![]() “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.’ “You never knew what Jack’s reaction will be to anything,” Capote once said. Dunphy carried his father’s temper like a recessive gene into adulthood, often flying into uncontrollable rages with little provocation. 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. ![]() 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. But he was at his best when writing novels that mined his hardscrabble existence as the child of Irish-American immigrants in Philadelphia. 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 that isn’t the script that Dunphy intended to write for himself. In Cold Blood‘s 1966 publication made Capote a household name, and sealed Dunphy’s fate as a handmaiden to literary immortality. “We sat on the couch and talked about trains. “He was cute, adorable looking,” Dunphy told Capote biographer Gerald Clarke about their first meeting at writer Leo Lerman’s apartment. It was to be Dunphy’s first sexual relationship with a man. ![]() 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. 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. 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. By turns poignant and darkly humorous, Dunphy’s work mapped out the rocky personal landscape of his own emotional dislocation.Ĭapote mined the tragedy of his lonely young life for material, as well, especially for his 1948 debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. 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. Like Capote’s greatest work, an undertow of dysfunction is palpable in Dunphy’s stories. 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? That’s where the tragic part comes in, because Dunphy was a very skilled and sensitive novelist. But chances are you have not read Dunphy’s books, as they are all out of print. 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. You might have seen Dunphy, or at least tantalizingly fleeting glimpses of him, portrayed by actor Bruce Greenwood in the film Capote. You might have heard of the protagonist, Jack Dunphy, if you have read about the life of his companion of 35 years, Truman Capote. 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. 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. 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.
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