David Davis 45, part 2
does this sex scene advance the plot?
My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we wont need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.
—Brian McFee’s letter to his lover and murderer, Sidney de Lakes
Be forewarned: even by 2024 standards, James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, published in 1978, is as hard to stomach as it is easy to read. The above excerpt—which recalls E.M. Forster’s mythic greenwood, where Englishmen in love might escape the constraints of homophobic “civilization”—only hints at the violence in which the majority of the novel rolls like a dying pig in hot mud. Whereas Rooms’ depictions of homosexual sex (where consensual) have been tempered by time, its rape, murder, and general brutality are as challenging as ever. There’s even a crucifixion, all the more heretical for making Christ’s look like a walk in Brian’s beautiful, mountainous park.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, Rooms was recommended to me by my friend, Daemonumx, who raved about its violent, sodomitical romance. I was surprised, only familiar with the Purdy who was a “gentle naturalist” of “small-town American life,” as Susan Sontag described him1. It turned out there were other Purdys, and the one who wrote Rooms was, per Sontag, the “writer of vignettes or sketches which give us a horrifying snapshot image of helpless people destroying each other.”
In the case of Rooms, these “snapshot images” coalesce into the story of four young Appalachian queers: Sidney de Lakes, football hero turned murderer who has returned home after serving time; Brian McFee, the boy he loved and killed; Gareth, the invalid son of a wealthy widow; and Roy Sturtevant, known as the Renderer, whose sadistic obsession with Sidney was spawned deep in their shared boyhood. What results is a pulpy, queeny, almost eldritch love triangle set in a gothic country noir2.
What I love about Rooms is that while (or perhaps because) its violence is atmospheric, it’s not always possible to discern which of it is good and which bad. By “good” and “bad” I mean, I suppose (though not even this is without reservation), consensual. In Rooms, sexual consent, or lack thereof, is constantly problematized—by the characters’ conflicted desires, by their muddled senses of obligation or ethics, by authorial appeals to the biblical, the magical, or the predestined. In leather culture, we rely on a sturdy, if not infallible, consent framework to help us stake out the line dividing hurt and harm. Rooms, while mostly peopled with homosexual men, takes place in a context outside and away from identity-based movements and subcultures like gay liberation and leather, to the extent that they can be teased apart. There is no sense that this small group of people in rural West Virginia is invested, or even aware, of these things3. They’re not doing S&M, or even homosexuality. They’re doing something else.
While the plot of Rooms is unambiguously sexual and violent, parsing it is complicated by this slippage4. When is it sexual violence and when is it violent sex? How do we differentiate between sex and violence (see Mitchum’s knuckles) at all? What even constitutes a sex scene in a book where guns are romantic; rusty nails flirtatious; sodomy ordained by god? To revisit Brian’s letter to Sidney, what is hunting without guns or prey?
But if we eschew the philistine’s dictum that sex scenes are only acceptable when “advancing the plot,” we don’t need to answer any of these questions (not for the philistines’ ugly purposes, anyway)5! You guys, the plot is not some separate entity whose integrity must be protected from the story, the book itself, or the reader! God didn’t come down from heaven to say that any kind of scene must drive the plot, although of course how the novelist navigates this relationship will say a lot about whether their book is interesting, entertaining, transcendent, or something else.
The fact of the matter is that Rooms does not exist without so-called sex scenes, no matter how stringently defined or censoriously punished. As Paul Binding writes in the introduction of the 1985 edition Daemonumx loaned me:
Because [Rooms] could not work on us unless we were made to share the emotional and sexual experiences of the central characters, Purdy insists that we have access to scenes of the utmost intimacy.
Indeed, to lose Rooms’ scenes of “jubilant entry into anus, single and double fellatio…” would be like being “excluded from the exchanges of Heathcliff and Cathy”—protagonists of another geographically isolated, topographically wild, incestuously passionate love story whose racism/racialization is both text and sub-, but whose lovemaking is at least considered natural. No, were this to happen to Rooms, Binding writes, “The metaphysics of the novel, as well as the particular psychological predicament, would be invalidated.”
For these reasons, Binding goes on, Rooms “constitutes a new landmark in the serious and poetic treatment of homosexual behavior”6. Almost fifty years since the novel’s publication, I think that landmark retains its gravity. What’s more, Binding declares that a serious engagement with (the) homosexual (in) art actually requires the sex scene, at least in this case. Denying “…Purdy’s courageous and uncompromising acceptance of the far from comfortable truth that passion is the most important constituent of the universe, and confounds all intellectual attempts to define or contain it, is to pervert a creative force into a destructive one.”
Read Part 1 of this series on the sex scene.
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Often mistaken as black and often by white writers of note—perhaps because of the influences that the Harlem Renaissance and jazz had on his writing, perhaps because his black characters tended to be imbued with an unexpected quantum of humanity—the white Purdy was reportedly an antisemite of some conviction, despite his having written often about “outsiders—women, African Americans, gay people, Native Americans.” In the more recent writing about him that I’ve found, the former is highlighted and the latter downplayed. I’m reminded of Patricia Highsmith, another white gay author whose, uh, peccadilloes have often been overlooked in light of her sexual marginalization. At any rate, as the twentieth century waned, Purdy rejected the increasingly benign designation of “gay writer”: “I’m a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.”
This Amazon review, titled “When Bad Boys Feel Their Oats,” is a good, spoiler-filled summary if you’d like to know more about Rooms’ plot.
“Our little mountain town here, in remote West Virginia, has had its veil torn away, and there have been revealed things just as terrible as those we read about in great seaports and immense metropolises the world over.”
Back to Forster, whose Aspects of the Novel describes plot this way:
We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” is a plot…If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?” That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by “and then—and then——”
Where does this “advancing the plot” thing come from? Twitter, naturally! Sorry, all the quality content in this newsletter is paywalled.
I can’t apologize for quoting Binding at length here. His analysis is better and clearer than mine, and so on the nose, in my opinion, that there’s little I can do to improve upon it. I’d never heard of him before reading this book but his intro slaps!