Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue.

After nearly five decades of writing fiction, James Purdy talks about friends, foes, fame, and his acclaimed new novel

The man who may well be America's greatest living gay writer is sitting in a straight-backed chair in his tiny apartment in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., looking back. During his 45-year career, James Purdy has produced 16 novels, 30 plays, and the odd volume of poetry. His work has been translated into 30 languages. His new novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue, has just been published to excellent reviews. It wasn't always so. No major writer has been so reviled by the notoriously homophobic literary establishment or so misunderstood by English professors everywhere.

"Straight people don't know anything," he says with a shudder.

But if paying his dues has been tough, he has a glorious body of work to look back on. Beginning in the 1950s with the now classic Malcolm and The Nephew, Purdy published in 1967 what may in retrospect prove to be the fust fully realized modern gay novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works. It was met with remarkable hostility.

"I don't think of myself exactly as a gay writer because I write about everything," Purdy says. "But when I dealt with [homosexuality] as one of my subjects, you would have thought I was a criminal. The New York Times wrote this vicious review. It was like someone thought you should never write about it and that it was unspeakable to write about it. It was like the Ku Klux Klan."

The young writer was undeterred. "Writing is like being a boxer. If you don't want to get knocked down, you shouldn't be in the game. I had been writing for years, and no one would publish me in America, so I was used to it," he says. "I had to be published first in England anyhow."

Since then he has produced a series of near-masterpieces, all dealing with variations on his favorite themes--the mystery of art, the power of sexual secrets, and most of all, the subversive truth that every homosexual learns at an early age: Depravity can often lead to enlightenment. Try selling that to the middle class.

Still, Purdy has always had a large reading public, both in Europe and in America. "Almost all my books went into paperback," he says. "I established myself without the help of the media. You reach your own audience no matter what the critics say."

Fans will recognize Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue as vintage Purdy. An old woman, Carrie, is trying to come to terms with the death of her daughter, an artist almost as famous for her promiscuity as for her paintings of naked men. The prose style is pure American vernacular, meaning it is simple, unadorned, and often quite funny. Yet it has poetry and grace, like a story told by Blanche DuBois's deeply repressed but just as deeply feeling aunt. Asked what he wants us to glean from the book, Purdy is dismissive. "Some people choose some politically correct topic to write about," he says. "I don't write to order. I wrote it to tell what I know."

Not everyone is trained to comprehend his work, Purdy admits. "When you get to real writers, they understand what I've done." No one appreciated Purdy more than Tennessee Williams, who called him a genius. (OK, maybe Dame Edith Sitwell did. She called him one of the greatest writers in the English language.) Purdy's fan club also extends to contemporary talents. "Ned Rorem is a big fan," he observes with pure enjoyment. "So is John Waters. Fran Lebowitz thinks I'm `it.'"

Purdy is in his mid 70s now, an impeccably polite, nearly dressed man, thin as a rake, with big startled eyes. There is something saintly about his persona--that is, until he opens his mouth. No saint was ever so tactless. Literature is holy ground to him, and woe to those who defile it. This includes most of the establishment's sacred cows. "James Joyce is the most boring writer in the world," Purdy states. John Updike? "I hate him." And as for Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye, "They're the golden turds of literature."

Younger gay readers are discovering Purdy, and with good reason. His novels are timeless; even those set in an America that has long since disappeared are as relevant to the homosexual experience as anything being written today. Of course, Purdy has written about the contemporary homosexual experience in a short story collection called The Candles of Your Eyes and in his last novel, Out With the Stars, based on the friendship of composer Virgil Thomson and writer Carl Van Vechten.

As for the immediate future, Purdy is at work on a new novel called All That Glitters. But he's having to sandwich writing time in between the preparations for his upcoming off-Broadway play, Dangerous Moonlight. Where does Purdy get the energy to keep working at such a furious pace? "Getting it out is easy," he says, laughing. "What's hard is to hammer it all into place."

Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie.