Marc Weingarten Remembers Jack Dunphy

It somehow seems fitting that this guest essay from Marc Weingarten should run today, as millions of film fans (many of whom may also be literature lovers) prepare themselves for tonight’s Oscars presentation, wondering just how many awards Capote is going to take. Marc is the author of The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, a history of the early years of New Journalism which I’ve heartily enjoyed.

This is a tragic story about what happens when a fine writer’s reputation is obscured by the very public persona of a genius, and how literary fame always trumps solid literary grunt work.

You might have heard of the protagonist, Jack Dunphy, if you have read about the life of his companion of 35 years, Truman Capote. You might have seen Dunphy, or at least tantalizingly fleeting glimpses of him, portrayed by actor Bruce Greenwood in the film Capote. He’s the one who peremptorily slams his study door shut while Capote struggles with the moral dilemmas of In Cold Blood, as if to keep the gathering storm of his partner’s life at bay. But chances are you have not read Dunphy’s books, as they are all out of print.

That’s where the tragic part comes in, because Dunphy was a very skilled and sensitive novelist. Perhaps not a brilliant prose stylist like his partner, but why should a fine novelist be penalized just because he shared his bed with a giant?

Like Capote’s greatest work, an undertow of dysfunction is palpable in Dunphy’s stories. Using the straitened circumstances of his childhood as raw material, Dunphy wrote about lonely families and lovers among the Northeastern Irish Diaspora during the first half of the twentieth century. By turns poignant and darkly humorous, Dunphy’s work mapped out the rocky personal landscape of his own emotional dislocation.

Capote mined the tragedy of his lonely young life for material, as well, especially for his 1948 debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. But he was more of a literary showman than Dunphy, his prose florid and heavily weighted towards symbolism where Dunphy’s was pinched and understated. Perhaps that was the reason why Dunphy could never emerge from beneath the black cape of Capote’s celebrity and make a name for himself as a writer; his temperament, both in his life and his art, wasn’t well suited to acts of self-promotion.

When Capote met Dunphy in 1948, the two men were both on the rebound; Capote from his affair with Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin, Dunphy from his marriage to fellow dancer Joan McCracken, with whom Dunphy, also a dancer, had appeared in the original production of Oklahoma. It was to be Dunphy’s first sexual relationship with a man. “He was cute, adorable looking,” Dunphy told Capote biographer Gerald Clarke about their first meeting at writer Leo Lerman’s apartment. “We sat on the couch and talked about trains. I had a mad desire to go somewhere.”

In Cold Blood‘s 1966 publication made Capote a household name, and sealed Dunphy’s fate as a handmaiden to literary immortality. But that isn’t the script that Dunphy intended to write for himself. For forty-odd years, Dunphy, who was 77 when he died in Manhattan in 1992, published books that ranged from grim social realism to biting social satire to post-modern memoir. But he was at his best when writing novels that mined his hardscrabble existence as the child of Irish-American immigrants in Philadelphia.

In his first book, John Fury (published in 1946, two years before Other Voices, Other Rooms), Dunphy leaned hard on his past as he told the story of a stern patriarch not unlike his own father living in a Philly slum, a simple coal driver who disdains the upwardly mobile pretensions of his wife. James Dunphy, like Fury, was an emotionally stunted man who held within himself “the hard fruitless stone of what like had left him.” A linotype operator, Dunphy disdained his son’s literary ambitions, frequently tossing his books out of the tenement window in disgust. Dunphy carried his father’s temper like a recessive gene into adulthood, often flying into uncontrollable rages with little provocation. “You never knew what Jack’s reaction will be to anything,” Capote once said. “You can say, ‘I think Horn & Hardart’s baked beans are better than Schrafft’s,’ and you will suddenly be in a fantastic quarrel with him.’

That pugnacity helped Dunphy forge ahead as a writer, despite his family’s protestations and Capote’s inexorably rising literary fame, which might have squelched a weaker man’s spirit. Despite the critical success of John Fury (Mary McGrory called it “a remarkable first novel, warm and strong”) the reviews didn’t help sell many books, much to his dismay; he had always wanted to prove his father wrong by writing a bestseller. And John Fury certainly didn’t stir up the publicity that Other Voices, Other Rooms generated upon its release, with that infamous Harold Halma jacket photograph of a come-hither Capote laying on a divan. It was to be Dunphy’s lot in life that his relationship with Capote opened doors for him even as it closed others. Despite Capote’s encouragement, Dunphy would always be the George Harrison of this partnership: gifted but shy, and so never front-and-center.

He pressed on nonetheless, and his exposure to Capote’s haute society lifestyle, which Dunphy had little use for, no doubt influenced his second novel, Friends and Vague Lovers. This 1952 book, which has a tart Evelyn Waugh sting to it, follows the infantile exploits of a clutch of bright young things flitting about in Italy right after the Second World War. There’s a spiritual rot at the center of the story, which traces an arabesque of thwarted love between a lonely schoolteacher and a young, orphaned arrriviste. Although Friends and Vague Lovers‘ high-flown prose is a departure from John Fury—which makes it the most Capote-like novel that Dunphy ever wrote—it shares that earlier novel’s preoccupation with lost souls seeking redemption and failing miserably at it.

Dunphy’s devotion to Capote was absolute, but he was the anti-gadfly, socially reticent where Capote was garrulous and flighty. According to Clarke, Dunphy’s shyness was “a crude but effective means of asserting himself, of saying that though he stood in Truman’s shadow, spiritually he stood by himself.” Somehow the pairing worked. Dunphy was Capote’s rock and father confessor, especially during the dark days of the early ’60s, when Capote was struggling to finish In Cold Blood while anxiously waiting out the protracted legal maneuverings that would eventually give him his ending: the execution of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock for the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas.

In Cold Blood made Capote the most famous serious writer in America, but Dunphy wanted to make his own way as a writer; riding Capote’s coattails was out of the question. Even as he was resigned to the fact that their relationship had curdled into a co-dependency that made Dunphy uneasy, especially as Capote dug deeper into drugs and booze, Dunphy was determined to produce books and carve out an oeuvre that would, if not equal Capote’s body of work, at least keep some kind of literary pace with it. (“There is something in me that envies him at the same time that I am reprimanding him,” Dunphy wrote of Capote in his memoir, “Dear Genius…”) Despite the hand-holding and caretaking in the later years, when Capote wrestled with his addictions and Answered Prayers, his magnum opus about the foibles of New York’s rich and spoiled class that remained unfinished when he died in 1984 at 59, Dunphy continued to produce good work, writing four more novels before his death: An Honest Woman, Nightmovers, First Wine and The Murderous McLaughlins, as well as “Dear Genius…”, a formally daring and moving memoir of his life with Capote published three years after Capote’s death.

In alternating chapters of the memoir, Dunphy writes in the first person about his grinding trials with Capote as the writer sinks into a creative torpor, then switches into the persona of a priest named John Synge, who, while deep in the throes of a spiritual crisis of conscience, tries to save Capote’s fallen soul. The odd narrative conceit shouldn’t really work, but Dunphy’s compassion for Capote is palpable; the book feels like an act of penance for a failed personal crusade.

Dunphy’s books are very hard to come by; The New York Public Library only keeps two of his books in circulation. I’m afraid that he’s suffered the fate of many fine postwar writers who simply never found the audience they deserved. Add to that his relationship with Capote, and the urge to simply footnote his writing career becomes stronger. But Dunphy has much to teach us about the complexities of the human heart, and attention, however belated, would be proper recompense for a life lived for so long under the shadow of another.

5 March 2006 | guest authors |