I was just coming off a long and feverish James Purdy binge in 1986 when his latest book, In the Hollow of His Hand, was published. It seemed the ideal opportunity to catch up with one of America’s most eccentric and compulsive writers–the subject of a cult that kept his name alive through more than twenty mostly un-reviewed novels, short-story collections, and plays. We met in his disordered Brooklyn Heights apartment one afternoon and, though he was reluctant to examine his own processes in any detail, he entertained me like a retired professor who still keeps office hours. He was a frail 72 when we spoke, but he was flintier than he appeared. He died in 2009, at 94. The conversation that follows has been edited–and picks up just as we’re settling down to talk. – 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: Many of your books have a very Southern atmosphere.
Purdy: Well, you know small towns, whether they’re in New England, the Midwest, or the South, have a certain cultural similarity. The colloquial language, though different, is similar in its use of idioms and colorful expressions. And there are usually great houses where people have lived for a long time. It has a certain tradition that you don’t always find in large cities where people live alone, or families live in one room and you don’t have the expansiveness.
Aletti: A number of your novels feature big, imposing houses in small towns that tend to weave myths around them.
Purdy: But they’re real, they’re actually real. In those days, you could build vour own house with the help of neighbors and you didn’t have to be so rich.
Aletti: So many of your books are inventive to the point of fantasy.
Purdy: Well, America is a fantasy land. Maybe it always was. I mean, people accuse me of inventing. Don’t they listen to the news? Don’t they read the newspaper? The most unbelievable things are going on. I’m horrified when I pick up the paper; it’s too much. What’s going on in America?
Aletti: Your story “Eventide” was originally turned down by The New Yorker with the comment that you didn’t know how to write English.
Purdy: Of course, the language there, even in the expository parts, is imitating Black speech so that even the expository sentences move in that ungrammatical pattern. The Spanish picaresque novels worked that way, too.
Aletti: Speaking of picaresque, In the Hollow of His Hand strikes me as your most picaresque work. Was it designed in that way?
Purdy: No. I don’t really have too much conscious intention. I just start and often I just throw it all away and it’ll reappear maybe a few years later. But I don’t think things through like a journalist or a biographer. I’ve been called an unconscious writer. They don’t like that; that’s bad to them. But I sort of am, I think. It’s coming from deep down. I just start to write and it comes out. Sometimes it works and then it doesn’t. I can tell when it works; it may not work for critics, but . . . [My writing has] many levels, I think, and it’s not so much conscious as it’s inevitable. I’m always amused by reading trial transcripts, because that’s how people speak, but if you put that in a novel, people would say, No one speaks like that. But the fact is, people speak in very outlandish ways and you can’t put that into a book, you have to rewrite it. That’s one thing I liked about Gertrude Stein. She used the rhythms of common people, and so did Sherwood Anderson. And of course, the granddaddy of all was Mark Twain. But those were very pared down, cut away, because you can’t put real human speech down, it would throw everyone. It has to be purified.
Aletti: Your writing is a combination of a kind of elevated, stilted, almost old-fashioned speech with very common, very direct language that even within one sentence will go back and forth.
Purdy: It’s true. I found people talk that way in small towns. One reason is, they’re brought up on the Bible, the King James version, so that even ignorant people will occasionally sound like the Bible. Also, they’re brought up to hear legal speech in trials, and that drifts out into common knowledge. The Blacks, for years, of course, have been nurtured on the Bible and yet they bring their own common speech into that, so it’s a crazy quilt of things. [In my books,] the exposition sometimes imitates the common speech, like a mirror. I guess people have to get used to me because they’re so used to the slick magazines.
I based Elijah Thrush [in I Am Elija Thrush] on a real person who talked that wav, so I didn’t have to put my ventriloquism into him. Most of mv characters are real. They’re based on real people. But when you begin to construct a book, they diminish to a degree because you can’t put everything you know into a book or else it would be a biography.
Aletti: In Elijah Thrush, the title character says, “I got rid of the critics by simply entering a world where they could not enter, and about which, for all their tacky cleverness, they could not gain one scrap of information.”
Purdy: That was the way that man spoke, but I could have said it, yes. I don’t do that consciously. I think that one cannot approach any work of art intellectually, alone. Only third-rate works of art open to intellectual perception. To me art is sort of like religious conversion: you can’t just walk in. I think it was Havelock Ellis who said, speaking of art criticism, “Don’t speak to the pictures until they speak to you.” And I think that’s true of anything that’s seriously conceived and executed. But it’s not something I consciously do.
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.
Photo courtesy of Sylvia Plachy
