Word: chisholms
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...large McCarthy vote in the primary, did not have the support of the regular Democratic machine and was never given much of a chance against the popular Javits. The New York House delegation remained largely the same but several races provided interest. In New York City Mrs. Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat, became the first Negro woman ever elected to Congress when she defeated James Farmer, former head of Core. Allard K. Lowenstein, another McCarthy candidate, won a House seat in the Fifth District in Nassau County, Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem Congressman, who was excluded from the 90th Congress...
...been treated to for the last six months is stories about guys in love with guys. Christ, the age of anybody being in love with girls must be over!" Thus moans a female character is Eustace Chisholm and the Works. The comment sounds distressingly like today's beleaguered fiction reviewer. Perhaps the fastest-growing literary genre in these times is frankly homosexual fiction in which the demimonde of the third sex is fully exposed down to its rawest nerve ending...
...Eustace Chisholm and the Works is about Amos Ratcliffe, a beautiful bastard who has bedded down with his own mother, and his Chicago landlord, Daniel Haws, a martinet of Indian blood. Daniel can only give expression to his love for Amos when he is walking in his sleep...
...Under his cruel, relentless treatment Daniel suffers the nightmare extremes of the homosexual experience-castration and disembowelment-before dying. And Amos, who has become a male whore but who has still remained faithful to Daniel in his aberrational fashion, also comes to an early and bloody demise. Meanwhile, Eustace Chisholm, a self-styled poet, observes the whole story from an ascetic pederast pedestal and is somehow cleansed and purified-or so the author insists...
James Purdy has achieved a considerable literary reputation for his precisely chiseled prose style and gallows humor (Malcolm, The Nephew, 63: Dream Palace). His talent does not flag here, despite his choice of subject. But Eustace Chisholm is not unlike certain surrealistic paintings in its rather surprising lack of effect: though an atmosphere is evoked in sharp and crystalline terms and though figures are intensely and skillfully rendered, the reader remains unmoved. Fortunately, most men do not live in a neo-Gothic neverland where the entire range of human experience is dominated by a single obsession. Life is at once...