Gay Fiction Speaks

Conversations with Gay Novelists

Richard Canning

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780231502498
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Today's most celebrated, prominent, and promising authors of gay fiction in English explore the literary influences and themes of their work in these revealing interviews with Richard Canning. Though the interviews touch upon a wide range of issues—including gay culture, AIDS, politics, art, and activism—what truly distinguishes them is the extent to which Canning encourages the authors to reflect on their writing practices, published work, literary forebears, and their writing peers—gay and straight.

? Edmund White talks about narrative style and the story behind the cover of A Boy's Own Story.

? Armistead Maupin discusses his method of writing and how his work has adapted to television.

? Dennis Cooper thinks about L.A., AIDS, Try, and pop music.

? Alan Hollinghurst considers structure and point of view in The Folding Star, and why The Swimming-Pool Library is exactly 366 pages long.

? David Leavitt muses on the identity of the gay reader—and the extent to which that readership defined a tradition.

? Andrew Holleran wonders how he might have made The Beauty of Men "more forlorn, romantic, lost" by writing in the first person.

ONE

JAMES PURDY

James Purdy has been a published author for over fifty years, and has been admired by many writers and critics, including Dame Edith Sitwell, John Cowper Powys, Angus Wilson, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and younger authors such as Paul Binding and Matthew Stadler. Born in Ohio in 1927, Purdy studied at universities in Chicago, Madrid, and Puebla, Mexico, before starting his first job as a teacher at Lawrence College, Wisconsin. He has subsequently worked in various capacities in the United States, Mexico, and Europe.

Purdy’s first published works were Don’t Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories (New York: William Frederick, 1956) and the novella 63: Dream Palace (New York: William Frederick, 1956). His British debut was the collection 63: Dream Palace—A Novella and Nine Stories (London: Gollancz, 1957). The same year, Color of Darkness: Eleven Stories and a Novella (New York: New Directions, 1957), a commercial edition of previously published material, appeared, and Purdy won awards from both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Dame Edith Sitwell provided an introduction to Color of Darkness for its British publication (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961).

Two of Purdy’s most popular and celebrated novels followed: Malcolm (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1959; London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), later adapted for the stage by Edward Albee, and The Nephew (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1960; London: Secker and Warburg, 1961). Next came a collection of ten stories and two plays, Children Is All (New York: New Directions, 1962; London: Secker and Warburg, 1963). This was followed by Cabot Wright Begins (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1964; London: Secker and Warburg, 1965), and two much acclaimed and more openly gay-themed novels, Eustace Chisholm and the Works (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967; London: Cape, 1968) and I Am Elijah Thrush (New York: Doubleday, 1972; London: Cape, 1972).

Two parts of a proposed three-part “continuous novel” appeared around Elijah Thrush: Jeremy’s Version: Part One of Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys (New York: Doubleday, 1970; London: Cape, 1971) and The House of the Solitary Maggot: Part Two of Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys (New York: Doubleday, 1974). More critically and commercially successful were Purdy’s last two novels of the 1970s, In a Shallow Grave (New York: Arbor, 1976), subsequently made into a film in 1988, and Narrow Rooms (New York: Arbor, 1978).

In the 1980s, Purdy was equally prolific, writing Mourners Below (New York: Viking, 1981), On Glory’s Course (New York: Viking, 1984), In the Hollow of His Hand (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), The Candles of Your Eyes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), a collection of stories, and Garments the Living Wear (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), a novel addressing the AIDS epidemic. More recently, Purdy has published the novels Out with the Stars (London: Peter Owen, 1992) and Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (London: Peter Owen, 1997). His story “The White Blackbird” appeared in David Bergman, ed., Men on Men 6 (New York: Plume, 1996), and “The Anonymous Letters of Passion” was included in Ben Goldstein, ed., More Like Minds (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1991).

Throughout his career, small press editions of Purdy’s poetry, stories, and drama have also been published, such as An Oyster Is a Wealthy Beast (story and poems; Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1967), Mr. Evening: A Story and Nine Poems (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1968), On the Rebound: A Story and Nine Poems (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1970), The Running Sun (poems; New York: Paul Waner, 1971), The Wedding Finger (play) in Antaeus 10 (1973), and Proud Flesh: Four Short Plays (Northridge, Calif.: Lord John, 1980).

Purdy has most recently completed a collection of short stories, “Moe’s Villa and Other Stories.” He lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where this interview took place on Wednesday, November 5, 1997.

JP Are you Irish? I looked up your surname and it’s a famous Irish one.

RC Not to my knowledge. There was a prime minister called Canning, who has a statue near our Parliament.

JP I think it would be terrible to have a statue. Don’t you think that would be awful?

RC Oscar Wilde’s about to get one in London.

JP He’s too good for a statue. He’s a marvelous writer. I visited his grave at Père-Lachaise, but it had been damaged by vandals.

RC When were you in Europe?

JP Four or five years ago. The Dutch brought me over there. Then one day they called from Israel and asked if I wanted to go there. I said: “Yes, but I’m not Jewish.” They said: “We know that.” So I went. The young ones seemed to like my stories. Then I had to go to Finland and Germany. The U.S. paid for that. I don’t know why they chose me. My God, I was a wreck when I got home. You had to take a plane every few hours. When I got to Berlin, I met my German publisher. They were very nice to me. After we had this nice dinner, they said: “We don’t earn most of our money from publishing. We have another business. Would you care to visit it?” I said: “Of course.” It was a glorious, old-fashioned ice cream parlor where young poets came and read. But I thought maybe it was a house of ill-fame!

RC This book is concerned only with gay novelists. Some authors have a problem with that.

JP Well, I have a problem with everything! Today everything has a subject, but when you look at it there’s no content. That’s true of so many gay novels. It’s true of everything written today: it’s all subject; no content. If you write like I do, they just don’t like it. They say: “Where’s the subject?”

RC By “subject,” what do you mean?

JP Something topical. Those books are just unreadable to me. The plays are the same. They’re all just: “This is the way it is.” The characters aren’t real.

Most of my books aren’t about gay themes. They scolded Rembrandt for doing studies of blacks and old women. Those things he painted of Negroes are the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen. He really got their souls. But they wanted him to paint people in lovely costumes with beautiful ruffs—like “The Nightwatch.” I thought: “That’s the problem today; you’re supposed to please people.”

RC Can we pursue the matter of race? Today many people feel uneasy about the idea of a white writer adopting a first-person black narrator, as you did with I Am Elijah Thrush and William Styron did with The Confessions of Nat Turner.

JP Well, when Angus Wilson and Dame Edith Sitwell came to America, they were under the assumption I was black. Dame Edith read my story “Eventide,” which is about black mothers. She thought it so anguished only a black person could have written it. There was a famous black writer—I think it was Langston Hughes—who admired my book. He’s said to have said: “James Purdy’s the last of the Niggers.” I thought that was wonderful. I really feel I am, because I don’t write subject but soul, you might say. I write the inside. John Cowper Powys, who also admired me, said: “He writes under the skin,” which I like very much. I write about blacks under the skin.

When I was interviewed at the New York Public Library, I told them I liked that sentence of Terence, the Roman writer: “Homo sum”—“I am a human being; I count nothing human foreign to me.” But the modern writers are ashamed of their real humanity. You should be dressed nicely or terribly; it’s all costume and where you eat. That isn’t about your humanity. It’s about your style.

RC In part your novels are concerned with social manners, though. Are you saying there’s always something beyond that?

JP Right. I think you finally see that what’s under the social manners is a human being—not a very nice one, maybe.

RC Those who resist the premise that there’s such a thing as universal human experience might say that clothes and matters of style aren’t the same as skin color. That’s not necessarily because they believe in skin color as something essential, but they do think social responses to skin color constitute something more fundamental and politically more pressing than something like clothes.

JP What they don’t always admit is that what’s beneath a homosexual and a black is something that’s neither homosexual nor black. There’s something very archetypal that goes back thousands of years. But we have seized on these other things now as the sole reality.

RC There are moments in your work where—even metaphorically—this is suggested: that underneath mankind lies some entirely concealed truth. In Narrow Rooms there’s this line: “Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the g...