Spotlight on … James Purdy Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967)

 

‘Weirdly, and to my considerable surprise, Eustace Chisholm & the Works reminded a lot of William Gaddis’ first novel The Recognitions – while it is shorter and less complex and lacks the vast amounts of erudition Gaddis splattered all across his work, both novels share something that I would like to describe (for lack of a better word) as their motion. Both Eustace Chisholm and The Recognitions are ensemble novels, they do not have a single protagonist whose unfolding story the reader would follow, not even a small group like a couple or a family, but a large cast of characters none of which would stand out as central; and their stories are not presented as continuous threads weaving a tapestry, but rather as isolated, small episodes which the reader has to actively perceive as a mosaic. Unlike the novels of, say, Dos Passos, however, who so far does something quite similar, The Recognitions and Eustace Chisholm do not replace the central character with a central perspective and ordering overview but, so to speak, stay at eye level with their characters and their fragmented worldview – while there is no single central perspective, each character forms the centre of his section of the narrative, resulting in a constant shift of focus throughout the novels, a stop-and-go, jerking, stuttering motion that can induce dizziness and indeed seems to have led to seasickness in many readers both of Purdy and Gaddis.

‘Eustace Chisholm & the Works, though, it has to be said, is considerable more accessible than The Recognitions. Where Gaddis often seems to be hellbent on frustrating the reader, Eustace Chisholm, while still a demanding read, appears to do its best to ease readers into its vertiginous structure – indeed, almost to lure them in, only to then shock and repel them with scenes of a harrowing violence that in their sheer, unmitigated brutality have an almost physical impact on the reader. The novel does have its humorous moments, does indeed have so many of them that it reads in part like a comedy, but in the end it is a tragedy that functions as its own satyr play.

‘And as it should in satyr play, sexuality plays a large part in Eustace Chisholm – more specifically male homosexuality to which the book has a remarkably relaxed and matter-of-course attitude that makes it unusual even today and that might very well have been just as shocking to readers at the time of it its first publishing as the scenes of violence. (And one might also note, to bring this comparison up for the last time, that homosexuality seems to play a structurally similar role in Eustace Chisholm as Catholicism does in The Recognitions.) But if the novel is accepting of homosexuality, its characters are not necessarily so, and in fact it is precisely this which finally gives rice to tragedy out of the farce – everyone in the novel is in some way or other refusing their innermost desires, not even acknowledging even – or possibly particularly – when they get a chance to fulfill them. Turning away their chance at fulfilment and happiness, they find that the denied desires will not be gainsaid but return to haunt them in invariably self-destructive ways.

‘Eustace Chisholm & the Works has apparently become something of a “gay modern classic” (at least that is what the cover of my edition claims) but it is worth reading not just because of its subject matter but because it attempts (and largely succeeds) to find a literary form for an altered way of life, the lack of a narrative centre or unified thread, the permanently shifting perspective capturing both the dissolution of social ties and the increase in individual freedom in 60s’ subcultures. In other words, this is excellent stuff and James Purdy is definitely a writer I want to read more of.’ — Heloise Merlin

 

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Further

James Purdy @ Wikipedia
Who is James Purdy? Edward Albee Tells
A Conversation with James Purdy
James Purdy: Memento Mori
James Purdy @ goodreads
The Strange, Unsettling Fiction of James Purdy
‘I’m not a gay writer, I’m a monster’: how James Purdy outraged America
The Mystery of James Purdy
An Interview
James Purdy Will Never Be Famous Again
James Purdy’s Chronicles of Outsiderdom
All of the Monsters (In Which I Accuse James Purdy of Throwing My Four-Year-Old Child Down Two Flights of Stairs Using His Powers of Telekinesis)
James Purdy (1914-2009)
Christmas with James Purdy
James Purdy’s Outrages Against the Establishment
James Purdy by Allen Frame
queerplaces – James Purdy
Seedy Equations: Dealing with James Purdy

 

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Extras

A Celebration of the Life and Work of James Purdy

James Purdy Radio Interview and poems with drawings

TLIO Episode 21: Eustace Chisholm and the Works — James Purdy

James Purdy Burial

 

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Interview
by Vince Aletti

 

James Purdy: You know the real fiction is life. It’s so complicated and we never understand it.

Aletti: Often in your books there are young men who are looking for fathers and find themselves taken up by older men who try to adopt them.

Purdy: Or older women. Or other young men, who are often unscrupulous.

Aletti: This seems to be an almost obsessive return to an idea.

Purdy: I think that’s one of the American themes, but it’s also in the Spanish novel. I lived in Spain and I got very fond of their literature, and they’re among of the first to deal with that subject of the lost children. Cervantes wrote a wonderful story called Rinconetti and Cortadillo about boys who are driven out by their families. They go to Seville and fall into the clutches of a gang of thieves…. But the Spanish earlv introduced the subject of, you might say, the lost boys. And it’s in Mark Twain and Herman Melville, very strong. But I think today, one of the most common things are these young boys and girls who get lost, who run off. You see them in New York and they really are lost. So it is one of the big American themes.

Aletti: But you rarely treat it in terms of kids in Times Square.

Purdy: I dealt with it in [Purdy’s early novella] 63: Dream Palace with the two boys from West Virginia who were destroyed, really. And in some of the short stories and the plays. But in the end, you’re stuck with yourself and what YOU know.

Aletti: What happened when vou went to Chicago?

Purdy: I was able to go to school. After a short time, the war broke out and I was in such bad shape I just joined the army. I couldn’t find work.

Aletti: How did you live in Chicago?

Purdy: I just lived in rooms. Sometimes I didn’t have a place to stay.

Aletti: Were you able to take care of yourself?

Purdy: Somehow, I don’t know how.

Aletti: Was it an adventure?

Purdy: Yeah! Yes, it was. I guess I didn’t know any better or I would have been frightened.

Aletti: What happened when you went into army?

Purdy: I was about the last person who should have ever been in the army. But I lasted four years, mostly in the South. That’s where I got the material for Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967).

Aletti: That was one of the books that horrified the critics.

Purdy: They’re easy to horrify! Yes! I knew a lot of Indians in the army; they hated it.

Aletti: So you were stationed mostly in the South?

Purdy: Yes, Mississippi and so forth. I went to Cuba after the army, before Castro, and loved it. I taught English for a vear to 14- and 16-year-olds. Then I went to school in Mexico and taught in Spain. But I was always writing these stories and sending them out, and these magazines just detested them.

Aletti: At what age was this?

Purdy: I was approaching 30 when I was pouring out these stories. But I was writing stories in my twenties and then I lost some of them when I was moving around. But I had about 11 stories. Some of the unpublished stories were privately printed in England. Which was strange, because these stories that had been anathematized by New York publishers and magazines were suddenly extolled so highly that I thought I was crazy, or they were crazy. And they were translated almost immediately. The Italians bought them before the U.S. on the basis of the English reviews.

“Malcolm” was one of the stories I had that was just lying around. I hadn’t finished it though, because I didn’t know how to finish it. “Malcolm” was sort of put on the map by Dorothy Parker in Esquire. The publishers didn’t know quite what to do with it. They’re all so timid, you know, and money-conscious. But Farrar, Straus condescendingly took it. And I think they felt they had a wild animal in the house. They didn’t know what to make of me. I’m always given a funeral when my books are published, a pauper’s funeral. Because they only push what they think is going to bring in the coin. In America, you have to be sort of a dancing bear, an entertainer, a personality.

Aletti: Let’s backtrack a bit and go back to your early writing. What made it occur to you to be a writer?

Purdy: I used to write little things as soon as I could write and my mother would find them and she was quite disturbed. Actually, I think I was mimicking some of the things she said about people and when she saw it in black and white, she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe she said it and that it was being recorded by a . . . devil. [Early on, Purdy also kept notebooks, all lost now, the result of his “gypsy” life.] That’s why I’ve stuck here [in Brooklyn Heights] so long–to have one place to keep things. You can see it’s a mess, I don’t know how to keep order.

Aletti: You’ve said you don’t write with an audience in mind.

Purdy: No, not a big audience . . . I guess I have an audience but not a public. I think being a writer is like being in a war. You’re in battle all the time. Not just with the critics but with yourself. So it’s not a very pleasant life.

Aletti: Jeremy’s Version and The House of the Solitary Maggot were described as parts one and two of a trilogy.

Purdy: That was the publisher’s idea; there was no real trilogy. But they are what I would call continuous novels in that they have similar themes: Jeremy, The Maggot, Mourners Below, On Glory’s Course and now this one, In the Hollow of His Hand. They’re sort of a quintuple, just related novels.

Aletti: How would you describe the theme?

Purdy: It’s really the passionate connection of family members, I think. Their sense of identity comes through the family and, in a way, the town. The parents are really obsessed with their children and the children with their parents.

Aletti: In On Glory’s Course, the power of the town is particularly striking.

Purdy: It’s almost as though it were the main character, with all the narrowness of prejudice and ignorance. But you see all societies are crushing like that. There are no free societies. We all live under scrutiny. But in cities, you don’t have the same sense of that.

Aletti: No, that’s because you can hide. But yet when your characters are in cities, like in Eustace Chisolm, they seem to form these little or groups that have interactions as violent and disapproving as your small towns. When I think of some of the things that happen in your books, like the horrible events of In a Shallow Grave, how can it surprise you that the critics would be appalled?

Purdy: They are appalling, they appall me. I mean, they appall me first. Or I would be a monster. My grandmother told me the story of The Solitary Maggot when I was a little boy. It was a sleety day and she was walking me, so I wouldn’t slip, and just then a buggy came by with an old man with white hair. He had this whip and was whipping the horse. And she said, “That old man’s son was in the silent movies.” And that was the basis, or one of the bases, of that book. I’m supposed to be part Indian. My great-grandmother was part Indian, an eighth, I think, so I have very little left.

Aletti: Does your interest in Indians have any connection to an outsider status?

Purdy: Yes, I think so. I’m always interested in whoever doesn’t belong or conform. I’m considered anti-establishment. That isn’t really true; the establishment never wanted me, and you can’t be anti-something where you’re not even invited.

Aletti: Your new book, In the Hollow of His Hand–where does the title come from?

Purdy: It’s an expression I’d always heard as a child. It meant to me, in this life one is totally insecure, totally at the mercy of fate, circumstance.

Aletti: I’m curious about the book’s growing sense of unreality and dreaminess.

Purdy: Well, he’s left his home, you see, he’s left his roots. I know a lot of people say that’s a defect in the book. The first part is realistic, and the rest isn’t, but he left the realistic part. If you suddenly leave home as a child and are kidnapped by gypsies or hobos, as a child you have no key to this world. It’s all fantastic. And furthermore, it is a fantastic world; I think a child would see all that as unreal. Children see a lot, but they have no key to that. When very young children see sex or see someone being murdered, they step out of something that they know into something they have no understanding of.

Aletti: Chad the book’s lost boy, is taken on long car rides with an Indian named Decatur, leading to a series of odd scenes of confrontation, fascination and revulsion over the discovery that they both have webbed feet. These encounters seem so compulsive.

Purdy: They are. But I think people do that. You see most people never tell you about those things; they’re ashamed. What I do, I guess, is I show what people really do and never tell.M

Most novelists write about what people see and understand and I don’t believe in that reality, I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s fiction. Two of my favorite writers are Hawthorne and Melville because they’re always doing that–they’re showing what really is there, behind the facade. And in so much writing, the facade is the reality.

Aletti: I’m wondering about the compulsive nature of your writing and about your impulse to write.

Purdy: Yes, I think it comes from some deep unhappiness and confusion and terror.

Aletti: Why terror?

Purdy: I just felt I was surrounded by danger.

Aletti: Do you feel writing helped to dispel it?

Purdy: It didn’t dispel it, but it kept me from screaming in the streets.

 

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Book

James Purdy Eustace Chisholm and the Works
Liveright

‘No James Purdy novel has dazzled contemporary writers more than this haunting tale of unrequited love in an indifferent world. A seedy depression-era boarding house in Chicago plays host to “a game of emotional chairs” (The Guardian) in a novel initially condemned for its frank depiction of abortion, homosexuality, and life on the margins of American society. A cast of characters displaced by economic distress congeal around the embittered poet Eustace Chisholm, who acts as a something of a Greek chorus for the doomed and destructive relationship that is instigated when landlord Daniel Haws falls in love with young college student Amos Ratcliffe. Building to a shocking conclusion, Eustace Chisholm and the Works is a dark and gothic look at the strange and terrible power of love amid a “psychic American landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence, and isolation” (William Grimes, New York Times).’ — Liveright

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hey. Trip was good. ‘Story of the Eye’ turned me around too when I read it. It’s way up there. Honored that my stuff is helping to create really good dialogue. What more could the maker of anything want really. I’m still too jet lag-zonked to subject your reading to my state of mind, but sleep’s help is gradually on the way. Excited to. Thanks a lot, man. My fuzziness is be-warmed. Love back! ** Tyler Ookami, Oh my god, that’s horror. The broiling sky, I mean. Awesome that you were a scare actor. Some LA artist friends and I were seriously talking about doing a haunt together there next year, in which case I’ll get to fulfil that particular career goal. Seriously, do Efteling. I think you know it’s my favorite amusement park, and I think you would similarly bliss out there. They just opened a new spooky and, as usual for them, innovative ride, Danse Macabre, and I think Zac and I will use that as an excuse to head up there shortly. I had no idea Kate Bush located a special there, wow. I’ll greedily use that link a bit later. Huh. I think I have to watch that horrible Fuji-Q knock off film, or a bit of it. Too curious. I never get scared in haunted houses, but I got the closest in that attraction. Thanks, jay. Such a rich bunch of paragraphs. Hugs. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, and ditto. I can’t wait to wake up fully enough to fully appreciate my homecoming. Not that I’m not. Trick-or-treaters in Vienna! Nice! I didn’t take photos of the haunts I hit up, but Zac did, and I’ll have to get him to dropbox them to me. So I can’t illustrate my favorites unless, well, I can find something online. No pix of Cats & Bats Haunt, but it was a fave. Very handmade, built on this kind of cliff in front of a person’s house. At one point you were forced inside a giant cardboard oven and ‘cooked’. Another fave was Backwoods Massacre. Hellizondo Haunt was really nice. Wildwood’s Ghost Town, ditto. On the pro ones, Reign of Terror was amazing. It had 350 rooms and took 45 minutes to walk through. Really incredible. So there’s some. We did about 25 haunts in all. Love making me not want to take a nap, G. ** Bill, Hi. I hope the gig went really well last night. How was it for you? Seven weeks?! Where in the world are you going? Being abroad does not help the election anxiety unfortunately. Yikes. ** Steve, Thanks. Much needed. I think what Zac and I want to do is make an actual haunt. We were talking with some LA artist friends about doing that next year. Maybe we would document doing that, if we do. I’m so sorry about the stuff with your parents. I feel that pain or imagine I can at least. Thank god for Internet Archive’s return. I haven’t heard the new Cure yet, but I’ve read it’s a gloomy one, which sounds promising to me for whom ‘Pornography’ is their highlight. ** _Black_Acrylic, The missing goes both ways, for sure. Great, Thursday, tick tick … The PT double header awaits me or my cogency, I mean. That Italo Disco vermouth looks pretty scary, dude. Be careful. ** Diego Luis Sanromán, Hi, Diego! No, that’s my old, defunct address, Write to me at [email protected]. Thanks. ** Uday, Hey, Uday! There you are! Reflective sounds good under the circumstances. I spent October doing more than being. But now I’m sitting at my desk again where thoughtfulness should be more conducive. Awesome to see you again! ** sam jenks at dif, Hi, sam, if I may call you that. It’s great to meet you, and I’m happy you found this place. Your project sounds really interesting. Connect … sure, how so? I’ll be seeing Thomas Moore any day now. Anyway, happy to help however I can. Everyone, sam jenks at dif has an exciting seeming new project called dif, described as ‘co-producing misfit gay lit and other queer shit​’. Check it out. Thanks! ** Lucas, Hey, buddy. Thanks for staying up late to watch the thing. No, Zac took pix, and I have to get them from him. I was too busy studying them and taking mental notes. I’m still lagged annoyingly, but it seems a little less annoying and in-play every day, so hopefully I’ll be sharp any minute now. I can’t wait to see you here too! ** Justin D, Hey, J. Thanks, pal, and same to you. The trip was very good, productive and mind-blowing in the right balance. Oh, I wonder who took the photo. It’s so crisp and cold here in Paris as it never is in LA. I pulled my scarf out of the drawer and everything. I’ll look for ‘Evil Does Not Exist’. Criterion isn’t available in France, sadly, but surely there’s way. Thanks a lot for the tip. I spent my Halloween on a jet watching in-flight entertainment, and I don’t think anything I saw was remotely recommendable. I would say avoid ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ if it’s not too late. ** Cletus, Hey, hey, Cletus. C. McCarthy is pretty great, no? ‘Blood Meridien’ especially for me. Cher! Pix? Great about the readings. Can you say more about them? I read in NYC at the top of my trip, and it was weirdly great. My Halloween was spent flying from LA to Paris, so no costume for me. One of the flight attendants had a toy jet ‘stuck’ through her head and fake bloody lips. It made people around me uncomfortable, but it made me happy. ** HaRpEr, Hi, H! Oh, that is a cool Bowie costume. Suave and just right combo of understated but unmistakeable. Thanks. How do they get rid of mould? I feel like I should know that. Can they just scrape it off? Is it that simple? I couldn’t get through ‘Dhalgren’, not because I didn’t think it was really good. Length + sci-fi is a tough route for me. ** Jacob, Hey, Jacob. That sounds fun: the haunt. I don’t think I’ve been to a frat haunt. Huh. Like I was sort of saying up above, my favorite haunt moment was when this evil baker forced my friends and me into a giant, walk-in oven and then cooked us, with high heat and steam and the sounds of flesh roasting. Pretty nice. Your tote bag ‘mask’ sounds like a hit in my imagination, for sure. And, yes, Ossian Brown-ish to boot. My favorite costumes … maybe this kid who looked about 13 years old wearing a t-shirt that said, ‘Eat me, pedophiles’. I thought that was daring. I don’t get scared, unfortunately, or not by ‘scary stuff. The oven thing tried hard. One monster in one of the haunts made a friend of mine sit in a chair and then electrocuted her very realistically even though she said it didn’t hurt. That was, well, startling at least. ** Okay. Not long before I left on vacation, I was talking with someone here about the James Purdy novel up there, and I thought I would just go ahead and extend that, if you’re interested. See you tomorrow.