Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy
Jonathan Franzen wishes you would read this novel. In a speech in 2005 when Franzen presented the Clifton Fadiman Award for Excellence in Fiction, given annually to “an American novel deemed most worthy of rediscovery” Franzen said:
“Mr. Purdy’s novel is so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring, in comparison.”
In the speech, included as the Foreword of the edition of the novel I read (Liveright paperback, 2015) Franzen compares Purdy’s 1967 novel favorably to Catcher in the Rye and to the authors Richard Yates, Saul Bellow, and William Burroughs and then says, “There are very few better postwar American novels, and I don’t know of any other novel of similar quality that is less like anybody else’s work, more uniquely and defiantly itself.”
Held against Purdy’s other novels, Franzen says, “Among his many excellent works, Eustace Chisholm is the fullest bodied, the best-written, the most tautly narrated, and the most beautifully constructed.”
Eustace Chisholm is set in Chicago during the Depression, from the summer of one year through the winter of the next. The year isn’t specified but it must begin in the summer of 1939 because at the end of the book Eustace gets called up for the draft and then rejected 4-F. The novel gives us the neighborhood of Chicago very precisely: Hyde Park, 55th street between Promontory Point on the lake at the east and Washington Park and a little further beyond to the west.
Eustace, 29, lives with a boyfriend named Clayton Harms who moved in after Eustace’s wife, Carla, walked out on him. Eustace is working on a long narrative poem and he expects his partners to support him, which both Clayton and Carla seem happy to do. Carla’s return from her brief adultery makes up the opening scene of the novel. Also introduced quickly is Amos Ratcliffe, called Rat, a gay boy, probably sixteen or seventeen, who has dropped out of the University because his fellowship wasn’t renewed. Amos is tutoring Eustace in Greek and later we’ll find him reading The Symposium in the original. But Amos’ most prominent characteristic is that he’s astoundingly beautiful; everyone says so.
Amos lives as a tenant in a building owned by Daniel Haws, a 25 year-old son of a coal miner who joined the army to escape the mines himself, then went AWOL. Daniel is straight but like everyone else he is mesmerized by Amos. He falls in love with Amos but can’t admit it or act on it. Instead Daniel sleep-walks, coming into Amos’ room in the middle of the night for a moment of unconscious affection and tenderness. Amos receives him positively, loves him back, but except for the midnight visits their relationship remains unannounced and unconsummated.
Other major characters are Maureen O’Dell, a prostitute and sometime painter; Cousin Ida, Amos’ mother who writes letters from Amos’ hometown in Southern Illinois; Luwana Edwards, a psychic; and Reuben Masterson a Chicago millionaire, “crowding forty” who was wounded in World War I.
Daniel works as an attendant at Reuben Masterson’s club and one evening when Reuben is too drunk to get himself home the club manager orders Daniel to find a place for Reuben to sleep it off. Daniel takes Reuben home and there, at Daniel’s apartment building, Reuben meets Amos and falls in love with the beautiful young man.
Many of the characters parallel characters in Purdy’s earlier novel, Malcolm. Amos is like Malcolm, young and beautiful. Reuben is like Girard Girard, older, wealthy, and as Girard does with Malcolm, Reuben proposes to take on Amos as a kind of lover/son/heir. There’s a painter, Maureen, like Eloisa in Malcolm. But the parallels are only on the surface. Where the strange characters in Malclom are played for farce, in Eustace Chisholm the characters are deeply real and the stakes are very high.
Eustace Chisholm is a serious novel, worthy of its praise. It’s been called a gay classic (so why haven’t I read it before?). It’s heart-breaking. It’s also shocking. It’s powerful, almost too difficult to read in places. It does, like Malcolm, seem eventually to burst the bonds of realism, but the explosion, when we get there, is deserved, and doesn’t reduce the human impact of the story.
Though Eustace is the title character, the main story line is Daniel and Amos’ impossible love affair. Like Ennis and Jack in “Brokeback Mountain,” Daniel and Amos are completely bound-up with each other and also completely unable to live the life that would make them happy. Instead of acknowledging their love and finding a way to be together, Daniel pushes Amos to accept Reuben’s offer of wealth, and then Daniel escapes, leaving town to rejoin the army.
That story, Daniel and Amos’ doomed love, is the thrust of the first part of the novel, roughly the first half, chapters 1 through 11 and sub-titled, “The sun at noon” in reference to Amos’ blinding good-looks. The second part of the novel, chapters 12-17, subtitled, “in distortion-free mirrors”, follows Amos’ life with Reuben, set-up at Reuben’s grandmother’s estate 40 miles south of Chicago. This part of the novel ends with Amos having sex with the Swedish gardener of the estate, the grandmother dying of a stroke, and, after a last all-night outing at a black, gay, dance-club, Reuben and Amos parting.
The final section, chapters 18-23, subtitled “under earth’s deepest stream” switches focus to Daniel and his life in the army at a training camp in Biloxi, Mississippi. Much of this section is told through letters between Eustace and Daniel that are quoted or read aloud by different characters. Daniel comes under the notice of a sadistic officer named Captain Stadger. The Captain uncovers Daniel’s buried love for Amos, senses his weakness, and he tortures Daniel by making him admit more and more of his love. There’s a strong sense that Stadger’s obsession with Daniel also includes a sexual attraction forbidden by internalized homophobia. The sick relationship between the two escalates, the captain demanding Daniel’s submission even to violence, and Daniel acquiescing to the torture as a means to punish his self-guilt hoping to release the pain he feels for his love.
Throughout the novel there are prophecies that the story won’t end well. Eustace reads palms. He sees a short life for Amos. The psychic Luwana is so frightened of the future she sees for Daniel that she won’t even let him come into her house to tell it to him. Foreswearing prophesy she transfers her psychic “mantle” to Eustace who begins to know the contents of Daniel’s letters before he even reads them. The bad ending is inevitable.
After the tragedy there’s an epilogue. We’re back to Eustace. Clayton has left him. Eustace and Carla are alone. Eustace gives up writing the epic poem he’s been working on; the already completed pages are destroyed in an accidental/not-accidental fire. The millionaire, Reuben, weds Maureen, the painter. Eustace and Carla re-constitute their marriage with a glimmer of tenderness.
With the main characters given Old Testament names, I was put in mind of the Bible. Amos and Daniel are both biblical prophets and Eustace Chisholm is filled with prophecies. The biblical Daniel is a model of steadfast faith, as is Daniel in the novel. Transferring the mantle from one prophet to another comes straight from Elijah giving his mantle to Elisha. Like the New Testament, much of the final part of the novel is told through letters. Daniel’s excruciating torture and sacrifice in the service of love constitutes a Passion narrative.
It’s a love story, essentially: a tragic love story. Greek tragedy is also frequently evoked, along with the Bible. One character sleeps with his mother. Everyone is controlled by fate arising from their immutable selves. But love is the foundation of it all. Love is the thread that pulls all the characters into, and sometimes through, but not always all the way out of, the hardships of life. Purdy doesn’t spare us the hardship, there are several scenes that are difficult to read, particularly the long final part of the novel describing Captain Stadger’s cruelty toward Daniel. But Purdy doesn’t withhold from us, nor from his characters, the love either, which feels real, even though Amos and Daniel’s love is un-realized, nor are we denied the beauty, either, both in the neighborhood the characters inhabit, and in Purdy’s prose, which is oftentimes lovely.