GLR January-February 2023

Purdy Has Been Neglected; Now What?

I T SEEMS to be the fate of any article discussing James Purdy to lament the lack of popular appreciation of his many novels, despite the fact that he was championed by such literary lights as Edith Sitwell, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal. The latter commented on this in the obituary he wrote for The New York Times after Purdy’s passing in 2009. It al

U.K. Only after his first British collection appeared did he receive book contracts in the U.S. Up to this point, Purdy’s biography reads like the story of a struggling author on the rise, and one would almost expect that, after this first hurdle was taken, the biography would continue to chronicle his ascent into literary stardom. The truth is

L OOI VAN K ESSEL

JAMES PURDY Life of a Contrarian Writer by Michael Snyder Oxford Univ. Press. 456 pages, $34.95

quite the opposite. After enjoying some success with novels such as Malcolm (1959) and The Nephew (1960), Purdy’s op portunities to break into the mainstream were thwarted by his choice of topics for his subsequent novels. Cabot Write Begins (1964) and Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) are about serial rape, abortion, and homosexuality, brought to life in “gruesome” detail. A few years before the Stonewall Riots and the first mainstreaming of gay literature, Purdy had already written in great detail about love and sexual attraction between men. The NewYork literary establishment simply wasn’t ready for such an honest treatment of homosexuality, and it made sure to bury his novels in negative reviews. Or, worse still, it ig nored them completely. That, at least, is Purdy’s own explanation for his declining sales and waning support from his publishers. Snyder draws a different picture, concluding somberly that Purdy himself was often to blame for his own obscurity. He was a difficult author who couldn’t accept editors infringing on his artistic vision, and he could turn on someone at any given moment. He felt he had been wronged, and he didn’t hesitate to lash out, even at people who had always been in his corner. A telling episode is when Purdy accused Robert Giroux, his editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, of deliberately sabotaging Eustace Chisholm with a homophobic review to curb its sales and boost the career of

most goes without saying that the first ever biography of Purdy’s life, written by Michael Snyder, opens with a similar lament. And so too does this review of Snyder’s biography. The narrative of Purdy as an unrecognized genius has be come something of a myth in and of itself. Over the past decades, Purdy has found a niche for himself in a small but dedicated readership. His stories and poems have been treated to biblio graphic editions by private presses, his novels are widely trans lated into other European languages, and literary scholars continue to write about his work. Still, the dominant narrative remains that Purdy never received a wide readership because he was too controversial, too ahead of his time. It is this narrative that Snyder investigates in his biography: was Purdy’s work in deed too controversial to receive mainstream popularity, or were there other factors that contributed to his slow disappearance from the literary mainstream? To write a biography about Purdy is no small feat. He was very reticent about his life prior to coming to New York and reveled in telling falsehoods about himself in interviews. A fa vorite anecdote among readers of Purdy is that, when he passed away, people discovered he was in fact nine years older than he claimed to be. Instead of being born in 1923, his actual birth year was 1914. Given his predilection for secrecy, it is com mendable that Snyder unearthed so many details about his life prior to his first literary success. Snyder has consulted numer ous archives and interviewed relatives and friends close to Purdy and, in so doing, has been able to write a biography that offers a new understanding of his life as an author, as well as grounds for new interpretations of his novels and stories. Purdy grew up in small-town Ohio and moved to Chicago in the late 1930s after finishing his studies at Bowling Green State University. In Chicago, he quickly became part of the bohemian circle around surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie. It is there that he started to write his first stories and developed his affin ity for characters at the margins of society. Despite his talents, it took him another two decades to have his first collection of stories published. Frustrated with the constant rejection he re ceived from magazines, he took it upon himself to privately publish his stories and first novel 63: Dream Palace in 1956. He sent these editions to authors and immediately got positive re sponses, most notably from Edith Sitwell. Impressed by his sto ries, she took it upon herself to secure Purdy a publisher in the Looi van Kessel, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Purdy, is an assistant professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. 36

Robert Giard. James Purdy, Brooklyn Heights, NY , 1987.

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