Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983
On F. W. Dupee (1904 - 1979)
By Mary McCarthy
'I have liked being miscellaneous,' Dupee roundly declares in the foreword to The King of the Cats (1965), sounding a note of defiance, of boyish stubbornness, where to the ear of a different author an apology might have been called for. 'Fred' was taking his stand as a literary journalist, a flâneur, a stroller, an idle saunterer, in an age of academic criticism, of 'field' specialists on the one hand and fanatic 'close readers' on the other. The shorter pieces of The King of the Cats, originally written for magazines, seem at first to bear out the confession: He turns from the letters of Dickens to a life of Sir Richard Burton, to Behrman's reminiscences of Max Beerbohm, to 'the secret life of Edward Windsor,' to the letters of Yeats, to Kafka's letters to a Czech woman he was going to bed with, to Chaplin's autobiography. Quite a variety.
Feature, 2833 words
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