Narrow Rooms Read online

  James Purdy

  NARROW ROOMS

  With a new introduction by

  GIORDANO TEDOLDI

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: For James Michael Tillotson and Stephen D. Adams

  Narrow Rooms by James Purdy

  Originally published by Arbor House in 1978

  First Valancourt Books edition 2019

  Copyright © 1978 by James Purdy

  Introduction © 2019 by Giordano Tedoldi

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  INTRODUCTION

  Narrow Rooms is the most Aeschylean contemporary novel you’ll ever read. It is violent, shocking, disturbing, but, above all, relentless, as Greek fate is. The characters inhabiting or rather haunting the “Mountain State” in which the novel is set may be doctors, farmers, cowboys, or renderers (a word which sounded so ominous when I first found it, and which applies in fact to the novel’s demon) but they may as well be Oedipus or Agamemnon living in Thebes or Mykenes.

  Countless writers have tried to revive ancient drama, and countless have failed. Without even attempting to do so, James Purdy succeeds. From the very first paragraph, the reader is taken into a world where nothing matters but the past. And the past carries a curse with it, a curse so ancient and deep that the damned themselves don’t know how to cope with it: “How in hell would I know what’s wrong with me at this late date! […] But I know what I feel, and I know I want to kill him for what I feel and what he has done to me,” says the renderer, the evil spirit of this story. Feeling is what matters, in Purdy’s works, feeling is king. No rationality, no civilization, no understanding of the facts, no knowledge can change the curse. What is the curse? It is human nature that is cursed, according to Purdy. Oedipus is cursed, Thebes is cursed and the whole (human) world is cursed and he can only comply. That’s what all the characters in Narrow Rooms do, they observe their own unraveling without ever trying seriously to stop it, quite the contrary in fact.

  If there is any sadomasochism in Purdy (and surely there is) it is in this strangely condescending behavior, in this mute resignation to the curse of the world, not in the sexual excesses or in the tortures. “He already in his heart is guilty of it,” says young Brian McFee, the renderer’s slave, about his master. It’s not the physical punishment which makes the sadomasochistic statement, it’s the mind. And the mind is not free: some evil spirit controls it, and the renderer has a name for this spirit haunting him, and it’s not Satan or any other personal natural or supernatural being, it’s hatred. Narrow Rooms is a study of hatred. Purdy describes hatred and anger as natural forces like hurricanes or earthquakes. It is staggering how we delude ourselves in thinking that we may tame hatred or anger. We tame what we are able to tame, but we can’t put the lid of self-­control or education or whatever on the erupting volcano. Purdy leads his readers closer to the rim of the volcano than any other writer of his generation has done, and with no complacency or artificiality. Complacency and artificiality you will find, and in spades, in many contemporary novels about emotional pain and suffering, long-winded pieces of sentimental literature in which the characters are shattered and vivisected by the writer’s sadistic impulses without ever having been alive in the first place. They were already hopelessly corrupted and actually dead from the beginning. When they kiss, it’s just necrophilia. When the renderer, or Brian, or Sidney, or any other of the characters in Narrow Rooms kiss, they move something deep in the reader because they are alive, because they have been in the same places of the heart where the reader, or any living human being, has been or will be sooner or later. Their bodies act and react to stimuli with wild unpredictability – it seems like the bodies of the characters have been gifted with greater liberty than their minds, as if the curse is less effective on flesh than on thoughts – but it is this unpredictability which is uncannily alive and familiar. We recognize the groping in the dark, the flailing, even the madness that it’s inherent to all our actions, equally shaped by confidence and despair.

  In fact, the plot may end in catastrophe, and the atmosphere of the novel is gloomy, but any sensitive reader will be able to glimpse the fleeting conjunction of night and day that extends like a deliverance on all the characters. “I have written my name in hell,” says Brian, but he has done so through love, a love of an intensity and freedom only a few have experienced. Certainly not angels. Therefore, his doom is the reverse of a story of redemption.

  In the end, equilibrium is reached. Everyone in the novel shifts in each other’s place and role. Actually, in each other’s life: “Make him pay for what he’s made me suffer, sweetheart. Be me for him like you said a while ago which made me so mad cause it was the truth,” the renderer commands Brian. The master becomes slave, the murderer the murdered. Vengeance is carried out by those who love the avenger. Purdy seems to think that human interconnection and communication on all levels is always possible, and that the belief that there are obscure, unfathomable recesses in any one of us is wrong. These dark areas in fact become strikingly visible during a crisis, when the volcano erupts, whether its bowels be filled with hatred or love. It’s the mystery of any physical and emotional bond, a mystery which bespeaks a telepathic quality in human relationships which Purdy has scrutinized and represented with unparalleled profundity.

  It’s the depth of this human bondage which sometimes makes his works seem unreal, or grotesque, but they are in fact neither. Unreal and grotesque are the supposedly realistic novels where everybody speaks or thinks like a prototype, an emblem, an abstract ego, but behind his words and thoughts, and around him, there is nothing. Everything is so painfully accurate, so exact, that it sounds false. Has any of us ever really experienced love or hatred as shown in these so called realistic novels? With all their flourishes in sexual descriptions, the affectation in the endless brooding, the mind-searching for the perfect sentence to impress the reader? Who on earth thinks so pompously like those people? Realist writers are, by and large, mannerists. They may seize the spirit of the time, or rather, the spirit of the day, but their characters are simply put all together in the bag, hoping that because of this confinement they will give the appearance of caring for each other.

  Truth is, you can’t mimic human relationships. You have to work a different magic, and to do so, first of all you have to drop all you know about human relationships. All that’s continuously put under your eyes and stuffed in your ears. All you have superficially experienced. All you’ve been told. All the chatter about “human relationships” in our time, the whole “culture” of it. Because this is a partial view of the subject. It’s biased. The truth is under the skin. You must feel it, have faith in it, it’s something that reveals itself like a tremendous undercurrent piercing through the gigantic flow of opinions, information, news, cultural trends. James Purdy was gifted enough and strong enough to exhume those truths about the eternal human nature which were long believed dead. They’re not truths about a specific civilization, American or Western or whatever. I suffer every time I read, for example, that Dostoevsky probed the “Russian soul”. He probed the soul, if there is one, and that’s why he is appreciated all around the world, and will be forever. The approach may be peculiar, and surely Purdy’s approach is positively extreme, but he does not talk about monsters, or degenerates, simply because he does not show any interest in mediocrity. The myth of the common man is all too useful for celebrations and fa
nfares, much less for a good book.

  Giordano Tedoldi

  Giordano Tedoldi was born in Rome in 1971. He has published a collection of short stories, Io odio John Updike (Fazi Editore, Roma, 2006; 2nd ed. minimumfax, Roma, 2016) and two novels, I segnalati (Fazi Editore, Roma, 2013) and Tabù (Tunué, Latina, 2017).

  NARROW ROOMS

  The human embryo is curled up in a ball with the nostrils placed between the two knees.

  At death the pupil opens wide.

  Vance De Lakes waited an interminable while in Dr. Ulric’s office. Every few seconds he would lose courage and make a motion to leave. The smell of carbolic acid, chloroform, whatever it was, always made Vance a little light-­headed in any case, and looking through the two medical books whose quoted sentences are above was as nauseating as the smells. There were extremely few magazines in the waiting room, and most of these were of interest only to farmers. The National Geographic was the only reading matter Vance could stand to open but “The South Seas Today,” and “The New Eskimo,” and the disappearance of the puffin, to tell the truth, did not mean too much to him.

  “It’s about Sidney.” Vance had begun volubly when the Doctor stood before him gazing under knitted brows, and extending his hand which Vance did not take only because he did not see it.

  Following the Doctor into his study, Vance shot a hasty look into the room on the left and saw a still fairly young man (who looked like somebody he had seen working on the highway) stretched out on a couch, his hands lavishly bandaged.

  “I won’t take but a minute of your time, Doc,” Vance began. He held a big straw hat in his hands which he wore to protect his head from the boiling August sun, but in his haste to get to the doctor’s he had forgotten to put it on, and had carried it as one would a parcel.

  The particular news which he had borne, the medicinal hospital smells, the brief glimpse of the man with the bloodstained bandages had made Vance begin to keel over, but the doctor quickly pushed his head down, and then seeing he was not going to pass out, pressed a smelling bottle to his nose.

  “It’s Sidney, Doc,” Vance had begun, lifting his head up, and gazing helplessly at the physician. “He’s come home. . . . But don’t start so, Doc . . . It’s all right . . . He’s been pardoned. He’s a free man.”

  That was how it began. Sidney was sent home from prison to us, pardoned, but he hadn’t been able to pardon what he felt about himself.

  Sidney was a big fellow when he was sent up, and his extreme size made him look older than he was. At fifteen people sometimes took him for draft age.

  Now when he came home from prison he looked considerably smaller, and younger. He looked almost as young as his kid brother Vance, who was twenty.

  There were times now after he had got back when Sidney would go into his brother’s bedroom and behave as if he was going to ask Vance something, his mouth would open slightly and all the time he tried to speak he looked like he had been slapped. He really looked slapped all the time. Then having said nothing he would stare in the direction of Vance as if he was the author of all his pain.

  “It hurts me more than anything else ever did,” Vance was explaining to Dr. Ulric now. “Sidney don’t want to go out to see anybody, and he’s not happy either when he’s with me. . . .”

  “Why force him then?” the Doc retorted, smoking one of those dilapidated-­looking black cigarettes he had been puffing on for forty years. “Don’t do anything, Vance, at this time . . . That’s often the best way to deal with a problem. Most problems. Sort of let it go away from you . . . You mind me now, do you hear? . . . But I would like him to come to see me . . . Anytime at all tell him. But don’t you do anything right now. There’s nothing you can do anyhow but let him know he’s still your brother. . . .”

  “But it was me who visited him in the pen,” Vance spoke like one defending himself. “Who else went there week after week, far as it is from here . . . And he never appreciated it! . . . All he ever asked about was Gareth Vaisey.” (Gareth was a neighbor boy who had been in a serious auto wreck about the time of Sidney’s trouble.)

  “But, Vance, see it’s you he has come home to! . . . He didn’t come home to Gareth after all. . . .”

  Vance quieted down. Dr. Ulric had that ability to calm one, not so much by what he said, he said very little, but by reason of his being himself so quiet. Then he had delivered most of the babies for twenty-­five miles around and perhaps the two speakers remembered at this moment ever so fleetingly that the doctor had delivered both Sidney and Vance. He was after all considerably closer to many of his patients than a father. Too close, the doctor often thought. Hence perhaps his insomnia.

  “I’m too close to everybody,” Dr. Ulric had once said in a loud voice when he had had a glass too many of the huckle­berry wine which he manufactured himself down in the basement.

  As he neared seventy Dr. Ulric’s face began to set in a certain way so that it resembled a door that has been nailed shut in a deserted house. His eyes were as bright as ever, perhaps brighter, the disc of the pupil appearing to move like a white fire, but his face in general gave the impression of belonging to someone who never expected anything again. His present was taken up with tasks which he held onto like a drowning man will to the sight of shore. Yes, his patients were as needful to him as air, and his ministrations were therefore not duty but necessity. And though his hands trembled too badly for him to deliver babies (it was his skill as an obstetrician which had given him his greatest reputation), he toiled from early to late with the sick and the discouraged.

  He had leased out the many acres of fields surrounding his house to farmers to grow corn on. There was something about the sight of the corn—in the summer growing taller and heavier and then the gold sheaves in the fall and winter—which was nearly as important to him as his patients.

  Sometimes in mid-­August he would walk out at some considerable distance into the cornfields and appear to be listening to the moving stalks.

  The night Sidney De Lakes had shot Brian McFee to death at the Bent Ridge Tavern, Doc had paid no particular attention to the dead youth lying on the sawdust of the floor. It was the one charged with the shooting he turned his attention to; Sidney towered up all his six feet three inches, chest out, his back pressed tight against the wall, his palms slightly upraised, a cold sweat pouring down over his forehead and upper lip so that he appeared to be standing under a leaking eavespipe.

  The Doc had opened his bag, called for a tumbler of water from the white-­lipped bartender, and taking up a tiny envelope containing powder, dropped some into the glass, stirred and then forced the solution past the clenched teeth of the new-­fledged murderer whose head had immediately fallen over the doctor’s hand as if to kiss or perhaps bite it. Doc had never seen Sidney since that day four years ago.

  Brian McFee, aged twenty, had raised his gun at Sidney and threatened to fire because of an alleged insult during some heated argument which had arisen while they had been hunting together that day, prior to their going to the Bent Ridge Tavern. Sid, who was of course armed also, had (his lawyer later claimed) fired involuntarily, at least in self-­defense, when he saw Brian was raising his gun at him again, and the bullet from that shot had hit Brian in the left eye, killing him instantly.

  During the trial in response to a question from the prosecution as to whether he was “sorry” or not for what he had done, Sidney at first had replied “I am not sorry,” which his own lawyer later had attempted to explain away owing to his “rattled” mental condition, but again under cross-­examination, Sidney had blurted out with regard to Brian: “He had hounded me for months, worried and nagged me each day . . . I am not sorry that nagging and worrying is over . . . But I cared . . . deeply for Brian McFee.” (He had added this statement also against the wishes or advice of his defender.)

  To make his case worse, Sidney refused to tell the court or even his own attorney what was the nature of Brian’s harassment and nagging of him, and the exact orig
in of his quarrel with the dead boy. Sidney refused to speak at greater length about the shooting thereafter, and no one else could come forward to offer an explanation, not even his brother Vance, to whom the whole affair remained a gloomy puzzle.

  Sidney was sent up for manslaughter.

  Dr. Ulric had received a letter from Sidney about two months after he had started to serve his sentence. It contained only one line, with no salutation or leave-­taking. It read:

  See that Vance makes something of himself.

  (Signed) Sidney De Lakes.

  Vance had thought the sun rose and set in Sidney, or so everybody said, but you didn’t need anybody to say it for you, you just had to watch. Dr. Ulric had once seen Vance lacing up Sidney’s boots at the start of hunting season. There was a peaceful expression on the boy’s face which recalled the look some people have when receiving the host. It had given the doctor pause.

  The day or rather the morning after Sidney had killed his hunting companion, Vance had been afraid to go home. With his brother already in jail, he had been ashamed to be seen on the streets. For a while he had thought he would step into the First Presbyterian Church and occupy one of the back pews, but even here he was sure he would be observed or that his presence in the church be explained as counterfeit piety. Later on for a while he had gone into the depths of the cornfield behind Doc Ulric’s. Both the moving corn and the lights from the doctor’s house comforted him. But the damp in the cornfield (it was rather cold for August) and a rat running over his shoes made him, together with the terror of returning to an empty house, go up the back steps of the doctor’s house and rap on the screen door.

  “I wondered when you’d show up,” Dr. Ulric had said. “Sit over there why don’t you . . .”

  Another peculiar thing about Dr. Ulric was that though known for his bountifulness, compassion and devotion to the lives of his patients he was almost never seen to smile. His face was not sour or bitter, nonetheless, but some said (perhaps wrongly) that it was disappointed in aspect.