"Nothing Worse Than a Traveler Who Keeps Looking Backwards": The Murderous McLaughlins

If, as proverbial wisdom holds, one is known by the company one keeps, then that axiom may be said to apply with a special poignancy to author Jack Dunphy (1914-1992), whose own considerable literary achievement has been largely eclipsed by his thirty-five years as the companion of Truman Capote. Dunphy's obituary in the New York Times, for instance, was headlined "Jack Dunphy, Author, 77: Friend and Chief Heir of Capote."¹ Dunphy himself chronicled his celebrated friendship in a widely acclaimed book Dear Genius: A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote (1984). Despite Capote's notoriety, the sense of Dunphy that emerges in the memoir is certainly not tinged with gossip or with celebrity-spotting. Dunphy comes across, rather, as a thoughtful writer who ponders the nature of relationships and of individual characters through eloquent prose—precisely the qualities that inform his fiction.

Dunphy's reflective nature also comes though in an interview that he gave to Newsday reporter Steve Wick in 1988, just a little more than four years after Capote's death. During this interview, Wick noticed that above the late author's writing table, where Dunphy now wrote, a bookshelf contained two books—Capote's Answered Prayers and Dunphy's The Murderous McLaughlins —and the sight of these two books led the reporter to comment that the books resembled the two men who were their authors, "side by side, art imitating life." Dunphy remarked that his intimate relationship to Capote altered at some point to one of a prolonged friendship, and that at the end, the two might be described as "attached to each other by memories."²

Dunphy's comment provides some insight into his literary concerns. Memories and attachments are, in fact, the central preoccupations of Jack Dunphy's novel that appeared in the same year as the interview, The Murderous McLaughlins. Told in the voice of a small boy who remains nameless throughout the book, The Murderous McLaughlins concerns a dislocated and disorderly Irish-American family of the 1920s, in an unnamed Eastern city that is the author's native Philadelphia, although some reviewers—and the book's own dust jacket—mistakenly assumed it to be New York. The book was generally well received by reviewers. Kenneth Mintz called it "a masterful work that achieves its aims through symbolism."³ The New York Times praised it as "a quiet, spare and warm book, its prose so finely tuned that the simplicity of the telling belies its richness."⁴ Nonetheless, the book has been for the most part forgotten.

The narrative strategy of The Murderous McLaughlins is that of the memoir in the making. The boy recalls those who have played a part in ushering forth the significant events in his childhood. Dunphy's narrator assumes the position of an observer who often appears remote from the vivid characters around him. His namelessness enhances his attenuated attachments to the family. Yet, realizing that by keeping his child-narrator at the periphery could easily foster a lack of empathy, Dunphy takes great care to render the narrator's speculation over the emotional impact of his relationship to others in the novel in the boy's own language.

Dunphy was a private man. He was born in Philadelphia in 1915, and at an early age began a career in dance. He performed both in ballet and in Broadway productions. He toured with the George Balanchine Company in South America, danced in the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and appeared in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! During the time that he was dancing in Oklahoma!, Dunphy married another dancer, Joan McCracken of Philadelphia, whom he later divorced. At a cocktail party in 1948, the shy Dunphy met Truman Capote, a young and rising Southern writer who even then had a colorful reputation, and their intimate relationship began. Dunphy kept his homosexuality quiet, and his sexual orientation was never mentioned in the press. He remained a practicing Roman Catholic to the end of his life, attending Mass every Sunday and, after Capote's death...