The Gay & Lesbian Review

hand, has no such scruples about handling precious things, so the story ends with Mr. Evening stretched out on a bed, “naked as he had come into the world.” Similarly, a physical object in “Rapture”

Lily is repeatedly penetrated by the two men, one of them her brother-in-law, with- out quite consenting, but not quite resist- ing. When Hobart joins in, “She let out perfunctory cries of expected rather than

The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy Liveright (Norton). 752 pages, $35.

mediates between one kind of love and another. Brice, the son, has long “gold hair.” When Mrs. Muir cleans the bathroom, she takes the strands of hair from his comb and saves it in a small box. After Kent arrives, she discovers that there are no hairs left in the comb: “She felt then, strangely, unaccountably, as if a load had been lifted from her heart.” Afterwards, she observes the daily “ceremony of the cleaning of the bathroom and the look- ing at the comb,” which never again has hairs in it. Eventually, she looks in Kent’s dresser: She left the top drawer for last, as if she must prepare herself for what she would find in it. There was a small mother-of-pearl box there. She opened it. At first she saw only the reproduction on its underlid of a painting of John the Baptist as a youth. But in the box itself, arranged in pink tissue paper, she spied a gathering of the gold hair of Brice Muir. She closed the box. There was a kind of strange smile playing over all her features at that moment. Then follows the paragraph, quoted earlier, about how Mrs. Muir finds peace because Kent will be the bridegroom to her son. Here, the manifestation of the box—mother-of-pearl, with John the Baptist thrown in for additional religious and homo- erotic resonance, because Purdy does not fear excess—makes the “gold hair” itself assume a power somewhere between the totemic and the fetishistic. When Mrs. Muir cherishes the hair, it’s maternal love; when Kent does, it’s incestuous lust. As in “Mr. Evening,” the revered object, effectively spot-lit by isola- tion, has the power to make the transition from one form of de- sire to another. Purdy does present one of the problems found in writers of his generation: he sometimes uses women and African-Ameri- cans more as symbols than as fully defined characters. Women are often grotesques, and their sexuality is discounted, in a way that men’s is not. For example, “Lily’s Party” is a kind of sex comedy that Lily herself might not find funny, but the action and the imagery still show Purdy’s touch. Lily tells a man named Hobart, “‘I gave your brother Edward two of the best years of my life.’ Lily spoke with the dry accent of someone

felt pain as one does under the hand of a nervous intern.” Again, the language—troubled children, expected rather than felt pain, the nervous intern, “vociferated”—shows Purdy’s style in full splendor. Just to make things even odder, Lily has baked pies for the church social. As in the other stories, the objects—here the pies—mark the transition between desires. The “preacher” throws one at Lily, and then targets himself: “[T]he ‘preacher’ was softly slowly mashing pies over his thin, tightly muscled torso. Then slowly, inexorably, Hobart began eating pieces of pie from off the body of the smeared ‘preacher.’ The ‘preacher’ returned the favor, and ate pieces of pie from Hobart, making gobbling sounds like a wild animal. Then they hugged one an- other and began eating the pies all over again from their bare bodies.” The men have their odd, erotic moment together, while Lily ends the story by herself “eating a piece of her still-unfin- ished apple pie.” Like women, African-American characters can also be used symbolically, again in unexpected ways. In “The Can- dles of Your Eyes,” a startling story, a black man named Sol- dier and a white boy named Beaut (the names suggest that we’re dealing with semi-symbols anyway) live together. Sol- dier sits in a rocking chair with Beaut in his lap, yielding an erotic image of white on black: “It was an unforgettable sight, midnight-black strapping Soldier holding the somewhat deli- cate, though really tough, Beaut. If you looked in on them in the dark, you seemed to see only Beaut asleep in what looked like the dark branches of a tree.” Purdy varies the image throughout the story. Soldier leaves, and when he doesn’t come back, Beaut sits in the chair alone: “Beaut stirred after a while in the chair, like a child in his mother’s body waiting to be born.” When Soldier does return, he finds Beaut in the chair with someone else: “They looked to him like flowers under deep mountain springs, but motionless like the moon in No- vember.” The imagery has become almost hallucinatory in its beauty. This story begins, by the way, with Soldier walking up and down East Fourth Street with a sign, “I AM A MURDERER .

testifying in court for the second time.” “Testifying for the second time” is strik- ing in its accuracy about how facts, when repeated, sound formal and a lit- tle tired. Later, Hobart follows Lily on her way to an assignation with a man he thinks of as the “preacher” and watches from outside her home: The preacher at this moment tore off the upper part of Lily’s dress, and her breasts and nipples looked out from the light into the darkness at Hobart like the troubled faces of children. “I’m coming into the house to ex- plain!” Hobart called to them inside. “You’ll do no such thing! No, no, Hobart!” Lily vociferated back to him.

Why Don’t They Give Me the Chair!” In fact, he hasn’t really killed Beaut, but this just makes the tragedy all the more devastating. I don’t want to end with the impres- sion that all of Purdy’s stories are this grim. There is “Kitty Blue,” about a talking cat who is given by the Crown Prince to Madame Lenore, an opera singer. Kitty Blue goes missing, has ad- ventures, and comes home again, to go on “a world cruise with a royal protec- tor and the greatest living singer.” It’s dedicated to Teresa Stratas. And it has the only unambiguously happy ending in the collection. It’s worth cherishing, if only for that reason.

after Resume Roger never loved you. And you never cared for Sid. Patrick was in the closet. And Ben detested kids. Leo—addicted to pills. Seth cheated with Tyrone. Pablo moved back to Brazil. Might as well live alone.

M ICHAEL M ONTLACK

March–April 2014

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