unkljim's ramblings

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Capote

I saw "Capote" this afternoon, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman definitely deserved the Academy Award for his performance. What a great film; I want to read In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's now. I never knew that Capote had a partner named Jack Dunphy, so I looked him up on Wikipedia tonight:

According to the presskit distributed by Sony Pictures, when he met Truman Capote in 1948, Dunphy had written a well-received novel, John Fury, and was just getting over a painful divorce from McCracken. In 1950 they settled in Taormina, Sicily, in a house where the author D.H. Lawrence had once lived. According to the presskit, "Ten years older than Capote, Dunphy was in many ways Capote’s opposite, as solitary as Truman was exuberantly social. Though they drifted more and more apart in the later years, the couple stayed together until the end."

John Fury (Harper and Brothers,
1946), is the story of an Irish
working-class man who moves from a happy marriage to an unpleasant one in a life of poverty, hard work and frustration where his only reprisal against is anger. According to the website of Ayer Company Publishers, a reprint publisher of rare and hard to find titles,
Mary McGrory praised the
book in the
New York Times at the time of publication, "It adds up to a remarkable first novel, warm and strong, its unflinching realism saved from brutality by the author's compassion and restraint ... What Betty Smith did tenderly for Brooklyn, James T. Farrell harshly for Chicago and, most recently, Edward McSorley in his moving ProviOur Own Kind for Providence, Dunphy does for Philadelphia." Calmann-Lévy published a French translation in 1949, which is available at the Library of Congress. Arno Press reprinted the English version in 1976. Other Dunphy novels are Friends and Vague Loves (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), Nightmovers (William Morrow, 1967) , An Honest Woman (Random House, 1971, First Wine (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), and its sequel, The Murderous McLaughlins, (McGraw-Hill, 1988). In this book, set again in Philadephia, c. 1917, the same narrator, at age eight tries to get his errant father Jim to return home to his family.Dunphy also wrote Dear Genius: A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote, published by McGraw-Hill in 1987. According to the review at Amazon.com, the book is actually a novel, with the subtitle provided by the publisher; Dunphy had subtitled the manuscript more accurately A Tribute To Truman Capote.