Clever Cats and Opaque Snakes
Granted, he has one of the most idiosyncratic voices in modern American fiction; it's an acquired, and sometimes gamy, taste. Purdy's writing is often tagged "Southern Gothic" and compared to that of Williams and Flannery O'Connor. There's a lot that's rural and wild in his stories, and even when he's writing about Manhattan or Chicago it can sound like New Orleans or Savannah. Funny thing is, Purdy isn't Southern and never lived there: he grew up in Ohio and Chicago, and traveled around Latin America and Europe before permanently settling in Brooklyn in the 1960s.
He's also been compared, by me if no one else, to the great Jacobean tragedians; there's an horrific, almost insane intensity to many of his works, especially the earlier ones, that recalls the bloody epics of John Webster or Beaumont and Fletcher. For characters, Purdy likes monsters and misfits, freaks and loners, often with ludicrous old-church names like Nehemiah Highstead or Bewick Freeth. At his best, Purdy's also at his maddest, whipping up these poor creatures into world-shaking high dudgeons of gory tragedy and a wild-eyed, antic humor, stitched together in preposterously frankensteinian plots. He crucified one early character to a barn door, and a young soldier in one of the stories collected here ("Brawith") comes home from the war only to burst apart in a shower of blood and innards on the living room floor.
Now in his high 70s, esconced for decades in a Brooklyn garret, Purdy has lately tended to be writing a little more gently, if just as eccentrically. Several of the dozen stories in Moe's Villa (two of these also appeared in New York Press) concern spinster ladies in old frame houses and the hunky younger fellers who work for them. Ineluctible forces utterly beyond their ken or control?love, lust, shyness, illness, a Ouija board, a will and in one case a white feather?either draw them together or push them apart. Purdy's a master at designing an antique, crepuscular atmosphere. These things read like old daguerreotypes describing a lost world where the scissors-grinder still goes door to door, the old family doctor prescribes a daily tumbler of well-water and a single lady might entertain her gentleman caller at the old piano in the parlor with a rendition of "Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming." Willoughby, next stop is Willoughby.
What I was unprepared for was his deft handling of the genre of adult fairytales. If he's done these before I missed it. In the wacky "Kitty Blue," a handsome prince gives an opera diva the gift of a talking cat. Butter wouldn't melt in Kitty Blue's mouth. He tells the diva when he meets her, "You're just as beautiful and charming as the whole world says you are." He's soon led astray by a couple of thuggish street cats, and finds himself performing a low vaudeville act in the theater of Herbert of Old Vienna. The diva is so distraught she cancels all her appearances and takes to her bed, where she lives on "ice-water and an occasional glass of champagne." In the more overtly symbolic "A Little Variety, Please," a fire-breathing Green Dragon scares all the adolescent girls in town when he comes to visit?except for young Alice Drummond, who likes him just fine.
Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue was first published in the UK and then here, so I hope the same happens for Moe's Villa. It's goofy to deprive Purdy's American readers, however limited a pool that is.
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As for Goethe... Well, I've never been able to get into the Colossus of German Literature. Not Faust, not Werther, nothing. I always thought the problem was stodgy translations (and you can add the Randall Jarrell Faust, Part One, just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to that list). But maybe it's me.
I say this on the basis of a new collection, Romantic Fairy Tales, translated and edited by a Scottish scholar, Carol Tully (Penguin, 159 pages, $11). The translation is fine; it's Goethe I find impenetrable.
As a kind of counter to or relief from the Enlightenment, German Romantics, like their French counterparts, became enamored of myth, fairytales and folktales. The Age of Reason was also the age of the Grimms, of E.T.A. Hoffman et al. In addition to collecting real ones, literary types tried their hand at inventing their own fairytales. In German, they're called Kunstmärchen, to distinguish them from actual Volksmärchen, folktales.
Romantic Fairy Tales brings together four examples, by Tieck, Fouque, Brentano and Goethe. I'm tempted to think Goethe's entry, titled with characteristic humility, "The Fairy Tale," is a parody. Tully makes no mention of that notion, but we know that Goethe didn't much like the Romantics; maybe he was making fun of them in this thing.
Because it's really bad. A key to good fairytales is their simplicity. Granted, the plots of some of the ones the Grimms collected get pretty gnarly and murky, but the good ones are marked by their relative clarity and straightforwardness: there's one wolf, one witch, one lantern, one talking fish, at most three tests or three wishes. "The Fairy Tale" begins charmingly enough, with two impish will-o'-the-wisps, one cranky ferryman, one green snake and a shower of gold coins. But then comes a numbing blizzard of symbolic or allegorical weirdnesses. A dog dies and is turned into a jewel, then back into a dog. The snake turns into a bridge. The old wife's hand (there's always an old wife) turns black and shrinks. There's some business about an artichoke, an onion and a cabbage. There's a giant and his shadow, a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman, and an underground temple where dwell four metal kings (gold, silver, "ore" and "alloy").
For all the business, nothing interesting happens. In the end the temple is hauled up out of the ground, presumably to augur some kind of proto-Wagnerian Manifest Destiny for the Germanic People. But I'm just guessing. This thing reads like one of those allegorical tracts from 18th-century Rosicrucians or Freemasons: you're aware that it's all supposed to mean something, but you don't have the foggiest idea what that is. Goethe notoriously refused to explain it, which bolsters my theory that it was a joke. He didn't know what the fuck it meant either.
I see from the latest issue of Juxtapoz, the magazine of "lowbrow" art, that Robert Williams, the genius of hotrod/psychedelic/pinup painting, has another show coming up at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho, Dec. 13-Jan. 27. His last show there was gorgeous and very funny. This issue (29) of Juxtapoz also has a long history of the venerable Psychedelic Solution by George Petros, and a cool piece on movie posters in Ghana.
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Joe Coleman is another great "lowbrow" painter (who just got married down in Baltimore). The used and rare book site rarebookroom.com has just added a new wing, a "Coleman Bibliografica," developed by a friend of mine, Don Kennison. It lists Coleman's books and comic books (Bunkers of Mars, The Mystery of Woolverine Woo-bait, Cosmic Retribution, etc.), articles about him, illustration work, Coleman recordings and film appearances, etc.
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Writer Stephen Jay Gould and photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell have just put out their third book together, Crossing Over (Three Rivers, 159 pages, $27.50). I confess I get a bit weary of Gould's writing, but I love Purcell's natural history photographs. Here they range from fossil fish swimming in rock to a reverse Descent-of-Man lineup of human, great ape and monkey skeletons to a humorous two-page spread that matches the corpse of a gibbon to a formal portrait of Fred Astaire, the two of them in very similar poses and looking almost identically glum.
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And to end with a different genre of modern fairytale, I was surprised to read in Variety last week that The Mothman Prophecies is being made into a feature film. Mothman is by Upper West Side writer John Keel who, over a long career, has written tons of books and articles on Fortean phenomena, UFOs, cryptozoa?general X-Files territory, and nothing you'd ever expect to be made into a big-budget movie. I interviewed Keel about Mothman in 1991, when the book, originally published in the 70s, was enjoying a new life as a paperback reissue. It's about a spate of monster sightings, UFO reports, Men in Black encounters and general weirdness that plagued a small West Virginia town in the months leading up to an actual disaster in the mid-1960s?the deadly collapse of a bridge over the Ohio River. Richard Gere will play the Keel big-city-reporter figure.