Truman Capote: Cutie Patootie

Young Truman Capote, O. Henry winner, short story writer (he may have written other things, too, but that's unconfirmed), gossip hound, and host to some wild parties, was a major cutie. Vintage recently released the paperback edition of his complete stories, and while his earliest pieces seem to end just when they're beginning, as Capote matures so does his voice -- and ooh, wouldn't you love to hear that voice as he whispered in your ear? Something that wasn't a malicious lie about you and your wealthy friends, I mean?

At times, Capote's writing could be hecka stylish; check out this transitional leap from a line of dialogue spoken at night to a description of the next morning:

Papa used to bring us Christmas trees from there: carry them on his shoulder. That's fifty years ago. Well, now: I can't wait for morning.

Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. ["A Christmas Memory," 220]

Here, Capote proffers his authorial elbow as he escorts the reader gracefully from a time fifty years in the past, to the present, to hope. Next thing we know and with only a paragraph break and a one-word sentence (Morning), Capote sweeps us to daybreak, which, be still my heart.

And where does this dashing writer take us from there? We find ourselves on frosted ground. Then he lifts us over his head, we twirl over the semicolon, and land safely on the sunny side. That's just the beginning of the routine, ladies and gentlemen of the Olympic committee, which is packed with difficult tripping steps, e.g. the repetition of the word "orange," which Capote uses two different ways in the span of an and, yet the overall effect is smooth as an ice rink. I think I'm going to faint.

Arguably the best story of the lot is the exquisitely titled "Children on Their Birthdays," which begins, "Yesterday afternoon the six o'clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit."[135] "Miss Bobbit" is a sophisticated and eccentric ten-year-old girl (think Becky Thatcher, if Becky Thatcher had studiend theater in Paris). She and her mother have just moved to the story's setting, a very small Alabama town. Soon after her grand arrival, two boys who at the beginning of "Children on Their Birthdays" were best friends fall for Miss Bobbit, and they become sworn enemies. One of the boys reflects on Miss Bobbit thus:

She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt [you]. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else.[153]

The story was made into a movie, and readers, don't bother. Don't even think about it. Just read the book, will you?

The 1966 publication of In Cold Blood changed nonfiction writing forever and with its release, Mr. Capote became wildly famous. But in 1975 Truman Capote published excerpts from his book Answered Prayers, which contained scandalous and sometimes untrue stories about the his famous socialite friends. Which he then lost in droves.

He drank, he took lots of drugs, and in 1984, he died.


I prefer to preserve in my memory a version of Mr. Capote that resembles his own memories, so lovingly captured in his prose: forever at his pinnacle, suspended in the crowning moments before the bus rounded the corner.