The Gay & Lesbian Review

ESSAY

James Purdy’s World of Extremes M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ

Y OU BEGIN to get at the problem of James Purdy by noting, as almost everyone writing on him does, that Dame Edith Sitwell praised him: “I am convinced that, long after my death, James Purdy will come to be recog- nized as one of the greatest writers America has ever produced.” Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes, more recent than Sitwell but not all that recent, were among Purdy’s admirers. Marianne Moore called him “a master of ver- nacular.” Edward Albee adapted a Purdy novella for the stage. But even adding Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal to the list doesn’t take away the sense that Purdy (1914–2009) is not ex- actly a writer for our times. Nevertheless, when Reed Woodhouse and I were teaching a continuing education class on gay male litera- ture, Purdy was central to the reading list. We would begin the first class with “Walking to the Ocean This Morning,” a two-page story by Sam D’Allesandro, who died in 1988 at age 31, which starts: “The truth of the matter is I like to be beaten and then fucked like a dog.” This is shocking, yes, and contemporary in its first-person, matter-of-fact admission of aberrant sexual pleasure. Then we’d turn to “Rapture,” published in 1981 when Purdy was 67. It’s about a young, dying widow, mother to a teenage son. Her brother, just out of the military, comes to visit. After she dies, her brother and her son become lovers. But that’s not the shocking part. That comes when the mother realizes that her brother physically desires her son: “Mrs. Muir felt, she did not know why, the same way she had when her father, the day of her wed- ding, had held her arm and they had walked down the aisle of the church together, and her father had then pre- sented her to her bridegroom. She had felt at the mo- ment a kind of bliss. She now felt she could give up her son to someone who would cherish him as her bride- groom had cherished her.” Think about it: the mother can die comfortably because her brother will do to her son what her husband did to her. Merely liking to get fucked like a dog pales in comparison. Our class always included one of Purdy’s two greatest gay novels: Eustace Chisholm And the Works (1967) and Narrow Rooms (1978), both wild narratives about the des- perate attempt to resist desire and the violent, humiliating grace of finally submitting to it. These novels should have secured Purdy’s place in the gay canon, and his vast writ- ings should have won him the wide acclaim that Sitwell predicted for him. (Reed has covered Purdy in these

pages: an appreciation in the Fall 1994 issue and a visit with the man himself, in Brooklyn, in the Spring 1995 issue.) Now we have this complete collection of Purdy’s short sto- ries, some published for the first time. Only a handful of the stories in these 700 pages are explicitly gay—for the most part, they’re the better ones—but they all offer a slice of Purdy’s in- tense, disturbing vision. This is another opportunity for readers to encounter Purdy and his unique subject and style. I’d like to take this opportunity to explore that style in some depth. “Rapture” is for me Purdy’s best story. It also illustrates the key negative reaction that Purdy provokes: people just don’t talk like that. Take the scene where the uncle, Kent, learns that his nephew loves him:

Michael Schwartz, a full-time writer based in Boston, is an as- sociate editor of this magazine.

March–April 2014

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