James Purdy

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James Purdy (1914-2009). Photo by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), 1957. Courtesy Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

Born	James Otis Purdy July 17, 1914(1914-Template:MONTHNUMBER-17) Hicksville, Ohio, United States
Died	March 13, 2009(2009-Template:MONTHNUMBER-13) (aged 94) Englewood, New Jersey, United States
Occupation	novelist, poet, playwright
Nationality	United States
Genres	drama, poetry, fiction
Influences Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne

James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 - March 13, 2009) was a controversial American poet, novelist, short story writer, and playwright.

Life

Overview

Purdy published over a dozen novels and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius") A.N. Wilson, and both Jane and Paul Bowles.

Youth

Purdy was born in Hicksville, Ohio in 1914. When he was abour 5 years old, his family moved to Findlay, Ohio, where he was educated, graduating from Findlay High School in 1932. Purdy’s parents went through a separation and then a bitter divorce in 1930 after his father lost large sums of money in investments gone bad. His mother then converted their home in Findlay to a boardinghouse.

Purdy earned a B.A. teaching degree in French from Bowling Green State College in 1935 and then studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in English in 1937.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Purdy studied Spanish at the University of Chicago (1944–45). He spent the summer of 1945 at the University of Puebla, Mexico, and taught English at the Ruston Academy in Havana, Cuba, in 1945–46. For the next 9-1/2 years, he taught Spanish at Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin. In the mid 1950's, with encouragement and support from Miriam and Osborn Andreas and the Andreas Foundation (Archer Daniels Midland), Purdy returned to Chicago to pursue writing.

Artistic scenes and influences

Soon after his arrival at the University of Chicago in 1935 James Purdy had met Chicago painter, Gertrude Abercrombie, dubbed “queen of the bohemian artists." His enormous body of work includes many works inspired by his close relationship to Gertrude and her underground salon (which had its roots in the salon of Gertrude Stein.) This American incarnation of the creative salon centerpieced future jazz greats Percy Heath, Sonny Rollins, Erroll Garner, Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Sarah Vaughan.

His attendance at the all-night, weekend gatherings where bebop and jazz were improvised by these greats (many times with Gertrude at the piano) combined with Purdy’s intensive study as a young boy of the King James Version of the Old Testament and Shakespeare, made Purdy the writer he became. At some points Purdy was living in Gertrude’s “ruined” mansion, with members of The Modern Jazz Quartet.

A climax of self-revelation in some of his novels stems significantly from Gertrude Abercrombie and an association to these great jazz musicians, and the music and lives they were able to create from their own humble origins. They enabled Purdy to begin to create a voice in literature using his American small-town speech patterns and his worlds of poverty and neglect. His associations with the jazz greats and his meeting with Billie Holiday gave him the confidence he needed to change from an upstart and lost boy, prone to running wild, to a world-renowned writer and artist. The association with the painters in Abercrombie's circle of magic realists, Ivan Albright, Dudley Huppler , Karl Priebe, Julia Thecla, and John Wilde helped strengthen the imagery he used to develop his own literary version of magic realism.

Gertrude also introduced the young student to others in her circle, to Miriam Bomberger Andreas and to the industrialist and literary essayist, Osborn Andreas, both of whom would become extremely significant in Purdy's life and work. His debut book, Don't Call Me By My Right Name, and other stories, was privately published by Osborn with the Andreas Foundation. The title story is based on Andreas' wife, Miriam. His earliest 5 books, with the exception of The Nephew, were inspired by his association with Miriam and Osborn Andreas.

His earliest novel which set forth his own developing style of American magic realism, was praised lavishly by Dorothy Parker and others of great literary merit. It was for decades a staple of the undergraduate American Literature curriculum of many American colleges and universities.

If Gertrude and the Andreas' inspired James Purdy to become a writer then Dame Edith Sitwell made him a known one. When she received the privately-printed edition, which Purdy had on a hunch sent to her, of Don’t Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories she was convinced she had discovered a great black writer from the story Eventide, which she felt only a black man could write. After requesting more of his work, Purdy sent her his newly published private edition of 63: Dream Palace. Both books were designed by Purdy with his own unique drawings. Upon the additional basis of this new work she had become convinced he was “a writer of genius” and she obtained a serious commercial publisher for his work in England. She would later write the prefaces for the publication of both these works. Her reviews, pronouncements, and assessments of his further works helped him create a coterie of supporters (notably Angus Wilson and Dorothy Parker) both in England and America. Purdy felt he would never have been a known writer without her. “My stories were always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines and they earned if possible even more hostile comments from the little magazines. All editors were insistent that I would never be a published writer.”

Cutting Edge

From the start, his work had often been at the edge of what was printable under American censorship. The major U.S. publishing houses rejected his 2 early books 63: Dream Palace, and Colour of Darkness, which had to be printed privately abroad. The publishers, according to Purdy, believed that he was mentally insane. Out of the U.S., Victor Gollancz could not bring himself to print the word "motherfucker" in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace.

In 1972, the supposedly liberal New York literary establishment was outraged by his I am Elijah Thrush. And as late as May 1990, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but the court, hostile to the accuser's position, belligerently decided it was a “work of the literary imagination which had no business in the courts.” Although many readers were scandalized, a solid cadre of distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dorothy Parker, and Susan Sontag, who warmly defended him against puritanical critics. Tennessee Williams was also an early admirer of Purdy's work.

In January 1966 a famous incendiary manifesto by Stanley Kauffmann set forth a bluntly damning and prejudicial way of criticizing works by homosexual writers. The article stirred the arts community. This finger in the wind of the so-called liberal critical establishment actually reflected the deep nature of an institutionalized prejudice throughout the media.

Cabot Wright Begins and Eustace Chisholm & the Works

Soon afterwards, Purdy set out to write a novel of what he experienced in Gertrude's Chicago scene of the 1930s. This time it was to reflect his fitfully terminated friendship with Wendell Wilcox, a writer of minor achievement in their circle. It would also include a scathing portrait of the department store heir Norman Macleish of the noted Chicago family.

All of Purdy's work after Eustace Chisholm would subsequently be met with both great praise on the one side, and stern, vehement condemnation and misunderstanding on the other. In 1967, a year after the publication of the treatise to limit homosexual artists—his shocking,(Citation needed) ground-breaking and memorable Eustace Chisholm and the Works -- his “undisguised” bisexual work—was put forth. The novel is dedicated to Edward Albee. The book was a groundbreaking sensation.(Citation needed) Purdy recalled in 1993 that he was "burned at the stake" in the New York Times review of Eustace Chisholm.

Critically it was thrown to an interpretation of and by this new Kauffmann assessment (quoted as the source in the review) and was vehemently condemned on all grounds including moral ones. The “noble” hatchet type review followed exactly the policy which had been set forth two years earlier: The attack surrounding the book chilled Purdy’s growing popularity though the book sold more copies than any of his other works.

Enmeshed in this critical outcome and resultant effect on Purdy of the publication of both Cabot Wright Begins and the ensuing novel Eustace Chisholm & the Works was the fact that by the time of publication of these novels all his immediate family, his friends and his supporters had died. This included Dame Edith Sitwell and Carl Van Vechten, his brother who had been a noteworthy actor in New York and very important to his development in literature, Dorothy Parker, and John Cowper Powys as well – thus eliminating all the probable defenders of both him as a writer and the 2 novels themselves. Osborn Andreas, Purdy's patron, had also died. All these deaths occurred within a 2-year period between 1965 and 1967 devastating Purdy's basis of support financially, critically and personally.

"I soon realized that if my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles, it was to be in the future a kind of endless open warfare," James Purdy wrote in an autobiographical sketch in 1984.

At a loss to know how to proceed and with his career seemingly shattered, his circle of literary supporters dead, Purdy began looking or rather staring at pictures of his long dead relatives for a kind of solace and validation. He began to remember ever more vividly the stories his Indian grandmother told him when he was a child, about eminent people, mostly women, and most often on the outside of a hidebound code of acceptance in the long ago towns of the hill country of Ohio.

In 1968 he began a series of independent but interconnected books (and plays) about the very real, regal and exciting personages his grandmother had bestowed upon, the Sleepers In Moon Crowned Valleys. In his hands they were to become the voices and journeys of an almost mythic people of a uniquely different and undiscovered America. He would follow them in their navigation through life and circumstance. The narratives were something that could be found perhaps in the archives of a historical society in the towns set into the farm country and rolling hills of the Midwest. Through these memories there began to flow also the remembrance of the country vernacular and way of speaking of his great grand parents. He began to create in association with these compelling individuals and their stories a voice that Paul Bowles would call “the closest thing we have to a classical American colloquial.”

Regarding Sleepers in Moon Crowned Valleys Gore Vidal stated in his New York Times essay, “Each novel stands entire by itself while the whole awaits archeology and constitution of a work that is already like no other.”

As part of the series in 1974 he published The House of the Solitary Maggot, which is often regarded as his most ambitious work. It was largely ignored.

Breakthrough

The aforementioned damning assessment, or slant, ended seemingly just as abruptly as it began, with the 1997 publication of his final novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. His body of work was cleared of its long-standing, erroneous stigmas, with a New York Times review assessing him in summation as a “singular American visionary.” On the last reprints of several of his books a further essay by Gore Vidal in the NY Times admiringly entitled “The Novelist As Outlaw” framed him as “an authentic American genius.”

Interesting to note his more controversial works had been seen as religious and spiritual allegories and praised many times by the religious right, while they were at the same time being annihilated by the ‘liberal’ critical establishment.(Citation needed)

Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as a recent appreciation by Gore Vidal in the New York Times Book Review, Purdy's work again enjoyed a brief renaissance in the first decade of the 2000s, including among younger writers. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, "there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork."

Purdy continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to "banish shame".

He had maintained throughout his career that he was being assessed in terms of the nature of his subject material and not in terms of the value of its content.

Purdy wrote anonymous letters from the age of nine. His first was written to his mother's landlady who, in young Purdy's view, was grasping. Countless thousands have been written since, many now owned by persons who have no idea of their provenance or value, although the style is inimitable. One of his very latest, written when he was 92, to a redactor who had displeased him by moving from New York to Montana, can be seen at http://hermeseta.com/purdyanon.html. This features some of Purdy's drawings, which have attracted some attention.

For nearly 50 years he lived and wrote in a small apartment in a Brooklyn Heights landmarked building surrounded by dozens of framed boxing prints from the turn of the 20th century. The bare-knuckled champs in the makeshift outside rings of their day. Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009.

Shortly after his death in 2009 a book of plays, Selected Plays of James Purdy including Brice, Ruthanna Elder, Where Quentin Goes and The Paradise Circus, was published by Ivan R. Dee. It focuses on Purdy's playwriting as being his first form of writing since childhood, when he wrote plays for his brother, an actor, to perform. John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: "James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart."

In an autobiographical sketch in 1984, James Purdy stated, "My work has been compared to an underground river which is flowing often undetected through the American landscape."

Writing

Through all his work, Purdy dealt primarily with outsiders: Women, blacks, Native American Indians (he was 1/8 Ojibway), homosexuals (living far outside the conventional gay community) – anyone who could be seen to be outside the circle of “normal” acceptability. Indeed, his final short story, Adeline, written at 92, surprisingly and unpredictably, is a tale of transgendered acceptance.

From the onset, with his book of short stories, Color of Darkness and through to his final book of short stories, Moe’s Villa and Other Short Stories, Purdy has written the outsider. Much of his early work takes place in extreme poverty, and is located in a small-town, heightened American vernacular. In the beginning of her assessment of him, Dame Edith Sitwell felt he was always writing the black experience without necessarily mentioning race. Purdy’s association with the American black experience is paramount to understanding him as an artist. In addition to his beginnings with Gertrude Abercrombie, Carl Van Vechten took him up when he arrived in New York and introduced him to his own important New York circle of black artists, boxers and activists. Langston Hughes praised Purdy as “the last of the [n-word] writers” for his use of the vernacular. He was seen as a master of different kinds of American vernacular as well.

Purdy was a classicist who could even read some ancient Greek. He maintained an extensive classical library in history, poetry, and drama from the ancient Romans and Greeks. In all his work he instinctively and perhaps unconsciously connects to a tight form of classical structure which is perceived only by those who have become familiar with it. His novel In a Shallow Grave has overt classical references running throughout, as do many others. The main character in his final novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue even considers in her memoir that her entire story has been Demeter descending into Hades in search of her daughter Persephone. His besieged novels which beleaguered his reputation, both Eustace Chisholm & the Works and Narrow Rooms, had outraged the critics. They were merely restating in a modern context the psychology of Dionysis set forth in the accepted and acceptable play the Bacchae by Euripedes. The outer texture of his work is realistic while the deeper and more elusive interior reveals a mythic, almost archetypal trail. Its great age is apparent; its history is clearly rooted in the classics and in the Old Testament. Thus his work can be very American but it is always also universal.

In his compressed dialogue structure too, he was ahead of his time. Much-later writers like David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett (also an admirer) paved the way to the acceptance of works in this "distilled" style which has now become the sine qua non of the modern audience with its very different attention span. His early stories from the 1940s and '30s were, because of their brevity, not even considered short stories at all at the time. They were vehemently rejected time after time by the mainstream magazines causing him almost to give up the notion of ever becoming a writer. Now this brevity of conveying a fullness and richness of experience in what Dame Edith Sitwell called a "marrow of form" has almost become a necessary standard. Both his “distilled” style and his reliance on dialogue to tell his story eluded the normal contemporary reader of his early days. There was an ingrained custom towards a much longer, more expository experience. His roots were in drama. It is a little-known fact that Purdy sstarted writing plays as a child, crafting them to win his elder brother's approval. Purdy would act all the characters in the plays, and play them out using stick-figures, which is consistent with the early origins of Federico Garcia Lorca.

His culturally-counterpointed use of in medias res (beginning his narratives in the middle of things) is extensive. He begins where most writers leave off. This is all part of the "magnificent simplicity" which is woven into all his work. His work, totally against the grain in its day, is accepted without question by the attention span of today.

Gore Vidal indicates further obstacles to his more widespread recognition in that it was impossible to reconcile his work that was labeled and published as “gay” to some of his other works and especially to the Faulkneresque novels based on his ancestors. Even today, as Vidal asserts, it is a problem that needs a solution. Edith Sitwell had recognized this when she stated that Purdy ”has enormous variety".

Recognition

Purdy received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993). He was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won 2 Guggenheim Fellowships (in 1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation.

In 2005 the novel that had been the impetus to hold Purdy’s reputation at bay for decades, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, received the Clifton Fadiman Award at the prestigious Mercantile Library. It was presented to Purdy with a stunning assessment of the novel by Jonathan Franzen; thus opening the door to a different kind of future assessment for his entire body of work.

The American composer Robert Helps (1928–2001), a close friend of Purdy's, used Purdy's texts in two of his works, The Running Sun and Gossamer Noons, both of which have been recorded by the soprano Bethany Beardslee.

The American song composer, Richard Hundley, composed many beautiful songs to poems of James Purdy, his friend as well of several decades in New York. Some of his more magnificent works set to Purdy’s poetry like Come Ready and See Me, have been praised as true classics in the medium of the American song.

Publications

Poetry

• Mr. Evening: A story & nine poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1968.
• On the Rebound: A story & nine poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1970.
• The Running Sun. New York: 1971.
• Sunshine is an Only Child. New York: Aloe Editions, 1973.
• Lessons & Complaints. New York: Nadja Editions, 1976.
• I Will Arrest the Bird that has No Light. Northridge: Santa Susana Press, 1977.
• Did I Say Yes, Did I Say No (prose poem). New York: Bellevue Press, 1978.
• Don’t Let the Snow Fall: A poem / Dawn: A story (editd by Andre Bernard). Utrecht: Sub Signo Libelli, 1985.
• The Brooklyn Branding Parlors (with artwork by Vassilis Voglis). New York: Contact II Publications, 1986.
• Are You in the Winter Tree? Utrecht: Sub Signo Libelli, 1987.
• Collected Poems. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 1990.
• The Blue House: Forbidden poems. Utrecht: Hugin & Munin, 2004.

Plays

• "Mr. Cough Syrup and the Phantom Sex." december 8.1 (1966): 175-177.
• "Wedding Finger." New Directions in Prose and Poetry 28 (1974): 77-98.
• "True." New Directions in Prose and Poetry 34 (1977): 140-145.
• A Day After the Fair: A Collection of Plays and Short Stories. New York: Note of Hand Publishers, 1977. ("A Day After the Fair," "Wedding Finger," and "True").
• "Now." New Directions in Prose and Poetry 41 (1980): 98-105.
• Proud Flesh. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1980. ("Strong," "Clearing in the Forest," "Now," and "What Is It, Zach?")
• "Adeline: A Short Play." Second Coming 10 (1-2) (1981): 6-20.
• "Adeline" and "Wonderful Happy Days." Conjunctions 2 (spring/summer 1982): 60-83.
• "The Berry-Picker." New Directions in Prose and Poetry 45 (1982): 157-165.
• "Heatstroke." Dirty Bum: A Magazine 1 (fall 1987): 14-26.
• "Immaculate Housekeeping." Dirty Bum: A Magazine 2 (winter 1987/1988): 22-25.
• "Souvenirs." City Lights Review 2 (1988): 64-70.
• "Joker in the Pack." Red Bass 13 (1988): 7-9.
• "Bright Summer Stars". Lord John Ten: 10: A Celebration (edited by Dennis Etchinson). North Ridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1988. 13-22.
• "Band Music." City Lights Review 9 (1990): 103-113. (This one-act was performed at Theater for the New City in 1990)
• In the Night of Time, and four other plays. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 1992. (the title play, "Ruthanna Elder," "Enduring Zeal," "The Rivalry of Dolls," and Paradise Circus").
• Selected Plays. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2009. "Brice," "The Paradise Circus," "Where Quentin Goes," and "Ruthanna Elder").

Novels

• Malcolm. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1959.
• The Nephew. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1960.
• Cabot Wright Begins. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964.
• Eustace Chisholm & the Works. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1967.
• I Am Elijah Thrush. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
• In a Shallow Grave. New York: Arbor House, 1975.
• Narrow Rooms. New York: Arbor House, 1978.
• On Glory’s Course. New York: Viking, 1984.
• In the Hollow of His Hand. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986.
• Garments the Living Wear. San Francisco: City Lights, 1989.
• Out with the Stars. London: Peter Owen, 1992; San Francisco: City Lights, 1992.
• Gertrude of Stony Island Ave. London: Peter Owen, 1997; New York: William Morrow, 1998.

Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys trilogy

• Jeremy’s Version. New York: Doubleday, 1970.
• The House of the Solitary Maggot. New York: Doubleday, 1974.
• Mourner’s Below. New York: Viking, 1981.

Short fiction

• 63: Dream Palace: A novella. New York: William-Frederick Press, 1956 (first edition, privately published; covers designed by Purdy).
  • London: Gollancz, 1957 (first commercially published edition).
  • Published as Color of Darkness. New York: New Directions, 1957.
• Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, and other stories. New York: William-Frederick Press, 1956 (first edition, privately published; illustrated by Purdy).
• Children Is All. New York: New Directions, 1961. (Also contains two plays: Children is All & Cracks.)
• Sleep Tight. New York: Nadja Editions, 1979.
• The Candles of Your Eyes (illustrated by Ed Colker). New York: Nadja Editions, 1985.
• The Candles of Your Eyes, and thirteen other stories. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.
• 63: Dream Palace: Selected stories 1956-1987. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1991.
• Kitty Blue: A fairy tale and a song. Utrecht: The Ballroom, 1993.
• Brawith. Utrecht: Hugin & Munin, 1999.
• Moe’s Villa, and other stories. London: Avon Books, 2000; New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.

SHE WAS A GIRL. Poem James Purdy. Music Joost Kleppe.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy Hyperion,

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

Fonds

• James Purdy Archives at the University of Rochester

External links

Audio / video

• James Purdy at YouTube
• Radio interview with Don Swaim at Wired for Books

Books

• James Purdy at Amazon.com

About

• James Purdy 1914-2009 at the Poetry Foundation
• James Purdy obituary at The Guardian.
• An Autobiographical Sketch by James Purdy
• Who Is James Purdy? - an appreciation from Edward Albee
• Remembering James Purdy Esquire at Exquisite Corpse.
• James Purdy: Leaving home is the same as staying put unless you've never left, essay by Martin Kich at Ohio Legacy Series
• A conversation with James Purdy
• A compendium of New York Times' reviews and articles on James Purdy and his work
• Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, Vol. VI, No. 1. Special issue devoted to James Purdy, features essays, interviews, a bibliography, and more. (.PDF)

Etc.

• The James Purdy Society