James Purdy: Playwright

James Purdy is perhaps America’s most internationally acclaimed novelist, and for over four decades has been translated into more than 30 languages. Critically, however, Purdy has always managed to be on the wrong side of the American fame/money track, in constant warfare with what he calls “the book industry and its sister whore the establishment book reviewing media.”

Figure 1.

Laurence Fishburne and Sheila Dabney in Souvenirs, one of a pair of short plays by James Purdy in Sun and the Sleepless, presented at Theater for the New City, New York, 1989. Photo: Courtesy Jonathan Slaff.

Distinguished critics have written admiringly of Purdy’s work, including Angus Wilson, Carl Van Vechten, George Steiner, and John Cowper Powys, and indeed it was Dame Edith Sitwell who, never having met him (and supposing him to be a Negro writer), arranged for his first publication with a British publisher. This was 63: Dream Palace, published in London in 1957. Although censored from the first edition, when the final line in the book was finally published—“Up we go then, motherfucker”—Purdy’s name was established, for good and for ill.

Although by no means a gay genre novelist, Purdy’s work was condemned and branded “homosexual” in the 1960s, in particular for writing in Eustace Chisholm and the Works about passionate love between two young men. Fashion’s pendulum swung and by the 1980s he was condemned by the gay establishment for not writing feel-good yuppy novels. His German publisher was taken to court for publishing a criminal work, Narrow Rooms; case dismissed. Not unscathed, but invigorated with indignation by such idiocy, Purdy continues to write exactly what he wants. “I don’t write for anyone. I write for the soul,” he has said. However, he told me he would just as soon write plays as novels, but no one would publish them. This is not entirely true, as most have been published by small presses and journals. A collection, In the Night of Time and Four Other Plays, was published by Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1992.

Even in his novels Purdy’s dialogue is a major factor. Writers as diverse as Langston Hughes and Paul Bowles have called his language true classical American, Marianne Moore hailed him as “a master of the American vernacular,” and Gore Vidal wrote “Purdy has created an American language which was always there but never noticed.” Purdy was encouraged to write for the stage by Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Tennessee Williams, who especially admired his dialogue. George Cukor called Purdy to invite him to Hollywood, but Purdy told him he was temperamentally unfitted to go there. In 1964, the actress Margaret Barker presented an evening of dramatizations of Purdy stories. This was attended by Edward Albee, who was so attracted to Purdy’s novel Malcolm that he wrote an adaptation of it for the Broadway stage.

The theatricality inherent in Purdy’s work has attracted options by Hollywood figures James Bridges, Tom Hulce, and Carroll Baker. M-G-M bought the rights to Cabot Wright Begins but never filmed it. Sleep Tight was shown on commercial television and “That wasn’t too bad,” Purdy says, but the PBS film of In a Shallow Grave is a clinical example of how an author’s work can be mutilated. In this case the hero is a hideously disfigured Vietnam veteran, who in a transcendent ending, vanquishes his heterosexual fantasy/fixation and returns to a black man who loves him. In the film, the white woman accepts the white man’s love: the end. On the contrary, 63: Dream Palace was faithfully and impressively transformed into an opera by Hans-Jurgen von Bose, commissioned by the 1990 Munich Biennale and televised nationally in Germany. And at the time of his death, Derek Jarman was planing to film a Purdy work.

James Purdy has written ten full-length plays and thirty short plays, which are produced at off-off-Broadway scale throughout the world. In 1983, I presented a dramatized reading of Purdy’s work at the Puerto Rican...