Why do we care about The New York Times?

With all the hubbub about the lack of a suitable New York Times obituary for Gilbert Sorrentino (see, for example, Dan here, here, and here, and Scott, and Ed), I've had to ask myself, why do we care? Since we obviously didn't expect the Times to do right by Sorrentino, it begs the question as to why it really matters. He was ignored by the paper when he was alive--if they had miraculously managed to produce an acceptable obituary, would it not have been a situation of "too little too late"? Seems to me that it might, in fact, be more than a little insulting.

In my last post, I talked about another neglected American master, James Purdy. There is a New York Times blurb on my copy of Eustace Chisholm and the Works that says "James Purdy is the outlaw of American fiction." I don't know what the context of the blurb was, but in the interview cited in that post, Purdy says that the Times "has given [him] some good reviews but also many vicious ones—reviews so vicious that I don’t think any civilized newspaper would publish them." This he attributes, in part, to the fact that the Times "has always been violently homophobic", but also "to a level of philistinism and ignorance that is abysmal; these are people who just do not respect culture or humanity." I have no trouble imagining Sorrentino saying those exact same words.

But, at some point Purdy gets labeled an "outlaw" or something like it, and it sticks. And, his work gets generally dismissed, relegated to a "gay lit" ghetto (a point touched on by Gore Vidal:

"Gay'' literature, particularly by writers still alive, is a large cemetery where unalike writers, except for their supposed sexual desires, are thrown together in a lot well off the beaten track of family values. James Purdy, who should one day be placed alongside William Faulkner in the somber Gothic corner of the cemetery of American literature, instead is being routed to lie alongside non-relatives.

--also in The New York Times, coincidentally, this time on the occasion of the reissue of Eustace Chisholm and other Purdy books; note that, unlike Sorrentino, Purdy does get some review attention from the paper of record, and yet he remains an outsider and largely misunderstood. It just goes to show that there are any number of ways for a great writer to be unappreciated.) Like Sorrentino, Purdy does not play ball. He is not interested in currying favor with anybody. He is irascible, borderline misanthropic, intensely literary. While with Sorrentino, it was probably his experimental bent that effectively locked him out, with Purdy my guess is that it's his "content". In a mainstream literary culture obsessed with content and which valorizes books that tackle big, important issues, issues that end up being the essential subject of most reviews, Purdy's novels are difficult to incorporate, difficult to assimilate.

I know, The New York Times is the major American newspaper; it ought to be an important part of the cultural conversation. The fact of the matter is, it's not, at least not when it comes to books. But it has long since stopped being important. There has been much documentation in a variety of places, particularly by Ed, for example, about the state of The New York Times Book Review since Sam Tanenhaus took over--about the explicit shift in focus towards more non-fiction, the paucity of female voices, a certain tone-deafness and lack of humor. But in my experience, the Book Review has never generated much excitement. Granted, I was never a regular reader, but in large part that's because I've very rarely found much of interest in it. If the situation is dramatically worse since Tanenhaus, I haven't been able to tell the difference.

The problem is not that The New York Times has not seen fit to recognize Sorrentino with an obituary worthy of a great writer, but that it is institutionally incapable of being part of the wider conversation about books in the first place. It is irrelevant.

Eustace Chisholm and the Works, James Purdy

Soon after the death of the underappreciated Gilbert Sorrentino, I found myself reading yet another much-neglected great American writer from the same generation, James Purdy. If you haven't yet read anything by Purdy, let me suggest that you will be doing yourself a favor by reading his work. I've now read four of his novels, having just finished Eustace Chisholm and the Works, and I have every reason to believe that I will read everything he's written (provided I can find it all).

The Purdy books I've read so far are deceptively simple. Elsewhere, I said of The Nephew that "a description of its so-called content would be unremarkable and uninteresting" but that "Purdy makes it interesting". A description of Eustace Chisholm could easily be rather more lurid than that of The Nephew, if one focused on the events. There is a fair amount of sex and talk about sex in the book, primarily sex between men; there is an unpleasant, illegal abortion (the third or fourth, we are told, for the character having it performed); there is torture. I imagine that it is this content, and the narrator's non-judgmental attitude towards it, that made the book controversial (so the back cover says) when it was first published in 1967.

It is 1937, Chicago. The Great Depression is in full swing. Eustace Chisholm, a self-styled poet who writes his verse on scraps of newspaper, is the figure around whom the rest of the novel is organized, one of those characters who always knows what everyone else is up to and who has (often questionable) advice for everybody. Most of the men are matter-of-factly "queer" (the word used in the book), at least part of the time. Eventually it emerges that the central character is Daniel Haws, a flophouse landlord who, in spite of himself, falls for young Amos Ratcliffe, one of his tenants. He refuses to admit to himself that he is in love with Amos. Then once he admits it to himself, he is unable to act on it, to tell Amos. Ashamed of himself for his inability to admit his true feelings for Amos, he leaves and re-enters the Army. Stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi, he starts writing to Eustace, telling him everything he was unable to tell Amos:

"I've got a sickness may not have a name....I'm sick to the very bottom of me. I hurt everywhere. Inside, I'm all hurt and ever have been. I've got a sickness which may have a name, and if it does, why name it to me? I won't remember it anyhow. Could you say, Ace, I'm boy-sick? If you want to call it that, I'd have half-admitted it in Chicago, but my sickness is so big now I couldn't feel any name would be right to contain it. Boy-sick, me that's mounted all them whores. I'm a whore's delight. Yet I'm boy-sick, Eus, if you want to say so. I'm lying here still under the same Spanish moss, it's not my country. My sickness, though, didn't come from being down here, it didn't come from the long hours in the mines or me being husband-son to my Ma. I must have come into this world with this hanging over my head, Eus: I was meant to love Amos Ratcliffe, without ever being a boy-lover and that was written down in my hand..."

(In an interview, Purdy described the problem thus:

...a young man who’s really an Indian chief can’t reconcile the fact that after nothing but sexual relations with women, he suddenly realizes he’s in love with this young boy. He can’t face that in himself. And I think that his problem is everybody's problem. We can’t face what is most ourselves, what is deepest in ourselves.)

While in the Army, Haws finds himself attracting the attentions of the sadistic Captain Stadger. Ultimately, realizing that he has abandoned the one thing that could have made him happy, he sheds any remaining self-protectiveness he may have left and submits fully to the bizarre depredations of the Captain:

Daniel waited now with the most extreme impatience for the reappearance of Captain Stadger, and suddenly the terrible thought presented itself that perhaps the captain would not appear. He knew then that he counted greatly on the officer's coming, that he counted above all else on receiving whatever it was he was to receive finally from his hands, that he counted on the "release" by which Stadger would sever him from all and everything he had had connection with before. He waited now for the captain with the impatience with which he had waited, in his hidden soul, for Amos. He was ready and he was at full surrender.

Purdy tells his story using a variety of methods, including going forward and back in time in the guise of letters, often entering into the letter, so to speak, moving from the first person of a given letter, being read by one character, to the third person of the narrator. As the above excerpts show, he is as comfortable in the language of the uneducated Haws, as he is in the elegant, if apparently plain, language of the third-person narrator.

Purdy does not flinch from the seedy, but he does not romanticize it either. He conveys a real sense of the desperation and poverty of most of the characters, of life in the Great Depression, but the book is not, strictly speaking, "realism"--there is, for example, an element of the supernatural in Eustace Chisholm, as Eustace believes he has been given the ability to see events before they happen--indeed, one of the key moments in the plot comes about as a result of Eustace trying to rid himself of this "gift". Purdy is able to juggle these disparate elements and create a story with unexpected affective power. It is an excellent novel.

There is not much on the web about Purdy. He appears to be one of those writers who gets reviewed but is on the whole largely ignored, and I haven't noticed much interest on the blogs yet, outside of Dan Green (it's because of a post by Dan that I decided to seek out Purdy in the first place) and the occasional comment. Take a look at the James Purdy Society web site, and this other interview. And this New York Times piece by Gore Vidal on the occasion of the reissue of Eustace Chisholm. But by all means read the books.