The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy
Liveright (Norton).
752 pages, $35.
YOU 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 recognized 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 vernacular.” 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 exactly a writer for our times.
Nevertheless, when Reed Woodhouse and I were teaching a continuing education class on gay male literature, 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 wedding, had held her arm and they had walked down the aisle of the church together, and her father had then presented her to her bridegroom. She had felt at the moment a kind of bliss. She now felt she could give up her son to someone who would cherish him as her bridegroom 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 desperate 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 writings 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 stories, 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 intense, 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:
“Is this true, Brice?” Kent said after a while in the midst of an unparalleled joy. “Are you sure you want to be with me?”
Brice held his uncle in his desperate embrace, and kissed him almost brutally on the mouth.
“I said you had dried all my tears,” Brice told him. He kissed his uncle again and again, and his hand pressed against the older man’s thigh.
“I hope in the morning I will find you against my heart and it will not be just a thing I felt in slumber,” Kent said.
Purdy’s language is stilted and archaic, almost biblical. His characters talk in awkward clichés: drying my tears, waking to find you. And it all strikes me to the heart. Clichés here are the expression of inexpressive people, of people trying to reach the depths of what they’re feeling, often for the first time. Paradoxically, the use of cliché also holds the characters at a distance from us by short-circuiting the very idea of psychologically realistic motivation: people do these things for the reasons that people have always done these things. Purdy doesn’t push beyond that mystery.
The mystery of motivation supplies the title to the most lacerating of the non-gay stories, “Why Can’t They Tell You Why?,” about a boy and his widowed mother, this one the absolute inverse of the mother in “Rapture.” It begins, “Paul knew nearly nothing of his father until he found the box of photographs on the backstairs.” This could be a story about claiming a patrimony, but that would be too easy, too comfortable. Paul obsessively, and secretly, looks at the photographs, to the point of not going to school for several months. The mother, Ethel, demands to know why he looks at them. This is the mystery, the “Why” of the title, but just as mysterious is the sadistic rage behind Ethel’s demand to know:
She took hold of his hair and jerked him by it gently, as though this was a kind of caress she sometimes gave him.
“If you don’t tell Ethel why you look at the photographs all the time, we’ll have to send you to the mental hospital with the bars.
“I don’t know why I look at them, dear Ethel,” he said now in a very feeble but wildly tense voice, and he began petting the fur on her houseslippers.
This is grotesque—the gentle hair jerk that is like a caress, the mental hospital “with the bars,” petting the houseslippers, the awkward formality of “dear Ethel”—but it descends further, to the final image of the boy: “He had crouched on the floor and, bending his stomach over the boxes, hissed at her, so that she stopped short, not seeing any way to get at him, seeing no way to bring him back, while from his mouth black thick strings of something slipped out, as though he had spewed out the heart of his grief.” Something primal and horrible is laid bare here, made more so by Purdy’s refusal to give us the escape valve of comprehensible motivations for the mother or the son.
A less brutal but even murkier battle occurs in “Everything Under the Sun,” about Jesse, a young man, who lets Cade, fifteen, live with him, because Cade’s brother died saving Jesse’s life in the army. They argue, ostensibly because Cade doesn’t have a job, but something dark and unspoken lies under the tense back and forth:
“You never did give a straw if I lived or died, Jesse,” Cade said, and he just managed to control his angry tears.
Jesse was silent, as on the evenings when alone in the dark, while Cade was out looking for a job, he had tried to figure out what he should do in his trouble.
“Fact is,” Cade now whirled from the window, his eyes brimming with tears, “it’s all the other way around. I don’t need you except for the money, but you need me to tell you what you are!”
The archaic, resonant phrase “in his trouble” points to but does not name what the “trouble” might be, while Cade’s statement ascribes an obscure but, again, resonant motivation to Jesse. Jesse eventually admits his need for Cade: “Of course your brother saved my life, but you saved it again. I mean you saved it more.” Cade agrees to stay, with a condition:
“But you leave me alone now if I stay,” Cade said.
“I will,” Jesse said, perhaps not quite sure what it was Cade meant.
We aren’t sure either, and the ending elucidates nothing. Earlier in the story, the heat makes Jesse remove his shirt, revealing the tattoo of “a crouched black panther.” At the end of the story, Cade does the same, “exposing the section of his chest on which rested the tattooed drawing of a crouched black panther, the identical of Jesse’s.” Does the identical tattoo mean that Jesse’s love for Cade—if that’s what it is—is reciprocated, whatever that might mean in this context? Purdy doesn’t say, because it’s not his style to say.
Another paradoxical aspect of these stories is that, for all the sexual intensity, there is little physical description. One unpublished story, from 1956, is explicit, and mildly embarrassing: “The Cuban’s head, with its thick entwined locks, fastened securely to his organ like some great revolving planet of the heavens.” For the most part, Purdy’s world is oddly non-physical. It’s all dialog with stage directions on how the dialog is delivered. The physical locations are only sketched in lightly. As a result, when an object makes an appearance, it becomes charged with significance.
In “Mr. Evening,” the title character, a young collector of rare items, puts an ad in the paper: “a desperate plea, it turned out, for information concerning a certain scarce china cup, circa 1910.” The ad reaches its intended target, Mrs. Owens, an older woman who counts the cup among her heirlooms and invites Mr. Evening to see it. He hesitates: “He was uneasy with old women, he supposed … [but]he wanted, he finally said out loud to himself, that hand-painted china cup, 1910, no matter what it might cost him.” When he does visit, Mrs. Owen moves to a table that has an object on it: “It was the pale rose shell-like 1910 hand-painted china cup. ‘You don’t need to bring it to me!’ he cried, and even she was startled by such an outburst. Mr. Evening had gone as white as chalk.”
After the obsessive repetition of the precise name (“1910”), the object itself finally makes an appearance. All of Mr. Evening’s desire, with its suggestions of sublimated erotic energy, is displaced onto the cup. At this point, however, we begin to discover that Mrs. Owens’ desire needs no such displacement. She eventually claims Mr. Evening as her own very precious object, and, in the final scene, serves him coffee from the cup. “He had put down the 1910 cup because it seemed unthinkable to drink out of anything so irreplaceable, and so delicate that a mere touch of his lips might snap it.” Mrs. Owens, on the other 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” 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 looking 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 homoerotic 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 isolation, has the power to make the transition from one form of desire to another.
Purdy does present one of the problems found in writers of his generation: he sometimes uses women and African-Americans 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 testifying in court for the second time.” “Testifying for the second time” is striking in its accuracy about how facts, when repeated, sound formal and a little 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 explain!” Hobart called to them inside.
“You’ll do no such thing! No, no, Hobart!” Lily vociferated back to him.
Lily is repeatedly penetrated by the two men, one of them her brother-in-law, without quite consenting, but not quite resisting. When Hobart joins in, “She let out perfunctory cries of expected rather than 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 another 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-unfinished apple pie.”
Like women, African-American characters can also be used symbolically, again in unexpected ways. In “The Candles of Your Eyes,” a startling story, a black man named Soldier and a white boy named Beaut (the names suggest that we’re dealing with semi-symbols anyway) live together. Soldier 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 delicate, 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 November.” 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. 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 impression 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 adventures, and comes home again, to go on “a world cruise with a royal protector 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.
Michael Schwartz, a full-time writer based in Boston, is an associate editor of this magazine.
