GLR March-April 2023

The Darkness of Narrow Rooms ART MEMO

M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ I EAGERLY READ James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer by Michael Snyder (reviewed in the January-February 2023 issue), hoping to find some clue to the inner sources of one of my favorite novels, Purdy’s Narrow Rooms (1978). What I found was this: “In August, he finished the first full typescript of Narrow Rooms . Looking back, he did not know how he ‘ever wrote that, it was so violent.’” How violent? The cover of the 2019 reissue from Valancourt Books shows a nail driven through a hand. Let’s just say that this is severe understatement. A reader of Narrow Rooms , or any of Purdy’s fiction, must suspend not only disbe lief but all conventional narrative expecta tions. The plot is both thin and improbable. Characters never quite coalesce into people having coherent motivations. They speak a stilted language that is equal parts biblical oratory and clichés. The setting in time and

dictating his life from at least the time of the eighth grade on. For Roy had had his eyes on Sidney for that long. And he had marked Sidney for his own since then. Sidney knew it, had resisted it, and thereby tightened the cord about both of them.” The pivotal moment for the two men had come on the night of the high school Gradua tion Exercises. Roy, a poor boy who had be come valedictorian, approached Sidney, who’d slapped him in front of the class. Roy had then gone home, “had taken the straight razor made in Germany which his Dad had later slashed his own throat with, and had carved out a place by his right eye where the middle finger of Sidney’s hand had struck him, the wedge cut there quite deep so that he would never be able to forget the insult.” Note Purdy’s method here. He takes some thing as commonplace as a high school grad uation and injects into it an epic scene out of a revenge saga, and, in glorious excess, in cludes the gratuitous detail of his father’s sui

There is nothing lovely about it. Each man commands the others; each shows his love by surrendering to the command. The com mands and surrenders intensify until they cli max in the final acts of violence, which are so extreme and protracted that they should collapse into absurdity but instead achieve a terrible sublimity. Purdy so subverts any idea of dominance and submission that, even though I’ve read the novel six times, I can never quite remember who is the perpetrator of the final violence and who is the victim, if such terms even apply here. For a taste of how Purdy complicates the idea of love, consider the following sentence (and, yes, it is a single sentence): The sight of Sid’s feet naked in the snow on Christmas had for a time mollified the scissor-grinder’s hatred (yet only by dying could Sidney De Lakes make up for what Roy had suffered, only by hanging on some barren tree forever, ignored even by the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field who would find his flesh too rotten), but then, as Roy had sat in his drafty im mense house, like an abandoned castle in the wastes, he went over, with the aid of a notebook he had kept since the eighth grade, all the slights and insults, rebuffs and insolence, the looking straight through him by the hero, as if he was air, the curled princely lip and sneer, the fine chiseled nose in the air, the contempt and loathing and fury of all those years culmi nating in Sidney’s striking him when the renderer had only reached the accomplish ment of valedictorian by reason of his love for the football player. The sentence literally begins with Roy’s ha tred and ends with his love, and its move ment mimics the whipsaw emotions that Roy experiences. The language of hatred—“the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field”— seems borrowed from scripture. The sen tence then pivots on the absurdly modern and concrete image of the notebook, the record of the insults Roy has suffered, which are for him indistinguishable from love. Roy returns obsessively to the night of the slap, which he cannot move beyond. By the end of the sentence, Roy and Sidney lose their names and take on the mythic identities of the renderer and the football player. I could go on. Every page of Narrow Rooms has at least one sentence that stops me cold. As the reviewer of the biography noted, everyone who writes about Purdy winds up urging readers to do themselves the favor of discovering him. I now do the same. Michael Schwartz is an associate editor for this magazine.

space is as specific and un real as a dream. But if you can surrender to it, if you can approach it as an opera or a saga that sacrifices verisimilitude for a deeper, more intense power, then Narrow Rooms can become what Gore Vidal called it, “a dark and splendid affair by an authentic American genius.” The novel centers on four young men of about twenty in a small West Virginia town. Sidney De Lakes has returned home from prison for killing Brian McFee,

cide (or rather “his Dad,” an unnervingly intimate word here). The final destination of the novel is obviously predetermined, even over determined. But Purdy lets the plot simmer. We get the past, when Roy se duced Brian and set him against Sidney, and the present, when he does the same with Gareth. Sidney loves them both, they love him back, and even Roy is “as much in love with [Brian] as a damned per son can be.” All these

who had been trying to shoot him. As Sidney explains: “He felt he’d rather die or see me die than lose my caring for him.” He finds work tending to Gareth Vaisey, “a sort of in valid,” who, on first seeing Sidney, asks: “Does the renderer know you’re out?” That reference is to the fourth man, Roy Sturtevant, known as “the renderer,” his grandfather’s trade, and “the scissors-grinder,” names that suggest a malignant, dark force from folk tales. The novel is slow to get started, with a vague sense of past disasters lingering in the present. But then, a third of the way in, Purdy inserts what is one of the most unset tling narrative transitions in fiction: “ Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skele ton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing ” [Purdy’s italics]. At this point, the underlying skeleton emerges. Sid ney remembers how “the ‘renderer’ had been

loves prefigure and inevitably lead to the fatal connection between Sidney and Roy. Love in this novel, however, takes a pecu liar form. When Roy saw that Sidney had re turned, he knew that “Sidney was waiting for him to command him again. He did not want to command any more boys, but Sidney would require him to.” Roy had in fact com manded Brian to seduce Sidney as he will command Gareth. But Gareth also commands Sidney to kill Roy, and even the dead Brian commands Roy: “he was being commanded by someone who had ‘gone before’ and whose command was law. Roy Sturtevant might command by the laws of this world, but not by the laws of the world to which Brian McFee now belonged.” Roy finally confesses to Sidney: “Every time you passed by me you threw off energy enough to make me want you forever. You commanded me just by your breathing.” Love here is compulsion and surrender.

March–April 2023

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