MORRIS DICKSTEIN
taches are implausible by nature. All dinner party embarrassments
approximate to the impact of cold steel on creamed felt, setting the
teeth on edge.
435
This is compact writing and eloquent, demonstrative thinking,
but above all it is sensuous and immediate in its feeling for art, for life.
Dupee's prose can
be
almost voluptuous in its fluidity and critical
refinement. Yet he had an Augustan epigrammatic wit and a born
ironist's seismic sensitivity to cant or pretension. Chaplin's childhood,
he remarks, "was made to order to destroy a waif or foster a genius. "
Dupee paid tribute to artists and intellectuals more single-minded than
himself but he disliked humorless moralists and ideologues. "A student
did once tell the present writer that Chaplin's style lacked 'moral
reference' and was a little dated.
It
is the unfortunate student who
seems a little dated now-if such things matter. "
Among the few negative pieces in
Th e King of the Cats
are reviews
of F.R. Leavis's intensely partisan book on D.H. Lawrence and James
Baldwin's eloquent sermon,
The Fire Next Time.
He finds Leavis's
pages "acrid with the smoke of old feuds" and complains that Baldwin,
after his first two books of essays, "has exchanged criticism for
prophecy, analysis for exhortation. " Dupee's attack on Baldwin dis–
mayed me when it first appeared in
The New York Review of Books;
it
seemed to reveal the limitations of his Apollonian civility. It looks
more defensible today as the prophetic mode has run its course and
sometimes left chaos in its wake. But Dupee's recoil from Leavis and
Lawrence-like Edmund Wilson's from Kafka-shows us the Achilles
heel of his catholic sensibility. His receptivity was enormous but it
closed down before the passion of an evangelical temperament bent on
a consuming mission, burning for conversion and salvation.
In the range of his taste and the stylishness of his writing, Dupee
resembles another English critic very different from Leavis-V.S.
Pritchett, like Dupee a cultivated comic ironist adventuring among the
world's classics. Both of them treat criticism as a contribution to
literature as well as a comment upon it; both write exquisite prose and
manage
to
strike a delicate balance between aesthetic appreciation and
moral seriousness; both are exceptionally novelistic critics who love to
tell stories and sketch characters, who love variety and vivacity and are
drawn to literature out of an interest in life, not a recoil from it.
Dupee's curiosity made him an avid traveler, though, unlike Pritchett,
he wrote few travel pieces. He saved his tourist lore for his friends.
At Columbia Dupee's openness and his perpetual curiosity were
translated into an unusual accessibility to students and junior instruc–
tors. Later in California he said what he missed most was having
