Next year is the James Purdy centennial and this literary precursor to brilliant weirdos like David Lynch and Almodóvar is once again struggling to achieve a full-blown renaissance: Here at last are his Complete Short Stories
[Kindle] in one big volume emblazoned with Gore Vidal's assessment that Purdy is "an authentic American genius." Degenerate, funny, inspired, and queer in every sense, Purdy's tales are likened by John Waters in his charming introduction to "a ten-pound box of poison chocolates you keep beside your bed — fairy tales for your twisted mind that should never be described to the innocent. Randomly select a perfectly perverted Purdy story and read it before you go to sleep and savor the hilarious moral damage and beautiful decay that will certainly follow in your dreams." Jonathan Franzen says Purdy delivers "the inexorable progress toward disaster in such a way that it's as satisfying and somehow life-affirming as progress toward a happy ending."
Purdy began publishing his fiction six decades ago and his vast admirers include Beckett, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, who called him "a writer of the highest rank in originality, insight and power," and Tennessee Williams, who said, "He may shock and offend some partisans of the well-trodden paths in fiction, but he will surely enchant the reader who values a new expression of new feeling and experience." You should add your name to the growing list of Purdy fans. If you prefer novels, try his Eustace Chisholm and the Works
, an early gay classic that nearly ruined him in 1967. Or the even earlier The Nephew
about a Midwestern spinster who decides to write a memoir of her nephew killed in war only to discover he liked men. More open is the lusty, violent novel of young gay love and hate, Narrow Rooms
,
from 1978. Fifteen years on, Purdy unleashed his gayest, funniest, Firbankian romp, Out With the Stars
(1993), in which a Virgil Thomson type decides to write an opera about a Carl van Vechten-ish photographer, revealing on stage in song his bent for his black male subjects. His Russian widow, a former silent-film siren claiming a Romanov connection, tries to shut down the NYC premiere. Supporting characters include a young Kentucky drama queen addicted to unhappy affairs and a has-been movie star who keeps his forty-room mansion crammed with obedient young men.
James Purdy died in 2009. Also available are his Collected Poems
and Selected Plays.
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