The Correction of Opinion
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Correction of Opinion By Stanley Edgar Hyman It appears to be generally believed that James Purdy is an important American writer. The publication of his third novel,...
...The most hardened offender, Dame Edith Sitwell, has spent many decades exposing her literary incapacities to the world...
...The most prodigiously funny book to streak across these heavy-hanging times," wrote Dorothy Parker, going on to commend Purdy's realism, originality, insight, and power...
...I wish I knew...
...Some (Rexroth, Southern) are loosely of Purdy's school, and thus promote their own work in promoting his...
...An elaborate and complex structure of narratives within narratives serves no purpose beyond introducing the jeremiads...
...In its place there is only verbal violence, as in the story that ends with the virtuous wife's rejecting the advance of her wealthy father-in-law with "You whoring old goat...
...Katherine Anne Porter praised Purdy's style: "Style as fluid and natural as a man thinking to himself in the dark, yet controlled, coherent, with an innate sense of form, and great powers of concentration...
...Ultimately, Purdy is neither a novelist nor a fiction writer...
...William Carlos Williams wrote to Purdy: "You have squeezed us into a ball, tenderly, heart and soul, and laid us bare with complete understanding...
...Alma learns principally that life is pretty hard on everyone, and she is broadened by the discovery...
...The novels are not novels but contrived sequences of visits to grotesque households in quest of someone's identity, and before long Purdy becomes bored with the contrivance and ignores it...
...Quite a few are fraternity brothers...
...Dudley Fitts, who had apparently been reading more stories than Gregory, said: "Purdy's stories are the real thing, the veritable real thing, the kind of excitement of art that only J. F. Powers has shown us in recent years, and Flannery O'Connor...
...Cabot Wright Begins has been out for only a few weeks, but already Susan Sontag has welcomed it as "a literary event of importance" by "one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously," and Theodore Solotaroff (once himself a corrector of opinion) has characterized its ending as "a great moment in contemporary writing.'- Both compared Purdy to Nathanael West...
...The book is a garish scrapbook of Purdy's opinions on the wickedness of our civilization, written in mock-Alger style (an interloper leaves "cursing his assailant roundly") whenever Purdy remembers...
...He has the priceless gift of compassion," she added...
...Here is one from Cabot Wright Begins: "Stooping to pick it up, her eyes were riveted to the irregularly margined triple-spaced words, giving the effect of having been branded on the paper by an iron...
...A woman's life in Cabot Wright Begins "had been as unpleasant as though she had been tied under the posterior regions of a huge mammoth, such as a rhinoceros...
...Some of them (Farrell, W. C. Williams) are themselves writers so tin-eared that they cannot see anything wrong with Purdy...
...She put Purdy himself "in the very highest rank of contemporary American writers...
...A rich and passionate talent," added Winfield Townley Scott...
...Horace Gregory wrote that Purdy's stories "are the only new and deeply moving stories written in this country in the 1950's...
...This review will attempt to show the vast discrepancy between the praise of Purdy by so many prominent literary figures and the reality of his work, and will then try to get at the causes of that praise...
...Purdy's first book of stories, Color of Darkness, appeared in 1956...
...As a plummy example, I offer her introduction's explanation of the end of "63: Dream Palace," involving one of Lenny Brace's favorite polysyllables...
...Dorothy Parker called Purdy "a striking new American talent, sure and sharp and powerful...
...Purdy is a terrible writer, and worse than that, he is a boring writer...
...Purdy specializes in the inept simile...
...The answer, I am afraid, allows them the choice of being fools or knaves...
...The book is an inconsequential Candide, or, more accurately, a pretentious Candy...
...The only reason for reviewing bad books is to attempt the correction of opinion, one of the traditional functions of criticism, which has fallen into abeyance in our sleazy literary age...
...Purdy's writing is so careless that by p. 172 of The Nephew he has forgotten what occurred on p. 159...
...But what is Dorothy Parker doing in this crowd, or my old friend Dick Lewis...
...A complex, reverberating work," said Angus Wilson...
...Kenneth Rexroth said of the book: "I sincerely believe it is one of the best first books of short stories I have ever read...
...Thus a son kicks his father in the groin, a husband beats his wife bloody at a party, a boy breaks the neck of his younger brother, and (in "Why Can't They Tell You Why?," the best story in Color of Darkness) a mother drives her son literally mad...
...In many respects it is an expansion of "63: Dream Palace," in the genre of sad farce rather than pathosbathos...
...She found "at least three" additional masterpieces in the new book, including one of the plays, and announced: "I think it undoubted that James Purdy will come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language...
...The question is, then, why do all these celebrated writers assure us that this ugly duckling is a swan, an ornament of our letters comparable to Nathanael West or Flannery O'Connor (not to speak of Herman Melville...
...The Nephew (which reads as though it had been written before Malcolm, and published as a result of Malcolm's success) is Midwest small town soap opera...
...Cabot Wright Begins is a delight all the way through," said Paul Bowles...
...The book was greeted by a rapturous chorus...
...R. W. B. Lewis classed Purdy with Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, and compared Malcolm to Billy Budd...
...Purdy's first novel, Malcolm, appeared in 1959...
...There was an earlier private printing of some of the stories, and an English volume...
...He is a social satirist, and at times a funny and effective one...
...The later stories, in Children Is All, have lost even this power...
...Here is a sentence from The Nephew: "They all sat drinking now with the exception of Alma, who having tasted from her glass gingerly, only made pretense from then on to imbibe any more...
...The Nephew, Purdy's second novel, was published the next year...
...Angus Wilson described the book's novella, "63: Dream Palace," as "a small masterpiece.' Dame Edith Sitwell, in an introduction to a paperback edition of Color of Darkness, added that the novella was a masterpiece from the first sentence to the last, and she found two other masterpieces in the volume...
...In Malcolm, Madame Girard's eyelids flutter "like a medium who sees the ghost she had never thought to catch...
...on the subject of his compassion, the author of "Flowering Judas" might have enlightened us, not the author of Ship of Fools...
...A genuine surprise...
...He will surely enchant the reader who values a new expression of new feeling and experience in our very new times,' said Tennessee Williams...
...The visits are made by two Chicagoans who came to Brooklyn to interview Wright and write his story right...
...His prose is ungrammatical, clumsy, graceless, and often unintentionally funny...
...In general, Purdy writes like a careless undergraduate...
...Alma keeps "a replenished store of nuts for the squirrels.' (Here Purdy is clearly trying to write two sentences at once, one saying that Alma keeps a store of nuts, the other that she replenishes the store whenever it runs low...
...an instance of the difference between the creative and the merely literary," wrote Terry Southern...
...If Malcolm is a pretentious Candy, The Nephew is a pretentious Peyton Place, or, to use a borrowed trope, a Burne-Iones allegorical painting entitled "Rigidity Yielding to Compassion.' Cabot Wright Begins is a bad sick joke, a portrait of the Yale man and Wall Street broker as mass rapist...
...Its predominant style is the sort of cuteness that Truman Capote has made peculiarly his own...
...A retired schoolteacher named Alma, living with her brother Boyd, goes on a series of visits in the town to learn more about their dead nephew Cliff (that is, A, B, and a quest for C...
...The contrast between all these incandescent words and the lumpish reality of Purdy's books is shocking...
...Others (Gregory, Daiches) are indiscriminate critics sorelegged from climbing on bandwagons...
...The last third of Cabot Wright Begins suggests that he missed the true vocation for which his combination of passion and bad taste qualify him, that of sick comic...
...As for Katherine Anne Porter: her remarks about Purdy's style are shamelessly irresponsible...
...In Malcolm the hero visits, in quest of his own identity, a series of exotic addresses given him by a peripatetic astrologer, then marries and dies...
...The publication of his third novel, Cabot Wright Begins (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pp., $4.95), offers an occasion for dissent...
...Malcolm is warned not to expose his tattoo "to the unprotected sun...
...A volume of stories and plays, Children Is All (1962), seems to have disappointed many of these enthusiasts, but Dame Edith Sitwell was loyal to the last...
...Texture is all, substance nothing," says Madame Girard in Malcolm, and her creator appears to agree with her...
...The early stories are ineptly written, but several of them have a raw power that comes from Purdy's imaging domestic hostility and potential violence as overt violence...
...Or there is the chic shock that begins another story: "Pearl Miranda walked stark naked from her classroom in the George Washington School where she taught the eighth grade, down Locust Street...
...John Cowper Powys called him "the best kind of original genius of our day...
...If The Nephew is an allegorical painting, Cabot Wright Begins is Pop Art...
...I think that his is a first-rate talent," said James T. Farrell...
...David Daiches announced: "It is a very funny book, and whatever else the careful reader will find in it, he will find the delight of true original comedy...
Vol. 47 • November 1964 • No. 24
