Remembering James Purdy Esquire
March 16th, 2009by David Breithaupt
COLUMBUS, OH-
In 2000 I had the opportunity to write a 10,000 word bio/crit piece on James Purdy for Scribner’s American Writers Series. Jay Parini, who was editor of those tomes at the time, gave me the green light when I suggested a piece on Purdy. James was always on my mind as a great writer who was under read. This would be my chance to champion his words.
In the course of writing this piece I was able to interview him on the phone for hours. When news of his death at age 94 reached me on Friday (the 13th, no less) I immediately recalled his frail yet wizened voice in my head, his words ringing clear in my memory banks, steady, sharp, ancient, opinionated and brilliant. I was saddened when the reality bit me like a hidden woods snake, I would hear the voice no more. Then suddenly, I was comforted by the memory of some wisdom Allen Ginsberg shared with me after my mother died in 1986. He said, “we’re next.”
Long after I finished my piece on Purdy we continued our conversations on the phone until the end, though trailing off in the last years as he became more frail and tired. It became increasingly difficult to catch him at a good time. I was reduced to sending him birthday cards every year in the summer. I hoped he was having a peaceful descent into oblivion.
James Purdy was never plugged into email so we wrote each other frequently. We addressed each other as “Esquire.” He sent poems and stories he was working on, signed copies of his books and advice on my own writing. Nothing was better than to see his familiar scrawl in my mail box.
We both grew up in Ohio and he often spoke on the phone about his childhood memories such as visiting herb doctors in the country with his mother who was an early believer in holistic healing (at least in Ohio). He recalled the glory days of Cuba when he lived there after WW II and how dark and exotic the gay scene was during those years. We spoke of everything from strange health cures (he drank wheat grass juice and soaked his toes in his urine), to the tragedy of the damming of the Yangtze River. James was nothing if not opinionated. Thurber was “vulgar,” Shirley Jackson and her husband had been out to get him. In fact the whole literary community, he felt, undervalued him as a writer. He did love Dame Edith Sitwell who sang his praises early on as well as John Cowper Powys. The man definitely had his A lists and shit lists but always laughed gently when he expressed himself. I hope his voice never stops ringing in my head.
So get off your ass and read some Purdy. My personal favorites, though it is hard to pick, are The Nephew, House of the Solitary Maggot, Gertrude of Stoney Island Avenue and all his short stories and poetry. Dig in. No one plundered the American Psyche like James Purdy, he was the grand daddy of black humor (but would disagree strongly when I called his writing “gothic”) and plowed his subject matter, sowing and reaping a combination of strangely dark and humorous tableaus that as far as I have seen, have never been close to being matched.
Damn James, you were my Ohio Home Boy. What am I going to do now?
Here is a favorite poem he sent me way back when. Take a bow James Purdy Esquire.
(Note; read to the tune of ‘Beautiful Dreamer.” Mr. McFist is Mephistopheles)
BEAUTIFUL SCHEMER
Beautiful schemer,
have you no nuts?
Beautiful schemer,
have you killed love?
Your black chevalure
is on the block!
& who’s auctioneer?
Why, Mister McFist!
Tags: Friendship, Philosophy, Purdy
The Groene Amsterdammer 27 March 2009, pages 50 and 51.
By Graa Boomsma (Translated by Piet de Best)
James Purdy (1914-2009)
James Purdy’s vulnerable characters show the tendency to gravitate to the big city after they suffer a loss, where they can bury themselves in anonymity or hide themselves behind the masks of art or insanity. James Purdy made this trip, with all its detours, as a kid from the country. Thanks to the obstacles along the way, he has had literary material sufficient for a lifetime.
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This is what I thought of when I heard that James Purdy (after breaking a hip) had died in the Authors’ Fund of America Nursing Home in New Jersey on 13 May. Every one of Purdy’s novels could have used the line from Mathew 26:41 as its motto. My homage to his unique body of literary work consists of four translations (three novels and a play that premiered in de Lanteren in Rotterdam on 17 April 1993. Oh well, who still knows that Tennessee Williams had a weak spot for Purdy’s theater work?
The first time that I visited him in Henry Street, Brooklyn Heights (in August 1984), he has just had an operation on his vocal cords. He wasn’t supposed to talk yet, but he wrestled with his hoarseness to answer my questions about my first book about America (Uncompromising Freedom, 1985). There was a heat wave. We went to the edge of Brooklyn and looked at the Statue of Liberty covered in scaffolding. Purdy’s hoarse voice blasted the literary climate that excluded him. The politically and sexually correct critics either ignored him or vilified him. He irritated them because he went where other authors fell silent. In the American issue of the contrary journal De Held (fall 1989), I wrote that Purdy at his best makes Gerard Reve look like a pretentious poser.
The second time that I visited him, in 1987, I was (thanks to his efforts) able to spend a month in the Hotel Chelsea at a special rate. This time he had back pain and the medication was causing auditory and visual hallucinations. His one-room apartment was an inspiring mess: unmade bed, books and papers everywhere, and Mapplethorpe photos of well-muscled pretty young boys on the wall. The New York Times had just savaged his collection of stories entitled The Candle of Your Eyes. He gave me the first draft of what would in 1990 become his AIDs novel, Garments the Living Wear. It is about the late twentieth century plague that made the Big Apple aware that all flesh was as vulnerable as grass: one person after the other was mowed away.
Pretty boys as unwritten slates, older femme fatales, mutilated victims of war, runaways, borderline figures and outcasts: starting with Malcolm (1959), Purdy filled his book with such figures (although he never characterized his work as Gay Lit). His characters are running from oppressive (country) spirits or they are looking for a lost father, brother or son. But their hesitating attempts to develop their own personality are damaged by uninhibited sexual instincts. Life looks like a whip, and the crack of the whip echoes with the spirit of the Marquis de Sade. The sensual widow Cottrell in the regional novel Glory’s Course (1984) exemplifies the essence of his rich body of work. She sees her boarders as photocopies of her husband. She is familiar with the ways of the flesh: “If there was anything in the world that Elaine Cottrell hated, then it was common sense. Only flesh and blood know the truth, while the spirit can only babble”.
Life is a shallow grave, a hole in the hand. It is impossible to maintain a stable ego. Death is a relief, the ultimate disappearance. Purdy’s vulnerable characters show the tendency to gravitate to the big city after they suffer a loss, where they can bury themselves in anonymity or hide themselves behind the masks of art or insanity. James Purdy made this trip, with all its detours, as a kid from the country. Thanks to the obstacles along the way, he has had literary material sufficient for a lifetime.
In 1990 James Purdy came to the Netherlands to be interviewed for VPRO television by Adriaan van Dis. The reason for this was my translation of his AIDS novel, Garments the Living Wear, which was also an indictment of the New York Cultural climate (the In-Crowd). He revealed to the world both his charming and his challenging demeanor. What is his position in American literature? On the margins, he smiled. And no, I am not a homosexual writer. Don’t pigeonhole me. I think that this elegant writer belongs in the same category as Flannery O’Conner, Carson McCullers, William T. Vollmann, David Foster and David Breithaupt. They also have a sharp eye for the fringes and for derailments.
Garments the Living Wear, the only Purdy bestseller in the Netherlands, is an impressive theatrical game, an unparalleled costume party full of identity confusion surrounding the AIDS Plague. The Statue of Liberty is made into the Goddess of the Scum, and the principle character Jared Wakeman has a vision of Jesus Christ. The biblical references climax in the appearance and disappearance of Messiah claiming such spirituality that death cannot harm him. But pride comes before the fall. The denial of death can only have a temporary effect. Purdy irreversible tears down all facades. All the actors (young or old) in Garments the Living Wear understand that they are, in the end, a slave to the man with the scythe.