Hyperion - Nietzsche Circle

Genet, but not really—because I don’t think he’s universal. I don’t even think
he understands homosexual men, because he’s so like Dickens. He writes
very beautifully at times. The best thing is Journal d’un Voleur. I think that’s
very great.
MCP. What about American writers?
P. Well, I admire Melville, and Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, and Stephen
Crane. George’s Mother: that’s very great. And some of Faulkner, and just a
little bit of—“un soupçon de”—Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson. After
that, nothing.
MCP. You don’t like Fitzgerald?
P. No. Hate him. He liked the rich so much. You shouldn’t like rich people like
that. He wanted their money, don’t you think? But he didn’t really understand
them—or he wouldn’t envy them. Proust saw through those people and
they are monsters, but they are human too. What he saw wasn’t real. What
he first admired later he rejected. But Fitzgerald never went through that. I
think Fitzgerald really had problems with his sexual identity. Because he was
always making fun of men who were not men, which is a giveaway, because
a really strong man isn’t bothered by weak men or women or children. He
isn’t bothered because he’s strong, but if you’re always making fun. It’s like
someone who makes fun of cripples. You know he is crippled too. So I don’t
like him at all. He has many of the detestable qualities of Hemingway. Walt
Whitman—Walt Whitman is very great—Walt Whitman said a wonderful thing
which I think made an impression. He said “I do not pity the wounded person,
I become the wounded person.” That’s really what writing is about. It’s not
writing about anything, it’s becoming what you write about. So in order to write
a book you have to become the characters, and that’s very painful. Because
unless you have really eaten them up and digested them you can’t become
one. But I think the writers I most like are Whitman and Melville. They seem to
have told everything.
MCP. But the manner of telling the story is equally important.
P. Yes, that’s everything, because it’s like a potato, you can’t just pull it out of
the earth and hand it to you with the mud on it. Of course everything comes
out of the American speech. That’s what I find missing in Henry James. He
invented a rhetoric so thick that you can hardly see the story when you are
looking through this thick cloth at the characters.
MCP. I am struck with the diversity of your work. I wonder if you feel it like that
or if you feel that there is a sort of pattern.
P. I feel I never quite get to tell all I know yet. The first person to find out
the diversity was Dame Edith Sitwell. She pointed that out in just my first
139 Hyperion—James Purdy: An Interview