SSC (2004) The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (2 page)

Capote’s short stories are gathered here; and they range over most of his creative life up until the devastating success of
In Cold Blood
, which was published in 1965 when he was little more than forty years old. With the brilliantly self-managed publicity bonanza of that riveting crime tale, Capote not only landed on millions of American coffee tables and on every TV screen, he further endeared himself to the denizens of café society and the underfed fashion queens whom he’d so bafflingly pursued in earlier years.

Soon he would announce his intention to publish a long novel that would examine the society of rich America as mercilessly as Marcel Proust had portrayed French high society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And he may well have gone to work on his plan. Yet one consideration that Capote never seemed to discuss, or even be questioned about in public, was crucial to the eventual collapse of his vision (if he ever had one). Proust’s society was one of
blood
, unshakably founded on positions of French social eminence that were reared upon centuries-old money, property and actual power over the lives of other human beings. Capote’s society merely teetered upon the unsubstantial and finally inconsequential grounds of financial wealth; fashionable clothes, houses and yachts and occasional physical beauty (the women were frequently beautiful, the men very seldom so). Any long fictional study of such a world was likely to implode upon the ultimate triviality of its subject.

When he surfaced from punishing rounds of frenetic social and sexual activity and began to publish excerpts from his novel—fewer than two hundred pages—Capote found himself abandoned overnight by virtually all his rich friends; and he fled into a nightmare tunnel of drugs, drink and sexual commitments of the most psychically damaging sort. Despite numerous attempts at recovery, his addictions only deepened; and when he died, a miserable soul well short of old age, he left behind only a few pages of the tall stack of manuscript he claimed to have written on his great novel. If more of the novel ever existed, he’d destroyed the pages before his death (and his closest friends disagreed on the likelihood of the existence of a significant amount of work).

Such a tragic arc tempts any observer to make some guess at its cause, and what we know of Capote’s early life provides us a near-perfect graph for any student of Freud who predicts that a disastrous adulthood is the all but inevitable result of a miserable childhood. And Gerald Clarke’s careful biography of Capote charts just such a dislocated, lonely and emotionally deprived childhood, youth and early manhood. Young Truman was, in essence, deserted by a too-young and sexually adventurous mother and a bounder of a father who left him in small-town Alabama with a houseful of unmarried cousins (cousins and neighbors who at least rewarded him with a useful supply of good tales).

When his mother eventually remarried and summoned the adolescent Truman to her homes in Connecticut and New York, she changed his legal surname from Persons to the name of her second husband, Joe Capote, a Cuban of considerable charm but slim fidelity. The physically odd boy—whose startlingly obvious effeminacy of voice and manner greatly distressed his mother—attended good Northern schools where he performed poorly in virtually all subjects but reading and writing. Then determined on a writer’s career, he decided against a college education, took a small job in the art department at
The New Yorker
, launched himself into a few of the mutually exclusive social circles of big-city writing and nighttime carousing and began serious work on the fiction that would bring him his premature fame.

The earliest stories gathered here clearly reflect his reading in the fiction of his contemporaries, especially in the quite recent stories of his fellow Southerners, Carson McCullers from Georgia and Eudora Welty from Mississippi. Capote’s “Miriam,” with its perhaps too-easy eeriness, and “Jug of Silver,” with its affectionate small-town wit, may suggest McCullers’s own early stories. And his “The Shape of Things,” “My Side of the Matter” and “Children on Their Birthdays” may be readily seen as not-quite-finished stories from Welty, especially “My Side of the Matter” with its close resemblance to Welty’s famous “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Yet Capote’s childhood, spent in a middle-class white world so close to Welty’s and McCullers’s own—and in a household uncannily like the one described in Welty’s comic monologues—might well have extracted such stories from a talented young writer, even if he had never encountered a Welty or McCullers story (Welty told me that when she was undergoing her
Paris Review
interview in 1972, George Plimpton suggested that the interviewer raise the question of her influence on Capote’s early work; and she declined to discuss the matter, having no desire to entertain any claim of another writer’s dependence upon her).

In general, however, by the late 1940s, Capote’s fictional voice was clearly his own. His weirdly potent first novel—
Other Voices, Other Rooms
in 1948—erected as it is upon the conventional grounds of modern Southern Gothic ends as an unquestionably original structure that, even now, is a powerful assertion of the pain of his own early solitude and his bafflement in the face of the sexual and familial mysteries that had begun to impinge upon his confidence and would ultimately contribute heavily to his eventual collapse in agonized shame, even in the midst of so much later artistic, social and financial success. The same dilemmas are on partial display in short stories like “The Headless Hawk,” “Shut a Final Door” and “A Tree of Night.”

But given the fact that homosexuality was then a troubling daily reality for Capote, and given that American magazines were still averse to candid portrayals of the problem, perhaps we can comprehend now why such early stories lack a clear emotional center. Had he written short stories as candid in their views of homosexuality as his first novel managed to be, they would have almost certainly gone unpublished, certainly not in the widely read women’s magazines which were the centers of much of the best short fiction of the time. It was in his second novel—
The Grass Harp
of 1951—that he discovered a mature means of employing important areas of his own past to empower fiction that would ring with convincing personal truth. Those areas centered around, not sexuality but the deeply encouraging devotion he received in childhood from a particular cousin and from the places he and that friend frequented in their games and devotions. The cousin was Miss Sook Faulk, a woman so slender in her concerns and affections that many thought her simple-minded, though she was only (and admirably) simple; and in the years that she and the young Truman shared a home, she gave him the enormous gift of a dignified love—a gift he’d received from no closer kin.

Among these stories, that depth of feeling and its masterful delivery in the memorably clear prose which would mark the remainder of Capote’s work, is visible above all in his famous story “A Christmas Memory,” and in the less well-known “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “One Christmas,” the last of which may be a little sweet for contemporary tastes but, true as it is, is almost as moving in its revelation of yet another early wound—this one administered by a feckless and distant father. It’s likely that more Americans know “A Christmas Memory” through an excellent television film, with an extraordinary performance by Geraldine Page; but anyone who reads the actual tale has encountered a feat rarer than any screen performance. By the sheer clarity of his prose and a brilliant economy of ongoing narrative rhythm, Capote cleanses of any possible sentimentality a small array of characters, actions and emotions that might have gone foully sweet in less watchful and skillful hands. Only Chekhov comes to mind as sufficiently gifted in the treatment of similar matter.

But once possessed of the skills to deliver the width of emotion he wished for, Capote was not limited to the recounting of childhood memory, more or less real or entirely invented. Like many fiction writers, he wrote fewer and fewer short stories as he grew—life often becomes more intricate than brief forms can easily contain. But one story, “Mojave” from 1975, embodies brilliantly and terribly the insights acquired in his years among the rich. Had he lived to write more such angled quick glimpses of their hateful world, he would never have left us with the sense of incompletion that the baffled rumors of a long novel have done.

And had his decades away from the Southern source of all his best fiction—long and short—not left him uninterested, or incapable, of writing more about that primal world, we would likewise have more cause for gratitude for his work. In fact, however, if we lay Capote’s fiction atop the stack that includes
In Cold Blood
and a sturdy handful of nonfiction essays, we will have assembled a varied body of work that’s equaled by only a very few of his contemporaries in the United States of the second half of the twentieth century.

This man who impersonated an exotic clown in the early, more private years of his career and then—pressed by the heavy weight of his past—became the demented public clown of his ending, left us nonetheless sufficient first-class work to stand him now—cool decades after his death—far taller than his small and despised body ever foretold. In 1966 when he’d begun to announce his work on a long novel—and to take huge publisher’s advances for it—he said he’d entitle the book
Answered Prayers
. And he claimed that
Answered Prayers
was a phrase he’d found among the sayings of St. Teresa of Avila—
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones
. There are few signs that prayers to God or to some intercessory saint—say a seizure-ridden Spanish mystic or his simple cousin Sook—were ever a steady concern of Truman Capote’s life, but his lifelong pursuit of wide attention and wealth was appallingly successful. Before he was forty, he’d achieved both aims, in tidal profusion and utter heartbreak.

In his final wreckage, this slender collection of short stories may well have seemed to Capote the least of his fulfillments; but in the arena of expressed human feeling, they represent his most impressive victory. From the torment of a life willed on him, first, by a viciously neglectful father and a mother who should never have borne a child and, then, by his own refusal to conquer his personal hungers, he nonetheless won on the battlefield of English prose these stories that, at their best, should stand for long years to come as calm enduring prayers and accomplished blessings—free for every reader to use.

R
EYNOLDS
P
RICE
was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is J.B. Professor of English. His first novel,
A Long and Happy Life
, was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award. His sixth novel,
Kate Vaiden
, was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Noble Norfleet
, his twelfth novel, was published in 2002. In all, he has published thirty-five volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and translations. Price is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.