Discernments
The King of the Cats.
by F. W. Dupee.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 224 pp. $4.95.
Mr. Dupee first became known to me through his lucid book on Henry James in the American Men of Letters series. One had seen so many critics chew this subject into a fine powder that it was refreshing to find the master recognizable and whole again. Mr. Dupee was not one of those critics who create pretentious “Problems.” He seemed also outside the mainstream of American criticism: how did he get on without announcing a critical Constitution, without which a writer may be accused in Calvinist quarters of being “light and chaffy”? I understand that Mr. Dupee has been well-known in New York for his extra-literary commitments; The King of the Cats, self-denyingly, contains nothing on the subject, but there is an answer to the general question in this miscellany of literary essays. It occurs in some extracts from a memorial essay on André Gide, which appeared in the Columbia Review in 1951.
Gide's enormous success in America had been due to some extent to one of those fashions in revelation which hit every decade; but it was also a response to a need for conversation in a culture rigidly based on monologue. Mr. Dupee puts the matter more exactly. Gide, he says, helped to rehabilitate the word “amateur” which has been made disreputable by the “modern pride in ‘pure’ creation and unremitting professionalism.”
Gide, Mr. Dupee goes on to say correctly, was not one of the greatest artists of his time. He was not a Proust, a Rilke, an Eliot or a Yeats—“but it remained for him to make explicit and to make exciting the minimum faith, the practical faith in self by which they all necessarily lived and wrote, and without which they would have been helpless. Hence his own tireless habit of self-cultivation.” That is a faith worth sticking to in the hope that some small deposit of it will be saved and picked up again when our present barbarities decline, for it is fertilizing. It is indispensable to civilization—when that occurs again. In any case, Mr. Dupee's criticism aspires to this ideal and must be a godsend to one or two students at Columbia. Around him criticism may be dogmatic, dynamic, and heavy with manufactured knowledge, but not for him the labor pains of high principled elephants who “major” without shame. He is not out for the maximum. (It was not the object of the great creative imaginations of literature, or even the lesser ones, to add to the store of advantageous knowledge.) Mr. Dupee relies, I would gather, with deceptive lightness on that saying of Edmund Wilson's that the critic “knows what he knows.” A theory may help, if it helps one to a finer sense of the pleasure of the imagination. But Mr. Dupee makes what he modestly calls “remarks”: modesty meaning not raising his voice. These move forward to his real object: discernment. Discerning, we may exchange discernments and create an ambience in which literature can live.
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To discern, a critic must write courteously and clearly. His criticism must not be machined by those abstractions and generalizations that are a substitute for sensibility to the subject. I take Mr. Dupee's reputation as a sign that accomplishment and ease may be coming back into a kind of writing that for a generation has got its sentences caught in a grinder. Scowls about the “biographical fallacy,” for example, do not disturb him: he likes to draw a portrait; what he likes he does; and soon sees what has point. The energy Yeats puts into creating the conditions of his life has a bearing on his poetry and on his “poise born of conviction.” Of Gertrude Stein it is important to understand the nature of her “prodigious and largely good-humored will to power.” She had “no quarrel with culture, with history, with the self,” as Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Yeats had. The full portrait here really feeds the criticism; it is a discovery of the person and a definition of the talent the person embalmed. And discovery of this kind demands from the critic an open, tolerant and decisive mind. The pleasure, for the reader, is in the rising expectation of Mr. Dupee's clinching “remark.”
Turn to Richard Burton of Arabian Nights fame: it is important to understand the egomania of Burton; it drove him to trying to be a Victorian on Regency terms. The garrulous bad writing—and his failure as an explorer looking for the source of the Nile—are due to an obsession with taking notes in the manner of a Victorian catalogue-maker. Again, the story of the Duke of Windsor turns out to be not a Romance but. like life, a sort of mistake, an incompetence, decent but naive. Or again, the question of what is life and what is art makes Mr. Dupee say of Lolita that it is partly a grotesque comedy, “partly an unsubdued wilderness where the wolf howls—a real wolf howling for a real Red Riding Hood.” That “remark” explains why Lolita is one of the best accounts of travel in the United States that has ever been written by a foreigner. About Proust—a brilliant study—it would be “a singularly unwary reader” who concluded from Proust that society is a fraud. The characters achieve what they intended: they live completely in their imaginative self-projections.
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There are essays on Dylan Thomas—Under Milkwood is “a liquefied Welsh version of Joyce's Dublin Nighttown”—on Thomas Mann, Malamud, Powers, Charles Chaplin, a reviewer's mixture. The Chaplin piece was by far the most thoughtful thing done on Charlie's autobiography when it appeared and, in hard covers, it still stands up.
The essay on Dickens's Letters is original. Many critics found the letters un-Dickensian. It remained for Mr. Dupee to ask why the manner and moral tone of the letters did differ from the manner and moral tone of the novels. Boz writes the novels; Dickens watches and enjoys to the uttermost what Boz has made him: a figure of power, the friend of the world and the tycoon who likes to run everything—“in his householding capacity he combines the scruples of an ambitious hostess with the vigilance of a concierge.” His letters pulsate with ambition, yet they show him amiably sharing his celebrity with his correspondents of all classes. He is an eager man of action writing from the thick of events. He is “able to avoid the nemesis of egomania by splitting his ego up,” Boz being identified with the taboos and melodramatic judgments of the Victorian reader, the letter-writer drawing quite different conclusions from daily experience. In his letters he is capable of finding self-respect in a genteel prostitute; he even finds a duke charming. Life was a relief, after the demands of art; he tore up all the letters he received and, one suspects, gave his own letters no more importance than he gave to his passing breath. Mr. Dupee notes that the great man did not engage in long correspondence with great artists. He preferred less exigent company.
In short, Mr. Dupee's criticism is of the kind that creates an ambience. It is not the classroom, it is not the library; it is that indefinable place where life and the writer have had their meetings. It is a place where only fineness of mind, and the quiet authority that goes with it, can count.
