kinbote4zembla's review against another edition
5.0
This is a nauseating novel. I just don't even know. Throughout my reading, I very much enjoyed it but I did not think it was incredible. But those last few pages are from so far out in left field... There is no precedent.
What begins as a frustrated romance between a young man and his even younger tenant, this work transmogrifies into a text of blazing grief, a thing so searing and uncomfortable, it is hard to finish.
(I will be discussing the plot in detail, so, if you want this novel to overwhelm you with its oddity, stop reading, immediately.)
Eustace Chisholm and the Works, written by James Purdy and published in 1967, is so fucking dark, you guys. By the time that Daniel Haws's sodomitical disembowelling takes place, the reader has sifted through incest, abortion, prostitution, and just general ugliness.
The three parts of the novel are perfectly arranged: the first part narrates the tension of love forming between Daniel Haws and Amos Ratcliffe; the second concerns the exploits of Amos with his millionaire lover, once Daniel has left him; and the third details Daniel's life in the military. We see love's forming and its coming apart.
Eustace Chisholm, the bisexual narrative poet at the heart of the novel, who spends much of his time piecing together other people's narratives to exploit them for his epic poem, is the binding agent through all of the novel's disparate parts.
The scene depicting the illegal abortion is an absolute punch in the gut. So nightmarish is the scene.
I think this is a highly complex novel. I love all of its moving pieces. For a transgressive work, it is so emotive and human. Issues of art and creation, power, repression, normalcy, identity, blah, blah, blah.
I am not so much shocked by its content as I am by its existence.
5 Palimpsests of Poetry out of 5
What begins as a frustrated romance between a young man and his even younger tenant, this work transmogrifies into a text of blazing grief, a thing so searing and uncomfortable, it is hard to finish.
(I will be discussing the plot in detail, so, if you want this novel to overwhelm you with its oddity, stop reading, immediately.)
Eustace Chisholm and the Works, written by James Purdy and published in 1967, is so fucking dark, you guys. By the time that Daniel Haws's sodomitical disembowelling takes place, the reader has sifted through incest, abortion, prostitution, and just general ugliness.
The three parts of the novel are perfectly arranged: the first part narrates the tension of love forming between Daniel Haws and Amos Ratcliffe; the second concerns the exploits of Amos with his millionaire lover, once Daniel has left him; and the third details Daniel's life in the military. We see love's forming and its coming apart.
Eustace Chisholm, the bisexual narrative poet at the heart of the novel, who spends much of his time piecing together other people's narratives to exploit them for his epic poem, is the binding agent through all of the novel's disparate parts.
The scene depicting the illegal abortion is an absolute punch in the gut. So nightmarish is the scene.
I think this is a highly complex novel. I love all of its moving pieces. For a transgressive work, it is so emotive and human. Issues of art and creation, power, repression, normalcy, identity, blah, blah, blah.
I am not so much shocked by its content as I am by its existence.
5 Palimpsests of Poetry out of 5
rpmirabella's review against another edition
5.0
Brutal, sadistic, mythical, graphic, strange, problematic, inappropriate, perverse, moving. When I read Purdy, I'm overwhelmed by the naked PAIN and meaning throbbing through the violence and horror of the relationships. A novel partly about the inability to love, to accept love when it's offered.
kingkong's review against another edition
4.0
He must have been going through a real dark period during this one
swmppsm's review against another edition
5.0
Incredible daring never been done before show stopping psychotic off the wall violently repressive
zefrog's review
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Although billed by many as a lost gay classic, Eustace Chisholm and the Works is in some ways not the most accessible of books, in that Purdy is not sparing of the sensitivities of his readers.
The book is divided into three parts made up of chapters, and an epilogue. It is set in the 30s, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, as the world prepares to return to war. It presents a disparate group of down-trodden misfits (Eustace's works), adrift in a harsh anarchic world, mirrored in the writing. At a time when society is falling apart, its rules in disarray, and the individual is left to its own economic and moral devices, they don't really know who they are and how to relate to each other and to themselves. Institutions, such as religion and the army, are less than a help to them; they prove to be a curse.
This rise of individualism, 20-odd years after a world war, clearly felt familiar in the late 1960s to Purdy's readers, who made it a bestseller, as it can still in some ways feel familiar to a modern reader. Some critiques were less enamoured, however. Failing to recognise the parallels, one of them called it a “fifth-rate avant-garde soap opera [about] prayer and faggotry.”
What the New York Times dismissed as "a homosexual novel" when it was released, is indeed at times arrowing, and surprisingly explicit for something brought out in 1967 by an established publisher ("I could drink your come in goblets" (p123), "Amos adjusted the folds of his scrotum with deliberate ostentation" (p159)). It is also quite literally visceral: the graphic and gory abortion scene is mirrored later in the book by scenes of barely consensual S&M torture that end with someone "carrying his bowels in his hands like provisions" (p233). Not content of having put his readers through this, Purdy, in the epilogue, goes for the jugular and takes an obvious dig at them, describing Eustace (Ace) as being "as anxious to know the end of the Daniel-Amos story as a depraved inveterate novel-reader" (p238).
Beyond the grotesque gothic of the situations, the writing is sparse and preoccupied mostly with describing the action. Rather alienatingly, the feelings of the characters as the scenes happen remain implicit, apart from a few expository passages dedicated specifically to painting the protagonists' inner lives, to emphasise how contained and discrete they are from what the characters experience.
In fact, events happen to them. Not only are they not agents of their own stories, they refuse to be who they know themselves to be. And the consequences are catastrophic. Homosexuality, for example, which is a reality for all the men of the story, is never the object of judgement. It is ostensibly accepted by everyone in the book. But three of the main characters cannot accept it within themselves.
There is also an artificiality about his characters that tells us that Purdy is trying to imbue them with allegorical value. They have qualities that transcend who they are as people. They represent more than who they are, even as they feel quite believable as people.
Most notably, Amos sits firmly in the literary tradition of the nihilistic angry young male. But the author also imbues him with religious traits, hinting in turn that he could either be the devil (we are told about his "goat feet" in one scene straight from a religious painting where they are washed by another man), cupid whom everyone falls in love with due to his angelic beauty, or "God Almighty" himself, as one of the characters calls him.
Similarly, despite being eponymous, Ace is not central to this ensemble piece. While being one of the outcasts, he is also both the enabler for all these people, the wizard behind the curtain, and a chronicler of their turpitude. He only serves as glue, almost as canvas to a deceptively simple narrative, which is constructed like a cubist painting, composed of an infinite number of layers, and bringing together different perspectives by dryly presenting each character's story in turn. Unlike a cubist painting, however, there is no narrative centre to the book. Just a yawning black hole of unfulfilled potential and passivity. Only in the epilogue, does Purdy finally dish out a sliver of redemptive hope.
The book, which is molded by Purdy's youthful experiences, comes as a vivid and haunting warning to embrace who we are, and to not "rip out the beautiful things in us so we’ll be acceptable to society." It is also a perverted ode to love. This is not the work of an ordinary mind. As Purdy himself later said: 'I'm not a gay writer, I'm a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.' There is nothing conservative about this book. Don't fret if you don't like it though. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” Purdy once remarked. “I’d think something had gone wrong.”
The book is divided into three parts made up of chapters, and an epilogue. It is set in the 30s, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, as the world prepares to return to war. It presents a disparate group of down-trodden misfits (Eustace's works), adrift in a harsh anarchic world, mirrored in the writing. At a time when society is falling apart, its rules in disarray, and the individual is left to its own economic and moral devices, they don't really know who they are and how to relate to each other and to themselves. Institutions, such as religion and the army, are less than a help to them; they prove to be a curse.
This rise of individualism, 20-odd years after a world war, clearly felt familiar in the late 1960s to Purdy's readers, who made it a bestseller, as it can still in some ways feel familiar to a modern reader. Some critiques were less enamoured, however. Failing to recognise the parallels, one of them called it a “fifth-rate avant-garde soap opera [about] prayer and faggotry.”
What the New York Times dismissed as "a homosexual novel" when it was released, is indeed at times arrowing, and surprisingly explicit for something brought out in 1967 by an established publisher ("I could drink your come in goblets" (p123), "Amos adjusted the folds of his scrotum with deliberate ostentation" (p159)). It is also quite literally visceral: the graphic and gory abortion scene is mirrored later in the book by scenes of barely consensual S&M torture that end with someone "carrying his bowels in his hands like provisions" (p233). Not content of having put his readers through this, Purdy, in the epilogue, goes for the jugular and takes an obvious dig at them, describing Eustace (Ace) as being "as anxious to know the end of the Daniel-Amos story as a depraved inveterate novel-reader" (p238).
Beyond the grotesque gothic of the situations, the writing is sparse and preoccupied mostly with describing the action. Rather alienatingly, the feelings of the characters as the scenes happen remain implicit, apart from a few expository passages dedicated specifically to painting the protagonists' inner lives, to emphasise how contained and discrete they are from what the characters experience.
In fact, events happen to them. Not only are they not agents of their own stories, they refuse to be who they know themselves to be. And the consequences are catastrophic. Homosexuality, for example, which is a reality for all the men of the story, is never the object of judgement. It is ostensibly accepted by everyone in the book. But three of the main characters cannot accept it within themselves.
There is also an artificiality about his characters that tells us that Purdy is trying to imbue them with allegorical value. They have qualities that transcend who they are as people. They represent more than who they are, even as they feel quite believable as people.
Most notably, Amos sits firmly in the literary tradition of the nihilistic angry young male. But the author also imbues him with religious traits, hinting in turn that he could either be the devil (we are told about his "goat feet" in one scene straight from a religious painting where they are washed by another man), cupid whom everyone falls in love with due to his angelic beauty, or "God Almighty" himself, as one of the characters calls him.
Similarly, despite being eponymous, Ace is not central to this ensemble piece. While being one of the outcasts, he is also both the enabler for all these people, the wizard behind the curtain, and a chronicler of their turpitude. He only serves as glue, almost as canvas to a deceptively simple narrative, which is constructed like a cubist painting, composed of an infinite number of layers, and bringing together different perspectives by dryly presenting each character's story in turn. Unlike a cubist painting, however, there is no narrative centre to the book. Just a yawning black hole of unfulfilled potential and passivity. Only in the epilogue, does Purdy finally dish out a sliver of redemptive hope.
The book, which is molded by Purdy's youthful experiences, comes as a vivid and haunting warning to embrace who we are, and to not "rip out the beautiful things in us so we’ll be acceptable to society." It is also a perverted ode to love. This is not the work of an ordinary mind. As Purdy himself later said: 'I'm not a gay writer, I'm a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.' There is nothing conservative about this book. Don't fret if you don't like it though. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” Purdy once remarked. “I’d think something had gone wrong.”
invertible_hulk's review against another edition
3.0
This one started off strong, but somehow jumped completely off the deep end during the last 1/4.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Purdy died this past weekend, so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of people who only pay attention to an author once they pass.
And since I've had this one on my to-read stack for a while.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Purdy died this past weekend, so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of people who only pay attention to an author once they pass.
And since I've had this one on my to-read stack for a while.
gerhard's review
5.0
Another literary dervish from the foetid imagination of James Purdy. This is only the second Purdy I have read, and is markedly different from Cabot Wright Begins. Whereas the latter is an excoriating satire, Eustace Chisholm is quite different.
Exactly what it is, I am unsure: a paean to the sanctity of love, a gothic tale of obsession and its horrific consequences, a sly homage to the muse of creativity and the toll it exacts on those enthralled to its servitude.
There is a passage early on that, to the modern reader, seems like a haunting foreshadowing of the ravages of the HIV/Aids epidemic:
“I have to say it all over again,” Carla said to Clayton, but her voice easily carried to the front room. “Never saw such a beautiful boy outside of pictures.”
“It won’t last,” Clayton said in a whisper that did not carry.
“Why not?” Carla wondered.
“Why, he’ll die,” Clayton replied sleepily.
The ethereal beauty of Amos, which seems like an angelic manifestation of gay perfection, has all sorts of repercussions throughout this grim novel, the most devastating being the sado-masochistic relationship between Daniel Haws and Captain Stadger.
What transpires is so brutal, and ultimately so self-destructive, tainted as much with the blood that is spilt as with the love that empowers these acts, that the reader is hard pressed to keep on reading until the end. (The closest comparison with Purdy is the New Queer Cinema of Gregg Araki, I think).
Purdy implicates the reader himself in the gory goings-on when Eustace comments near the end that “he was as anxious to know the end of the Daniel-Amos story as a depraved inveterate novel reader.”
The edition I read has a curious cover featuring a prominent picture of a moth. I was quite puzzled by this, until the shattering ending:
The thick body of a moth on his lips awakened Daniel, and opening an eye – half of his face was pressed tight to the ground – he saw the ‘fair-browed Moon’ about which Amos had once written in a poem addressed to him.
It is perhaps no surprise that both Cabot Wright and Eustace Chisholm were attacked on ‘moral grounds’ upon publication. Infinitely more damaging to Purdy’s critical bastion though was that, in the period during which both of these novels were published, “all his immediate family, his friends and his supporters had died.”
What a devastating fate to befall such a remarkable writer, who wrote so eloquently about the marginalised, and ended up falling through the cracks of history itself.
Exactly what it is, I am unsure: a paean to the sanctity of love, a gothic tale of obsession and its horrific consequences, a sly homage to the muse of creativity and the toll it exacts on those enthralled to its servitude.
There is a passage early on that, to the modern reader, seems like a haunting foreshadowing of the ravages of the HIV/Aids epidemic:
“I have to say it all over again,” Carla said to Clayton, but her voice easily carried to the front room. “Never saw such a beautiful boy outside of pictures.”
“It won’t last,” Clayton said in a whisper that did not carry.
“Why not?” Carla wondered.
“Why, he’ll die,” Clayton replied sleepily.
The ethereal beauty of Amos, which seems like an angelic manifestation of gay perfection, has all sorts of repercussions throughout this grim novel, the most devastating being the sado-masochistic relationship between Daniel Haws and Captain Stadger.
What transpires is so brutal, and ultimately so self-destructive, tainted as much with the blood that is spilt as with the love that empowers these acts, that the reader is hard pressed to keep on reading until the end. (The closest comparison with Purdy is the New Queer Cinema of Gregg Araki, I think).
Purdy implicates the reader himself in the gory goings-on when Eustace comments near the end that “he was as anxious to know the end of the Daniel-Amos story as a depraved inveterate novel reader.”
The edition I read has a curious cover featuring a prominent picture of a moth. I was quite puzzled by this, until the shattering ending:
The thick body of a moth on his lips awakened Daniel, and opening an eye – half of his face was pressed tight to the ground – he saw the ‘fair-browed Moon’ about which Amos had once written in a poem addressed to him.
It is perhaps no surprise that both Cabot Wright and Eustace Chisholm were attacked on ‘moral grounds’ upon publication. Infinitely more damaging to Purdy’s critical bastion though was that, in the period during which both of these novels were published, “all his immediate family, his friends and his supporters had died.”
What a devastating fate to befall such a remarkable writer, who wrote so eloquently about the marginalised, and ended up falling through the cracks of history itself.
eriknoteric's review
5.0
Rarely do I feel comfortable saying there is a "right way" to feel after finishing a book, but if readers aren't reeling after closing the back cover of James Purdy's 1960s classic of queer literature, "Eustace Chisholm and the Works," I am not sure they read the same book I read!
Telling the story of some low and out characters living at the margins of Chicago society during the peak of the Great Depression, it is honestly remarkable how outright and blatant Purdy is in discussing the sexualities, desires, and actions of his mostly queer cast of characters. Labeled a "pre-stonewall" book by the gay literary elite in the 70s/80s/90s, in fact I find Purdy's tales of diversely queer experiences far more timely and interesting in its engagements than many of the gay texts that followed it and have earned their own canonical statuses.
Refusing to tell a linear tale of a middle-class attractive white gay male character, Purdy instead shows how queerness intersects with and recons with the various other identities we hold and have - foremost among them poverty - and other forms of sexual desires. For this and so much more "Eustace Chisholm" will always rank among my most cherished books.
Telling the story of some low and out characters living at the margins of Chicago society during the peak of the Great Depression, it is honestly remarkable how outright and blatant Purdy is in discussing the sexualities, desires, and actions of his mostly queer cast of characters. Labeled a "pre-stonewall" book by the gay literary elite in the 70s/80s/90s, in fact I find Purdy's tales of diversely queer experiences far more timely and interesting in its engagements than many of the gay texts that followed it and have earned their own canonical statuses.
Refusing to tell a linear tale of a middle-class attractive white gay male character, Purdy instead shows how queerness intersects with and recons with the various other identities we hold and have - foremost among them poverty - and other forms of sexual desires. For this and so much more "Eustace Chisholm" will always rank among my most cherished books.