CAPOTE, Truman

Nationality: American. Born: Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana, 30 September 1924; took step-father's surname. Education: Trinity School and St. John's Academy, New York; Greenwich High School, Connecticut. Career: Worked in the art department and wrote for "Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, early 1940s; then full-time writer. Awards: O. Henry award, 1946, 1948, 1951; American Academy grant, 1959; Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award, 1966; Emmy award, for television adaptation, 1967. Member: American Academy. Died: 25 August 1984.

Publications

Collections

A Capote Reader. 1987.

Short Stories

Other Voices, Other Rooms. 1948.

A Tree of Night and Other Stories. 1949.

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories. 1958.

A Christmas Memory (story). 1966.

Novels

The Grass Harp. 1951.

Answered Prayers (unfinished novel). 1986.

Plays

The Grass Harp, from his own novel (produced 1952). 1952.

House of Flowers, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Capote and Arlen (produced 1954; revised version, produced 1968). 1968.

The Thanksgiving Visitor, from his own story (televised 1968). 1968.

Trilogy (screenplay, with Eleanor Perry), in Trilogy. 1969.

Screenplays:

Beat the Devil, with John Huston, 1953; Indiscretion of an American Wife, with others, 1954; The Innocents, with William Archibald and John Mortimer, 1961; Trilogy, with Eleanor Perry, 1969.

Television Plays and Films (includes documentaries):

A Christmas Memory, with Eleanor Perry, from the story by Capote, 1966; Among the Paths to Eden, with Eleanor Perry, from the story by Capote, 1967; Laura, from the play by Vera Caspary, 1968; The Thanksgiving Visitor, from his own story, 1968; Behind Prison Walls, 1972; The Glass House, with Tracy Keenan Wynn and Wyatt Cooper, 1972; Crimewatch, 1973.

Other

Local Color. 1950.

The Muses Are Heard: An Account of the Porgy and Bess Tour to Leningrad. 1956.

Observations, photographs by Richard Avedon. 1959.

Selected Witings, edited by Mark Schorer. 1963.

In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. 1966.

Trilogy: An Experiment in Multimedia, with Frank and Eleanor Perry. 1969.

The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places. 1973.

Then It All Came Down: Criminal Justice Today Discussed by Police, Criminals, and Correction Officers with Comments by Capote. 1976.

Music for Chameleons. 1980.

One Christmas (memoir). 1983.

Conversations with Capote, with Lawrence Grobel. 1985.

Capote: Conversations, edited by M. Thomas Inge. 1987.

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Bibliography:

Capote: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography by Robert J. Stanton, 1980.

Critical Studies:

The Worlds of Capote by William L. Nance, 1970; Capote by Helen S. Garson, 1980; Capote by Kenneth Reid, 1981; Capote by Marie Rudisill and James C. Simmons, 1983; Footnote to a Friendship: A Memoir of Capote and Others by Donald Windham, 1983; Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy by John Malcolm Brinnin, 1986, as Capote, A Memoir, 1987; Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke, 1988; Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton, 1997.

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In the early 1940s Truman Capote left the provincial South to seek first the sophistication of New York and then the most worldly of wisdom in the "cold blood" of Kansas. From the beginning his stories were set in both New York and the likes of Admiral's Mill, Alabama. Indeed, most were set in the city. But this is mere physical place. The real provinces of Capote's stories are loneliness, dreams, and the unconscious. His characters' preeminent conflicts entail the struggle to connect with others, through love if possible. It is an aspiration generally overwhelmed by selfishness or narcissism. Frequently, however, his protagonists glimpse, in the course of their failings, the reasons for their shortcomings and ruined aspirations.

It is thus a legitimate commonplace that his stories may be divided not between geographical places but between the diurnal and nocturnal and, thence, between good and evil. Perhaps it is even better to say that his stories are either principally light or dark. These appropriately ambiguous terms dichotomize the body of his work both figuratively and literally. They capture the way those that are most amusing and social are enacted in daylight, while those that are most disturbing and psychological, whether grotesque or macabre, are enacted at night. Capote inclined to the dark variety. This and a certain effect of tour de force have provided him his share of detractors who find in his tales more that is facile than felicitous.

Capote did not write a great number of stories; nor did his talent in the genre really grow. He was skilled in the form and on a few occasions brilliant. But he was never better, either on the whole or in a single piece, than in his collection A Tree of Night. "Master Misery," "Miriam," and the title story are the dark tales here. The experiences recorded in these stories are essentially internal. The worlds circumscribing their protagonists exist only as mirrors of their interiority or as complements to a really psychic drama. Each story blends the macabre and the fantastic in an eerie ethos. "Master Misery" involves a lonely young woman's willingness to sell her dreams, at five dollars each, to a fabulous Mr. Revercomb. Strangely, this story has been attacked as meaningless, on the grounds that the exchange is inexplicable, a sheer gratuity. Surely we have here an allegorical romance for our times. (One needn't give it credence.) The youthful Sylvia (place of the "sylvan," the lovely natural) comes from Ohio to the big city and discovers her unalterable separation from others, save one lonely and passing drunk. Life being a flop, she sells her dreams and acquiesces in her miserable lot. They are purchased by Master Misery, the worse-than-reality principle. His name is Revercomb (comber, searcher among reveries, dreams). He is not a psychoanalyst, but a mythic figure. He rids Sylvia of any last illusion and leaves her about to be violated. The erosion of one's dreams by misery is common enough. Not happy, but a Capotean romance indeed. "Miriam" is similar. The aged and isolated Mrs. H.T. Miller speaks to a perfect-little-lady of a girl one night outside a theater. The child is surreal, but shows up at her apartment, finally inviting herself to stay. Capote grants neither that Miriam is real nor a figment of Mrs. Miller's imagination, though we don't really doubt the latter. Miriam is an alter-ego and version of the child Mrs. Miller probably was. Their bond is finally antagonistic, but indisputable and irreversible. The world outside the apartment is dark and dense with snow. Miriam is all that Mrs. Miller finally has to stave off the cold blackness of her future.

"A Tree of Night" is Capote's best story in this vein. Its eccentric characters and the palpable tackiness of the train car they inhabit convey a minimal reality that yields gradually to the story's symbolist core. The train moves through a night of metaphysical darkness, taking a young woman named Kay from an uncle's funeral toward an impossibly youthful sophomore year at college. With her in the car, which has the faded plush ambience of a coffin, rides a deathly old man who lives by doing a Lazarus trick in a carnival. He is the wizard of her childhood, the bogeyman in the human attic, with us for the long haul once we've made the acquaintance of death.

The light stories are "Children on Their Birthdays," "Jug of Silver," and "My Side of the Matter." These are rendered very colloquially in the first person. The first two are peppered with characters too cutely named, whose enterprises are the stuff of village legend. They are stereotypes of southern eccentrics, especially of youthful cut-ups and dreamers. The death of the wondrous quasi-child, Miss Bobbit, of "Children on Their Birthdays," is treated whimsically and seems a saccharin counterpoint to her transformation of the community she mesmerized for a year. These tales simply don't admit essential darkness to their milieux. "My Side of the Matter" strives for hilarity through a narrator who lies and gives offense on a big scale. He is a loafer, come to a hick town with his pregnant wife to freeload off her aunts. When he thieves from their savings, they take a stand against him. His tale is a grand and very funny rationalization of his whole person. To accuse Capote of not capturing a real voice here is to fail to measure this persona against the hyperbole the work intends. This fiction is after the manner of Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." and, like it, is exempt from any phonographic litmus test. It is the epitome of Capote's diurnal mode.

The later stories come closer to reality. "Among the Paths to Eden" and "Mojave" explore, pessimistically, the prospects of marital well-being. If Eden stands for the blissful state of the human couple before the fall from grace, this Eden is a sad retort. The setting is a graveyard where a widower finds himself happier alone than he had been in his marriage. Yet he experiences loneliness and is tempted by the strange allurements of a woman for whom the cemetery is a virtual dating service. She looks to the obituaries to find a decent man and follows up by going to the cemetery when widowers make their annual visits. Her imitation of the songstress Helen Morgan tests Mr. Belli to the limit, but he goes his isolated and preferred way, while she turns hopelessly, we know, to the "new pilgrim, just entering through the gates of the cemetery."

In "Mojave" the desert serves as a metaphor for estrangement in marriage. In his youth George Whitelaw had met a blind man left on the desert by a wife who had decided on a younger one. George's wife, Sarah, would never do that to him. Instead she has affairs and arranges George's liaisons with other women. Neither person has any satisfaction, but the bond they have built is solid—and sterile. All they have together is the shred more than the nothing emanating from relationships that make them feel even lonelier than their marriage does. That Sarah had never seen George as more than a version of her father explains a little. But Sarah's judgment seems right when she says, "We all, sometimes, leave each other out there under the skies, and we never understand why." This seems a story poised at the end of a body of work always pointed toward it. Its truest antecedent is the most realistic story from the first collection, "Shut a Final Door," wherein Capote charted the dead-end course of a perfect narcissist through one exploitive relationship after another. That seems his judgment on our times.

—David M. Heaton

See the essay on "Other Voices, Other Rooms."