Malcolm by James Purdy

I’ve been hearing about James Purdy for years. An American author, born in Hicksville, Ohio in 1914 he was first published in England. He lived in Chicago as a young man and later in New York City. He published, Malcolm, his second novel, in 1959, and published eighteen novels total, plus twenty plays, as well as collections of poetry and short stories. He died in 2009.

He is sometimes considered a gay author, which is the context in which I’ve heard of him and remembered his name, but he rejected that label saying in an interview, “I’m not a gay writer. I’m a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.” His books often have gay characters, but only as part of a general milieu of outsiders and cast-offs and plain weirdos: a literary version of a John Waters film with the same not exactly gay but certainly camp sensibility.

He has had plenty of admirers throughout his career and after his death, though not a lot of readers. Edith Sitwell, the English poet, was responsible for his early notice. Dorothy Parker said of Malcolm, “…the most prodigiously funny book to streak across these heavy-hanging times.” Edward Albee adapted Malcolm for the stage and opened it at the Schubert theater on Broadway in 1966. Jonathan Franzen selected Purdy’s 1967 novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works for the 2005 Clifton Fadiman Medal as the American novel most worthy of re-discovery (I’ll read that next).

Malcolm reads like a fairy-tale. Many critics describe Malcolm as a Candide-like character. I found the general tone more like Alice in Wonderland. There’s a central naif, Malcolm, a 15 year-old boy, though at one point he admits he might only be 14 and a half, who, like Alice, encounters a series of odd characters with outsized emotions and big drama. Strange episodes happen one after the other, but they don’t really progress toward any growth, or meaning. The penultimate chapter begins, “Malcolm’s adventures might have been continued indefinitely….,” which seems true and is the problem with the novel, except that Purdy has Malcolm die, only a few months after the action of the novel begins.

Malcolm is presented as a blank, an empty vessel, an innocent. He lives at a hotel, alone. His father has disappeared, though why he’s gone is never firmly resolved. Perhaps he’s dead. No mention is made of a mother. There’s a hint here that Malcolm may be a Christ figure, but the idea doesn’t seem to be developed further, and besides his mysterious origins Malcolm does nothing Christ-like. Malcolm recalls a happy childhood, traveling with his father, living out of hotel rooms. He’s been left wealthy by his absent father but a motivating force of the novel is that Malcolm’s inherited money is starting to run out. He addresses his situation by doing nothing. He sits on a bench in front of the hotel, waiting for something to happen.

He’s discovered on the bench and taken up initially by a man named Mr. Cox, an astrologer who Malcolm also calls a magician. If Malcolm is Jesus then Mr. Cox is Satan, a meddling, tempter and corrupter. Cox is annoyed by Malcolm’s passivity and decides to intervene in helping Malcom begin his life. He does this by introducing Malcolm to a series of friends. First there’s a retired mortician named Estel Blanc. Then there’s a painter, a midget (who thinks of himself as a small man) named Kermit Raphaelson married to a former prostitute named Laureen. Next there’s an imperious woman named Madame Girard and after her, Madame Girard’s husband, a billionaire named Girard Girard.

At that point the pattern of introducing ever new characters chapter by chapter breaks up and now the previously introduced characters begin to return and recombine. For some reason everyone is taken with Malcolm, his youth, his beauty, but also, perhaps, his general nothingness, which allows the more forceful characters to impose their own desires on him.

Girard Girard and Madame Girard invite Malcolm to spend the summer at their country home. Malcolm says he’ll go only if the painter Kermit Raphaelson, who has somehow now become Malcolm’s best friend, will come, too. The Girards are willing but Kermit is frightened by their wealth and status and refuses to come. He hides in his home when they arrive to pick him up. So Malcolm doesn’t go either.

He meets another new character, again introduced by Mr. Cox. This is Eloisa Brace, who is also a painter and runs a kind of free boarding house for itinerant jazz musicians. She’s married to an ex-con, named Jerome, who spent ten years in prison for burglary and wrote a book about his experience. Jerome gets Malcolm drunk and attempts to seduce him. The scene ends with Malcolm falling “unconscious out of his chair and onto Jerome’s lap, head first.” (p, 106)

Malcolm wakes up in bed with a different man, but apparently innocently as the boarding house never has enough beds for all the guests. But the innocence of the situation fades when we’re told that Malcolm sleeps in a different bed every night, sometimes with three in a bed, and sometimes changing beds halfway through the night. Although it’s easy to forget, remember that Malcolm is fifteen or maybe not even that, younger even than Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye, another not quite adult on his own in the city.

Eloisa wants to paint Malcolm’s portrait. Madame Girard demands that Malcolm come live with her. Kermit shows up jealous of Eloisa’s painting and miffed that he never gets invited to the jazz parties at her home. Madame Girard causes a scene. There’s a chapter titled, “The Oration of Madame Girard” that sounds like one of the speeches written for Elektra on the television series, “Pose.” The Girard’s buy Eloisa’s barely begun portrait of Malcolm but Jerome persuades her she’s been insulted and she destroys the check. Girard Girard divorces Madame Girard and then asks Malcolm to stay with him and be his heir. Malcolm agrees but Girard Girard fails to meet him at the promised place.

Instead, Malcolm is picked up by a new character, this one not introduced by Mr. Cox: Gus, who is also named Brownie. Gus takes Malcolm on the back of his motorcycle to a kind of a blues club way out of town, where he introduces Malcolm to a singer named Melba. “America’s Number One Chanteuse” as she’s advertised on a poster. Like everyone, Melba is immediately and inexplicably attracted to Malcolm. Nearly the first thing she says to Malcolm is, “Would you marry me?” (p. 184) and Malcolm says he will. But first Melba wants Gus to “mature him up just a little” (p. 190), which involves a ride back to town on Gus’ motorcycle and a visit to a tattoo parlor and a whorehouse. Gus dies alone at the whorehouse while Malcolm has his first sex upstairs. Malcolm and Melba marry but her sexual appetite and encouraging him to drink kills Malcolm. “Acute alcoholism and sexual hyperaesthesia” (p. 224) a physician diagnoses.

“If there is one thing that is fatal to most men, Mr. Cox always told his followers, it is marriage. Malcolm was not precisely a full-grown man, but he was a man, and marriage in his case may have proved fatal.” (p. 221)

and then:

“Marriage which ushers most people into life, in Malcolm’s case, therefore, ushered him into happiness–and death.” (p. 222)

All the characters in Malcolm, nearly, are married, none of them well. Mr. Cox has a wife we never meet. Kermit and Laureen are married but divorce. He says she left him for a Japanese wrestler, but that’s just a story. Actually Laureen marries Girard Girard after he divorces Madame Girard. Malcolm is Melba’s third husband. Gus was number two. She marries number four after Malcolm’s death, a cuban named Heliodoro that had served as Malcolm’s valet. There’s kind of a “where are they now” in the closing pages of the book where we also learn that Mr. Cox finds a new protege to work on and that Kermit meets “a young, though retired, and very wealthy motion picture star, who was immediately taken with the little man, and they were married in a somewhat ostentatious ceremony in a suburb of San Francisco.” (p. 230)

I suppose it’s all meant to be taken as farce. The subtitle of the book is, “a comic novel.” Some people read it that way. But I didn’t find it funny. I didn’t laugh. It’s all too strange and chaotic. Doesn’t humor need to show the absurd side of the real and not just the absurd for the absurd? It does for my taste anyway.