James Purdy

American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.

• Born: July 17, 1914
• Place of birth: Defiance County, Ohio
• Died: March 13, 2009
• Place of death: Englewood, New Jersey

Biography

James Otis Purdy’s considerable body of work—including novels, short fiction, poetry, and plays—is remarkable for several consistent characteristics: an unrelentingly grim depiction of the American experience, a reliance on the macabre and the grotesque, an unconstrained exploration of sexuality, and an idiosyncratic stylistic fusion of overwrought eloquence and automatic banality. For his writing, which has elicited critical comparisons with Flannery O’Connor, Nathanael West, and John Hawkes, Purdy won recognition from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. He did not court public recognition, and he remained circumspect about the details of his personal history.

Purdy's parents were divorced when he was eleven, after which he lived for various periods with his father, his mother, and his grandmother in several Ohio towns. When he was sixteen years old he escaped his family situation and Ohio by moving to Chicago, where he experienced a series of nightmarish misadventures that later served as the basis for many of the incidents in his fiction; in fact, he once said that his fiction conveys his life’s experiences more accurately than any biography might describe them. Eventually Purdy entered the army, and he later attended the University of Chicago, the University of Madrid, and the University of Puebla in Mexico. Between 1946 and 1949 he worked as an interpreter and as a schoolteacher in Mexico, Cuba, Spain, and France. From 1949 to 1953 he taught at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. After leaving that position he devoted himself full time to his writing, which appeared in such magazines as New Directions, Esquire, and the New Yorker.

It was not until a privately printed edition of the short-story collection Color of Darkness came to the attention of Edith Sitwell that Purdy was able to acquire a publisher in Great Britain. Enthusiastic British reviews, such as that by John Cowper Powys, led to his being published in the United States. His first three books were collections of short fiction: Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, and Other Stories and 63: Dream Palace were both published in 1956, and Color of Darkness appeared in 1957. In 1959 Purdy published his first novel, Malcolm, which became perhaps his best-known work. Like the central characters of many of his earlier short stories, Malcolm is a peculiar sort of innocent, an artist who is emotionally isolated and who, in his terrible need for a satisfying identity, opens himself to sexual and social exploitation by a range of disturbed characters who ostensibly have the identity that he lacks. The novel stands as a picaresque of absurdly brutal degradations.

The Nephew (1960), Purdy’s second novel, may in many senses be his most mainstream work. In it, a young soldier is reported missing and presumed dead in the Korean War; although he never actually appears in the novel, his presence fills it. His aunt, a retired schoolteacher, attempts to compose a booklet memorializing him, but in the process she discovers that he was gay and that, ironically, her idealized memories of him were something she should have protected for her own sake.

In 1961 Purdy published Children Is All, a collection of stories and plays that explore the deprivations of the materially disadvantaged, the socially alienated, the spiritually empty, and the sexually exploited in a manner that allows no easy distinctions between realism, surrealism, and satire. Next came Cabot Wright Begins (1964), a wildly bitter satire on American values that has been compared with Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968).

The publication of Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) may be regarded as something of a turning point in Purdy’s career. Because the novel deals primarily with sadomasochistic homosexuality, Purdy came to be associated more with such brutally naturalistic writers as Hubert Selby Jr. and John Rechy than with self-conscious experimentalists such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. The novel’s ironic validation of heterosexual “normalcy” subverts conventional, binary sexual categories and flustered many contemporary critics. In Garments the Living Wear (1989), Purdy’s satirical attack centers on the corrupt, decaying, loveless American society during the epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Purdy’s grandiose depictions of sadomasochistic violence and homosexuality, as well as the idiosyncrasies of his style, provide a barrier for widespread readership and critical attention. Purdy was primarily concerned with how eroticism serves both to define personal identity and to prevent a full definition of self; he cared about how the emptiness of the American culture of his time and the depravity of individuals inexplicably combine to exploit innocence. These concerns, combined with his willingness to experiment cogently with the conventions of fiction, would seem to guarantee him a place among the more prominent writers of his generation.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Malcolm, 1959

The Nephew, 1960

Cabot Wright Begins, 1964

Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 1967

Jeremy’s Version, 1970

I Am Elijah Thrush, 1972

The House of the Solitary Maggot, 1974

In a Shallow Grave, 1975

Narrow Rooms, 1978

Mourners Below, 1981

On Glory’s Course, 1984

In the Hollow of His Hand, 1986

Garments the Living Wear, 1989

Out with the Stars, 1992

Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue, 1997

Short Fiction:

Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, and Other Stories, 1956

63: Dream Palace, 1956

Color of Darkness: Eleven Stories and a Novella, 1957

The Candles of Your Eyes, 1985

The Candles of Your Eyes, and Thirteen Other Stories, 1987

63, Dream Palace: Selected Stories, 1956–1987, 1991

Moe’s Villa & Other Stories, 2000

The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy, 2013 (John Waters, introduction)

Drama:

Mr. Cough Syrup and the Phantom Sex, pb. 1960

Cracks, pb. 1962

Wedding Finger, pb. 1974

Clearing in the Forest, pr. 1978

True, pr. 1978

Now, pr. 1979

Two Plays, pb. 1979 (includes A Day after the Fair and True)

What Is It, Zach?, pr. 1979

Proud Flesh: Four Short Plays, pb. 1980

Strong, pb. 1980

The Berry-Picker, pb. 1981

Scrap of Paper, pb. 1981

In the Night of Time, and Four Other Plays, pb. 1992 (includes In the Night of Time, Enduring Zeal, The Paradise Circus, The Rivalry of Dolls, and Ruthanna Elder)

The Rivalry of Dolls, pr., pb. 1992

Selected Plays, pb. 2009

Poetry:

The Running Sun, 1971

Sunshine Is an Only Child, 1973

She Came Out of the Mists of Morning, 1975

Lessons & Complaints, 1978

The Brooklyn Branding Parlors, 1986

Collected Poems, 1990

Miscellaneous:

Children Is All, 1961 (10 stories and 2 plays)

An Oyster Is a Wealthy Beast, 1967 (story and poems)

Mr. Evening: A Story & Nine Poems, 1968

On the Rebound: A Story & Nine Poems, 1970

A Day after the Fair: A Collection of Plays and Stories, 1976

Bibliography

Adams, Stephen D. James Purdy. Barnes & Noble Books, 1976. Covers Purdy’s major work from the early stories and Malcolm up through In a Shallow Grave. Of particular interest is his discussion of the first two novels in Purdy’s trilogy Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys.

Chupack, Henry. James Purdy. Twayne Publishers, 1975. Notable for devoting an entire chapter to the author's early short stories. Chupack also offers an interesting introductory chapter on what he terms the “Purdian trauma.”

Guy-Bray, Stephen. "Purdy, James." The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Claude J. Summers, rev. ed., Routledge, 2002, pp. 539–40. A short article that identifies some of Purdy’s most pervasive themes, including the betrayal of love, the use of violence to resolve inner conflict, and the malevolence of fate.

Ladd, Jay L., compiler and annotator. James Purdy: A Bibliography. Arranged and edited by Nels P. Highberg, Ohio State U Libraries, 1999. An annotated bibliography of works by and about James Purdy.

Peden, William. The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature. Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Discusses Purdy in comparison with some of the southern gothic writers, such as Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, and in relation to Purdy’s probing of themes about the strange and perverse in American life.

Purdy, James. Interview. By Richard Canning. Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists, by Canning, Columbia UP, 2001, pp. 1–39. Focuses primarily on Purdy’s identity as a gay novelist, but does include some material on his plays. In particular, Purdy acknowledges his interest in and debt owed to the Jacobean theater of the early seventeenth century in England, especially those plays by John Webster and Thomas Middleton that fixate on the existence of evil as a major force in human destiny.

Purdy, James. “Out with James Purdy: An Interview.” Interview by Christopher Lane. Critique, vol. 40, no. 1, 1998, pp. 71–89. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=1106047&site=ehost-live. Evaluates reasons for critical hostility to Purdy’s writings. Presents Purdy’s views on racial and sexual stereotyping, violence in art, and the effect of political correctness. Analyzes theme and subject, presenting real-life counterparts to characters in several novels.

Renner, Stanley. “‘Why Can’t They Tell You Why?’ A Clarifying Echo of The Turn of the Screw.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 14, no. 2, 1986, pp. 205–13. Compares the story with Henry James’s famous tale, arguing that both are about a female suppressing a male’s sexual identity.

Schwarzchild, Bettina. The Not-Right House: Essays on James Purdy. U of Missouri P, 1968. Focuses primarily on Purdy’s novels, although there is some comparative discussion of such early works as 63: Dream Palace and “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name.”

Skaggs, Calvin. “The Sexual Nightmare of ‘Why Can’t They Tell You Why?’” The Process of Fiction: Contemporary Stories and Criticism, edited by Barbara McKenzie, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969, pp. 305–12. Argues that in this short story from Don't Call Me by My Right Name, and Other Stories, the mother tries to destroy the boy’s masculine identification because of her own ambiguous sexual identity. Claims that in the final scene a strong female emasculates a weak male.

Tanner, Tony. Introduction. Color of Darkness [and] Malcolm, by James Purdy, Doubleday, 1974, pp. 9–11. Discusses Purdy’s novel Malcolm and his novella 63: Dream Palace, and compares Purdy’s effects with those achieved by the Russian realist Anton Chekhov.

Turnbaugh, Douglas Blair. “James Purdy: Playwright.” PAJ, vol. 20, no. 59, 1998, pp. 73–75. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=1053997&site=ehost-live. Discusses Purdy’s international acclaim and publication history. Praises his uses of dialogue and vernacular in the novels. Critical evaluation of dramatizations of Purdy’s novels, specifically focusing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) distortion of In a Shallow Grave (1975).