PARTISAN REVIEW
609
BIRDSONG
I AM ELIJAH THRUSH. By Jamel Purdy. Doubleday. $4.95.
Imagine a critic whose preferences and prejudices when it
comes to modern American fiction have been formed by a regular
reading of, say, Saul Bellow, N0n11an Mailer and John Updike - what
might he be expected to say a bout a novel with the following scenario?
The narrator is a young black, Albert Peggs, in love with a golden
eagle; he becomes involved with an aging actor, "mime, poet, and
painter" called Elijah Thrush, who is himself in love with his mute
great-gra ndson. He a lso becomes the memoirist of an heiress, Millicent
de Frayne, who stopped growing old in
1913
when she fell in love
with Elijah Thrush. All four of these people, plus the bird, are linked
together in a number of ways which takes the book far beyond the
simply narrative. Albert's account outlines the frightening (and comic)
ascendancy of Millicent over all of them, a series of preemptive power
plays which culminates in a funereal wedding banquet on board a
ship at sea. Albert is last heard taking over, from the doomed Elijah,
Elijah's role in his theater.
Our imaginary critic may well be tempted to dismiss it as per–
verse farce, a weiI'd homoerotic daydream or nightmare, a frivolous
and mannered piece of idiosyncra tic surrealism, in all cases lacking the
sort of pained "rele\'ance" which he feels he ca n find among his pre–
ferred novelists. This, I fea r, is how some America n critics are going
to receive James Purdy's most recen t novel, of which the above sce–
nario is a crude outline. Purdy has neve r, it seems to me, been done
justice by many of the leading contempora ry critics and one reason, it
may be, is that they simply don't know how to read his work proper–
ly. "Relevance" is an elusive and often impoverishing concept, and it
should not be felt that long ruminating monologues on modern times,
or the dyin.g embers of naturalism, constitute the most direct or even
the most compelling ways of contacting present realities. There is such
a thing as indirect releva nce as well, and it can offer us riches and
subtleties not atta inable by headlong assaults on contemporaneity. Since
I think it would be an act of injustice to undervalue this hauntingly
serious and beautifully written book, I would like to suggest some of
the \\'ays in \\'hi eh it tou ches, in its o\\'n unique \\'ay, on matters
which concern all of us.
We can say straightaway that the book centers on various kinds
of parasitism, \'ampirism, sponging, addictions and habits; the appro–
priation of some ';ital part of a person - semen or soul, blood or youth
