Unsettling James Purdy

 

Edward Albee’s forgotten play  Malcolm was a Broadway flop lasting only seven performances. The play’s premiere, on January 11, 1966, followed 20 half-price preview shows at the Shubert Theatre. Adapted from James Purdy’s darkly comic novel, which had been celebrated by Dorothy Parker on its publication in 1959, the play was a critical and commercial failure. “Of all Albee’s plays,” biographer Mel Gussow reckons, “Malcolm is probably the one with the fewest admirers, the easiest to categorize as a mistake.”
 
Just as dreamy teenager Malcolm was ill-fated in Purdy’s novel, so was his namesake play destined to die young, or so it seemed. This outcome was painful for Purdy; had the adaptation been a success, it would have promoted his career a good deal. But the play’s failure had the effect of diminishing the reputation of the novel and of Purdy in general, after he had received mostly praise for his first five books. With Purdy’s next novel, the harrowing Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967), the author would receive some praise but also damnation from the critics. By contrast, Albee, propelled by the success of the 1966 film adaptation of his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), survived the Malcolm debacle unscathed.
 
Albee’s adaptation of Malcolm was panned by drama critics. Despite the playwright’s huge past success, not a single critic complimented his insipid adaptation. Facing low ticket sales and half-empty houses, Albee’s devoted producers, Clinton Wilder and Richard Barr, decided to close the show. To some observers, it seemed incredible that a playwright of Albee’s caliber could have taken such a steep fall. After all, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had run for almost two full years on Broadway. In the aftermath of Malcolm, critic Richard L. Coe broke down the financials and concluded that “there is certainly something grievous wrong that any play by a leading playwright, no matter how poorly received, is unable to survive better than this.” Tickets should have been offered at half-price rather than canceling the show after just seven performances, Coe reasoned. To insiders, the rapid shutdown was perplexing.
 
The adaptation, however, was ultimately built to fail. Albee stripped from Purdy’s story a number of thematically central characters, including Estel Blanc, an African American undertaker whose appearances bookend the novel. Albee also removed a Black jazz musician, George Leeds, and whitewashed two other Black characters, Gus and his ex-wife, Melba. Finally, Albee removed the tattoo parlor that was based on a boutique run by Purdy’s friend, Samuel Steward, the former professor turned sexual revolutionary. As a result of Albee’s unhappy choices, his adaptation is, unlike Purdy’s lively novel, drab and unengaging.
 
Beyond the inherent problems involved in adapting such a maverick text, Albee, who usually held a tight rein, was oddly disengaged from the production of Malcolm. According to Gussow, Albee decided to regard Malcolm as “an experiment” and let director Alan Schneider “run the show.” Experiment involves risk, and Albee was ready to take a big risk with Purdy’s story, but Schneider “was never enthusiastic about the project.” Even the Shubert Theatre, a huge musical house, was a poor selection as a venue; the producers could not have expected to pack such a house with an experimental play like Malcolm.
 
Purdy was allowed little input into Albee’s dramatic choices and could offer feedback only toward the end of the process. When he viewed rehearsals, he sent Albee telegrams containing brief but urgent suggestions. Albee, who had planned to finish the play in August 1965 and begin rehearsals in October, was still completing his revisions at the end of the year, amid preview shows. There was thus very little time to make significant changes in response to Purdy’s concerns. This was likely by design; director Peter Hall, who worked with the playwright in the late 1960s, said that Albee “makes a religion of putting people off. He loves destabilizing people.”
 
But to write a bad adaptation — what could have motivated Albee to make such a self-destructive move? Albee was attracted to Purdy’s picaresque tale because of its theme of corrupted innocence, which runs through many of his own plays. “But why tell [this story] again,” Gussow reasonably asks, “unless he had something to add to it?” Albee added nothing good but instead sucked the lifeblood out of Purdy’s best-known novel. As Gussow shows, Albee was not psychologically well during 1965 when he was working on Malcolm, often drinking to excess, and his focus was dispersed across various projects. Many noted that Albee exhibited “a prickly personality marked by malice.” Paranoia, mind games, and maliciousness were traits that became more prominent during this period. Albee had come to regard Purdy as at once a genius, a rival, and a growing threat. All of this suggests that he adapted Malcolm in less than good faith.
 
The critics agreed that Albee’s play seemed meaningless or impenetrable, and Albee seemed strangely content with that judgment. Interpreting the play as a religious allegory, New York Times theater critic Stanley Kauffmann posed a series of possible readings before concluding that “these questions might be stimulating except for one lack: we are never convinced that Mr. Albee himself knows the answers or — which is worse — that he cares.” Albee’s play, he went on, is “more pretentious than pertinent, is fashionably disdainful of communication, is shiny with an artistic veneer that may cover as much vacancy as depth.” The adaptation failed to do what Purdy succeeds in doing throughout his corpus — “sustain mystery.”
 
Albee’s play was less an adaptation than a hostile takeover. The “property” was now half Albee’s, and he succeeded in co-opting and degrading Purdy’s signature work. After the debacle, Purdy wrote in the Harvard Advocate: “I think that Malcolm would do better as a film […] it really requires the camera.” But, in fact, no film, musical, or opera was ever made from Malcolm, unlike many lesser-known Purdy works that have been optioned, and in many cases produced, in North America and Europe. Why? Because Albee controlled the rights, and he was extremely envious of the praise Purdy had received, which Albee privately felt was overinflated. No less than Susan Sontag had declared in 1964: “Anything Purdy writes is a literary event of importance. He is, to my mind, indisputably one of the half-dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously.” In Malcolm, Albee saw an opportunity to control Purdy’s story, refusing to relinquish the rights despite Purdy’s repeated requests. The merger placed Malcolm in the middle of two mad geniuses; as editor and publisher Don Weise, who worked with both authors, told me: “When you put Edward Albee and James Purdy together, it’s like an explosion.”
 
Albee and Purdy are both gone now, and their reputations are wildly divergent, with Albee a globally famous playwright and Purdy for the most part forgotten, aside from a small but diverse cadre of intense admirers that includes John Waters and Jonathan Franzen. The debacle of Albee’s Malcolm has been expunged from history. In his 2012 book Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, Christopher Bram excises Purdy from the narrative entirely, and although he discusses Albee’s career in the 1960s, he never mentions Malcolm. On the other hand, Gore Vidal hailed Purdy as an “authentic American genius” in a long New York Times essay entitled “The Novelist as Outlaw,” and novelist and critic Jerome Charyn has called Purdy “America’s outlaw of fiction” and “one of the very best writers we have.”
 
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Purdy began writing stories as a boy in Findlay, Ohio, and became serious about trying to publish them after graduating from college in Bowling Green. Through graduate school at the University of Chicago, service in the Army, employment with the US government, short teaching stints in Cuba and West Virginia, and a professorship at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, Purdy continued writing short stories. But he had a hell of a time getting them published. His first publication was in 1939, but he did not publish again until 1946 (in Prairie Schooner), and then not again until 1955 (in The Black Mountain Review). The world, it seemed, was not yet ready for Purdy’s pursuit of the outrageous and (as he put it) the “impossible.”
 
In 1956, with financing from his friend Osborn Andreas, a Chicago businessman and literary critic, Purdy privately published a collection of stories. Later that year, his partner, Jorma Sjoblom, a chemist who had been Purdy’s colleague at Lawrence College, financed a private edition of Purdy’s novella, 63: Dream Palace. Purdy mailed out copies of these two books, adorned with his Cocteauesque line drawings, to writers, critics, and others he intuitively felt would resonate with the work. Before long, letters filled with praise and appreciation poured in from Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes, John Cowper Powys, Elizabeth Bishop, Thornton Wilder, Virgil Thomson, Tennessee Williams, and many more.
 
The grandest figure of all to reply was Dame Edith Sitwell. At the time, Sitwell was revered by many as a magnificent poet and influential tastemaker — a visionary, a great English eccentric. As Albee noted in a New York Times piece appearing soon before Malcolm opened, her “opinions were strong and more often than not unfavorable.” After receiving Purdy’s collection at Montegufoni, the Sitwell family’s Tuscan castle, Sitwell wrote to say that she thought several of the stories to be “superb; nothing short of masterpieces,” possessing a “terrible, heart-breaking quality.” Stunned, Purdy was prompted to send her 63: Dream Palace. In late 1956, Sitwell wrote: “What a wonderful book! It is a masterpiece from every point of view,” and Purdy was “truly a writer of genius.” Through Sitwell’s auspices, Purdy found a publisher in England, which led to a contract with New Directions in the United States.
 
Sitwell broadcast her praise in published reviews starting with his first British book: “Mr. Purdy is a superb writer, using all the fires of the heart and the crystallising powers of the brain.” She was “convinced that, long after my death, James Purdy will come to be recognized as one of the greatest writers America has ever produced.” This kind of lavish praise inspired many readers to seek Purdy out, but it also caused some of his contemporaries, including Albee, to seethe with envy. In 1980, Albee confessed that Purdy had “received public praise of a fulsomeness — the extravagance of enthusiasm — that may have sown envy and maggoty urgings toward revenge in the hearts of many.” Malcolm was Purdy’s follow-up to his 1957 collection Color of Darkness, his first commercial book, and many critics were curious to see whether Purdy could produce longer work that might justify accolades such as Sitwell’s.
 
Malcolm remains Purdy’s signature book, an enigmatic tale of a towheaded teenage cipher adrift in a large city, searching for his missing father. Sent to various “addresses” by Professor Cox, he encounters all kinds of fascinating and sometimes slippery adults. Chapters focus on characters who are based on colorful people Purdy had met and befriended in Chicago from the late 1930s through the 1950s. For example, the models for Eloisa and Jerome Brace were Gertrude Abercrombie, the bohemian surrealist painter, “jazz queen,” and friend of Dizzy Gillespie, and her second husband, Frank Sandiford, an ex-con and memoirist; and the characters of Girard Girard and Madame Girard were based on Osborn Andreas, Purdy’s friend and benefactor, and his imperious, hard-drinking wife, Miriam. Most notoriously, the model for Professor Robinolte was Samuel Steward, the English professor turned tattoo artist, pornographer, and sexual revolutionary (who became much better known after Justin Spring’s 2010 biography, Secret Historian, was published).
 
Purdy’s Malcolm was mostly favorably reviewed. R. W. B. Lewis situated the novel in the “fine old comic picaresque tradition,” calling it “a work of baffling, perverse and very real distinction” and praising Purdy as “a writer of exceptional talent, who must be acknowledged in the company of Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison.” Dorothy Parker, known more for her biting wit than for her generosity with praise, hailed Malcolm as a “most prodigiously funny book” and called Purdy “a writer of the highest rank in originality, insight and power.” This was the kind of praise that made Albee turn green.
 
Purdy became known for his tight dialogue, which led playwrights like Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams to encourage him to write plays. Hellman not only connected Purdy with potential producers, but she also proposed him for the Academy of Arts and Letters, a nomination seconded by Dorothy Parker and Glenway Wescott, the poet and novelist. Although the first play Purdy wrote, Madonna, was not ultimately produced, the experience empowered him to compose two short dramas, Cracks and Children Is All, which were published in book form in 1962 (and which influenced some of Tennessee Williams’s later work, according to John Uecker, who was Williams’s last assistant and Purdy’s longtime friend and assistant). The attention of theater heavyweights like Hellman and Williams was likely vexing to the up-and-coming Albee.
 
In 1961, Gene Andrewski, a Paris Review editor, adapted some of Purdy’s stories, mounting them as Malcolm and Others by James Purdy at the Poetry Center in New York. The production featured a famed acting couple, Zachary Scott and Ruth Ford, and Purdy himself played the narrator; also starring were Betty Field and Eli Wallach, whose Broadway debut had been in Williams’s The Rose Tattoo in 1951. Albee was thus not the first to put Purdy on stage or even the first to show interest in bringing Malcolm to Broadway. In 1962, newspapers reported that playwright William Archibald was adapting Purdy’s novel into a Broadway play. Archibald had adapted Henry James’s short novel The Turn of the Screw as a successful play, The Innocents, in 1950, which was produced as a film (with a script by Archibald and Truman Capote) in 1961. Of course, his plans for Malcolm would not come to fruition once Albee became involved.
 
In 1963, the play Color of Darkness: An Evening in the World of James Purdy, directed by Bill Francisco of the Yale Drama School, was performed at the off-Broadway Writers Stage Theatre. Composer Ned Rorem, who wrote incidental music for the production, wrote in his diary: “Not the least effective element of Color of Darkness […] is the music which plays almost constantly, even during intermission when the taped saxophone wails into the washrooms.” Gloria Vanderbilt, a future admirer of Purdy’s poetry, was Rorem’s “date” for the performance. Purdy and Rorem became friends. The culmination of the evening was a performance of Purdy’s short play Cracks starring Eleanor Phelps, who had just returned from touring My Fair Lady. Edward Albee was in attendance, and seems to have been inspired, since he began adapting Malcolm in 1965.
 

 
Why was Albee’s play such a miserable failure, receiving universally unfavorable reviews, despite the involvement of a big-name playwright, not to mention the veteran actress Estelle Parsons? In his stage debut, Matthew Cowles played Malcolm and, by all reports, handled the role well. Privately, Purdy wrote that Cowles had “much of the naiveté and innocence — very good — but lacks the ‘divine’ or ‘princely’ aura” and “doesn’t suggest deeper meaning.” But “anyhow Matthew Cowles was fine.” The director, Alan Schneider, had previously helmed the US premieres of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice (1964), along with a number of other Broadway hits. He was not excited about Albee’s take on Malcolm, however, and it showed. Moreover, Albee allowed the production to fall out of his control for some reason, perhaps because he knew his adaptation was lackluster. The New Yorker panned the play, and Kauffmann in the Times, after praising the production as “exquisite,” dismissed Albee’s adaptation as hollow and boring. Although the critics were hostile, most of them made clear that Purdy’s novel was not the source of the problem. Kauffmann, for instance, took care to stress the many “changes from Mr. Purdy’s novel (too lengthy to examine here),” and the review in Choice noted that Purdy’s book is a “clever and well written novel.”
 
In the late ’60s, Purdy stated publicly that he had liked Albee’s adaptation, but his personal notes on the script make clear that he did not. In these notes, Purdy recorded that “Albee’s concept of Malcolm” was “very different from” his own and complained that the removal of key characters was not based on “dramatic exigency but show[ed] a radically different concept.” By 1989, Purdy was complaining openly about the changes, telling Patricia Lear that Albee “couldn’t find anyone to play the midget, or dwarf, so he changed it to a one hundred and twenty-year-old man, and that doesn’t work at all.” Privately, he wrote that “Albee removed two crucial characters,” which is “like removing Hamlet’s ghost father and the Queen from Hamlet” — the play “can’t work as Malcolm without these.” By 2000, Purdy was even more forthright, revealing to Richard Canning that he found Albee’s adaptation “terrible. Awful. I like Edward Albee, though. I’m glad he did it. It had moments, but I don’t know that anyone could put Malcolm on the stage.” According to Purdy’s notes on the first page of the playscript, “none of this worked dramatically or visually — Dead.”
 
Remarkably, Albee removed all the African American characters, draining the story of much of its richness and diversity. As Purdy complained in his private notes, “Albee ignored the fact that nearly half the characters in Malcolm are colored. He made it all white.” More pointedly, he remarked that the adaptation “excludes carefully and thoroughly all the Negro elements (I can only guess why).” Albee also did not include much of the modern jazz that Purdy had heard at Gertrude Abercrombie’s salons, which plays an important role in the novel. For example, he stripped out the character of George Leeds, a Black jazz pianist who is based upon John Lewis, a future member of the Modern Jazz Quartet, whom Purdy met at Abercrombie’s house. On top of all this, Albee whitewashed some of Purdy’s Black characters, including the leather-clad motorcyclist Gus and his ex-wife, Melba, a nightclub singer. In the production, white actors played Gus and Melba.

 
It’s possible that deeply seated racism may have played a part in Albee’s purging of Blackness from Purdy’s story. Notably, the Albee estate, in 2017, denied a small professional theater company in Oregon permission to cast a Black actor as Nick in their planned production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The director subsequently aired his indignation on social media, and online outrage ensued, with pundits asserting that, if the Albee estate was racist and out of touch, then, by implication, Albee was too. The New York Times covered the story under a sensational headline: “A Black Actor in ‘Virginia Woolf’? Not Happening, Albee Estate Says.”
 
Born in 1928, Albee grew up in a wealthy family. His adoptive father owned a few theaters, and his grandfather had been the general manager of the Keith-Albee circuit, which held a near-monopoly on Vaudeville theaters and talent in much of the United States. Albee’s mother, with whom he had a torturous love-hate relationship, was an overt racist. The composer Noel Farrand, Albee’s neighbor and longtime friend, said that the “regal and forbidding” Mrs. Albee was “a very bigoted woman” who was “ruling Edward in a far from benevolent way.” Albee himself said that the representation of his mother as a censorious termagant in his 1991 play Three Tall Women was “fairly accurate.” As he commented to Gussow, aside from “vile remarks” about Blacks and Jews, the Albees would have passed “as a perfectly normal middle-class WASP family.” Another friend recalled that “nobody even had black help; it was all Irish and Scottish.”
 
While Albee grew up in an over-privileged, toxic environment, Purdy, by contrast, came from a humble, struggling Midwestern family, and he felt looked down upon by his more affluent peers. Purdy would often linger to listen to the stories of two older African American women who prepared desserts for his mother to serve at their home, which she had converted into a boarding house after her divorce in 1930. Purdy’s early story “Eventide,” which featured dialogue in vernacular between two Black women, was inspired both by these early experiences and by his absorption of jazz culture in Chicago. This story, along with the title of his collection Color of Darkness, caused early readers of his privately published manuscript, including Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes, Angus Wilson, and Edith Sitwell, to believe that Purdy was African American.
 
Unlike Purdy, Albee hardly ever featured Black characters in his works. Despite the resistance of his estate, however, he was not personally opposed to Black actors starring in Virginia Woolf and had, in fact, supported an all-Black performance of the play at Howard University, even writing some changes to facilitate the production. Another all-Black production was mounted in Chicago not long after the Oregon fiasco. The Albee estate has said that making only Nick African American “essentially transforms George and Martha into older white racists, which is not what Edward’s play is about,” but that “virtually all the roles” in Albee’s plays “can and should be done in a diverse, color-conscious way.”
 
In short, it wasn’t mere racism that caused Albee to expunge the Black characters from his adaptation of Malcolm. Perhaps he removed the African American elements of the novel for the same reason he removed the tattoo parlor: to drain the story of life and relevance. Combined with a lifeless set centered on distracting treadmills, which never quite worked right, and Albee’s persistent delays and lack of focus, the result, predictably, was a disaster. Even the music, composed by Albee’s former romantic partner, William Flanagan, lacked dynamism and was ill-suited to Purdy’s vision. Purdy told Marie-Claude Profit that Albee’s play “was not my work. It was rather gloomy. He cut out all the humor. And he changed all the blacks to whites and the musical score, instead of being jazz, was sort of avant-garde music of many years ago. It had a very ambitious score.” Flanagan was not associated with jazz but rather art music, so he would not have been able to compose convincing bebop. As Purdy wrote in his private notes, “Mr. Flanagan’s musical score was distinguished, but doesn’t convey all the shades of the novel — it is sparse like everything else in the production.” Ned Rorem, who had written to Purdy expressing interest in composing music for the play, wrote in his diary that Flanagan’s music betrayed “an absence of direction, hence its untheatricality.”
 
Albee’s radical changes to Purdy’s novel drained meaning and pleasure from the work. In the draft of an article intended for Life magazine, Purdy revealed his suspicions about Albee’s character. He complained that Albee “altered some of the [novel’s] characters in line with his own concept of ‘evil.’” None of his own characters were evil, Purdy wrote, they simply lacked “values by which to live,” but Albee, either for dramatic reasons “or because he reads life this way,” made two characters “actively evil […] purposely harmful and conniving.” Art imitates life: Albee was notoriously fascinated with — and given to — petty mind games, and some commentators have identified his ferocious spats with Flanagan as a key source for the verbal warfare in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As Blanche DuBois remarks in A Streetcar Named Desire, “[S]ome things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.”
 
Against all good sense, Albee courted not success with Malcolm but outright failure. He was willing to suffer the play bombing to ensure taking down his rival. As Robert Brustein wrote in The New Republic, “Albee’s declared intention was to attract readers to Purdy’s writings, but he seems to have precisely the opposite effect.” The retrospective conclusion of Malcolm’s producer, Richard Barr, is revealing: “Edward wrote that play with a sword instead of a pen and we overproduced it.” In a dark emotional place, often pickled in alcohol, feeling “envy and maggoty urgings toward revenge,” Albee plunged that sword into his rival. Purdy intuited this motivation, stating in the Harvard Advocate that, “[a]s a matter of fact, I never believed Malcolm was on Broadway, and I don’t now, and it probably never was.” After the play closed, he told Roger Straus that he was “recovering from Armageddon at the Shubert! Let’s have the Mafia sprit away the next adapter.”
 
For his part, Albee had some final thoughts about the catastrophe, which he shared in a letter to Flanagan. The letter was sent from Europe, where Albee was on an extended tour, dining with Dick and Liz in London, discussing a potential film collaboration with Franco Zeffirelli and Rudolf Nureyev in Rome. All this excitement had quite wiped the disaster of Malcolm from his mind. In fact, he felt good, though he admitted to being a bit “guilty and uneasy” about his sense of well-being. “Indeed, why was I not going into a decline?” he wondered. “Why was I not sleepless, disoriented, and given to feelings of worthlessness and subject to writers-block?” On the contrary, after the regenerative violence of taking down Purdy, his next big hit, A Delicate Balance, was flowing rapidly from his pen.
 
I am of good mind, am working, resting, and — at most — mildly curious to know, when the time comes, whether or not the commercial failure of Malcolm was a true statement of its artistic value, as well. Otherwise, I couldn’t care less about it. (Had it not been an adaptation!!!! Well now!!!).
 
Albee’s coldness toward Purdy here is astonishing. Clearly, for Albee, Malcolm’s failure was a kind of twisted success, with Purdy rather resembling his own creation, a naïve innocent exploited and discarded by a jaded sophisticate.
 
 
“Maggoty Urgings Toward Revenge”: Edward Albee’s Adaptation of James Purdy’s “Malcolm”
By Michael Snyder. Los Angeles Review of Books , September  9,2020.

Michael Snyder, an assistant teaching professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, is completing a biography of James Purdy. Snyder is the co-author and editor of a new book, Our Osage Hills, which features lost early work by John Joseph Mathews (Lehigh University Press), and the author of John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer (University of Oklahoma Press).

At first he was feted. But then his novel about a handsome, Yale-educated serial rapist made him an outcast. Ten years after his death, has the scabrous author’s time finally come?

 On 6 August 2015, the American author and playwright James Purdy left New York for the last time. Bound for Denmark, he travelled in a small flip-top leather case with a combination lock. This was inside the rucksack of Maria Cecilia Holt, Harvard doctor of theology, who was asked to produce the necessary papers while going through security at Boston Logan airport.

 “I’d collected James’s ashes from his literary executor,” she explains. “It had been quite traumatic. So I presented security with the papers and the ashes and they said, ‘Ma’am, we’re sorry for your loss.’ I began to cry. I wanted to say, ‘It’s not my loss, it’s yours. America is losing a great writer. He’s leaving the US for ever – and no one even cares.’”

 Holt gave the ashes to Charles Lock, professor of English literature at Copenhagen University, who put them on his bookshelf – and that’s where they have been for three-and-a-half years. However, on 13 March, exactly 10 years after Purdy’s death at the age of 94, Lock will travel with the remains to the graveyard of St Mary’s Church in Weedon Lois, Northamptonshire, where they will be interred next to the grave of the English poet Edith Sitwell, in accord with Purdy’s final request.
 
“The idea was appealing in its sheer oddness,” says Lock, who was asked to help by Purdy’s literary executor. “I don’t think there’s another American writer of such importance buried in Britain. TS Eliot, of course, but he’d long been a British subject.”
 
When Purdy died, obituaries eulogised him as a unique, fearless voice of American fiction. They praised his bizarre, savage wit, his dreamlike vernacular prose and its ability to conjure up gothic midwestern landscapes of beguiled innocence, grotesque violence and gender-fluid racial and sexual obsession. But they also pointed out that this white, midwestern writer who wrote about outsiders – women, African Americans, gay people, Native Americans – was himself cast out by the US literary establishment.
 
Despite praise in his lifetime from Langston Hughes, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, Gore Vidal, as well as – in later years – John Waters and Jonathan Franzen, Purdy felt more loved in Britain. He talked often of how the critic and poet John Cowper Powys called him “the best kind of original genius” – and of how Sitwell helped him publish 63: Dream Palace, his first novella, in 1957. He eventually notched up a total of 18 novels and 20 plays, as well as numerous poems and short stories.
 
 “English critics saw something unique in Purdy,” says Professor Richard Canning, a Purdy scholar at the University of Northampton, who has organised a symposium on the writer’s work to follow the burial ceremony this week. “Purdy met his American critical neglect with incomprehension, suspicion and anger. Yet from the start, he could write no other way.”
 
The writer was born poor in Hicksville, Ohio, in 1914. His parents divorced when he was young, so Purdy moved between his mother and father, and his grandparents, who would tell him strange gothic tales that he’d transform into short stories and plays, utilising the language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s dramas, works he was made to read cover-to-cover by his Calvinist family. “I think it taught me the English language,” said Purdy. “I grew up in a family of matriarchs. They were all inveterate storytellers.”
 
Purdy studied English at the University of Chicago where, in 1935, broke and without friends, he befriended Gertrude Abercrombie, painter and “queen of the bohemian artists”, whose ruined mansion was a popular stopover for jazz artists including Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Billie Holiday. Inspired by the improvised jam sessions at Abercrombie’s salon, and by the writers of the Harlem renaissance, Purdy developed his unique writing style, incorporating a small-town midwest vernacular and African American slang.
 
“Jazz is a good description of Purdy’s writing,” says his biographer, Michael Snyder. “He incorporates different tonalities and voices within a single story, employing this archaic, almost biblical American language.”
 
Purdy began sending out his stories to magazines. But, as he wrote in An Autobiographical Sketch in 1984, they “were always returned with angry, peevish, rejections … They said that I wrote in a peculiar manner … too vivid. [They] were insistent I’d never be published.”
 
If it wasn’t for Sitwell, that might have been true. But in the period following Gollancz’s publication of 63: Dream Palace, with Purdy ensconced in a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, his work was briefly in vogue. His first novel Malcolm, an absurdist Candide-like journey through an American metropolis, was described by Dorothy Parker as “the most prodigiously funny book [of] these heavy-hanging times”, while 1961’s follow-up, The Nephew, was hailed by Angus Wilson as “a reverberating work [of] magnificent simplicity”.
 
Feted by the establishment, Purdy received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. But just a few years later, he bit the hand that fed him (clean off, you could say) with Cabot Wright Begins. A scabrous satire about three of New York’s sacred cows – publishing, politics and psychiatry – the novel concerns the battle for the biographical rights of the titular Wright, a handsome, Yale-educated stockbroker and serial rapist. New York Times book critic Orville Prescott called it “the sick outpouring of a confused, adolescent, distraught mind”. A counter-attack from Susan Sontag hailed it as “a bravura work of satire”, but the damage was done.
 
“If my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles,” wrote Purdy, “the future was to be a kind of endless open warfare.” Cabot Wright Begins, he added, “was condescendingly reviewed by the pew-warmers of the local think tanks. [It] was not about a rapist but about people that try to write a book about a rapist. It’s about writing. Nearly everybody missed that.”
 
However, it was Purdy’s next novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, that especially outraged the “pew-warmers”. A violent hallucinatory work set in Depression-era Chicago, it told the story of a Native American who can’t accept he’s in love with another man. The book, said Purdy, was about how “we rip out the beautiful things in us so we’ll be acceptable to society”. Dismissed by the New York Times as “a homosexual novel”, the book was also denounced by the writer Nelson Algren as a “fifth-rate avant-garde soap opera [about] prayer and faggotry”.
 
 Despite it being his bestselling book, with a review in the Sunday Times by George Steiner praising its “power to make nerve and bone speak”, Purdy was effectively marginalised for the rest of his life. “My books are all underground,” Purdy told Interview magazine in 1972. “They’re about something people don’t want to hear expressed. Critics would like to carry them off to the shit-yard, [but] they can’t, because they haunt people.”
 
“He was tapping into something deep within us,” says biographer Snyder. “He was writing about same-sex love and desire, saying it could happen to anyone. Plus, he was combining that with issues of race and power. New York critics just shut him down and diminished his name.”
 
The label “homosexual writer” stuck for the rest of his career, with Purdy confined to what Gore Vidal called “the large cemetery of gay literature … where unalike writers are thrown together in a lot, well off the beaten track of family values”. In later years, Purdy moved further off the beaten track, as much by intention as circumstance. “I’m not a gay writer,” he would tell interviewers. “I’m a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.”
 
Speaking to Penthouse magazine in 1978, Purdy said being published was like “throwing a party for friends and all these coarse wicked people come instead, and break the furniture and vomit all over the house”. He added that, in order to protect oneself, “a writer needs to be completely unavailable”.
 
 “The public image was something horrific to him,” says Purdy scholar Canning. “But he was also completely impossible. He refused to play the game. When Derek Jarman wanted to make a film of his 1976 novella, Narrow Rooms, Purdy asked who Jarman wanted for the lead, then said, ‘Over my dead body!’ For the rest of his life, Purdy regarded Jarman as the biggest traitor. When I interviewed him in 1997 a lot of what he said was slanderous, or unintentionally offensive, or settling scores … though it was also pretty funny. He was nobody’s servant.”
 
In the last 10 years of his life, Purdy also developed a circle of acolytes not best interested in promoting his reputation. “They believed in alchemy and secret genealogies,” says Canning. “You’d call his apartment and other people would answer the phone, saying he wasn’t in. People were worried about him, but he always loved being on the wrong side of the tracks.”
 
“He put his worst foot forward,” says Snyder. “But because he remained uncompromising, his style still feels fresh, weird and unique. His 1989 novel, Garments the Living Wear and his final short story, Adeline, were both ahead of their time in dealing with gender fluidity.” Then there’s Cabot Wright Begins, the book that destroyed Purdy’s career. Snyder insists its time has come. “It has all the hyperbole and hysteria of Trump’s America,” he says. “Purdy got under the skin of America to something deep, universal and macabre.”
 
What Purdy would think of the burial ceremony, and this revival of interest in his work, remains debatable. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” he once remarked. “I’d think something had gone wrong.”
 
• The burial ceremony will take place at 2pm on Wednesday 13 March. Narrow Rooms and In A Shallow Grave have just been republished by Valancourt Books. Peter Owen Books plans to publish four of Purdy’s later works in November.
 
 'I'm not a gay writer, I'm a monster': how James Purdy outraged America. By Andrew Male. The Guardian , March 11, 2019. 

A couple of years ago, I mentioned James Purdy in passing, in an essay I was writing for a literary journal. When the proofs came back to me, I found that the copy editor had suggested that I delete Purdy’s name since, in her estimation, few of the journal’s readers were likely to be familiar with his work. I declined the suggestion but remain startled by its implication—that Purdy, always a proud outsider, had fallen so completely off the literary map that he was essentially unknown to even the most literate readers.

 
Like his near contemporaries Jean Stafford and Dawn Powell, Purdy has long had a small but vocal following that believes him worthy of a much wider readership. Born in Ohio, in 1914, Purdy began writing at an early age, but for years was unable to find a commercial publisher for his fiction. He turned to England, where he was taken up by Edith Sitwell, and there his first novel was published when he was forty-five. In the decades since, the case for Purdy has been made by Dorothy Parker, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Paul Bowles, and, most recently, Jonathan Franzen. But none of them have quite succeeded, it seems, in lodging Purdy in the minds of very many readers.
 
Publishers have also sought to rekindle interest in Purdy’s work. A generation ago, it was the Black Sparrow Press which steadfastly kept his titles in print; in the middle of the last decade, Carroll & Graf put out new editions of several of his books. Now Liveright has taken up the cause. Last year they released a handsomely produced compendium of Purdy’s short stories, and this year they have republished three of Purdy’s novels: “Malcolm,” his 1959 début; “Cabot Wright Begins” (1964), and “Eustace Chisholm and the Works” (1967), which Franzen selected for the 2005 Clifton Fadiman Medal, a prize bestowed on the American novel deemed most worthy of rediscovery. As genuinely strange, unsettling, and indelible as these books are, it seems unlikely that their republication will gain Purdy, who died in 2009, the kind of widespread posthumous embrace enjoyed recently by another near contemporary, John Williams. On the contrary, a reading (or rereading) of these books—and the stories that preceded them—suggests that the very qualities that make Purdy’s works worth reviving are also the ones that will forever limit his potential audience. Unsparing, ambiguous, violent, and largely indifferent to the reader’s needs, Purdy’s fiction seems likely to remain an acquired taste. But it is a taste worth acquiring.
 
Purdy once said that he was drawn only to stories that “bristled with impossibilities.” In his novels and short fiction, possibility and potential are always compromised. There is neither transcendence nor transformation. His characters do not grow or develop; they dwindle and unravel. Purdy saw Hawthorne and Melville, “two other Calvinists,” as his literary antecedents, and it is not hard to interpret some of Purdy’s protagonists as latter-day incarnations of Billy Budd and Young Goodman Brown: guileless innocents abused by the world’s depraved sinners. “Malcolm,” along with the novella “63: Dream Palace,” is perhaps the book that most closely fits this mold. The title character is, by his own account, “a cypher and a blank,” completely ignorant of the ways of the world. A fifteen-year-old orphan with “an untouched appearance,” Malcolm lives in a palatial hotel, but on a dwindling inheritance. He passes his days sitting on a bench, waiting in vain for his father to return. One day, he is taken up by a mischievous passerby, an astrologer named Cox, who promises to introduce him to the wider world. “Give yourself up to things!” Cox insists. When Malcolm demurs, Cox taunts him: “You wish to remain on the bench. You prefer that to beginning.”
 
Malcolm finally relents and, in the following pages, is sent to a series of “addresses” where he encounters an array of oddballs and eccentrics, including a retired undertaker, a dwarf married to a former prostitute, and a billionaire named Girard Girard. The novel becomes a contest to see who among Mr. Cox’s “addresses” will succeed in possessing and ultimately defiling the young man. Purdy is often referred to as a symbolist, and one way to read “Malcolm” is as an unhinged allegory of accelerated adolescence, with debts to both “Pilgrim’s Progress” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
 
The plot, in any case, loosely parallels the story of Purdy’s own youth. Raised in a Bible-reading family in a small town in Ohio, Purdy was, by his own account, “brought up in a troubled atmosphere.” During the nineteen-twenties, his father suffered financial setbacks, his parents divorced, and he was shuttled among different relatives. He moved to Chicago as a teen-ager, “unprepared for its overwhelming confusion.” “Everything since then has been unreal,” he later wrote. In his twenties, after military service and studies at the University of Chicago, he began sending out his short stories. These stories were, he claimed, “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.” While in Chicago, Purdy was taken under the wing of the painter Gertrude Abercrombie, who ran a salon in her home that was fashioned after Gertrude Stein’s. Among the participants of the Abercrombie salon were some of the most important figures in the history of jazz: Sonny Rollins, Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan. Later, when Purdy moved to New York, it was the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten who served as his mentor and facilitator.
 

Gertrude Abercrombie turns up in “Malcolm” in the form of Eloisa Brace, an artist who is married to an ex-con named Jerome. Brace’s house is full of black musicians rehearsing and putting on shows. Malcolm takes up residence there so that Brace can paint his portrait for Girard Girard’s wife, who has become besotted with the young man, seeing in him qualities her money can’t buy: juvenescence and innocence. Malcolm ends up being plucked off the street by a man on a motorcycle, who takes him to a club where he is introduced to a renowned singer named Melba (“America’s number one chanteuse”), who promptly decides she must marry him. Not long after, Malcolm dies of “acute alcoholism and sexual hypertension.”
 
Purdy was heavily influenced by black artists, drawn to the work of people who existed outside the white cultural mainstream. (Both Sitwell and the British novelist Angus Wilson, among others, were convinced on first reading Purdy’s work that the author himself was black.) In “Malcolm,” which was published almost a decade before Loving v. Virginia, the protagonist marries a powerful black woman. It’s a quiet transgression that can get lost amid Purdy’s louder ones.
 
Still, “Malcolm” is, by some criteria, a complete failure as a novel. Its protagonist is not fully human; none of the characters in the book are particularly recognizable. The ending is not only downbeat but unsatisfying. It doesn’t seem to have much of a point. (The book illustrates why Purdy fits uneasily into the slots we use to pigeonhole writers: he’s not a gay novelist per se, nor a social critic, though gay themes and social critique abound in his work.) The material feels unnervingly personal, as if the reader is peeping at the author’s nightmares. And yet “Malcolm,” like Purdy’s other work, is admirable for many of those very same qualities. It is the uncanny product of a singular vision, distinctly American and hard to refute. It is also extremely funny, much of the humor stemming from Malcolm’s innocence. When someone refers to Cox as “a pederast,” the boy takes it to be a synonym for “astrologer.” Later, when Jerome is trying to seduce Malcolm, he keeps asking the boy if he knows what an “ex-con” is. Malcolm doesn’t pick up on this euphemism for “sexual predator” until it’s almost too late. In Purdy’s work, the things we’d rather not know about are forever manifesting themselves, often uproariously.
 
It’s hard to think of a contemporary writer whose work shares this sensibility, a cool elegance laid over extreme emotion. The most apt comparison may be Wes Anderson, whose films similarly feature casts of eccentrics, dialogue full of non sequiturs, deadpan humor, and unabashed farce. But Anderson’s movies can, at times, seem glib; Purdy’s books are shot through a much darker lens. There’s nothing in Anderson that is akin to the gruelling abortion scene in “Eustace Chisholm and the Works,” for instance. (For that, you’d have to turn to David Lynch.)
 
Lauded by both Franzen and Vidal, “Eustace Chisholm” is probably the peak of Purdy’s career, the book of his to read if you’re only going to read one. Not long after its publication, Purdy embarked on a series of linked novels, known collectively as “Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys.” Historical works inspired by stories Purdy’s grandmother told him as a child, they, like so many of Purdy’s later novels, seem like a rebuke to the expectations of mainstream commercial publishers. Purdy continued to write novels, stories, and plays almost to the end of his life, but he appeared resigned to obscurity. Popularity, he told an interviewer, would have meant “that something had gone wrong.”
 
Reviewing “Malcolm” in Esquire, in 1959, Dorothy Parker wrote, “I do not know if ‘Malcolm’ will greatly add to the numbers of James Purdy’s readers. …. It may be, as they say, only for the special.”
 
Half a century later, Parker’s assessment still feels right. Reading “The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy” on the subway recently, I was approached by a fellow passenger, who said, “Great book!” When I replied that I was enjoying it very much, he shook his head. “I wish more people read him.”
 
 
The Strange, Unsettling Fiction of James Purdy.  By Jon Michaud. The New Yorker ,  July 21, 2015

When he died in 2009, at 94, James Purdy was a forgotten man. He had always been a cult writer, held in almost worshipful regard for his wildly original, sometimes shocking novels and stories that worked the margins of American society, fringe territory populated by small-town folk, failed artists and tormented gay men.

 
Over time, he made the transition from underrated to unread. The trajectory was steep. In his brief but brilliant heyday, from the late 1950s to the mid-’60s, he seemed poised to take a place in the literary front ranks. Susan Sontag, assessing his 1964 novel, “Cabot Wright Begins,” for The New York Times Book Review, called him “indisputably one of the half-dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously.”
 
That opinion was not eccentric. The backup chorus included Edith Sitwell, Angus Wilson, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Their combined voices failed to secure Mr. Purdy a permanent place in the mainstream. “His hope kept being deferred, the hope of being a major voice in American literature,” said Paul W. Miller, a Purdy scholar now retired from Wittenberg University in Ohio. “It never happened.”
 
Liveright Publishing, which reissued “Cabot Wright Begins,” has just given Mr. Purdy what may be his last, best chance at a breakthrough. “The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy,” released in July, gathers all 49 of his published stories, from “A Good Woman,” which first appeared in the magazine Creative Writing in 1949, to “Reaching Rose,” from the 2000 collection “Moe’s Villa and Other Stories.” It also includes five early unpublished stories, found in the Purdy papers at Yale — the earliest dating from the 1930s — and two recent stories that John Uecker, Mr. Purdy’s literary executor, says the author deemed ready for publication.
 
Robert Weil, the editor in chief of Liveright and a longtime Purdy fan, said: “I wanted to do something that would resurrect his career and secure him his rightful place in American letters. Otherwise, I felt he might be lost.”
 
“I thought it was worth a gamble to bring together all the stories known to exist,” he added.
 
It is a gamble. To read all of the stories and follow the arc of Mr. Purdy’s career is to be reminded of how idiosyncratic, unpredictable and deeply strange an artist he was. These qualities drastically limited his readership, but they also make him a tantalizing figure for certain writers, notably Jonathan Franzen, and a hero for provocateurs like Tao Lin. John W. McCormack, a senior editor at the experimental literary magazine Conjunctions, said, “Someone that iconoclastic is always going to appeal to young writers.”
 
In her review of “Cabot Wright Begins,” Sontag shrewdly identified at least three authorial identities: “Purdy the satirist and fantasist; Purdy the gentle naturalist of American, particularly small-town American, life; and Purdy the writer of vignettes or sketches, which give us a horrifying snapshot image of helpless people destroying each other.”
 
These multiple personalities made Purdy difficult to classify. “He had no antecedents,” said Jerome Charyn, a fellow author at Arbor House in the 1970s. “He came out of nowhere, singing.” John Martin, who brought out a large collection of Purdy stories in 1991 when he ran Black Sparrow Press, puts Purdy in the same “dark category” as Paul Bowles, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.
 
 “Purdy digs a bit deeper than those,” he wrote in an e-mail. “He takes more risks. He is more extreme.” He added, “He is not afraid to push on until he fails, which he often does.” Dwight Garner, in a review of the collected stories in The Times, called him “one of those American originals who is mostly more interesting to read about than to actually read.”
 
The “nowhere” that Mr. Purdy came from was the unforgettably named Hicksville, Ohio, where he was born in 1914, about a decade earlier than he let on. His difficult small-town boyhood in nearby Findlay, where he took nourishment from the tales that older relatives told, helped shape the sensibility that sent critics searching for a new label: Midwestern Gothic. In Chicago, where he moved after graduating from Bowling Green State University, he fell in with members of the Bohemian set around the painter Gertrude Abercrombie, many of them future jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach.
 
As a writer, he earned more than his fair share of rejection. Like Dawn Powell, a fellow Ohioan, he was a Midwesterner trying to make inroads in New York. Adding to his sense of alienation, he was a gay man in a hostile straight society. His early work saw the light of day only when a couple of well-to-do patrons arranged for private printings of his stories. His first commercial publication came in Britain rather than the United States.
 
Mr. Purdy nevertheless had his moment. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, his stories appeared in top-shelf journals like Partisan Review, Commentary, Esquire and The New Yorker. His publisher, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, was already becoming synonymous with high-quality fiction. His first full-length novel, “Malcolm,” published in 1959, was later adapted by Edward Albee for the Broadway stage. He was a rising star.
 
Success proved elusive, though, and Mr. Purdy did little to advance his cause. “Cabot Wright Begins,” a scathing take on New York’s literary culture, included a merciless sendup of Orville Prescott, a book critic for The Times. “Eustace Chisholm and the Works,” about the doomed relationship between a repressed gay man and one of the innocent Billy Budd figures that turn up frequently in Mr. Purdy’s fiction, failed to find an audience. Its graphic description of an abortion, and its horrific, sadomasochistic resolution, made it a difficult read.
 
Publishers dropped Mr. Purdy. He could not find an agent. “Given his personality as an artist, it was inevitable that he would be isolated from the literary mainstream,” said David Means, a short-story writer who sought out Mr. Purdy in the ’80s. “When you write a long, strange book, and call it ‘The House of the Solitary Maggot,’ you can’t shoot for the stars.”
 
By the late ’70s, Mr. Purdy had settled into the role of the prince in exile from a literary kingdom he held in contempt. It was in this period that Fran Lebowitz met him, at his invitation, for a cup of coffee on Hudson Street.
 
“It was summertime, and he was wearing a seersucker suit,” she recalled. “He was very old-fashioned in his manner, very courtly, very proper in his dress. It was very apparent to me that he had no money.”
 
The two became friends. From time to time, Ms. Lebowitz arranged readings for him. “He had so much unpublished work, and this was the only way to hear it,” she said. “But he was a terrible reader. He did not make any concessions to the fact that people wanted to hear. He did not make any concessions, period. That, to me — in addition to the carrying of grudges — is the definition of character.”
 
Small awards and grants came his way, along with the occasional accolade, like the lifetime achievement award that The Antioch Review, with whom he had a long history, gave him in 2001.
 
The ceremony was bittersweet, and emblematic of Mr. Purdy’s predicament. “I met him at the National Arts Club,” said Robert S. Fogarty, the editor of the review. “He was lamenting the fact that he couldn’t get a publisher in the United States.”
 
James Purdy, a Fabulist Haunting the Fringes.  By William Grimes. The New York Times,
August 26, 2013

An Interview : James Purdy
 
Interview by Bradford Morrow
 
The following interview with novelist and playwright James Purdy was conducted in two sessions, the first in the middle of the night drinking cappuccinos in a small Seventh Avenue coffee shop, the second in the middle of the day eating sole and deep-fried okra in a restaurant situated in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge.
 
BRADFORD MORROW: When you began writing, what authors did you read and who had an influence on you?
 
JAMES PURDY: Unamuno had some influence: only putting into the work what is absolutely essential. Also Hemingway, at least technically, again because he leaves out so much. Sherwood Anderson. I always felt a close affinity with Whitman and Melville, though people tell me it’s not possible. Especially Melville, the tensions between men in isolation and the megalomania, the megalomania in Pierre and Moby Dick, Billy Buddand The Confidence Man. It is something I immediately recognized as significant. And even James Fenimore Cooper. I knew it was a world which I belonged to.
 
MORROW: What was Sherwood Anderson’s influence?
 
PURDY: The isolation in his work, the small-town vernacular. When Marianne Moore said I was a master of the American vernacular it was very nice because even then I was working in the dark, I didn’t know what I was. Anderson wrote a wonderful story called “The Man Who Became a Woman”: one of the most amazing stories ever written. I don’t know whether he knew how startling it is. It’s about a young boy who is a groom in the stables, he takes care of horses. The story is really a problem of crisis of sexual identification, to use a pretentious psychological phrase. Suddenly, working around these awful, rough men, and being just a young boy who simply loved to curry the horses, suddenly one night he wanders into a saloon and he looks into the mirror and instead of seeing himself he sees a young woman. Horrified, he runs back to the stables. There these Negro laborers try to rape him and he runs away. He becomes a man again, but there is no real closing to the story: Anderson shows such deep insight into the terror of adolescence in this story.
 
MORROW: It sounds to me like a James Purdy story.
 
PURDY: Yes, it does! It’s the only story by Anderson where I think he really plumbed the depths.
 
MORROW: Did you read that when you were a youngster, or later?
 
PURDY: Oh, I didn’t understand it when I read it, but I knew it was great.
 
MORROW: When did you start reading fiction?
 
PURDY: When I was about ten. Another book that influenced me when I was young was Gogol’s Dead Souls, which is a great book. I think he is so much greater than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories, in Spanish Las Novelas Ejemplares. These also have the outcasts, the young derelicts. “Rinconete and Cortadillo” is one of the greatest stories ever written. “The Dialogue of the Dogs” is also a great story—much greater than Don Quixote, which is great. But these stories are the distilled liquor of his genius.
 
MORROW: You just naturally gravitated toward the “outcast” figure since you were a child? Are you an only child?
 
PURDY: No, I have two brothers. I’m the middle child. Lots of uncles, cousins, aunts, a whole clan.
 
MORROW: Where did you put your hands on the books as a child?
 
PURDY: My father left a big library. He read.
 
MORROW: Any writers in the Purdy ancestry?
 
PURDY: They’re all farmers!
 
MORROW: The question I am circling is: How and when did you know you wanted to become a writer, a novelist?
 
PURDY: I began writing anonymous anomalous letters when I was eight and nine. These anonymous anomalous letters, as I call them, and which I still write today, are purportedly unsigned letters which defame the recipient by telling him the truth about himself. You know, a truth can never be told in public. Anyway, I remember my mother had this terrible landlady where we rented a house and she pestered my mother about little things, do this, do that, about the yard. And so I wrote her this letter … I wrote it about her, I didn’t send it to her. My mother was horrified by it, because there was so much anger in it.
 
MORROW: Why do you write the anonymous anomalous letters? Is it a kind of recreation?
 
PURDY: It’s a blowing off of steam. But the novels sort of come out of it, I think.
 
MORROW: When you write an anonymous anomalous letter it seems ultimately that you are the outcast figure rather than any character.
 
PURDY: Yes, I guess so, yes. Because there is so much anger in them.
 
MORROW: Could it be that you write these anonymous letters, in which you yourself are the outcast figure, and then you work toward decentralizing that outcast figure by creating a fictional ball around it?
 
PURDY: Yes, I suppose so. I’ve known a lot of outcasts. And so I would write these letters and my older brother loved them, because he was wicked!
 
MORROW: I notice you’ve left Henry James out of your list of early influences.
 
PURDY: I was once quite fascinated by him and now I can’t read him. He annoys me no end. I don’t think he knew anything about people. He reminds me of that old story about the three men who were asked to describe an elephant and each one had a completely different and erroneous description—one thought it looked like a snake, the others thought it was something else. I think the reason he remains so fascinating is because he was so confused by life. He is the only “great” writer who doesn’t seem to have had any real, direct life experience. It’s all what he heard, or what someone told him. It’s amazing the energy, and the number of books he wrote, an amazing body of work. And yet I almost always come away from his work bitterly disappointed. It’s a matter of temperament: I don’t really care about his people, and I don’t really care therefore about him.
 
MORROW: One very obvious difference between your work and James’s is that in his dialogues, especially in the late novels, all of the characters seem to speak in James’s voice, whereas I can never hear your own voice in your characters’ mouths.
 
PURDY: Oh, really. That’s interesting. Proust is a little that way, like James, everything is Proust’s voice.

MORROW: What about Thomas Hardy?
 
PURDY: I love him. I adore his poetry, he is a great poet. Much better than someone like T. S. Eliot: I can’t stand him.
 
MORROW: I believe I see a pattern emerging here: You don’t like the exiled American who becomes super-Anglophile.
 
PURDY: I can’t bear them. It’s one thing I find unattractive in Hemingway, the fact that he was an expatriate. I don’t think he got into America enough.
 
MORROW: The Nick Adams stories would contradict that.
 
PURDY: “The Killers” is a great story. But I don’t think he ever did much after those.
 
MORROW: Is there any over pattern that you are trying to develop, novel by novel, into a “body” of work?
 
PURDY: No. I think my style’s changing but I don’t pay much attention to it. I know it’s different but I’m too busy writing the next book. I’m not consciously trying to develop a body of work: I’m so lucky if I can make another book, get through another book. They are hard to make. No matter how many times you dive from an eighty-five-foot height I think you’re scared each time.
 
MORROW: You’re afraid when you start a book?
 
PURDY: I’m scared all the time. This book, On Glory’s Course, I thought I’d never finish. It is about as long as Mourners Below. It’s like being put on a different animal to ride each time. Part of the difficulty in it all is that everything is dictated by the characters: They sort of appear, they come to visit you, they say, “Here I am.”
 
MORROW: Do you consider your work comic or tragic?
 
PURDY: In the middle.
 
MORROW: Do you dream about your characters?
 
PURDY: Well, I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember any of my dreams. I probably do, but don’t remember them. Maybe because I’m dreaming all day.
 
MORROW: What is your best book?
 
PURDY: I sometimes think it is The House of the Solitary Maggot. I sort of wrote that asleep: It all just came out of me: I don’t know where it came from. William Carlos Williams admired the stories in Color of Darkness and he was a great admirer of The Nephew. That was his world he said, The Nephew. But you know he was very ill at that time, he died shortly after The Nephew was written. He and Marianne Moore were friends of mine, she was a little bothered by my subject matter but she loved those stories.
 
MORROW: I’ve always been amazed that Edith Sitwell managed to see through the subject matter and get to the form.
 
PURDY: Absolutely. It sounds boastful but it showed real insight in her as a critic. You know she defended the use of the word “motherfucker” in print, she said it had to be in there. All these little sissy men were crying and carrying on.
 
MORROW: How did you get in touch with Sitwell?
 
PURDY: I simply sent a copy of Don’t Call Me by my Right Name to her at the Castello Montilgafani, and I thought, “She’ll never get it, and if she gets it she’ll never read it.” But she really went wild over them, and when I sent her 63: Dream Palace she said that it had to be properly published.
 
MORROW: She was the person who put it into Victor Gollancz’s hands?
 
PURDY: Yes. Then he infuriated her by taking those words out. It’s bowdlerized, that edition. She was indignant about it.
 
MORROW: How does a Purdy novel develop? You begin by writing anonymous anomalous letters, then ideas begin forming themselves into larger schemes, then characters begin making visitations, etc.?
 
PURDY: I don’t know when I’ve started a book. For example, On Glory’s Course. I knew the heroine of the book largely through my mother. I only remember her because she was always talking about her. I was thinking this would make a wonderful story but it was too far away from me, too removed from my actual memory. But it just started and I couldn’t stop: I resisted it all the way through, the last fifty pages I thought I’d never see through. There were these young veterans from World War I who were horribly disfigured, and they had plates in their legs and plates in their heads. These veterans appear in the story.
 
MORROW: These disfigured vets have appeared before!
 
PURDY: Yes! I used to see them in my hometown, I’d see them on my way to school. They were in their early thirties, and they’ve stayed with me.
 
MORROW: How much do you write at a sitting?
 
PURDY: This may sound a little pretentious, but the books are so intense that if I write three or four pages it’s just like I’ve been running for an hour in the blazing sun. I’m just a wreck. I have to either take a walk, or lie down. Sometimes I’ll write at two sittings in a day. But I can always write anonymous letters, even if I’m fagged. Those are like taking dope. I used to write terrible letters to publishers and send them but I’ve learned not to do that: I write them, but I don’t send them now! I write three or four pages in a day. I’ve written as many as twenty pages in a day, but at that intensity twenty pages kills you, something bursts inside of you. Usually I revise at a later date; when I get up I usually keep going rather than revise what I’ve already written. It’s like mountain climbing: You had better keep going. Sometimes I reread, sometimes not. Sometimes I’m afraid to reread it for fear I’ll look down and fall. You see, you’ve got to maintain a speed, you’ve got to keep telling what you know. There’s part of you that says, “This is so much shit, stop, it’s no good, who cares about it.” But you can’t believe that. You have to be crazy and believe.
 
MORROW: Lack of a certain kind of apperception is an important element in creating a novel?
 
PURDY: Yes, you’re too dumb to know better. You have to keep going. Malcolm Cowley once wrote me that it is true I am a genius, but I’m a primitive genius. I was astonished anyone called me a genius in the first place, whatever that is. But he said I don’t know how to write.
 
MORROW: I noticed in your room in Brooklyn that your library has no contemporary fiction in it.
 
PURDY: Yes, just Loeb Library. All Greeks, dead Greeks! I get the sap for my work out of those books. I was reading Diodorus Siculus the other day and he said, “It’s very hard to travel beyond the north wind, but if you do go beyond the north wind you can pick up an arrow and it will fly back to where you started.” Like a witch on a broomstick, say. And I thought, Isn’t that horrible, to go back to beyond where the north wind blows. Those people are called the Hyperboreans.
 
MORROW: Sounds like Einsteinian curved space.
 
PURDY: That stayed with me for a week.
 
MORROW: What was the last book of contemporary fiction that you read and admired?
 
PURDY: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. I can see how William Gaddis is said to like my work, because we both come from that sort of puritanic small town in America. I like some of Paul Bowles’s work, and some of Tennessee Williams’s stories. Also, Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo and Peter Feibleman’s A Place Without Twilight.
 

MORROW: What is your opinion, in retrospect, of your novel Malcolm?
 

PURDY: I think in a way it’s my best book, one of my best. It’s like a big firecracker that keeps going off. It’s quite outrageous and I’m sorry to say that some academics now say, well, that’s just his first book, he ought to just forget it: I think that’s a mistake, because they’re not reading it correctly.

 
MORROW: What about Cabot Wright Begins?
 
PURDY: That used to be my least favorite book. I think it’s somewhat like Malcolm in that it is an outrageous work. I based it on real characters, except Cabot himself. This crazy ex-convict I knew was always going to write a book about a rapist and all he talked about was this man, this rapist. I got so sick of hearing about it, and I knew he’d never write it because he’s not a writer, so I wrote it for him!
 
MORROW: Which of your stories would you include in a selected stories of James Purdy?
 
PURDY: “Some of These Days,” “Eventide,” “You Reach for Your Hat,” “Cutting Edge,” “Man and Wife,” “Sleep Tight.”
 
MORROW: “Daddy Wolf”?
 
PURDY: Yes. And “Goodnight, Sweetheart.” “Summer Tidings” too.
 
MORROW: We’ve talked before about how America tends to exile its greatest writers. You’re essentially in a state of self-exile, exile, at least, from the so-called establishment.
 
PURDY: Yes. Because they want Longfellow. They want lies. The publishers do.
 
MORROW: The country is conservative?
 
PURDY: I don’t think the country is conservative. I think it’s wild. I’m talking about business. I’m talking about business. You see, very ordinary people can read my books, but they’re never told to read them, they’re told not to read them. Anybody could read Mourners Below. Public relations men need labels to sell things, but they could never label me because every one of my books is different.
 
MORROW: Tell me about your new novel, On Glory’s Course.
 
PURDY: It takes place almost eighty years ago, some of it a hundred years ago. It’s about a woman who in 1897 had an illegitimate child, and she came of a wealthy family. Her life was ruined by it. They took the baby away from her. The book begins when she is forty-eight years old, and this young boy who is sort of her adopted errand boy gets this girl in trouble. And suddenly his baby, and this similar predicament, digs up her past life, which she thought she had kept a secret. Actually everybody knew about it all along. It’s based on a true story. I’ve always wanted to write it but I thought it was too difficult. Finally I just started it. Everything about it is difficult.
 
MORROW: How did you research it?
 
PURDY: I read a lot of books about the period, a lot of novels, too, like Poor White and Heaven’s My Destination. But in the end they didn’t help much. The story was told to me by my grandmother.
 
MORROW: In your dialogues in the novel do you use period terminologies?
 
PURDY: Well, sort of. But it’s not a “period” book, it could happen now.
 
MORROW: When did you write your first story? Not the anonymous anomalous letters, but an actual story?
 
PURDY: I wrote a lot of stories when I was very young. They’re all lost. I used to publish this little magazine on a duplicator. It had my stories in it.The Niocene. I got out five or six issues! They’re all lost now, I imagine. I was eleven or twelve. I wrote everything in it, but it was mostly imaginary. I printed it on a duplicator, an old one that you used with jelly. It was very messy. I ran off several copies and bound them myself with fasteners. I guess those were my first published stories. I’d run off ten and give them to my family and friends. I sold some, too!
 
MORROW: Instead of lemonade.
 
PURDY: Yes! I forget how much I charged.
 
MORROW: There is a deep compulsion to write, in order to be read.
 
PURDY: Yes, but I don’t think it’s so much to be read as to be heard, to communicate. My idea now is that there is really no communication in the media at all. That you’re not reaching your audience. People are listening, but nothing is being communicated. Their attention is simply being taken up. But nothing is being told them. It’s noncommunication on a mass scale. It’s like the music in this restaurant. It’s noise: it’s not communicating, musically. It’s not saying anything to the psyche. That is what the television is all about. Nothing is being said. There are these words. And there are these people speaking these words. But they’re not actually reaching their audience. It’s noncommunication communication.
 
MORROW: This ties into the earlier statement about the desire to hear lies, perhaps. Tell me more about your childhood.
 
PURDY: I grew up in the country. My family is Scotch-Irish. The family were mostly farmers, but my father didn’t like being a farmer. He became a businessman, so he got to work in the bank, in real estate, things like that. But they all remained sort of rural. I had two brothers, actually I had three brothers, but one died before I was born.
 
MORROW: Besides publishing your stories in The Niocene, did you ever publish in school magazines as you were growing up?
 
PURDY: No. I don’t think they liked what I wrote in school. It was a preview of what the critics were going to say. The stories bothered my teachers, until I got into high school, where I had a good teacher. She read my writing and thought it was remarkable. The only advice she gave me was to keep writing. She said I would be a writer.
 
MORROW: What did you do after you finished high school?
 
PURDY: I went to Chicago. Then I got into the army. I was a most unlikely soldier. I was going to be drafted, so I just joined up. That was in 1941. But there were a lot of people that didn’t belong in the army. I didn’t have to go into combat, for some reason. I was based at Scott Field, which is in Belleville, Illinois.
 
MORROW: Did you manage to write still, while you were in the army?
 
PURDY: No, that stopped it all. I suppose I wrote a few little things, but I was frustrated. But I was learning a lot.
 
MORROW: What did you do after you got out of the army?
 
PURDY: I did interpreting for a while, and then I got a job in Cuba. I learned Spanish in the army. I taught school in Havana for a year, and that was quite interesting. The government got me that job, it was sort of a teachers’ agency, except it was the U.S. government. It was a school for Cubans and Americans, and I taught English literature more or less. We had trouble getting books, so they had to read a lot of books that weren’t first-rate. I could have stayed on longer, but I didn’t want to.
 
MORROW: Did you start writing again when you were in Cuba?
 
PURDY: Yes. I had one story published then, in The Prairie Schooner. That was a big event. They took my story “You Reach for Your Hat.” That was my first published story. After I left Cuba, I came back to Wisconsin, where I taught for several years at Lawrence College. I taught English and Spanish. Then I just gave it all up. I had jobs all around the country. Those were terrible years. I want to tell you, I wouldn’t want the name of the magazine used, though it ought to be, I think it was between 1948 and 1951, I sent “Eventide” to a magazine. Now “Eventide” has since become a classic. This magazine accepted the story for publication and after three years returned it to me stating that they decided not to publish it. I don’t think editors know what that does to a young writer. It is so devastating. Then when I was made rather famous when Color of Darkness was praised by all these critics and writers, the editor of that magazine had the nerve to write me a letter of congratulations. I never replied, of course. What was I to do? But anyway, I wrote a lot in Wisconsin, I finished Color of Darkness there. But it was impossible to get those stories published. I would send them out and they were rejected one by one by one. I got vicious comments. Editors said to me, “These stories are sick.” You know, when you’re that young you are just starving for encouragement. I was destroyed by it, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop. I don’t trust evaluations. I don’t care who it is. It’s hard to forgive people: To tell a writer he has no talent is a form of murder. Why don’t you go out and shoot yourself? That’s what it means.

MORROW: What magazines began accepting your stories?

 PURDY: Black Mountain Review, which Robert Creeley edited. He took a story, and it was a godsend, because I couldn’t get anything published. And when he took “Sound of Talking” that was a big moment for me. Then there was nothing. Then there was a man in Chicago, Osborn Andreas, who felt that the stories had to be published, so he privately published Don’t Call Me by my Right Name. And those stories were kind of a bombshell, they shocked everyone.

 MORROW: What did your family think?

 PURDY: Well, they didn’t shock them. 63: Dream Palace shocked them, but not as much as it shocked the critics. Had this man never published those two books I would have been unheard of forever. I couldn’t have gone on because of all the rejections. I probably would have written, but it all would have been left in bureau drawers.

 MORROW: All these novels would be in drawers?

 PURDY: I probably would have died. I think the New York literary establishment is totally closed to anything new. When you think of the slick magazines and what they publish, and when you think of the editors and what they want! What they want is recycled cellophane. They want recycled recycled. Sawdust. Those are formula stories they take. They’re utterly dead. They don’t even have water in them. They’re utterly recycled sawdust. The stories are meant to go along with the ads for Tiffany’s, the Plaza Hotel, Cartier’s, Alfred Dunhill. There should be nothing really human about the stories. It’s all about clothes and fashion.

 

 MORROW: Most New York-based slick magazines are simply vehicles for advertisements and are meant to generate capital. They mask this behind the guise of self-help, fashion, cuisine. But it’s all a showcase for the ads.

 PURDY: It’s all for the money. Everything in the United States is money.

 MORROW: Perhaps this is part of the reason some of your best writers are exiles, in Brooklyn, or Tangier, or whatever. So you would have stopped writing and sending material out?

 PURDY: I would have died. What else could I have done? I hate teaching. I like being with the students, and talking with them. But I hate teaching, I don’t communicate that way. It’s not my form of communication.

 MORROW: How did you leave stories, as a literary form, and begin writing your first novel, Malcolm?

 PURDY: I just started writing. I wrote Malcolm for a friend, really. He gave me a place to live in the country, in Pennsylvania, near Quakertown. His name is Jorma Jules Sjoblom, he’s Swedish and Finnish. He would read it when he came home from work. I wrote Malcolm in a few months, but, see, I didn’t think anybody was ever going to publish it. But when I did get a publisher I spent quite a few months going over it. It didn’t have an ending, so I had to write an ending.

 MORROW: I notice that you write purposely to be read. Malcolm was written during the day as a gift to someone who came home from work in the evening to read it.

 PURDY: It’s true. This is how I communicate. This is how I stay alive. That’s what I mean about television. It doesn’t communicate. It’s sad how people sit in front of that box instead of touching other people, like your family, and saying, “I did this. What did you do today?” or “What are you wearing, what is that fabric?” You see, this is communication, that other is death. They’re being used as a mechanical receptor, they’re as dead as the television itself.

 MORROW: What makes reading an act of communication where watching the television is noncommunication?

 PURDY: If it is an important book, it is another human being talking to you, even though it’s on the written page. Television is something thought up out of a formula not to communicate with another human being, but to manipulate him. To get money out of him because there will be ads. When Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass he wanted to communicate with anyone who would want to understand: He didn’t want to manipulate that person, or get money out of him, he wanted to touch that person. Television is manipulative noncommunication. Nearly everything in our society follows that principle, though. Movies, medicine. There is no communication between doctor and patient, by and large. It’s just to extract money out of them, and giving them a formula which probably doesn’t fit them. So I think the whole society will crash because of this lack of communication. Everything that we do in America is non‚communicative. We lie to get power over people, and to get money. People are manipulated into thinking they want to manipulate! It’s the only thing we believe in, money. We think it would be nice to be rich, because then we wouldn’t have to suffer certain things. Then you spend your life protecting your eggs. It’s a nightmare. When you are reading a book, you are actually talking with another person, whether you know it or not. I can’t just look at you, and let you talk, and not give you anything. But you can do this to a screen: That’s why it is noncommunication: You cannot give the screen anything, because it’s dead. In Aristophanes’ and Shakespeare’s theaters the players and the audience were one, they weren’t separate: They were communicating with one another. Shakespearean audiences screamed at the actors, threatened them, cheered them. I was brought up not on the theater, because we had no theater, but on the movies. And this has harmed us, because the actors can’t see us. We can see the screen, but it can’t see us. This is the beginning of the noncommunicativeness of our culture.

 MORROW: It’s funny that you have to sit in a darkened room to watch television or the movies, but you have to sit in a lightened room to read a book.

 PURDY: True. Also, when you read a book you know that one person wrote that book for you, for you. Nobody wrote these television shows, they were compiled by machines, they were tested. And they are considered complete failures unless ninety-eight million people see them. And they don’t even exist! Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass for maybe ten people, but those ten people were communicated with, while the ninety-eight million are not. The reader has to react to the text or it will not come into existence for him, where the television will go on whether you are there or not. Television is eternal, it’s eternal noise. It has no beginning, middle, or end, like a book: it is just … it!

 MORROW: When someone reads a book the visual imagery that is formed in his head is an imagery that comes from his own personal past, whereas the television screen provides all ninety-eight million people with a single image that doesn’t relate to anyone’s past except for the cameramen and actors.

 PURDY: It doesn’t relate to anything at all.

 MORROW: So when I read about some fellow named Daddy Wolf, and I am given no physical description of what a Daddy Wolf looks like, or what he is finally up to, the communicative part I play as a reader comes in the formulation of an imagery in my mind: In the process of reading, my intellect and imagination are sparked into participation: There is room for movement because James Purdy has constructed a landscape for me to bump around in.

 PURDY: What is a Daddy Wolf and why is it called Daddy Wolf? You see, you are being opened up, if you are really “conversing” with the book. Even if you are talking about trivial things. You are having a reciprocal human experience. Communication is life. We are only human as long as we have communication with other human beings. If man lived totally alone, he wouldn’t be human. I don’t know what he would be: He’d be something else. This is the whole reason for art, and for life. Only by being next to other people are we human. And in our culture this happens less and less and less and less. That’s why we have all kinds of strange behavioral anomalies.

 MORROW: And yet you refuse to exile yourself from America, even though you recognize the horror that defines our culture.

 PURDY: I couldn’t leave. I used to get very upset when I lived in Spain because I was communicating with Spaniards, but it was in a language that was not my own. I started getting ill because of it. I couldn’t live elsewhere. Brooklyn is not the kind of English I know either, it is a very bad English.

 MORROW: How did you end up living in Brooklyn?

 PURDY: I really don’t know why I’m here. I really didn’t have much choice. I moved here because I was desperate to find a room. I moved here from Pennsylvania in 1962. You might think that I chose Brooklyn; I didn’t. I fell here, from a plane. I’m stuck here. I don’t have any freedom of movement, unless I become a vagabond, because I don’t have any money. You can’t plan your life if the job you are doing doesn’t pay. People say you can do this, you can do that, but all I can do is live by the day. People think I’m a writer. I’m not a writer. I write books, but I’m not a writer. I’m not supported by the profession.

 MORROW: Do you think that will change?

 PURDY: I doubt it. It’ll probably get worse. I don’t know, I don’t even care. I used to think that one day my books would sell, but I don’t think they ever will.

 MORROW: It’s not impossible that a year after you die everyone will say, “That’s the man, James Purdy, what a great writer.”

 PURDY: Oh, sure. That happens in America. They’re glad you’re dead.

 MORROW: The more “slick” the death, the more apt one is to gain a twenty-five-year reputation among those in academe as one of the greats.

 PURDY: It happened to Dylan Thomas. Nathanael West. It will happen again.

 MORROW: Are you a compulsory writer?
 
PURDY: No, it’s not compulsory. I guess it’s just inevitable that I keep on writing books. After I finish a novel I sort of rest by writing a story, or plays. But I don’t make any plans; those are made for me by my subconscious.
 
MORROW: Are you conscious of any style in your writing?
 
PURDY: Not in those terms. I know this, and this is all I know. It has to fit right: every sentence: It has to just be … right.
 
MORROW: You build by sentences?
 
PURDY: Sometimes. More often by little paragraphs. But I think I am a dramatic writer in that it’s what people say that is what I write, why I write. It’s people speaking, it’s not a writer explaining something. I don’t explain much. I think it’s all in what is either said, or not said. But I am very fussy about the sentences being just the way I want them, and the fact that many of my characters use, as Marianne Moore called it, the vernacular, makes certain pseudo-highbrow critics wring their hands. They think I’m an ignoramus. I don’t like that word “style,” because it smacks of the academies, but I do have style. But it’s not style in the sense that one would apply to Henry James, where he talks through five thousand sheets. He never gets to the characters because he, Henry James, talk talk talks. Everything is talked about, nothing shown. Which is a great achievement, I guess, but doesn’t work for me. Tennessee Williams once told me “That’s mahtee fahn dahlog.” It also has to do with communicating. Style shouldn’t be thrown up between the writer and reader. It destroys the communication. Noncommunicative communication destroys attention, destroys the family.
 
MORROW: This noncommunication you’ve discussed sounds very Machiavellian to me, in the sense that it makes the populace easier to be ruled.
 
PURDY: True, by monsters. It is Machiavellian. But instead of making people fascists, or cannibals, or criminals, it turns them into zombies, which is worse. Because to be made into a member of some terrible political party, or a cannibal, is still sort of human. But to be turned into nothing is awful. Evil is better than nothingness, because it’s human. Evil is horrid, but it’s still human. To be a zombie is the bottom. You’re another television set looking at a television set. You go out into the world and no one knows you, you can be ruled because you’re programmed. Everything is stamped, put on the shelf, described, thrown out into the garbage. It’s a political process, and behind that an economic process. But to be nothing, that is the worst of all possible things.
 
 
Conjuctions 3, Fall 1982
 

James Purdy   Memento Mori  1914 -2009

James Purdy Papers: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center