"The Human Eye Sees More Than it May Want To": James Purdy's in a Shallow Grave

Born in 1923 and publishing since 1956, James Purdy has been much praised by other writers - including Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Gore Vidal - but has not had a wide readership at least since his story collection 63: Dream Palace (1956) and first novel, Malcolm (1959). His 1967 novel with a military setting, Eustace Chisholm And the Works, I found devastating, and I thought that his 1986 novel In the Hollow of His Hand was hilarious, while being disappointed by his "AIDS novel," Garments the Living Wear (1989).

I picked up In a Shallow Grave (1976) as part of my ongoing examination of fiction set in the Vietnam war and/or among veterans of it. The other one that In a Shallow Grave most readily and most often brings to mind is Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, but Heinemman's novel is haunted by particular ghosts (dead American soldiers) from Vietnam. There are only two allusions to the particular war in which the narrator with the outlandish Southern name Garnet Montrose was disfigured (one to "Indo China," the other to the South China Sea) and some readers have mistaken the war in which Garnet fought (for WWII; it could just as easily have been the Korean War).

The pain and humiliation of returning a monster is not specific to any war. The isolation of very visible stigma is not even specific to combat veterans. The book is not a representation of "The Vietnam Experience" of Americans who were sent there, but representation of attempting to live with some dignity when one's appearance makes many people sick, and makes those who knew the man before and know that he was disfigured in combat uncomfortable.

In a Shallow Grave is not quite a ghost story, not quite a parable, but shows the obsessiveness and intractability of the human heart, like Eustace Chisholm and other Purdy fiction has. (I did not find reading it as horror-inducing as reading Eustace Chisholm was for me).