6 10
T ONY TANNER
- by a resolute predator. We keep encountering the feeder and the
fed, host and guest, the devourer and the devoured. Millicent is a
very determined feeder, constantly pressing strange foods, rare delicacies,
exotic potions and elixirs on Albert, just as she pours her words in his
ear and thrusts money onto his poverty. However, forced bounty is no
bounty at all, but an act of implacable will, and in seeming to give
most Millicent in fact takes all. Albert is the main donor: metaphor·
ically to Millicent and Elijah who in turn bestow on him unexpected
rewards and uninvited projections; literally to his golden eagle which
he feeds from his living flesh, a "habit" gradually displaced by his
feelings for Elijah and Millicent and the great-grandson. Love, here
I
as so often in Purdy's work, tends to be a sickness rather than a satis·
faction. His world is full of love, but love which takes distorted forms,
failing, or being frustrated, in what might be true attachments. Ev–
erywhere there are annihilating failures of recognition, leaving us with
a sense of lonely incomplete identities vaporizing back into the void,
unfinished because unloving or unloved. Here then is a manifestly
serious theme - people living off each other without loving each other
- as serious in Purdy as in Hawthorne and James.
But this it only part of the novel. For instance, we gradually no–
tice that the book is full of birds. Albert has his golden eagle, Elijah
T hrush
(sic)
calls his great-grandson "Biro of Heaven" and, though
mute, the boy articulates in bird song. Albert is referred to as "black
eagle," and so on. This is not purely gratuitous. Some sense of the mys–
tery of birds is as old as history. In Purdy's story "Home by Dark"
the grandfather says to the boy: "Birds are really strange creatures....
They remember always where to go, where to build their nests, ",here
to return to.... " Such a notion of birds would necessarily be attrac–
tive to directionless, unhoused, or mis-housed modern man. Since
Purdy's book is set in New York where man is not only, like all men,
earthbound, but congested, claustrophobic, deep in the "behavioral sink,"
the high incidence of birds moving through the words of the book seems
to hold out the invitation and temptation of a higher, cleaner realm,
This novel suggests more than it says, and keeps its secrets in the
midst of revelation.
It
is a book which de\'ours its own allegories, but
not before we have glimpsed their outlines. Thus, for instance, at one
level the book is about the fate of America. The Bird of Hem'en has
I
"wild Indian eyes" and wears an Indian suit - he is silent, even as the
I
voice of the Indian is no longer heard in the land. Albert is black and
comes from Alabama, but like so many displaced blacks he has come
North , Elijah was brought up in lllinois and Nebraska but has been
drawn East to become a theatrical role-player. Millicent we may take to
be quintessentially New York. The Indian and the black ha\'e their
