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students come by, though quite a few old ones managed to drop in. In
the late sixties, in his own sixties, he had the venturesome temperament
of a man thirty years younger. Unlike some of his colleagues he bore
his reputation lightly, with a twinkle of irony that may have concealed
a sadness about the things he might have done but knew he never
would. Once I remarked that his discussions of Henry James's novels
had the freshness of contemporary reviews, the responsive kind James
almost never received in his lifetime. Unexpectedly he seemed a trifle
hurt, for
Henry James
was his only "real" book. "I suppose I've always
been a journalist," he said ruefully. In fact no journalist was ever more
of a real critic, whatever such a distinction might mean. The same
tender nerve was touched when I wrote in a book that his mock-heroic
account of the Columbia student disorders in
The New York Review
in
1968 was "an almost novelistic evocation." "But true," he wrote to me,
with unusual emphasis, as if either of us thought of "novelistic" as the
opposite of veracious
I
Dupee may have felt impaled by that time on the horns of the
Yeatsian dilemma-perfection of life, or work-for he had chosen to
savor the moment rather than make full use of his literary gift. Had he
been more ruthless or ambitious he would never have given as much of
himself to his friends or students. His wit was legendary. We heard it
crackle after he was selected by students at Columbia to receive their
Mark Van Doren Award for great teaching. At the official dinner there
might have been a temptation
tq
solemnity, except that the guest
speaker was Dwight Macdonald, an old college friend, and Dupee kept
interrupting him with barbs from the other end of the dais. Mac–
donald shot back in kind-it was a vaudeville routine they must have
been improvising for forty-five years, and one of the funniest acts I'd
ever seen.
As a student a decade earlier I had observed Dupee do a series of
turns almost as hilarious in Columbia's august colloquium on great
books. The other instructor was Sidney Morgenbesser, the university's
most quick-witted philosopher and kibitzer, whose analytic ability
could devastate any statement into its logical (or illogical) components.
Dupee was all nuance and sensibility, Morgenbesser all intellect and
argument: two more mismatched minds-and evenly matched wits–
could hardly be imagined. For several weeks the duel raged, with
tongue-tied students enjoying the spectacle too much to intervene.
Once, after one innocuous student observation, Morgenbesser began a
surgical dissection of the hapless speaker's " thesis. " Dupee erupted
with exasperation: "That wasn' t a thesis," he fumed; "it was just a
remark, a comment, an aperc;u." With that remark hostilities ended and
