The Canker of Comedy

COLOR OF DARKNESS (175 pp.)--James Purdy--New Directions ($3.50).

In the title piece of this strange short-story collection, an emotionally disturbed child kicks his father in the groin. In Don't Call Me by My Right Name a man and wife take turns beating each other up. In Plan Now to Attend a hypocritical evangelist gets blind drunk in midmorning. In Sound of Talking a crippled husband makes his wife share his suffering. Almost all the women characters are fat and fortyish; almost all the men are shamed and unhappy. The poor are most often feebleminded, the rich vicious.

Horror Beneath Humor. These summaries help explain why publisher after publisher turned down Author Purdy's collection of short stories. Privately printed last year by two of his friends, the stories found few readers but avid ones. Poets Marianne Moore and Dame Edith Sitwell praised them. Aging (77) Novelist Carl Van Vechten was so impressed that he presented a collection of James Purdy's papers to the Yale library. After British publication last summer, a moderately daring U.S. firm, New Directions, finally took on the Purdy product. On the whole it was worth it.

The best humorous writing turns on a man's well-intentioned efforts to accomplish something--from assembling a do-it-yourself barbecue pit to catching a taxi in a downpour--and the fun lies in his frustration. Purdy uses much the same theme, but his purpose is to reveal the horror underlying the humor. The father who gets kicked in the groin has been trying to make up to his small son for his orphaned state. The husband and wife who belabor each other seem right off the burlesque stage, but the story's aim is to expose the canker that lies at the heart of comedy. Ohio-born James Purdy, 34, writes in a manner that is all his own, using a prose at once precise and clumsy, almost as if he had learned English well but late in life. People "grunt" out entire sentences, voices "darken" at listeners, metaphors sometimes reach too far and fall into absurdity.

Desolation of the Soul. In his most ambitious story, 63: Dream Palace, he tells of two young hillbillies from West Virginia who come to bad ends in Chicago, and of their only mourners, a writer improbably named Parkhearst Cratty and a wealthy matron most commonly called "greatwoman." Again the theme is one that could be comic--the adventures of a yokel in a big city. Again, the working out is pure terror, with murder of the body and desolation of the soul at the end. Author Purdy dislikes to be considered morbid and argues that "despair in art shows concern." All his stories are grotesque, but caught in them, like the tremble of a bird in cupped hands, is the undeniable flutter of life.

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