the beautiful boy always dies

In the novels of James Purdy, the beautiful boy always dies. In The Nephew, his second novel, Cliff is missing in action in Korea, and then dead; in Malcolm, his first novel, the eponymous, very young man who waits on a bench, can only die after being claimed by a succession of eccentrics; in In a Shallow Grave, Daventry, with hair the colour of corn silk, and possibly otherworldly powers, is plastered to a pine tree in a hurricane.

Malcolm is his most famous novel, and the one I liked least. James Purdy has his device: a fifteen year old who lives in a hotel and waits on a bench for his father, perhaps, and meets a succession of people who all find him irresistible but have troubles of their own and sometimes he doesn't come first in their needs. He marries one of them (her third husband), and then dies, and for this reader it is more of a convenience than a climax. 

The Nephew is a small town novel. I have a soft spot for tales of small town life: somewhat suppressed and wistful older folk who are forced to learn secrets they'd rather not know, constantly adjusting to the shifts in the tone of neighbourhood life brought by each new revelation. 

In a Shallow Grave, a war veteran needs looking after, the beautiful boy is Potter Daventry, of mysterious, possibly violent past, he sees beyond the raw mulberry skin of Garnet Montrose until one is permanently attached to the other. Daventry dies and Garnet's skin returns to a more normal colour, beyond death, as if by transfer of atoms.

I read these three novels nine years ago. All at once. Some elusive writers you have to take hold of a few books at once. James Purdy is elusive. His books are full of applicants and supplicants, a shifting crowd of emigrants who always lose their centre; that's what always happens. The beautiful boy, hair the colour of cornsilk, will die instead of you. 

I have been reading essays (Notting Hill Editions, A Eulogy for Nigger and other essays) by day, and James Purdy novels (Malcolm, followed by The Nephew and In a shallow grave) by night. This doesn't feel like a decision I've taken, fiction opening the dream channel and essays for the light of day. Reading is a path to follow, or paths. Friends all. The life of the mind, as people used to say.

James Purdy tells truths at a useful, awkward distance, useful to James Purdy, that is, as well as to certain readers since 1959. Awkward on my bookshelves too, lodged for many years in a corner you can hardly see, next to Barbara Pym. The essays are of now, written in the last year or two. These are people thinking and writing in the world I live in. A contemplation of a rabbit's detachment; a docket from a day's thinking up a mountain, in the clear air; a eulogy for nigger, the word and her maidens.

We present ourselves to an essay as the essay presents itself to us, disarmed and revealed, a state of mind as well as an argument and a history: what we can understand by considering a rabbit; having time to contemplate a rabbit.

James Purdy's characters would have time, like Malcolm on his gilded bench, fatherless, expectant; or the nephew in his home town of Rainbow before he went out to Korea and was killed; or Garnet Montrose In a shallow grave, back from Korea, with all his insides on the outside, mulberry-coloured, the applicants who look after him, they have time. Characters are created out of the writer's time, the writer's contemplation. Do you know how long that can go on?

Fiction is a tale to tell on your own out of a dark place, the best tale you have just a short walk away from the truth. The essay is an exploration without purpose; you don't know what you might find or lose. It's only when you read people who have been thinking, who continue to think after you have stopped reading them, that the world activates again.