Neo-Gothic Trend

EUSTACE CHISHOLM AND THE WORKS by James Purdy. 241 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $5.95.

"All I've been treated to for the last six months is stories about guys in love with guys. Christ, the age of anybody being in love with girls must be over!" Thus moans a female character is Eustace Chisholm and the Works. The comment sounds distressingly like today's beleaguered fiction reviewer. Perhaps the fastest-growing literary genre in these times is frankly homosexual fiction in which the demimonde of the third sex is fully exposed down to its rawest nerve ending.

This sort of novel (John Rechy's City of Night, Alfred Chester's The Exquisite Corpse) runs to a pat boy-meets-boy formula and also takes to a traditional thematic cover. The jacket proclaims a search for love and the breakthrough from loneliness. But inside the jacket the reader usually finds an untucked hair shirt of violence and degradation. The gay life never leads down a simple primrose path; most relationships of this sort are entangled in the bramble of sadomasochism, and inevitably, the virgin is despoiled, the innocent becomes jaded, and another sensitive, out-of-step, sad young man is ultimately and tragically tripped up. There are no happy endings in the homosexual story.

Eustace Chisholm and the Works is about Amos Ratcliffe, a beautiful bastard who has bedded down with his own mother, and his Chicago landlord, Daniel Haws, a martinet of Indian blood. Daniel can only give expression to his love for Amos when he is walking in his sleep.

Pederast Pedestal. Enlisting in the Army to forget his confused yearnings, Daniel falls into the clutches of the sort of officer who might have given the Marquis de Sade himself basic training. Under his cruel, relentless treatment Daniel suffers the nightmare extremes of the homosexual experience--castration and disembowelment--before dying. And Amos, who has become a male whore but who has still remained faithful to Daniel in his aberrational fashion, also comes to an early and bloody demise. Meanwhile, Eustace Chisholm, a self-styled poet, observes the whole story from an ascetic pederast pedestal and is somehow cleansed and purified--or so the author insists.

James Purdy has achieved a considerable literary reputation for his precisely chiseled prose style and gallows humor (Malcolm, The Nephew, 63: Dream Palace). His talent does not flag here, despite his choice of subject. But Eustace Chisholm is not unlike certain surrealistic paintings in its rather surprising lack of effect: though an atmosphere is evoked in sharp and crystalline terms and though figures are intensely and skillfully rendered, the reader remains unmoved. Fortunately, most men do not live in a neo-Gothic neverland where the entire range of human experience is dominated by a single obsession. Life is at once simpler and more complicated than that.

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