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Introduction James Purdy’S Melodramas of Identity

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Introduction James Purdy’S Melodramas of Identity Cover Page The following handle holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation: http://hdl.handle.net/1887/81091 Author: Kessel, L. van Title: Savage embraces: James Purdy, melodrama, and the narration of identity Issue Date: 2019-12-04 introduction James Purdy’s Melodramas of Identity There is a popular anecdote that readers of James Purdy lovingly circulate amongst themselves. It is a story about Purdy’s age that most new readers will undoubtedly hear when they first chance upon his work, and few scholars and commentators fail to mention in their more recent discussions of Purdy’s work.1 Since debuting in 1956, and possibly even before that, Purdy’s publishers, interviewers and friends believed that he was born in 1923. Since he still looked young and handsome at the time – contemporary pictures taken by Carl van Vechten attest to this – no one thought to doubt his date of birth. It was only after he passed away in 2009 that readers and friends, even those closest to him, learned that he was actually born in 1914. For his entire career, Purdy had presented himself as nine years younger than his actual age. The reason behind this piece of biographical misinformation remains unknown. As Michael Snyder remarks, Purdy was reticent when giving out biographical details (“Becoming James Purdy” 111). The information he relayed in interviews was sparse and often riddled with inconsistencies and fictive accounts of his own life. Although never proven, some suggest that Purdy purposefully changed his birth date because he felt he was too old to be a debuting author. When he published his first collection of stories at age of forty two, he actually belonged to the pre-World War ii generation; at this time critical acclaim was extended to the generation of new and exciting authors with whom he would rather be compared. If this was indeed Purdy’s strategy, it most definitely succeeded. Early in his career Ihab Hassan compared his work to that of Truman Capote, John Updike, and Flannery O’Connor, among others (7), while Robert Hipkiss later (1976) drew parallels between Purdy, Jack Kerouac, and John Knowles. Jean E. Kennard (1975) read Purdy alongside Joseph Keller, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. Although he was much older than these authors, Purdy ensured he was considered their contemporary by lying about his age. Even if this bit of speculation touches only lightly on Purdy’s motives for presenting himself as younger than he really was, this anecdote nevertheless tells us is that, if anything, Purdy was well aware of how he would be perceived by his audience 1 See, for example, this selection of articles, reviews, and obituaries that mention this particular anecdote about Purdy’s age: Healey; “James Purdy”; Miller 421; Snyder, “Becoming James Purdy” 111; and Swaim. 2 introduction and critics. By manipulating his biographical information – either by withholding or giving out false information – he managed to orchestrate the narration of his public persona: his identity as James Purdy, the author. This brings us to the crux of this dissertation. Throughout my dissertation I argue that the central concern of Purdy’s work is his interrogation of the narratives through which we produce our own and other’s identities. Writing at a time in which the American political stage turned increasingly to identitarian rhetorical strategies, Purdy seemed wary of narratives that reduce sexual, racial, and national experiences to the limiting confines of totalizing identity categories. In his writing, I argue, Purdy sought to undermine the narrative construction of identity and expose the oppressive structures embedded in society’s investment in stable identity categories. Purdy considered these forms of oppression to be not only concomitant to the marginalization of non-normative identifications by a heteronormative, patriarchal, and white society, but part and parcel to any form of identitarian rhetoric. Ultimately, it is the restrictive nature of identity categories in and of itself that Purdy sought to criticize in his novels, short stories, and plays. Discussing sexuality in a letter (dated October 14, 1957) to British poet John Cowper Powys, Purdy writes, “how really thrilling is your discussion of those words homo and hetero. I really am very queer, I suppose, in that I have never believed in any of those terms” (“Purdy to Powys 10” 51, original emphasis). Purdy’s early use of the term queer to denote neither gay nor straight, but something that defies categorization signals a career-long suspicion of the identitarian politics that started gaining purchase at the beginning of his literary career. Purdy’s outright resistance against identity categories has, in turn, led to suspicion of his works and politics by identitarian political movements. According to Rainer Hanshe, Purdy “was neither palatable to the status quo nor celebratory enough of queer identity politics to be taken up by that community, and it is this which probably led to Purdy’s hovering between acceptance and condemnation and his being largely invisible in America after a certain period” (“Choir Invisible” 18). Richard Canning corroborates Hanshe’s assessment and even likens Purdy’s distrust of identity categories to the work of the great modernist author Djuna Barnes: “like Barnes’s Nightwood, Purdy’s novelistic containment of the inalienably tragic status of the figure of the homosexual coincides with a personal incomprehension at the very idea of identity formations, identity politics or ‘liberation’” (50). Purdy, in short, diametrically opposed the politics of a fledgling gay rights movement, but this opposition came at the cost of critical misrecognition. He was, as Hanshe puts it, “even marginalized within the gay community” (“Choir Invisible” 18). james purdy’s melodramas of identity 3 The invisibility and marginalization that Hanshe mentions refers to the lack of mainstream and critical attention dedicated to Purdy’s work since the 1970s. At the beginning of his career Purdy found his work being championed by established authors such as the aforementioned John Cowper Powys, Dame Edith Sitwell, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Angus Wilson, but the publication of his controversial novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) saw him lose a large part of his readership. He also lost his publishing contract with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, which up until that point had published all of Purdy’s novels and short stories. Purdy could similarly count on significant academic interest in his work in the first decades of his career, and while he was able to sustain this attention slightly longer, this too began to wane in the early 1980s. Among his early academic admirers we find Ihab Hassan (1962), Warren French (1962), Joseph Skerrett (1969), Tony Tanner (1969), and Donald Pease (1970).2 Purdy arguably experienced his height of critical attention in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when Bettina Schwarzschild (1968), Henry Chupack (1975), and Stephen Adams (1976) each dedicated a monograph to his work over a relatively short time period. Although Purdy continued publishing with great frequency until the mid-nineties, with the disappearance of a mainstream readership, critical attention followed suit. Christopher Lane speculates that this decrease in critical popularity was the result of his own rejection of “academic orthodoxy and identity politics, a position – he was the first to admit – that cost him many readers” (84). Whatever the cause of this critical decline, it resulted in Purdy’s remaining “virtually absent from the literary canon and from the shelves of book stores in America” (Hanshe, “Choir Invisible” 18). Despite his apparent absence from the American literary canon and his self- professed misrecognition by the literary establishment, recent years have seen a modest revival of interest in Purdy’s writing. The foundation of the James Purdy Society in the first decade of the twentieth century and his death in 2009 returned his work to the purview of some readers and scholars. This modest revival led to the reprinting of some of his novels, as well as the publication of The Complete Short Stories (2013), which features a foreword by cult filmmaker John Waters. Scholarly output on Purdy has also increased in recent years, and my interrogation of the question of identity in his work responds in part to this recent upsurge in critical attention. 2 For a more extensive (albeit incomplete) overview of critical publications, see the bibliography that Hanshe compiled for the Hyperion special issue on James Purdy (“Bibliography” 222–226). The overview makes it obvious that the volume of critical and academic writing on Purdy’s work decreased significantly in the second half of the 1980s. 4 introduction Recently, scholars such as Don Adams (2008), Lane (2011), and Snyder (2011; 2017) have begun to theorize Purdy’s complex relationship with identity.3 While most critics agree that Purdy resisted the restrictions of identity categories, few have moved beyond that assessment to recognize Purdy’s attempts to produce a language in which he could create space for those who defied categorization. If Purdy called himself queer in the sense that he placed himself outside of identity categories, I want to take him to task and read his work not only as a reflection on the restrictive nature of identity, but also as a proposal to live differently: to find a language within which to exist without adhering to restrictive identity categories. Throughout this dissertation, I will bring Purdy’s work in conversation with recent queer scholarship that has considered strategies by which queer and other non- normative subjects are enabled to survive within heteronormative and phobic societal structures. These conversations allow me to think through Purdy’s work beyond the mere rejection of identity categories. Instead, I recognize that Purdy offers his characters tools with which they can act out their desires without submitting to normative societal structures.
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