The King of the Cats, by F. W. Dupee (University of Chicago, 363 pp„ $28)
Readers of Jeffrey Hart’s When the Going Was Good! may recall a particularly ironic “camera eye” devoted to the long, disorderly life of F. W. Dupee, a highly regarded professor of English at Columbia University who flirted desperately with all the latest trends: Stalinism, orgone boxes, tweed jackets, homosexuality, student riots. Mr. Dupee’s sundry enthusiasms apparently kept him away from his typewriter most of the time; his entire published output would fit in a good-sized shoebox. More’s the pity, as the University of Chicago Press has reminded us by issuing an expanded edition of The King of the Cats, Mr. Dupee’s 1965 collection of periodical essays in what he liked to call “literary portraiture.” A relaxed, graceful stylist, Mr. Dupee had a wildly eclectic range of interests: Casanova, Samuel Butler, J. F. Powers, Nabokov, Max Beerbohm. Mary McCarthy’s admiring introduction places Mr. Dupee squarely in the Sainte-Beuvian line of descent, ranking him above Edmund Wilson (“a fineness of intuition of which Wilson with his wounds and bows was incapable”) and praising his “conversational” tone. Ex-wifely pique may have been what caused Miss McCarthy to drag Wilson into it, but in every other respect she is right as rain. The eight new pieces added to this edition include Mr. Dupee’s brilliant New York Review of Books essay on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (“it is surely to Capote’s credit that one cannot quite suspend one’s disbelief that In Cold Blood is a novel”) and an introduction to The Way of All Flesh so sympathetic and articulate as to make one almost disagree with Malcolm Muggeridge’s famously jaundiced view of Samuel Butler.
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