and undiscovered America. He would follow them in their navigation through life and circumstance. The narratives were something that could be found perhaps in the archives of a historical society in the towns set into the farm country and rolling hills of the Midwest. Through these memories there began to flow also the remembrance of the country vernacular and way of speaking of his great grand parents. He began to create in association with these compelling individuals and their stories a voice that Paul Bowles would call “the closest thing we have to a classical American colloquial.”
Regarding Sleepers in Moon Crowned Valleys Gore Vidal stated in his New York Times essay , “Each novel stands entire by itself while the whole awaits archeology and constitution of a work that is already like no other.”
As part of the series in 1974 he published The House of the Solitary Maggot, which is often regarded as his most ambitious work. It was largely ignored.
Breakthrough
The aforementioned damning assessment, or slant, ended seemingly just as abruptly as it began, with the 1997 publication of his final novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. His body of work was cleared of its long-standing, erroneous stigmas, with a NY Times review assessing him in summation as a “singular American visionary.” On the last reprints of several of his books a further essay by Gore Vidal in the NY Times admiringly entitled “The Novelist As Outlaw” framed him as “an authentic American genius.”In 2005 the novel that had been the impetus to hold Purdy’s reputation at bay for decades, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, received the Clifton Fadiman Award at the prestigious Mercantile Library
Mercantile Library
Mercantile Library may refer to any of several United States libraries:* The Center for Fiction, originally the New York Mercantile Library, 1820 New York City, New York * Mercantile Library Association , est. 1820...
. It was presented to Purdy with a stunning assessment of the novel by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections , a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
. Thus opening the door to a different kind of future assessment for his entire body of work.
Interesting to note his more controversial works had been seen as religious and spiritual allegories and praised many times by the religious right, while they were at the same time being annihilated by the ‘liberal’ critical establishment.
Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as a recent appreciation by Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Book Review, Purdy's work again enjoyed a brief small renaissance in the first decade of the 2000s. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, "there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork."
Shortly after his death in 2009 a book of plays, Selected Plays of James Purdy including Brice, Ruthanna Elder, Where Quentin Goes and The Paradise Circus, was published by Ivan R. Dee. It focuses on Purdy's playwriting as being his first form of writing since childhood, when he wrote plays for his brother, an actor, to perform. John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: "James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart."
He continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to "banish shame".
He had maintained throughout his career that he was being assessed in terms of the nature of his subject material and not in terms of the value of its content.
Purdy wrote anonymous letters from the age of nine. His first was written to his mother's landlady who, in young Purdy's view, was grasping. Countless thousands have been written since, many now owned by persons who have no idea of their provenance or value, although the style is inimitable. One of his very latest, written when he was 92, to a redactor who had displeased him by moving from New York to Montana, can be seen at http://hermeseta.com/purdyanon.html. This features some of Purdy's drawings, which have attracted some attention.
Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009.
The American composer Robert Helps
Robert Helps
Robert Helps was an American pianist and composer....
(1928–2001), a close friend of Purdy's, used Purdy's texts in two of his works, The Running Sun and Gossamer Noons, both of which have been recorded by the soprano Bethany Beardslee
Bethany Beardslee
Bethany Beardslee is an American soprano particularly noted for her performances of contemporary classical music....
.
The American song composer, Richard Hundley
Richard Hundley
Richard Albert Hundley is an American pianist and composer of American art songs for voice and piano. -Early life:Hundley was born in Cincinnati, Ohio....
, composed many beautiful songs to poems of James Purdy, his friend as well of several decades in New York. Some of his more magnificent works set to Purdy’s poetry like Come Ready and See Me, have been praised as true classics in the medium of the American song.
For nearly 50 years he lived and wrote in a small apartment in a Brooklyn Heights landmarked building surrounded by dozens of framed boxing prints from the turn of the 20th century. The bare-knuckled champs in the makeshift outside rings of their day.
In an autobiographical sketch in 1984, James Purdy stated, "My work has been compared to an underground river which is flowing often undetected through the American landscape."
External links
- The James Purdy Society
- A compendium of New York Times' reviews and articles on James Purdy and his work
- The Literary Encyclopedia entry on James Purdy
- Who Is James Purdy? - an appreciation from Edward Albee
- A conversation with James Purdy
- The first story from the out-of-print "Color of Darkness"
- Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, Vol. VI, No. 1. This special issue devoted to James Purdy features essays, interviews, a bibliography, and more.
- An Autobiographical Sketch by James Purdy