How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (32 page)

These works, with their affected Gothic darkness, are often marred by leaden symbolism (a number of them feature long dream sequences—always a crutch), juvenile awkwardnesses (“the hostess went toward her sudden guests”), and overwriting of the sort that characterized the young Capote's hothouse style. (“A knot of pain was set like a malignant jewel in the core of his head” is a sentence likely to induce a few headaches of its own.) But you can also see what caught people's eye. In “Miriam,” the story that first won Capote serious attention, in 1945, a middle-aged widow called Miriam is befriended by a small girl, also called Miriam, who gradually insinuates herself into the older woman's apartment and eventually takes over her life. Here you can see the author struggling to control the prose and put his effects in the service of the narrative. Near the beginning of the story, a snow begins to fall during which “foot tracks vanished as they were printed”—a nice way of suggesting how the elder Miriam herself will soon be erased.

Others of these early tales give you glimpses of the aptness of detail and rigorousness of style that were so enthusiastically celebrated later on. In “The Bargain” (1950), a short story discovered among the writ
er's papers after his death, the awkwardness of a transaction between a wealthy woman and her impoverished friend, who's trying to sell an old fur coat, is beautifully conveyed in the matron's somewhat pretentious lapse into French when the difficult subject of money comes up. (“
Combien
?”)

In these early stories, Capote often wrote about upper-crust ladies who experience tiny epiphanies. Small wonder. Capote, who was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans in 1924 to unhappily married parents—the father a pathetically failed huckster, the mother a child-bride beauty with, to put it mildly, convenient morals—spent only the earliest years of his childhood with the eccentric Alabama relatives he later memorialized in stories and novellas. From the age of eight (when his mother was remarried, to a rich Cuban whose name he later adopted) he lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and later on Park Avenue. Glamorous ladies and fur coats were very much a part of his life. It was not a particularly happy life: Capote's mother, Nina, a narcissistic alcoholic, was horrified by her son's all-too-evident effeminacy, and frequently abused and humiliated him.

All this bears mentioning only because pretty much all of the stories tend to fall into either of two categories that reflect the author's bifurcated childhood. One of them features those grim, rather dutiful tales of doomed cosmopolites, New York ladies or well-brushed suburban girls, falling victim to Destiny. But the best of Capote's short fiction belongs to a second, far smaller group, which draws on his happier memories of Alabama, when he was cosseted by three elderly spinster cousins. It's a remarkable experience to encounter first the empty posturing of “Master Misery” and then to read “Jug of Silver,” a charming tale about a poor Southern boy bent on winning a jar filled with coins at the local drugstore, or “My Side of the Matter,” a slyly funny first-person narrative of a young Southerner's conflict with his bride's less-than-welcoming family. Here the young writer is clearly at home in every way, his assurance and perfect pitch evident in the kind of delicious details that can't be counterfeited. “The Odeon had not been so full since the night they gave away the matched set of sterling silver” tells you more about the sociology of its small-town setting than ten pages of earnest exposition could.

In these stories, too, the first of a distinctively Capote type of character appears: the stubborn misfit whose refusal to heed convention transforms and elevates those around her—not least, by reminding the grown-ups of the beauties and pleasures they knew as children but have since forgotten. “I think always,” says Miss Bobbitt, the precocious ten-year-old heroine of “Children on Their Birthdays” (1947), “about somewhere else, somewhere else where everything is dancing, like people dancing in the streets, and everything is pretty, like children on their birthdays.” This motif would reappear throughout the fiction for which Capote is best remembered:
The Grass Harp
, in which a crew of adorably eccentric Southern misfits leave their homes to go live in a tree;
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, whose heroine, Holly Golightly (née Lulamae Barnes), has, largely thanks to the 1961 film, become a cultural byword for a certain kind of enviable free-spiritedness.

Given the ferocity of his attachment to the distant happiness and emotional comfort of his Alabama years, it's not hard to see why Capote kept returning to this theme. When he does so, all his graces as a writer combine—the wise-child humanity, a real rather than faked lyricism, strong detail. This is nowhere truer than in “A Christmas Memory,” his 1956 reminiscence of baking holiday fruitcakes with his elderly Alabama cousin. The story's stately, delicate, spun-caramel narration lends an incantatory aura to its almost hieratic lists of actions and ingredients (“cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour…”)—all in the service of evoking a memory whose delight is enhanced by the inevitable parting at the end. The story represents, perhaps, the acme of Capote's fictional art, whose special character lies in its ability to give voice to the childlike in us. The part of us, in other words, that resists adult strictures, that wants to retreat, delightfully, to treehouses or to the inviolable past; the part to which he himself had such remarkable access.

And yet you close
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote
with a sense less of genius than of disappointment—a feeling that there's somehow less than you thought there would be, and that the ingenious talent for spinning cotton-candy charm you may have recalled is, in fact, seldom in evidence. An overview of the career is likely to leave you with a similar feeling; the catalogue of Capote's substantial published work
is disarmingly short, at least in proportion to his reputation. That narrowness of output is matched by—and, I think, ultimately explained by—an infantine narrowness of outlook.

“Narrow” may seem unfair, given the way Capote's work veers from enchantment (in his best stories) to terror (those other stories, and of course
In Cold Blood
). But the extremes between which Capote's work seems to move may, in the end, be seen as no more than the poles of a child's consciousness, divided as it is between golden fantasies of pleasure and omnipotence, on the one hand, and terrors of the dark, on the other. That Capote's oeuvre should oscillate so consistently between the two was, if anything, overdetermined: the alternation clearly reflects the bifurcated nature of this particular child's early life, split between the womblike snugness of that house in Alabama and the cold limestone of 1060 Park Avenue, where lurked a monster who was, for him, only too real.

It is, indeed, in this light that Capote's famous characterization of
In Cold Blood
as “a reflection on American life—this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe,” takes on its proper meaning. If
In Cold Blood
is, of all Capote's work, the one that can stand as a classic outside the context of Capote's time and persona, the reason has much to do with the way it cannily maneuvers between the extremes that framed his artistic vision. There is, again, the alluring, cherished surface calm: the meticulous pacing, the careful enumeration of small details, everyday objects and moments (“for the longest while she stared at the blue-ribbon winner, the oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust”). And there is the horror that lurks, always about to explode—and which, like a child, you both do and don't want to see, when it's finally described. Here Capote's mature stylistic rigor, his eye for the telling detail, and the oral tradition of his haunted Southern boyhood brilliantly come together to create what is, essentially, one of the great ghost stories—a tale that continues to have the power to enthrall and terrify precisely because it conflates our childish fears of things that go bump in the night with our adult understanding of what those things can actually be.

One of the things Capote's perennially child's-eye view of the world accounts for in this book is his striking preoccupation more with the
killers, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, than with the victims, the Clutter family. The author's presentation of the killers (particularly the “artistic” Smith) as children gone pathetically wrong, as poignantly misguided dreamers, was a terrible variation, but still a variation, on the type of child misfit that in his fiction he found irresistible. Capote's boyhood friend Harper Lee, who accompanied him to Kansas to research the story, recalled that when Perry Smith, whose legs had been shortened as the result of a motorcycle accident, took his seat at his arraignment, Capote noticed he was so tiny that his feet didn't touch the floor. “Oh, oh!” Lee remembered thinking. “This is the beginning of a great love affair.” Capote knew a kindred spirit when he saw one.

 

Capote the child is also much in evidence in the letters collected in
Too Brief a Treat
. (The title quotes the opening lines of a letter Capote wrote to Bob Linscott in May 1949: “Your letter was too brief a treat, but a treat all the same.”) Certainly there is much here that is charming. In his biography of Capote, Gerald Clarke writes of the “puppylike warmth” that was “basic to his personality,” and this aspect of Capote's character goes a long way toward explaining why, despite his frequent malice, Capote was thought so adorable for so long by so many. But beneath the endearing, tail-wagging enthusiasm of his hyperbolic Southern salutations (“lover lamb,” “Magnolia my sweet”) lies, all too obviously, an infantile neediness. “Dear Marylou,” he wrote his
Harper's Bazaar
editor, Mary Louise Aswell, in 1946, “everyone loves you so much! I am really jealous, because I love you more than anybody, but everyone keeps saying how much they love you without seeming to realize that you belong to me, and that I love you more than anyone.” You can almost hear him waiting to be told that she loves him more than anyone, too.

This, alas, sets a claustrophobic tone that never really lets up. It's true that the letters will doubtless provide many tasty morsels for students of midcentury American social and publishing history. Some of the gossip is literary. (“Did you see the Guggenheim list?! Ralph Bates!”) And much of course is decidedly and exaltedly jet-set: in August 1953, he writes, “everything became too social—and I do mean social—the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan), the Oliviers (they let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face
lifted for the fourth time—the Doctor's [
sic
] say no more.)” And some, of course, mark milestones both golden and black in Capote's career. “The reaction,” he wrote to William Styron in January 1976 after one of the “Answered Prayers” chapters appeared in
Esquire
, “has ranged from the insane to the homicidal.”

But after nearly 500 pages of this, you can't help noticing how small Capote's world—and worldview—really was. What the letters don't provide is, indeed, anything beyond the personal, the local, at any point in his life. (Here again, chronology is revealing: of this volume's 452 pages of letters, almost 400 pages' worth were written before Capote turned forty.) There are virtually no references to larger world events; nor are there substantial literary insights apart from what Capote thought of his own work and the occasional contemporary novel. For comparison's sake, while reading these
Letters
, I took down a volume of letters by Evelyn Waugh—another writer whose literary substance was matched by a keen interest in Society—and opened to random pages. On one: musings on the history of heraldry and the nature of a stable social structure. On another: tart thoughts about religion in the novel, following the publication of
Brideshead Revisited
(“No one now thinks a book which totally excludes religion is atheist propaganda”). Another: Mme. de Pompadour's disastrous influence on Louis XV's foreign policy in the wars of 1759. And so on.

Or take the letters of another socially ambitious, adorably popular gay littérateur. Oscar Wilde's correspondence sparkles with true wit rather than mean cracks, and the personal warmth that emerges is generous and adult, rather than childishly selfish. When you read these and other authors' letters, in other words, you get a sense not only of them but of their time, the world. But to read Capote is to note how little interest he showed in any life but the social life, in any experience but his own. He prided himself on refusing to go on sightseeing tours of the exotic Mediterranean locales to which his rich ladies' yachts took him (he preferred the nearest bar to ruins or museums); prided himself, too, on never having voted. Like a small, imaginative child, he was, to himself, the world entire.

The smallness of Capote's world helps explain what is, in the end, so curiously unsatisfying in his work—even, to some extent, in
In Cold Blood
, with its distasteful attraction to the childlike, “gifted” killer.
However appealing are the fantasies of freedom that recur in his writing, they are, at bottom, un-adult: if to be an adult means to grapple successfully with the unyielding realities of life, it's interesting that this is something that so many of his characters—like Capote himself, in the end—never do. Capote may have written Lulamae/Holly a ticket to freedom at the end of
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, but he knew, and we all know, too well what happens to the real Lulamaes. (The real name of Nina Capote, the author's awful mother, was Lillie Mae.) The transformation of the monstrous Lillie Mae of real life into the adorable Lulamae of fiction seems, in fact, to be much more than conventional artistic chemistry that turns life into art. It may, rather, be seen as a symbol of Capote's distaste for hard realities, as opposed to the kind of gossamer fantasies he spun in both his work and, increasingly, his life. (Before he died he dreamed, rather pathetically, of giving another grand ball, at which he planned to appear disguised in peasant clothing, “revealing his true identity only by the huge emerald that would sparkle from his forehead, dazzling all those who approached his royal presence.”)