Fruitcake at Tiffany's
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Fruitcake at Tiffany's By Stanley Edgar Hyman I KNEW Truman Capote when he was an office boy at the New Yorker, faintly comic in the intensity of his ambition to become a...
...He has a terrible ear...
...something stops "like the hands of a dropped watch...
...Here is an entry in the Limp Second Clause Sweepstakes: "A competitive spirit had pervaded the purchasing of these outfits, of which more than several had a certain Eskimo-look...
...It is about a Mr...
...Capote has a mastery of the world of fantasy...
...Capote writes: "A snowstorm moving across Colorado, across the West, falling upon all the small towns, yellowing every light, filling every footfall, falling now and here: but how quickly it had come, the snowstorm: the roofs, the vacant lot, the distance deep in white and deepening, like sleep...
...It does not specifically symbolize any malaise of the modern world, or any special condition of life, or even any universal human condition...
...Now Capote has reached an apotheosis in Selected Writings of Truman Capote (Random House, 460 pp., $5.95...
...it is a free-floating image of deprivation with no reference...
...But these are flashes, and we never get any sustained revelation...
...It is this capacity that Capote uses to evoke the special imaginative world of childhood in his novels...
...Some of the reporting is smothered in chic...
...in an undefinably obscene manner...
...At its best, Capote's fiction produces the terror and pity that Aristotle distinguished as the emotions proper to tragedy...
...Leaden whimsy weighs down a good half of his stories, and at least once, in the case of "Children on Their Birthdays" the story sinks under the weight and drowns...
...Let us look at some examples...
...The Selected Writings makes it clear that Capote has a real talent, however flawed and limited it may be...
...Well, he has made it...
...Sometimes Capote gets his effect with beautifully chosen detail, as when Vincent in "The Headless Hawk" gives the girl D. J. 40-odd dollars to buy clothes, and she spends it on a leather windbreaker, a set of military brushes, a raincoat and a cigarette lighter...
...witness a sentence from "A House on the Heights": "Not that this is the Heights' sole maison de luxe: we are blessed with several exponents of limousine life—but unarguably, Mrs...
...But these two absurdities are necessary contrivances for one beautiful and touching scene...
...He evades the responsibility to describe precisely: "like a child aged abruptly by some uncanny method...
...The comedy in Breakfast at Tiffany's is always slightly tinged with melancholy...
...the liniment bottle is broken in the scuffle...
...His metaphors and similes are often wildly inept: Porgy and Bess, "when slipped under the dialectical microscope, proves a test tube brimming with the kind of bacteria to which the present Russian regime is most allergic...
...Such early stories as "A Tree of Night" (1943) and "Miriam" (1944) are in the tradition of Djuna Barnes' short fiction: bizarre, gothic and nightmarish...
...He muddles syntax dreadfully: "he could no more dispossess it than could, for example, a dead man rid his legendary eyes of the last image seen"—here Capote doesn't mean that the eyes are legendary, but that the inability is...
...A Christmas Memory" (1946) is the best of the early stories, and the one that most fully displays these features of Capote's talent...
...The dreams in his stories are powerful and convincing: Vincent's dream of the headless hawk in the story of that name...
...After she and the narrator are separated, she sends him a dime wadded in toilet paper in every letter, with the instructions: "See a picture show and write me the story...
...The end of the novella, Holly's cat finding a home, is absolutely right...
...Their Christmas gifts—for the third year each has built a kite to surprise the other—are as corny and pat as the gifts in O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," and as apt to move the reader nevertheless...
...It contains selections, chosen by the author, from all the books except the novels, along with three new pieces...
...with the emphasis on the "where" instead of the "are...
...Nude and bleeding a path of bloody footprints," he follows Holly and the detectives helplessly to the door...
...Holly is done in wonderful brush strokes: her oral parentheses...
...her training herself, as a call girl, to get excited only by men over 42...
...When Capote tries fancy writing, the results are sometimes catastrophic...
...This is not improvement— the early stories are as effective in their own terms as the late ones—so much as a psychological transformation of the author, a shift from a preoccupation with an inner world to a concern with the outer world sometimes almost sociological...
...when he has acquired all their dreams, he has stolen their souls...
...There are similarly powerful images throughout the reporting: Marlon Brando as a boy, running away from home every Sunday, rain or shine...
...The best example of this is "Master Misery...
...Gershwin, is brought magnificently to life...
...There is a lot more to Truman Capote than that checked weskit that the ads used to show...
...Walter's dream of an old castle where only old turkeys live in '"Shut a Final Door...
...The narrator is seven and his elderly female cousin is 60-something, but they are two children together, and the Christmas fruitcakes they bake contain all the magical world of childhood...
...Capote loves to say everything twice: "an enormous, really huge head...
...Is it...
...Capote himself running from a gang at the end of "A House on the Heights...
...her desire for a "quite coony baby...
...For example, Capote hears the question, "After all, where are we going to gossip...
...At one point he challenges comparison with James Joyce by rewriting the famous ending of "The Dead...
...Holly herself is a reincarnation of Isherwood's Sally Bowles, and an improvement on her...
...Holly is arrested in the narrator's bathroom, waiting for the bruised narrator to finish a bath so that she may rub him with liniment...
...If "The Muses Are Heard" is a failure as a whole, one character, Mrs...
...Mary O'Meaghan's perfect imitation of Helen Morgan in "Among the Paths to Eden" is one of those moments that seize the heart...
...her doing in a rival with the gentlest hint of venereal disease...
...Despite this meager output over 20 years, he is taken very seriously, as the result of a complex combination of talent and shrewd promotion...
...The ending of "Miriam," Miriam's return, is equally fine, and if its terror is less, its pity is considerably more...
...Bad prose is not Capote's only defect...
...Holly's quarrel with the narrator while he is rubbing her back with suntan oil is a marvelous scene, perfectly rendered...
...But here too the lack of interest in ideas, along with the tin ear, handicaps him...
...her inability to cook anything not exotic...
...It is absurd that the narrator's horse should run away with him up Fifth Avenue...
...somewhat naked children...
...The details have an absolute Tightness...
...The best-known of Capote's pieces, "The Muses Are Heard," tells us everything about the Soviet Union except what we want to know: what Russian life was like for Russians in 1956...
...It is just a pointless fable in which dreams are imagined as commodities...
...Capote is just as effective when he uses fantasy for comic purposes, as in the old drunk's delusion in "Children on Their Birthdays" that the girls are midgets in the walls trying to get at his supply of toilet paper...
...But the comparison is fatal to Capote, and when last seen he was blowing across Colorado...
...More important than these defects are two major failings: Capote has no subject to write about and no interest in ideas...
...Over the years his work has changed markedly...
...In the stories, it is often a world of adults become childlike and innocent: in "Master Misery," Oreilly's song about loveberry pie, and the playing-house weekend that Sylvia and Oreilly spend together, "like the most beautiful party Sylvia could remember...
...It is, I think, Capote's recognition that he has a creative imagination but no subject on which to exercise it that has increasingly turned him toward reporting...
...It is absurd that Holly Golightly should be arrested for transmitting coded messages that enable a convict named Sally Tomato to control his world-wide drug syndicate...
...The one thoroughly bad story in the book, "House of Flowers," is a pastoral fantasy of happy amorous Haitian peasants, all moulded out of milk chocolate...
...Capote has published two novels, two collections of stories and two books of reporting...
...A. F. Revercomb who buys people's dreams, generally at the rate of five dollars a dream...
...The novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, although it is not free of Capote's faults, seems to me the best thing that he has yet done...
...it then becomes much less likely that Capote really met a hip Russian who says: "So a lot of squares don't dig it...
...The plot is wildly improbable...
...WRITERS & WRITING Fruitcake at Tiffany's By Stanley Edgar Hyman I KNEW Truman Capote when he was an office boy at the New Yorker, faintly comic in the intensity of his ambition to become a writer...
...They don't flip...
...Again, Capote's imagination sometimes saves him...
...Such recent fiction as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and "Among the Paths to Eden" (1960) is more like the work of Christopher Ishcrwood: wryly comic, perceptive and oddly impersonal...
...is la regina di tutti...
...We hear characters use language that we know from the stories is Capote's own (orange "hulls" for "peels," for example...
...Unless this is a satire on psychoanalysis, which seems highly unlikely, it is not about anything...
...when the narrator jumps out of the tub he cuts his feet...
...So is that big news...
...A single image, of four men silently beating a fifth on a Leningrad street, says more than all the rest of the article...
...The ending of "A Tree of Night," with Kay catatonic under her raincoat as the horrible woman robs her, is truly chilling...
...of Marlon Brando: "how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part...
...For all its absurdities and awkardnesses, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a triumph...
...Mark Schorer, whose blurbing account must be considerably overdrawn by now, says of Capote's prose in his introduction: "perhaps its single constant quality is the unerring sense of style...
...The cousin's reason for never seeing a movie is: "When the Lord comes, let me see him clear...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 8
