something about “Other Voices, Other Rooms”

I had a decent review of “Other Voices, Other Rooms” by Truman Capote, but stupid Blogger lost it when I pressed Ctrl+z.

I think I talked about how The New York Times review was somewhat negative, and then I probably agreed with it. In any case, I remember reading this book and thinking that the richness of detail was overwhelming, and that it must be almost unbearable to be someone like Capote—someone so sensitive to one's surroundings, for so much of life to fall into your attention.

and quotes something about movie stars

Marc Maron had George Clooney on his podcast not too long ago and tried to ask Clooney about being the movie-star-style leading man, like a Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart—actors who are always kind of the same in each role. Clooney says he is always still Clooney-ish in his roles because he lacks the talent to lose himself in a character. Clooney's humility, which Maron called out as bullshit, often produced unsatisfying conversation. (But how do you describe star quality? A star is born.) The unsatisfying interview moved me to reread Truman Capote's short sketch of Humphrey Bogart.

If one listens attentively to any man’s vocabulary, it will be noticed that certain key-to-character words recur. With Bogart, whose pungent personal thesaurus was by and large unspeakably unprintable, “bum” and “professional” were two such verbal signposts. A most moral—by a bit exaggerating you might say “prim”—man, he employed “professional” as a platinum medal to be distributed among persons whose behavior he sanctioned; “bum,” the reverse of an accolade, conveyed, when spoken by him, almost scarifying displeasure. “My old man,” he once remarked of his father, who had been a reputable New York doctor, “died ten thousand dollars in debt, and I had to pay off every cent. A guy who doesn’t leave his wife and kids provided for, he’s a bum.” Bums, too, were guys who cheated on their wives, cheated on their taxes, and all whiners, gossipists, most politicians, most writers, women who Drank, women who were scornful of men who Drank; but the bum true-blue was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a “pro” in his work. God knows he was. Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy before breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition). No, there was never a mite of bum-hokum about Bogart; he was an actor without theories (well, one: that he should be highly paid), without temper but not without temperament; and because he understood that discipline was the better part of artistic survival, he lasted, he left his mark.

 

something about Truman Capote's novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

In Truman Capote's classic novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Holly Golightly often appears to be a mean, awful person. But she cries on Fred's shoulder the first time they meet. We quickly see that Holly is a contradiction, a "real phony." She feigns an aloof, carefree attitude to protect herself from rejection; she acts refined and educated to disguise the fact that she comes from extreme poverty. She is very vulnerable, which makes her very dangerous.

Capote is a sentimental literary genius because he knows how to cut edges around his open heart. During a crucial, heart-wrenching scene in which Holly reunites with her pitifully naive first husband, Doc, Capote inserts a scream from Holly's upstairs neighbor: "Shut up! It's a disgrace. Do your whoring elsewhere."

This novella's many wonderful lines include the following:

You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky.

And

So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived.

something about "The Complete Stories of Truman Capote"

I read everything in "The Complete Stories of Truman Capote." These are shorts laid out by the famous, brilliant American author. The stories are wonderful, of course. But the introduction is ridiculous—almost hateful. It includes the following passages:

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...

And,

In his final wreckage, this slender collection of short stories may well have seemed to Capote the least of his fulfillment ... by his own refusal to conquer his personal hungers ...

Awful.

Of the earlier Capote works collected here, "A Diamond Guitar" strikes a chord. But the best of all the stories was the later work, "Mojave," written in 1975. The protagonists' detachment makes the exotic and strange seem sadly familiar.

something about "The Thanksgiving Visitor" by Truman Capote

The Thanksgiving Visitor returns to the childhood days Truman Capote wrote about in his previously published semi-autobiographical short story, A Christmas Memory. This time, a schoolyard bully, Odd Henderson, menaces young Buddy. To his horror, Buddy's older cousin, Sook, invites Odd to Thanksgiving dinner in hopes of ending the boys' feud. At dinner, Buddy attempts to publicly humiliate Odd, but this revenge scheme fails. Buddy learns about cruelty, the lesson of Two Wrongs, and the dignity of empathy.

After his failed attempt at revenge, Buddy sulks in the shed. Capote writes:

The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.

Note: The Thanksgiving Visitor was first published in the November 1967 issue of McCall's magazine.

something about "Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote"

This provided some relaxing nighttime reading. The two parts I enjoyed most: first, from Observations, the entry on Humphrey Bogart, which includes this:

Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy for breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition).

Second, "A Lamp in the Window," a wonderfully wrought short that suddenly sweeps the ground out from under you at the end.

about "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote

In this short piece by Truman Capote, a seven-year-old narrator lovingly remembers the last Christmas he shared with his intellectually disabled, elderly distant cousin. That season, the pair followed their tradition of making fruitcake and giving gifts. Capote's unadorned writing colors the events with innocence.

In the years following that Christmas, the boy goes away to school and his cousin succumbs to old age and dementia. In the wonderfully sentimental passage below, Capote masterfully captures the heartbreak one feels when a loved one passes:

Life separates us. Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn't count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go.

And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen. Alone with Queenie. Then alone. ("Buddy dear," she writes in her wild hard-to-read script, "yesterday Jim Macy's horse kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn't feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet and rode her in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her Bones...."). For a few Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes single-handed; not as many, but some: and, of course, she always sends me "the best of the batch." Also, in every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet paper: "See a picture show and write me the story." But gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880's; more and more, thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!"

And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.

Note: "A Christmas Memory" was published in 1956.