James Purdy's Allegories of Love

The work of the contemporary American author James Purdy always has evoked strong response. Early on—in the late 1940s and early 1950s—the response from editors and publishers was almost entirely negative, even hostile, as Purdy himself humorously and ruefully relates in this 1984 autobiographical sketch:

In my twenties, I began sending out my completed stories to magazines . . . My stories were always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines, and they earned, if possible, even more hostile comments from the little magazines. All editors were insistent that I would never be a published writer.

("An Autobiographical Sketch")

In 1956 when he was thirty-three years old, Purdy—spurred by "a kind of psychic impulse"—sent a privately published collection of his fiction to Dame Edith Sitwell, whom he did not know. In what must have seemed to the unknown author a more or less miraculous letter of reply, Sitwell declared Purdy "a writer of genius" and offered to introduce his work to a commercial publisher in England, who soon published it to critical acclaim ("An Autobiographical Sketch"). American publishers then competed for the right to publish the work that they had spurned earlier, and Purdy found himself, for a period of several years and novels, a critical, if not a financial, success as an author. But he was not to remain in the media and critical establishments' good graces for long, as he relates:

Despite all this acclaim coming to me out of total obscurity, I soon realized that if my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles, it was to be in the future a kind of endless open warfare. Neither the kind of publishers I had nor the press stood wholeheartedly behind me . . .In general, too, I found the so-called literary establishment parochial and studiedly insensitive to the kind of writing I was engaged in, completely taken up with trends and ratings and sales, and prostrate before their true God, Mammon.

("An Autobiographical Sketch")

As Purdy continued to write novels that not only failed to adhere to, but also lampooned and satirized, contemporary taste and habits of reading, his work came more and more to be overlooked and dismissed by the publishing and reviewing powers that be, as well as by the literary critical establishment.

Manifest and latent homophobia no doubt lies at the root of much of the neglect of and hostility to Purdy's fiction, which has persistently refused to adhere to political correctness of any stripe, for which Purdy claims total contempt: "What they call politically acceptable I call philistinism and stupidity" (Lane). Indeed, more recently, as the author has complained, it is the gay literary critical establishment that has found the most to object to in his work, which does not always portray gays as "well-behaved bourgeoisie" (Lane).

The relationship of bigotry and homophobia to Purdy's literary reception is a topic that I will return to at the end of this essay. But first I want to explore the possibility of a more pervasive and generic cause for critical misunderstanding of, and negativity in response to, Purdy's work—and that is the failure of readers and critics to recognize the allegorical nature of Purdy's fictionalizing, and to alter their critical assumptions and habits of reading in order to get his fiction to work for them in an enlightening and rewarding fashion.

Purdy himself noted in his 1993 interview with Christopher Lane that the "misreading" of him has been "almost total":

Even some of the good reviews don't understand what I'm writing. I think intellectuals are the worst sinners because they want everything clear and life is not clear. Actually I think my books are very clear, but they don't get it because they come with preconceived notions as to what fiction should be and what political correctness should be.

(Lane)

One of Purdy's best readers, the English critic Tony Tanner, concurred with Purdy's assessment regarding the misreading and misunderstanding of his work on the part of critics: "Purdy has never, it seems to...