The Incompleat Novelist
Eustace Chisholm and the Works.
by James Purdy.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 241 pp. $5.95.
James Purdy was born in Ohio in 1923. His parents separated when he was quite young, and as a result he attended schools in a goodly number of Ohio towns while being shuttled back and forth among relatives. These Ohio towns would later become the terrain of many of his short stories and of a novel, The Nephew. Not surprisingly, in all of his books Purdy has written about boys without fathers: Malcolm, in Malcolm, Cliff in The Nephew, Fenton Riddleway in the best of all his books, 63: Dream Palace, Cabot Wright in Cabot Wright Begins, and in the book at hand, Amos Ratcliffe and Daniel Haws.
Purdy attended the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico and later did graduate work at Chicago and at the University of Madrid. He then taught for four years at Lawrence College in Wisconsin before leaving in 1953 to write full-time. In 1956, angered by his inability to find an American publisher for his work, Purdy had some of his stories, most notably the novella 63: Dream Palace, privately printed. British reviewers and critics were so enthusiastic—Purdy has generally done better with critics and with fellow writers than with the common reader—that a British edition was quickly issued, and an American one, from an embarrassed New Directions, which had earlier rejected the manuscript, followed in 1957.
Among British critics, the late Dame Edith Sitwell was a particular champion of Purdy’s writing, asserting roundly and with characteristic generosity that he would become “one of the greatest writers produced in America during the last hundred years.” This is going very high, I think, for reasons I will discuss later. But in any event, since the reception accorded the publication of his first stories, the way has been quite a bit smoother for Purdy. He has had two Guggenheim grants and one from the Ford Foundation, and he has lectured at Yale and had his unpublished manuscripts collected there. He has published Malcolm (1959), of all his books the most even and the funniest, but also slick and faddish and best described, I believe, by a slick and faddish epithet, campy. Purdy has also written The Nephew (1960), a novel, and Children is All (1962), a collection of short stories and playlets—two books of which it is only possible to say that they go on for a total of 393 pages of what may or may not have been intended as a terrible revenge on the publishing industry. The stories, with the exception of “Daddy Wolf,” are of a surpassing dullness, and of The Nephew all I can remember is a lot of old women sitting on porches and saying to each other “no juice if you please. I’ve drunk so much orangeade today I have a sour stomach.” What these books show is the astonishing Ohio flatness that Purdy falls into when he writes in a straight realistic mode about ordinary small town people, as though the correct way to treat the dullness of life in Zanesville were to write a dull book. Purdy knows better than that, of course, but the point seems to be that he does his best work when he gets away from small towns and ordinary people and writes instead about people whose specialness, usually of a sexual variety, leads them into Gothic or surrealist terrain that matches and objectifies their agonized states of soul.
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It is just such a Gothic atmosphere that pervades 63: Dream Palace, and hovers in the Spanish moss and Mississippi forest of the last part of Eustace Chisholm and the Works. Purdy in this vein is closer to Southern writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams than to any of his fellow mid-Westerners. Like the former, he uses the Gothic as a function of what he sees and the way he sees it; it is connected with his view that the “rationalism and liberalism” of our age has yielded a “simple-minded definition of human nature.” Purdy’s strongest work, I think it fair to say, is written in this Gothic or Surrealist mode. The plot of Cabot Wright Begins, for instance, a novel about a Yaleman rapist with upwards of 300 victims, has the funniest comedy and the sharpest satire Purdy has yet managed. In this book Purdy pops away smartly not only at certain epiphenomena of the publishing industry (the New Yorker, Gooey and Girly, Your Rarebit is Running) but at an entire society, and with great exuberance and brilliance of invective. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere Purdy has serious trouble with his plot, and despite the book’s obvious merits one formed the suspicion after Cabot Wright Begins that he was not about to become the major novelist Dame Edith Sitwell had predicted.
Eustace Chisholm and the Works confirms that suspicion. It has a good novella under a lot of fat, but it’s not a novel. Purdy simply cannot write novels, and when he tries to stretch out a novella, as he does here, the result can be very heavy going indeed. The book is about an aspiring writer in Depression days in Chicago. He has an ex-wife named Carla and lives with a salesman named Clayton Harms. Chisholm functions in the book mainly as a raisonneur who watches and comments on the love that grows up between Amos (“Rat”) Ratcliffe and Daniel Haws. Amos is young, clever, and handsome, and studies Greek at the University of Chicago. Haws is older, an almost illiterate ex-coal-miner from downstate who falls in love with Ratcliffe but can’t speak of that love or even acknowledge it to himself except by sleep-walking into the boy’s room every night in the boarding house where they both live. Ratcliffe goes sour because of his unhappy love of Haws and starts selling himself around. Haws runs away and enlists in the army because he can’t acknowledge to himself that he loves Ratcliffe. At appropriate intervals Eustace Chisholm comments that “the whole U.S.A. is nothing but Daniels and Amoses whispering and muttering . . . in the fallen darkness,” a somewhat strained and matey thesis to begin with, it seems to me, and one not much recommended by Purdy’s heavy management of it. Eustace goes around nailing things down in the Freudian way: Ratcliffe, we learn, had been abandoned by his father and slept with his mother, and Haws’s father had died leaving the boy to function as son-husband in the household.
As the novel progresses, the characters become more like dossiers than people. Purdy carries this mistake even further with Maureen O’Dell, the main woman character, who is an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Maureen O’Dell’s mother had (1) “withheld any knowledge of the human body from her,” (2) “had refused to toilet-train her,” and (3) “at her first discharge of menstrual blood had been more dismayed than her daughter, and had steadfastly sworn she did not know what the bleeding meant or what to do about it.” Eventually we get everything but her Stanford-Binet and her undergraduate transcript. This is Purdy at his most inept, writing like a particularly keen group leader.
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The book doesn’t get any better until the last section, “Under Earth’s Deepest Stream,” when it breaks with this method entirely and starts working in the Gothic mode to say something about how terrible and beautiful life can be beyond positivist or rationalist categories of any kind. Trite as it may sound when described in this way, the sequence has considerable power, and for a simple reason: Purdy is working here with matter that nobody has conceptualized for him. Instead of treating his characters as analysands, Purdy tells us about the end of Daniel Haws in an army camp in Mississippi where a functionary named Captain Stadger almost literally carves him into pieces in a manic love-hate relationship that hasn’t made its way into the textbooks yet but that becomes by Purdy’s narrative powers ominously real. This section has the strongest writing in the book; it offers intense and brilliant flashes of the lives of desperate and crazed people—the kind of writing that characterizes Purdy at his best. But brilliant as they are, the flashes come too late to save the book.
Behind Purdy’s trouble with the size and structure of the novel lies, if I am right, petulance. He has never forgiven his boyhood, or the Ohio towns, or the Depression, or any of the dark and terrible wounds he doubtless received when young. Accordingly, his books come to resemble a wheelchair careening in ever-narrowing circles, always returning to the theme of the lost childhood. In Cabot Wright Begins it appeared briefly as though Purdy might break this circle, widen his range, and transform the petulance into satire. But it hasn’t worked out that way and in Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Purdy is back at lost children again. There is something essentially soft about this stubborn petulance, and in the attitude toward the rest of the world which it entails. It has prevented Purdy from introducing into his books a larger range of characters, or a larger chunk of the real world, and hence his lost children are never seen in their proper relation to reality. Unless Purdy succeeds in resolving his own sense of petulant deprivation, I would bet against his ever writing a genuine novel.
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