Some passages in my original draft of the essay on James Purdy's poetry recently published by the Poetry Foundation had to be excised for reasons of space and relevance. But I still rather like much of what I said in them, so I am reprinting them here rather than discard them entirely.
On In a Shallow Grave and Narrow Rooms:
Most of the important tendencies in Purdy's fiction were worked out in the novels of the first decade of Purdy’s career, but two of the novels published in the 1970s, In a Shallow Grave (1976) and Narrow Rooms (1978), realize them in particularly powerful ways. Both set in rural America, In a Shallow Grave enacts Purdy’s predominant themes through the form of what might be called a pastoral romance, while Narrow Rooms might be called a pastoral tragedy (although more in the mode of Jacobean revenge tragedies than the Shakespearean sort). Garnet Montrose, the protagonist and narrator of In a Shallow Grave, is both one of Purdy’s innocents, in effect made so through the loneliness imposed by a disfiguring, war-related injury, and a character who must come to terms with himself—although in this case the resistance to self-knowledge comes less from willful blindness on Garnet’s part than from the oppressive situation in which he has been forced to live. His isolation is overcome when he receives the sincerely given friendship of Quint, an African-American boy, and falls in love (not sexually consummated) with Daventry, a young drifter. Ultimately Garnet obtains a kind of redemption through a remarkable act of self-sacrifice performed by Daventry (involving a ceremony of ritual bloodletting and a subsequent violent hurricane). It is perhaps Purdy’s most affirmative book, although it is in no way sentimental, despite the temptation offered by Garnet’s rather pathetic circumstances; its depiction of human weakness and the deforming effects of American social arrangements is as uncompromising as any of Purdy’s other, more unremittingly bleak narratives.
Narrow Rooms, the immediate successor to In a Shallow Grave, would have to be called one of Purdy’s bleakest. It is also the novel that most directly addresses homosexuality as its subject, or at least uses explicitly identified homosexual characters to tell its story. Finally the novel portrays the characters, in their inability to fully accept their own natural impulses and desires (especially one of the characters, known as “the Renderer,” who takes his self-hatred to murderous extremes), much as they are portrayed in Purdy’s other novels, where homosexuality per se is either mostly unspoken or merely suggested. The violence and degradation accompanying this story of a group of homosexual men in West Virginia did not exactly endear Purdy to a gay community otherwise eager to champion gay-themed novels and self-identified gay writers. Purdy always insisted that he was not interested in being regarded as a “gay writer,” and that indeed his subject was not homosexual desire in itself, or the myriad consequences of asserting a homosexual identity, but, as he shows with particular power in Narrow Rooms, the palpable effects of the seemingly intractable human propensity for self-destruction and accompanying ability to live in illusion and profound alienation from our most authentic selves.
On Purdy as dramatist:
Although James Purdy throughout his career was regarded primarily as a writer of fiction, he also worked in the other genres, poetry and drama. Both of these activities enabled Purdy to interact more widely with the theatrical community in New York (where he lived for the last 50 years of his life), as well as classical musicians and composers, when two of the latter set a number of Purdy’s poems to music. In fact Purdy wrote more than twenty plays (ten of them full-length), although not all of them were performed. It is not surprising that Purdy would be drawn to writing plays, since in his novels and stories he uses a scenic method that is predominantly structured though extended passages of dialogue. Indeed, one of the singular features of Purdy’s fiction is his treatment of American speech, which blends idiomatic talk and vernacular speech patterns with a more formal sensibility, as if the available forms of expression are struggling to transcend their own diminished powers of articulation. The speech of Purdy’s characters may or may not be “realistic,” but it is remarkably consistent across all of his work and helps create the uniquely off-center tone of his fiction.
On the "poetry" of Purdy's fiction:
If it could be said that Purdy’s fiction has a kind of “poetic” effect,” perhaps that effect emerges not from overtly poetic turns of phrase or a conspicuously “lyrical” prose style—Purdy seldom indulges in flourishes of “fine writing”—but in this distinctive tonal or atmospheric impression Purdy’s writing so tangibly makes on the reader, both during the reading experience itself and when afterwards contemplating its cumulative aesthetic character. While Purdy’s novels all tell stories, it would be reductive to think of them purely as narratives, even of the “gothic” variety critics sometimes identify as Purdy’s chosen narrative mode. Poe famously identified the goal of a short story as producing a “unity of effect,” an achieved integration of structure, mood, or milieu that forges the aesthetic whole that makes a work of fiction more than the mere summation of its parts. Purdy’s fiction, stories and novels alike, is best appreciated for its compelling unity of character, event, setting, and perspective into singular works of verbal art.