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hand, has no such scruples about handling
precious things, so the story ends with Mr.
Evening stretched out on a bed, “naked as
he had come into the world.”
Similarly, a physical object in “Rapture”
mediates between one kind of love and another. Brice, the son,
has long “gold hair.” When Mrs. Muir cleans the bathroom, she
takes the strands of hair from his comb and saves it in a small
box. After Kent arrives, she discovers that there are no hairs left
in the comb: “She felt then, strangely, unaccountably, as if a load
had been lifted from her heart.” Afterwards, she observes the
daily “ceremony of the cleaning of the bathroom and the look-
ing at the comb,” which never again has hairs in it. Eventually,
she looks in Kent’s dresser:
She left the top drawer for last, as if she must prepare herself for
what she would find in it. There was a small mother-of-pearl box
there. She opened it. At first she saw only the reproduction on its
underlid of a painting of John the Baptist as a youth. But in the
box itself, arranged in pink tissue paper, she spied a gathering of
the gold hair of Brice Muir. She closed the box. There was a kind
of strange smile playing over all her features at that moment.
Then follows the paragraph, quoted earlier, about how Mrs.
Muir finds peace because Kent will be the bridegroom to her
son. Here, the manifestation of the box—mother-of-pearl, with
John the Baptist thrown in for additional religious and homo-
erotic resonance, because Purdy does not fear excess—makes
the “gold hair” itself assume a power somewhere between the
totemic and the fetishistic. When Mrs. Muir cherishes the hair,
it’s maternal love; when Kent does, it’s incestuous lust. As in
“Mr. Evening,” the revered object, effectively spot-lit by isola-
tion, has the power to make the transition from one form of de-
sire to another.
Purdy does present one of the problems found in writers of
his generation: he sometimes uses women and African-Ameri-
cans more as symbols than as fully defined characters. Women
are often grotesques, and their sexuality is discounted, in a way
that men’s is not. For example, “Lily’s Party” is a kind of sex
comedy that Lily herself might not find funny, but the action
and the imagery still show Purdy’s touch. Lily tells a man
named Hobart, “‘I gave your brother Edward two of the best
years of my life.’ Lily spoke with the dry accent of someone
testifying in court for the second time.”
“Testifying for the second time” is strik-
ing in its accuracy about how facts,
when repeated, sound formal and a lit-
tle tired. Later, Hobart follows Lily on
her way to an assignation with a man he
thinks of as the “preacher” and watches
from outside her home:
The preacher at this moment tore off
the upper part of Lily’s dress, and her
breasts and nipples looked out from the
light into the darkness at Hobart like the
troubled faces of children.
“I’m coming into the house to ex-
plain!” Hobart called to them inside.
“You’ll do no such thing! No, no,
Hobart!” Lily vociferated back to him.
Lily is repeatedly penetrated by the two
men, one of them her brother-in-law, with-
out quite consenting, but not quite resist-
ing. When Hobart joins in, “She let out
perfunctory cries of expected rather than
felt pain as one does under the hand of a nervous intern.” Again,
the language—troubled children, expected rather than felt pain,
the nervous intern, “vociferated”—shows Purdy’s style in full
splendor.
Just to make things even odder, Lily has baked pies for the
church social. As in the other stories, the objects—here the
pies—mark the transition between desires. The “preacher”
throws one at Lily, and then targets himself: “[T]he ‘preacher’
was softly slowly mashing pies over his thin, tightly muscled
torso. Then slowly, inexorably, Hobart began eating pieces of
pie from off the body of the smeared ‘preacher.’ The ‘preacher’
returned the favor, and ate pieces of pie from Hobart, making
gobbling sounds like a wild animal. Then they hugged one an-
other and began eating the pies all over again from their bare
bodies.” The men have their odd, erotic moment together, while
Lily ends the story by herself “eating a piece of her still-unfin-
ished apple pie.”
Like women, African-American characters can also be
used symbolically, again in unexpected ways. In “The Can-
dles of Your Eyes,” a startling story, a black man named Sol-
dier and a white boy named Beaut (the names suggest that
we’re dealing with semi-symbols anyway) live together. Sol-
dier sits in a rocking chair with Beaut in his lap, yielding an
erotic image of white on black: “It was an unforgettable sight,
midnight-black strapping Soldier holding the somewhat deli-
cate, though really tough, Beaut. If you looked in on them in
the dark, you seemed to see only Beaut asleep in what looked
like the dark branches of a tree.” Purdy varies the image
throughout the story. Soldier leaves, and when he doesn’t
come back, Beaut sits in the chair alone: “Beaut stirred after a
while in the chair, like a child in his mother’s body waiting to
be born.” When Soldier does return, he finds Beaut in the chair
with someone else: “They looked to him like flowers under
deep mountain springs, but motionless like the moon in No-
vember.” The imagery has become almost hallucinatory in its
beauty. This story begins, by the way, with Soldier walking up
and down East Fourth Street with a sign, “I
AM A MURDERER
.
Why Don’t They Give Me the Chair!”
In fact, he hasn’t really killed Beaut,
but this just makes the tragedy all the
more devastating.
I don’t want to end with the impres-
sion that all of Purdy’s stories are this
grim. There is “Kitty Blue,” about a
talking cat who is given by the Crown
Prince to Madame Lenore, an opera
singer. Kitty Blue goes missing, has ad-
ventures, and comes home again, to go
on “a world cruise with a royal protec-
tor and the greatest living singer.” It’s
dedicated to Teresa Stratas. And it has
the only unambiguously happy ending
in the collection. It’s worth cherishing,
if only for that reason.
The Complete Short Stories
of James Purdy
Liveright (Norton). 752 pages, $35.
March–April 2014
31
after Resume
Roger never loved you.
And you never cared for Sid.
Patrick was in the closet.
And Ben detested kids.
Leo—addicted to pills.
Seth cheated with Tyrone.
Pablo moved back to Brazil.
Might as well live alone.
M
ICHAEL
M
ONTLACK