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PARTISAN REVIEW
Back in New York in the mid-1930s, Dupee joined the Communist
party and made some comical forays as an organizer on the waterfront.
For a brief period he was literary editor of the
New Masses,
but by 1937
he helped refloat
Partisan Review
as an anti-Stalinist journal devoted
to independent radicalism and modernist aesthetics. On the whole he
had too much
joie de vivre
for politics, just as he had too much fellow
feeling for
l ' art pour l' art;
he later wrote tellingly of one writer's split
between the "citizen" and the "wanderer." By the time I got to know
him at Columbia more than twenty years later, he was more the
civilized wit and raconteur than a veteran of the turbulent 1930s.
At Columbia and to the world at large he was a little overshad–
owed by Lionel Trilling, a close contemporary, whose interests and
sensibility overlapped with his. But Dupee recurrently attracted an
ardent undergraduate following distinct from Trilling's. Preeminentl y
a man of ideas, Trilling appealed most to the budding intellectuals, the
bright, aggressive overachievers hungry for cultural authority, while
Dupee attracted the poets, aesthetes, and campus wits, hedonists more
eager to please themselves. As a militant intellectual myself, I was late
in appreciating how much thought he could distil into a sentence
without noticeable strain or effort. Yet writing did not come easily for
him. Reviewing
The King of the Cats,
his superb 1965 collection of
essays, Elizabeth Hardwick observed that he seemed to wait upon
inspiration to fulfil even the most casual commission.
Lightness of touch was crucial to his writing-a feeling for nuance
and tone, the evocation of atmosphere. He was as hooked on the comic
spirit as Trilling was on the tragic, and his best sketches were of great
comedians, Dickens, Nabokov, Beerbohm, Chaplin, the New York
poets, even Thomas Mann. He rebuked critics for being "engulfed by
Mann's own omnivorous critical intelligence" and for making heavy
weather of his metaphysics, and he was wonderfully attuned to the
social comedy in Henry James, another writer easily overwhelmed by
critical abstractions.
Dupee's point of view was not antiintellectual but he was against
criticism that milked art for its "ideas" and themes without being alert
to its relation to lived experience. He believed that "culture was
founded in experience" and that "knowledge is always primarily
personal. " Here, on the subject of Chaplin's tramp character,
IS
a
specimen of his lively, concrete, and sinuous literary style:
Charlie is a dream-but a dream that much solid stuff is made of.
In
the way he twitches a property mustache or slices with a knife a derby
hat doused in a creamy sauce, believing the hat to be a real pudding,
there is a multitude of all too human suggestions. Twitched mus-
