A Quest for Love
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
A Quest for Love In a Shallow Grave By James Purdy Arbor House. 140 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" "There's too many rotters around today and...
...His work was, said Maurice Richardson, "sequined with those fine allegorical, symbolical fish that I can only just glimpse as they slip through my coarse-grained net...
...We may protest the unfair narrowing of focus on an easy target, but in the same moment we feel an irresistible exhilaration at the accuracy of his aim...
...That this leads to complexities is less surprising than that the author has a woman as the love object...
...When the boy in The Nephew is reported missing in action, the old aunt decides to make a record of his short and presumably uneventful life...
...True, the love in Purdy is likely to be concealed or distorted, misdirected and unrequited...
...These digressions, dazzling as they are, suggest a crucial contradiction in Purdy, a failure in self-understanding...
...The author's best effects cannot be suggested by quotation, since they are composed of a sort of continuous mosaic of small observed details such as a motion made by someone's head that "resembled putting his neck in a noose more than it did a bow or a nod...
...There is something new, though —an ease in confronting emotion unscreened by comedy: "I felt again somehow like I had the day I and my buddies were all exploded together and rose into the air like birds, and then fell to the erupting earth and the flames and the screams of aircraft and sirens and men calling through punctured bowels and brains...
...As usual, academics came to the rescue...
...At the end of The Nephew, where outwardly the aunt and uncle seem robbed of the only mainstay of their life, they know better...
...It becomes clear even this bickering elderly brother and sister can share a solid and sustaining love...
...He has never presented even a modestly satisfying heterosexual relationship...
...when openly expressed it may be too passionate for the, health of the object, as in the case—not unpredictably—of mother and son...
...Purdy's new novel, In a Shallow Grave, turns on the hiring of an "applicant" by its war-wrecked narrator, who is hopelessly infatuated with a widow...
...Purdy's first work, 63: Dream Palace, was unanimously rejected in New York and had to be printed privately...
...Her discoveries shock her into dropping the plan...
...others followed...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" "There's too many rotters around today and they've got to be done away with, that's what...
...In his dialogue, too, the effect is cumulative, created by the continuous mingling of idiom, mangled cliche, the archaic and the commonplace, flowing with such seeming naturalness from the character's effort to communicate...
...Though Purdy himself has explicitly declared that the theme of all his books "can be said to be the alienation of the individual from a culture that is no longer human," his banal phrasing warns us to follow D. H. Lawrence's maxim and "trust the tale, not the teller...
...This precision helps explain why Purdy's books, concerned as they are with the bleak and dreadful in life, are nevertheless consistently funny...
...And Jeremy marvels, "I felt the pen move under my nervous fingers as if it were guided by something beyond my strength and knowledge...
...Can books that deal with "nightmare subjects"—which Purdy's admittedly do—affirm the value of life...
...Yet elsewhere he has sometimes let his own voice take on the very tone he opposes...
...In Cabot Wright Begins, a wife's absurd whim forces a talentless writer to attempt the biography of a gentleman-rapist...
...In a Shallow Grave is very quiet and sure in its progress, with no lapses into "morbid indulgence...
...The employe's chief duty will be taking down dictated love letters and delivering them...
...This latest book refutes once and for all the theory that Purdy's work asserts "the impossibility of giving and receiving love...
...When he sent copies to major writers overseas, Edith Sit-well took up his cause...
...The rotters are everywhere, and there's only one way to get rid of them: shoot to kill...
...Jeremy is literally an amanuensis, taking dictation from an aging actor who uses his skill as a ventriloquist to tell the violent history of a family with whom he is obsessed in its members' different voices...
...One suspects Purdy is describing himself...
...When in Jeremy's Version he shows a naked female body as exquisitely appealing, the scene is a prelude to a brutal and quite unnecessary rape...
...They may well be the only ones that truly can...
...The book itself, one of the author's best, clearly demonstrates that such wild, impotent nihilism is deranged, subhuman...
...Purdy usually includes some act of writing in his story structures...
...In Cabot Wright Begins Purdy describes with gruesome relish the Saturday night parties where semi-sophisticated married couples change partners...
...In 1957 Gollancz in England and New Directions in New York brought out his book of stories, Color of Darkness...
...By the time Malcolm appeared in 1959, reviewers were agreeing Purdy was a genius, though most had no idea, as Granville Hicks put it, "what he is up to...
...They've got right into where you would never expect to find them, our schools and churches and lodges...
...My face was bathed in a film like tears, but it wasn't tears, it was the sweat of death...
...Yet it is very recognizable Purdy, with his marvelous tricks of juxtaposition...
...Yet there is always a quest for love, and it does not invariably fail...
...It would be tempting to say that the ending of In a Shallow Grave reaches an even higher level, except that perfection is so hard to beat...
...Digging down through the black humor, the PhD candidates found no dearth of meanings in Purdy's "unique vision of radical emptiness," his "damaged cosmos," his "not-right house" in "Nowhere land...
...And the result could be a blinding of the reader to the rest of what he is saying...
...Toward the end of Cabot Wright Begins (his 1964 novel about a man who "raped easily and well") Purdy's disgust with venal publishers drives him into what one critic called "cackling and obscene rhetoric...
...For nightmares are part of most people's existence, and any assessment of life lacking this experience is to a degree a copout...
...In Jeremy's Version (1970), a father reads his 15-year-old son's secret journal and thinks, "such terrible jottings could scarcely be imagined, let alone put down, except by a divine maniac...
...In a Shallow Grave tells a story that is sadder and more terrible than ever—of a man made repellent by war to those whose love he needs—but the comedy is still there...
...Throughout his work there are hints that the author is a mysteriously gifted spokesman for his own Silent Majority—not just the dead but those so crushed by life as to be mute...
...For Purdy has been preoccupied with homosexuality, inextricably involved with loneliness and lack of true kinship...
...In his 1960 novel The Nephew, James Purdy gave this speech to an old woman sitting in murderous lust before a television screen crackling with gun shots...
...Still, embedded in its last pages is a secret perhaps less tangible but, once discovered, as potent as it is astonishing...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 11
