James Purdy - Biography - Literary Criticism With Views On Obstacles To Wider Acceptance

Literary Criticism With Views On Obstacles To Wider Acceptance

Through all his work, he has dealt primarily with outsiders. Women, blacks, Native American Indians (he was 1/8 Ojibway American Indian), homosexuals (living far outside the conventional gay community) -- literally 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 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. And much-later writers like David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Becket (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. Dame Edith Sitwell had recognized this when she stated that Purdy ”has enormous variety".