The Limits of Miniature

...In literature and among literary figures, one could cite James Joyce, who proved finally, in spite of his eclecticism, to be a great writer...

...Sometimes all the reader gets is a fragment of observation, acute observation admittedly, but no resolution...

...At most one can only whisper, as his heroine Miss Miranda does in "Goodnight Sweetheart," "God, dear God," and wonder what the world and what our human relationships amount to...

...Even attempting to work on a large canvas seems virtually impossible for the young fiction writer...

...The difference lies in the situations and the people that Purdy chooses to illustrate what he has to say...

...It would be easy, but not entirely accurate, to type him as still another addition to the Theater of the Absurd...

...or, in the field of play writing, Bertolt Brecht, who has a claque so clamorous that objective judgment becomes exceedingly difficult...

...Sometimes he brings it off...

...One of them said to me not long ago, "Yes, he writes pretty well...

...After reading Children Is All, Purdy's new book of 10 stories and two plays, I am not at all sure that I can either answer my critic friend or fall in with the Edith Sitwell crowd...

...The first scene of "Children Is All" is somewhat like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot...

...There is no comfort in the author's view of his people or of the world...

...My reservations are not so much about his writing, which is certainly excellent, important and compelling, as about his genre...

...About Purdy's only previous short story collection, called Color of Darkness, various writers ranging from Kenneth Rexroth to Tennessee Williams have claimed that it is "the best first book of short stories I have ever read" and "a new expression of new feeling and experience in our very new times...

...Everything Under The Sun," perhaps the most admired of Purdy's short stories, spells out the sad, necessary, symbiotic relationship between two young men...

...two of them are included in this volume, "Children Is All" and "Cracks," the latter soon to be produced offBroadway...

...One can say that he feels about his material, but what is so new about it...

...But it is a sad and chilling appearance: He has broken out of prison, as he had tried many times before, and now he is so badly wounded that he dies in his mother's arms...

...Instead he follows a genuine theme, develops it, resolves it, just as a conventional playwright might...

...In the second scene, after the "welcome home dinner" has been ruined, the mother has been reduced to near panic, and a great deal of self-exploration has been accomplished, the son finally appears...

...Purdy's plays express another side of his literary personality...

...These are days, however, in which the resolution of a literary theme is considered, at best, unfashionable...

...One wonders eternally whether their profound hold on their audience and imitators and appreciators is a matter of art or of some mysterious projection of a romantic personality...

...This is the current enigma about James Purdy...

...Yet Purdy is not absurd for the sake of being absurd...

...Daddy Wolf" is a heartbreaking picture of the destruction of a man, done in 10 brief pages in the form of a telephone conversation to a stranger...

...Or one could cite Jack Kerouac, who, despite his devoted following, proved, after all, to be fairly trashy...

...That he is controversial, there is no question...

...Consider, for instance, in another medium, James Dean, the actor, on whom an entire mystique was centered...

...Reviewed by SANTHA RAMA RAU Author, "Remember the House," "Home to India," "Gifts of Passage" James Purdy is an example of a curious and fascinating phenomenon that occurs in the arts from time to time—the person who, as a result of some private but communicable magic, acquires a clique of passionate admirers and often an opposition of puzzled outsiders who wonder what the fuss is all about...

...Their dialogue explores not only the relationship of the mother to the son, but also the bonds between the two women, and between them and the teenage girl next door, an illegitimate child who lives with a resentful uncle and who, because she is living in her own romantic delusion, is the only one to have the courage to visit the young man in jail...

...Unlike Beckett, though, Purdy does not leave his audience guessing...

...A middled-aged woman and her middle-aged companion and housekeeper are waiting for the return of the woman's son from the state penitentiary after a 15-year sentence...

...Equally, Wayne C. Booth, writing in the New York Times Book Review, remarked, "Anyone who cares for creative vitality must add James Purdy to the small list of writers who matter...

...Unhappily, an eye for the comical aspects of life, for the pleasure not the despair in its absurdities, seems to be an endemic lack in the "progressive writing" of our time...

...Purdy's talents are such that one longs to see him move out of the bitter vignette, the transitory yet significant, small yet deep incident, into a more spacious field...

...The play ends with a poignant and frightening exchange between the two women: The mother who loved and couldn't love will not accept the bleeding, dying man as her boy Billy, and the housekeeper, begging for a sense of reality in life...

...Cracks," is less successful, than "Children...

...Nevertheless, considering the collection as a whole, I am on the side of Purdy's devotees...

...Why do people consider it so revolutionary...

...In his short stories, Purdy chooses tiny incidents, small moments out of the lives of his characters—a conversation that lasts perhaps 10 minutes, a fugitive emotional turning-point in a character's life, that kind of thing—and hopes to reveal through them the entire nature, character and life of the person that he is writing about...

...In any case, within the limits of miniature, Purdy creates some extraordinarily moving moments and some deep insights into the lonely, troubled people about whom he writes...

...The cult, in short, doesn't necessarily guarantee the quality of the product...

...Edith Sitwell, for example, writing in the New York HeraldTribune, said, "I think it undoubted that James Purdy will come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language...

...That he has his admirers (and very distinguished ones), there is again no question...

...But I have heard responsible critics wonder, in the age-old way, what elicits such uncontrolled excitement...