James Purdy by Michael Snyder

Author:Michael Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Elijah Thrush

In the spring of 1971, Purdy conjured I Am Elijah Thrush, his allegorical fantasy originally inspired by Paul Swan. This surreal short novel explores race, power, identity, parasitism, and art in dazzling prose. An octogenarian oil heiress, Millicent Frayne, who pines for a ninety-year-old mime, poet, and pederast, Elijah Thrush, engage in an extended power struggle. “When shall we be married?” she asks. “When hell freezes its oldest star boarders,” is the queer thespian’s reply. Caught in between is the narrator, Albert Peggs, a young black man from the South who was hired by Millicent to write her memoir and spy on Elijah. This description only begins to scratch the surface of the strangeness. Opulent and camp, I Am Elijah Thrush bears the strong influence of Ronald Firbank, the subject of Purdy’s master’s thesis, and the “decadent movement” he was part of. Atypically, Purdy wrote Elijah in longhand in a notebook because it felt like a more personal book. In June, he sent the first two pages to Sandy Richardson at Doubleday, who found them wonderful. James considered Sandy an old friend and had co-dedicated Malcolm to him—but Purdy’s emerging difficulties with Doubleday placed strain on their relationship.1

Not just Swan was an inspiration, but also Purdy’s friend, John Carlis, a black poet, painter, and designer whom Purdy sent to Van Vechten to be photographed; Carlis was a model for narrator, Albert Peggs.2 In May, Jorma Sjoblom gave his feedback on the new work. The beginning reminded him “so much of the torrid Mother’s Day we spent with John Carlis in the divine Fairmont Hotel. The sensuous as well as psychic qualities are that intense. And it is such a highly visual novel.”3 Built by the International Peace Mission of Father Divine, a charismatic black leader who claimed to be God, the Divine Fairmont was an integrated first-class hotel in Jersey City, where Carlis lived for a time. Purdy later told Abercrombie that the novella, “narrated by a black youth,” was “in a way based on John Carlis and Mrs. Stark,” but set in New York.4 Inez Cunningham Stark, a model for rapacious Millicent DeFrayne—along with Miriam Andreas and perhaps even Gloria Vanderbilt—was a Chicago Gold Coast socialite, poet, critic, and patron. Stark, a reader for Poetry and president of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, believed that Negroes could write “serious literature.” To this end, during the 1940s and early 1950s she led Wednesday evening workshops: Carlis was a student in her Chicago Poets’ class, along with poet Gwendolyn Brooks.5 In 1968, Carlis told an interviewer he had a “Chicago friend, a white writer” named James Purdy whose Malcolm quite interested him. Carlis had long wanted to write, but felt he needed more life experience. Purdy said, “you’ve got to write about things you really know about. That you’ve really lived through,” so Carlis began writing of his childhood.6 In 1976, Purdy occasionally ran into Carlis, a friend of Chicago artist John Pratt, but thought he had become “too difficult to know any more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.