The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy He was an early evoker of a certain kind of gay experience in America. His stories are damp, cloistered, climate controlled, intentionally uncomfortable environments. His closeted gay men sense that something is wrong with them, rarely that anything is right. Purdy’s is a universe in which women are frequently grotesque. We read about one’s “immense meaty body” and another’s “receding chin and large pores.
About yet another, we read, “There was a faint smell from her like that of an uncovered cistern.” His men, when they open their mouths, are given to utterances like: “I’m not a normal man, Peaches Maud.”
The gay signifiers in Purdy’s stories take you back to another time. His men and boys lisp, or sew, or bake, or have womanly voices, or prize photographs of male relatives emerging from the water in swimming trunks. Their mothers and wives wonder what is wrong with them.
Like
his poetry his drawings illuminate a still deeper aspect of his talent. They are spirit drawings, intensely
original, archetypal, like cave drawings coming out of the deep recesses of the
psyche. Purdy
spiraled his pencil in free flowing lines forming innocent looking minimal
human figures. Purdy stated, "I don't know how to draw I just let the pencil go. Purdy
usually doodled in between his literary projects, working with a ink pen and
felt tip marker--compulsively filling one sketch book after another.
What critics have said about James Purdy
Style
as fluid and natural as a man thinking to himself in the dark, yet controlled,
coherent, with an innate sense of form, and great powers of
concentration.--Katherine Anne Porter
Cult author,
poet and playwright James Purdy, whose fans ranged from Dorothy Parker to Gore
Vidal and who was little known to the general public was born in
Ohio. Purdy said he was "exposed to everything" as a child, when his
parents split and he lived alternately with his mother, father and grandmother.Though best known for novels like Malcolm (1959)
and The Nephew (1961), Purdy's credits include Cabot
Wright Begins, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, as well as
numerous short stories, plays, poems and drawings created over the past
half-century.
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