A PECHINCHA, by TRUMAN CAPOTE

A PECHINCHA, by TRUMAN CAPOTE

Várias coisas no marido irritavam a sra. Chase. Por exemplo, a voz: ele sempre falava como se estivesse apostando num jogo de pôquer. Ouvir aquela fala arrastada e indiferente era exasperador, sobretudo agora, que, conversando com ele por telefone, ela própria falava de forma estridente de tanta empolgação. "Claro que eu já tenho um, sei disso. Mas você não entende, querido — é uma pechincha", explicou, enfatizando a última palavra, depois fazendo uma pausa para deixar a magia dela crescer. Só ouviu silêncio. "Puxa, você podia dizer alguma coisa. Não, não estou numa loja, estou em casa. Alice Severn vem para o almoço. É sobre o casaco de Alice que estou tentando lhe falar. Você deve se lembrar dela." A memória esburacada do marido era outra fonte de irritação, e, embora ela lhe lembrasse que lá em Greenwich Village eles tinham visto com freqüência Arthur e Alice Severn, chegaram até a receber o casal em sua casa, ele fingiu não conhecer aquele nome. "Não importa", ela suspirou. "Só vou dar uma olhada no casaco. Tenha um bom almoço, querido."

Mais tarde, ao se aborrecer com as ondas precisas de seu cabelo retocado, a sra. Chase admitiu que realmente não havia motivo para o marido se lembrar dos Severn com tanta clareza. Deu-se conta disso quando, com sucesso parcial, tentou evocar uma imagem de Alice Severn. Pois bem, quase conseguiu: uma mulher rosada e desengonçada, com menos de trinta anos, que sempre dirigia uma caminhonete, acompanhada por um setter irlandês e por duas bonitas crianças de cabelos louros avermelhados. Dizia-se que o marido dela bebia; ou seria o contrário? Além disso, eles eram considerados maus pagadores, ao menos a sra. Chase lembrou de certa vez ter ouvido falar de dívidas incríveis, e alguém, teria sido ela própria?, descrevera Alice Severn como simplesmente boêmia demais.

Antes de se mudarem para a cidade, os Chase mantiveram uma casa em Greenwich Village, que era um tédio para a sra. Chase, porque ela detestava os sinais de natureza dali e preferia o divertimento das vitrines de Nova York. Em Greenwich Village, em algum coquetel, na estação de trem, vez por outra encontravam os Severn, e não passou disso. Nem éramos amigos, ela concluiu, um tanto surpresa. Como costuma acontecer quando de súbito se ouve falar de uma pessoa do passado, e alguém conhecido num contexto diferente, ela fora induzida a uma sensação de intimidade. Mas, pensando melhor, parecia extraordinário que Alice Severn, a quem ela não via fazia mais de um ano, tivesse telefonado oferecendo à venda um casaco de vison.

A sra. Chase parou na cozinha a fim de pedir sopa e salada para o almoço: jamais lhe ocorria que nem todo mundo estava de dieta. Encheu um decantador de xerez e o levou consigo até a sala de estar. Uma sala verde-esmeralda, o mesmo gosto excessivamente juvenil das roupas dela. O vento fustigava as janelas, pois o apartamento ficava num andar alto, com uma vista de avião do centro de Manhattan. Colocou um disco do Linguaphone na vitrola e sentou-se em posição não relaxada, ouvindo a voz forçada pronunciar frases francesas. Em abril, os Chase planejavam comemorar o vigésimo aniversário de casamento com uma viagem a Paris; por essa razão, ela começara as aulas do Linguaphone, e, por essa razão também, cogitou no casaco de Alice Severn: seria mais prático, achou, viajar com um vison de segunda mão; mais tarde, poderia mandar transformá-lo numa estola.

Alice Severn chegou alguns minutos mais cedo, uma casualidade decerto, pois não era uma pessoa ansiosa, pelo menos a julgar por seus modos contidos e cautelosos. Usava sapatos comuns, um casaco de tweed que já vira dias melhores, e carregava uma caixa amarrada com um barbante puído.

"Fiquei encantada quando você telefonou esta manhã. Deus sabe, faz um tempão que não nos vemos, mas, claro, não vamos mais a Greenwich Village."

Embora sorrindo, sua visita permaneceu calada, e a sra. Chase, que assumira um tom efusivo, ficou um tanto sem graça. Quando as duas sentaram, os olhos dela apreenderam a mulher mais jovem, e ocorreu-lhe que, se tivessem se encontrado por acaso, poderia não tê-la reconhecido, não porque sua aparência tivesse se alterado tanto, mas porque a sra. Chase se deu conta de que nunca antes olhara atentamente para ela, o que parecia estranho, pois Alice Severn era alguém que chamava a atenção. Se fosse menos comprida, mais compacta, as pessoas poderiam ignorá-la, talvez reparando que era atraente. Mas, do jeito que era, com seus cabelos vermelhos, a impressão de distância nos olhos, o rosto sardento, outonal, e as mãos magras e fortes, havia nela certa peculiaridade difícil de ignorar.

"Xerez?"

Alice Severn assentiu com a cabeça, que, equilibrada precariamente sobre o pescoço fino, parecia um crisântemo pesado demais para seu talo.

"Cream-cracker?", ofereceu a sra. Chase, observando que alguém tão esguio e alongado devia comer feito um cavalo. Sua frugalidade de sopa e salada despertou-lhe um súbito receio, e ela contou a seguinte mentira: "Não sei o que Martha está preparando para o almoço. Sabe como é difícil, em cima da hora. Mas conte, querida, o que está acontecendo em Greenwich Village?".

"Em Greenwich Village?", ela disse, entrecerrando as pálpebras, como se uma luz inesperada refulgisse na sala. "Não tenho a menor idéia. Não moramos mais lá faz algum tempo, seis meses ou mais."

"Oh?", fez a sra. Chase. "Veja como estou desatualizada. Mas onde você está morando, querida?"

Alice Severn ergueu uma das mãos ossudas e desajeitadas e apontou para a janela. "Lá fora", respondeu, de forma estranha. Sua voz era clara, mas tinha um tom de esgotamento, como se ela estivesse pegando um resfriado. "Quer dizer, no centro. Não gostamos muito, sobretudo Fred."

Com a mínima inflexão, a sra. Chase perguntou: "Fred?", pois lembrava perfeitamente que Arthur era o nome do marido da visita.

"Sim, Fred, meu cachorro, um setter irlandês, você deve tê-lo visto. Está acostumado com espaço, e o apartamento é tão pequeno, só um quarto."

Dias difíceis deviam ter sobrevindo para que todos os Severn estivessem morando num único quarto. Por mais curiosa que fosse, a sra. Chase se controlou e não indagou a respeito do assunto. Provou seu xerez e disse: "Claro que me lembro do seu cachorro; e das crianças: todas as três cabecinhas vermelhas espiando pela janela da caminhonete".

"As crianças não têm cabelos vermelhos. São louras, como Arthur."

A correção, com tão pouco senso de humor, provocou na sra. Chase uma risadinha intrigada. "E Arthur, como vai?", perguntou ela, preparando-se para se levantar e conduzir a visita até o almoço. Mas a resposta levou-a a sentar-se de novo. Sem mudança alguma na expressão placidamente desornada de Alice Severn, consistiu apenas em: "Mais gordo".

"Mais gordo", ela repetiu após um momento. "A última vez que o vi, acho que só uma semana atrás, estava atravessando uma rua feito um pato. Se ele tivesse me visto, eu teria de rir: ele sempre foi tão preocupado com a aparência."

A sra. Chase pôs as mãos na cintura. ''Você e Arthur. Separados? É simplesmente incrível."

"Nós não estamos separados." Ela esfregou as mãos no ar como que para remover teias de aranha. "Eu o conheço desde criança, desde que nós dois éramos crianças: você acha", disse tranqüilamente, "que poderíamos algum dia estar separados um do outro, sra. Chase?"

O uso exato de seu nome pareceu afastar a sra. Chase; por um momento, ela se sentiu isolada, e, ao caminharem juntas até a sala de jantar, imaginou uma hostilidade circulando entre elas. Possivelmente foi a visão das mãos desajeitadas de Alice Severn tentando abrir um guardanapo que a persuadiu de que aquilo não era verdade. Exceto por algumas palavras corteses, elas comeram em silêncio, e ela começava a temer que não haveria nenhuma história.

Enfim Alice Severn disse abruptamente: "Na verdade, nos divorciamos em agosto passado".

A sra. Chase esperou; depois, entre a descida e a subida de sua colher de sopa, disse: "Que horrível. Por causa da bebedeira dele?".

"Arthur nunca bebeu", ela respondeu com um sorriso agradável mas espantado. "Ou melhor, nós dois bebíamos. Por prazer, não por vício. Era gostoso no verão. Costumávamos descer até o riacho, colher hortelã e preparar um coquetel de uísque com hortelã em enormes potes de frutas. Às vezes, nas noites quentes em que não conseguíamos dormir, enchíamos de cerveja gelada as garrafas térmicas e acordávamos as crianças, depois íamos de carro até a praia; é divertido beber cerveja e nadar e dormir na areia. Bons tempos; lembro que uma vez ficamos lá até o sol raiar. Não", disse, alguma idéia séria retesando sua face. "eu vou lhe contar. Sou quase uma cabeça mais alta que Arthur, e acho que isso o preocupava. Quando éramos crianças, ele sempre achou que me ultrapassaria, mas isso nunca aconteceu. Ele detestava dançar comigo, e olha que ele adora dançar. E gostava de um monte de gente ao redor, gente baixinha de voz alta. Não sou assim, preferia que ficássemos só os dois. Nesse aspecto eu não era agradável para ele. Pois bem, lembra de ]eannie Bjorkman? Aquela de rosto redondo e cabelo encaracolado, mais ou menos da sua altura".

"Lembro, sim", respondeu a sra. Chase. "Esteve no comitê da Cruz Vermelha. Horrorosa."

"Não", replicou Alice Severn, refletindo. "Jeannie não é horrorosa. Éramos ótimas amigas. O estranho é que Arthur costumava dizer que a odiava, mas tenho a impressão de que sempre foi louco por ela, com certeza agora é, e as crianças também. Eu queria que as crianças não gostassem dela, embora devesse estar feliz por gostarem, já que têm de viver com ela."

"Não acredito: seu marido casado com aquela horrorosa da Bjorkmanl"

"Desde agosto."

A sra. Chase, fazendo primeiro uma pausa para sugerir que fossem tomar o café na sala de estar, disse: "É deprimente você estar vivendo sozinha em Nova York. Pelo menos devia ter ficado com os filhos".

"Arthur quis ficar com eles", respondeu Alice Severn simplesmente. "Mas não estou sozinha. Fred é um de meus melhores amigos."

A sra. Chase gesticulou, impaciente: não gostava de fantasias. "Um cachorro. Loucura. A verdade é que você é uma tola: se algum homem tentasse me passar para trás, eu cortava os pés dele em pedacinhos. Vai ver que você nem exigiu", hesitou, "uma pensão."

"Você não entende, Arthur não tem dinheiro algum", disse Alice Severn com o desânimo de uma criança que descobriu que os adultos, afinal, não são muito lógicos. "Teve até de vender o carro, e vai e volta a pé da estação. Mas, sabe, acho que está feliz."

"O que você precisa é de um bom beliscão", disse a sra. Chase como se estivesse pronta para realizar o serviço.

"É Fred que me preocupa. Está acostumado com espaço, e, com uma única pessoa, não sobram muitos ossos. Você acha que, quando terminar meu curso, consigo arrumar um emprego na Califórnia? Estou estudando administração, mas não sou muito rápida, sobretudo na máquina de escrever, meus dedos parecem detestar aquilo. Deve ser como tocar piano, você tem de aprender quando é jovem." Ela olhou curiosa para suas mãos, suspirando: "Tenho aula às três; importa-se se lhe mostrar o casaco agora?".

A festividade de coisas saindo de uma caixa em geral alegrava a sra. Chase, mas, quando ela viu a tampa ser retirada, um mal-estar melancólico dominou-a.

"Pertenceu à minha mãe."

Que deve ter usado essa tralha durante sessenta anos, pensou a sra. Chase, encarando um espelho. O casaco dava nos seus tornozelos. Ela passou a mão pela pelagem opaca, quase sem pêlos: estava mofada, fedida, como se tivesse permanecido num sótão à beira-mar. Fazia frio dentro do casaco, ela estremeceu, ao mesmo tempo um rubor aqueceu-lhe o rosto, pois foi aí que notou que Alice Severn olhava sobre seus ombros e na expressão dela havia uma expectativa tensa, humilhante, antes inexistente. Quanto à solidariedade, a sra. Chase praticava a parcimônia: antes de oferecê-la, tomava a precaução de amarrar um barbante nela para, em caso de necessidade, pegá-la de volta. Quando ela fitou Alice Severn, porém, foi como se o barbante tivesse sido cortado, e dessa vez ela se confrontou com as obrigações da solidariedade. Hesitou mesmo assim, procurando uma escapatória, mas seus olhos colidiram com aqueles outros olhos, e ela percebeu que não havia nenhuma. A lembrança de uma palavra das aulas do Linguaphone facilitaram uma pergunta: "Combien?".

"Isso não vale nada, não é?" Havia confusão na pergunta, não franqueza.

"Não, não vale", ela respondeu, cansada, quase irritada. "Mas pode ter alguma utilidade." Não repetiu a pergunta; estava claro que estipular o preço fazia parte de sua obrigação.

Ainda arrastando o incômodo casaco, dirigiu-se a um canto da sala onde havia uma escrivaninha e, com movimentos nervosos e ressentidos, preencheu um cheque da sua conta pessoal: preferia que o marido não soubesse. Mais que a maioria, a sra. Chase detestava o sentimento de perda; uma chave fora do lugar, uma moeda caída, despertavam sua consciência do roubo e das trapaças da vida. Sensação semelhante acompanhou-a quando entregou o cheque a Alice Severn. Esta, dobrando-o sem olhar para ele, enfiou-o no bolso do traje. Era um cheque de cinqüenta dólares,

"Querida", disse a sra. Chase, carrancuda com a falsa preocupação, "você tem de telefonar e contar como andam as coisas. Não deve se sentir solitária."

Alice Severn nem agradeceu, e na porta não disse "tchau". Em vez disso, segurou uma das mãos da sra. Chase e deu um tapinha nela, como se estivesse delicadamente recompensando um animal, um cachorro. Fechando a porta, a sra. Chase fitou sua mão, aproximou-a dos lábios. A sensação da outra mão ainda perdurava, e ela continuou ali, esperando que passasse: logo sua mão ficou bem fria de novo.
(1950)

Truman Streckfus Persons Capote nasceu no ano de 1924 na cidade de Nova Orleans, Luisiana - EUA. Convivendo, na infância, com diversos problemas familiares — prisão do pai, divórcio do casal, briga por sua guarda — o autor acabou indo morar em Nova York na companhia de sua mãe e seu padrasto. Foi dele, cubano, que Truman adotou o sobrenome. No início dos anos 40, foi admitido como contínuo na New Yorker. Durou pouco o emprego, do qual foi demitido por brigas internas. Suas primeiras histórias foram publicadas na Harper's Bazaar, quando tinha vinte e poucos anos. Muito bem recebidas, com o romance "Other voices, other rooms" (1948) e a novela "The grass harp" (1951), consolidaram sua fama precoce. Com uma ampla gama de escritores e artistas, figuras da alta sociedade e uma constante presença na mídia, passou a dedicar suas forças ao palco — adaptou The grass harp e escreveu o musical House of flowers — ao jornalismo e, também ao cinema. O assassinato de uma família no Kansas fez com que Capote se interessasse pelo assunto e, após, muita investigação, escreveu o famoso "A sangue frio" (1966), seu livro mais aclamado e de maior sucesso.

Truman Capote faleceu no dia 25 de agosto de 1984.

Outros livros do autor:

- Travessia de verão (SUMMER CROSSING)
- Música para camaleões (MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS)
- Bonequinha de luxo (BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S)
- Os cães ladram — Pessoas públicas e lugares privados (THE DOGS BARK)


Texto extraído do livro "20 contos de Truman Capote" (The Complete stories of Truman Capote), Ed. Cia. das Letras - São Paulo, 2006, organização de Reynolds Price, tradução de Ivo Korytowski.

The Truman Show - Again: A year after Capote, Infamous revisits the same territory - with fresh results.

The Truman Show - Again: A year after Capote, Infamous revisits the same territory - with fresh results.
By Phoebe Flowers *

Oct. 8--When Capote premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was generally agreed that star Philip Seymour Hoffman -- who would go on to win a best actor Oscar for the role -- was superb. Another popular opinion held that there could not possibly be enough material to sustain another movie about the same man, revolving around the same time in his life and career. And, even if there was, why would anyone want to see a retread of Capote? Undeterred, Infamous rolls into theaters Friday, a year after Capote. And it turns out Warner Independent Pictures was not completely out of its mind when the studio decided to forge ahead with the seemingly duplicate project. Capote and Infamous "will be, in the short term for people, companion pieces," acknowledged director and screenwriter Douglas McGrath (Emma, Nicholas Nickleby) at this year's Toronto festival. Both movies focus almost exclusively on the six years that Capote spent researching and writing In Cold Blood, a "nonfiction novel" about the brutal murder of a Kansan family of four, and about their killers. The 2005 Capote was adapted from Gerald Clarke's 1988 biography of the writer, while McGrath derived Infamous from the more recent oral history by George Plimpton. The new movie spends more time depicting Capote's lavish New York City lifestyle. Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Hope Davis and Juliet Stevenson portray his coterie of socialites, and Gwyneth Paltrow has a cameo as a singer modeled on Peggy Lee. Sandra Bullock steps into Catherine Keener's Oscar-nominated role as novelist Nelle Harper Lee.
Infamous also has something else last year's film lacked: an utter unknown in the lead role. The casting of Toby Jones, an English actor primarily known for his theater work, could be seen as a negative. But Jones' relative anonymity is actually a tremendous boon for the film, allowing him to subtly slip into Capote's well-documented affectations. He's so good, in fact, that he accomplishes what seems like the impossible -- he makes you forget about Hoffman. "I was never worried" about the competing film, says McGrath, "because I'd been on the set, I'd seen what Toby was doing. I felt I was watching one of the greatest actors I'd ever worked with. ... So I wasn't worried about the comparison. ... "I knew people would like Philip -- he's a great actor. But I knew what Toby was doing. And I don't mean this in a cocky way, I only meant, I know [people were] thinking, 'How could your lead performer possibly compare with Philip Seymour Hoffman?' And all I thought was, 'Well, just you wait.'" Second in line While Capote and Infamous were on basically parallel paths from the beginning, at a certain point it became clear Capote was pulling ahead in the race for a release date. "Even from the day I was sending my script out [in June 2003], we knew about [Capote writer Dan Futterman's] script," McGrath said. "They were going out looking for money, but they had their Truman. We were going out, and right away had money, but were looking for our Truman. ... We found Toby about a year later, maybe more than a year later. And they got their money sometime that fall of 2004." During the course of the three-month shoot, McGrath said he still didn't know which movie would bow first. But Infamous wrapped in spring 2005, several months after Capote, and by last fall, Capote had premiered at Toronto and was being rolled out as an Oscar hopeful. Infamous had to wait patiently for another year. No required reading It might have helped audiences if the situation had been reversed. Infamous is likely to work equally well for a viewer who hasn't read In Cold Blood as one who has; that's a strong plus that cannot be said of Capote. McGrath said this approach was intentional. "One of the tricky things when you're writing is knowing that there will be a certain part of the audience who are coming to the movie because they've read In Cold Blood, they've read the biographies of Truman -- they know a lot coming in," he said. "And then you have to assume there's a whole other audience that's not going to know anything. And it's that careful balance of trying to find a way to get information that's important for people so they understand, without boring the people who already know it."
But McGrath also expresses nothing but confidence about being the runner-up. "I knew we had a very strong group of actors to help tell the story. And I knew that there was so much about his life, even about that period. ... I knew the material didn't suffer from there not being enough good stuff to put in. Two people could come at this story and not step on each other's toes at all." The question is whether audiences will agree, and, on that subject, McGrath accepts that it's beyond his control. "You know, I have no idea if anybody will come to the movie or not," McGrath says. "I hope they will. Our experience is that when [preview audiences] come to see it, they really love it, they really respond to it. "Which is not surprising, because that was Truman Capote's own experience in life. He would come in front of people and they would think, 'I don't think so.' And then pretty soon they're like, 'Hey, we love you. You're fascinating.'" Phoebe Flowers can be reached at pflowers@sun-sentinel.com.

FLOWERS, Phoebe. The Truman Show - Again: A year after Capote, Infamous revisits the same territory - with fresh results. South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL). McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. October 8, 2006, Copyright (c) 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

THE COMPLETE STORIES by Truman Capote, Reviewed by Dan Schneider

THE COMPLETE STORIES
by Truman Capote
(Penguin Books 2005) - Book Review
Reviewed by Dan Schneider

Of the twenty stories that comprise the surprisingly slim (for a writer of his renown) ‘The Complete Stories Of Truman Capote’, only two can be classified as great, or at least excellent, while only two others can be called good. The rest are not even passable, despite the occasional memorable image or well-crafted sentence, for the narratives are weak, trite, and transparent. Now, this ration of twenty and ten percent success in goodness and greatness is one that if it were sustained throughout published literature, would leave our time to be considered a Golden Age. However, since the only things I read of Capote’s, before this book, were the excellent ‘In Cold Blood’, and the two Christmas tales, ‘A Christmas Memory’ and ‘One Christmas’, this book’s tales were a profound disappointment. More so considering the very two Christmas tales were the only arguably great tales, and the only good tales were also holiday stories: ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’ and ‘Jug Of Silver’. One might argue, from this quartet, that Capote was the greatest occasional short story writer of all time. The rest of his work, however, ranged from passable to atrocious.
Part of the reason for this reality, however, is that the span of the tales range from 1943 to 1982, with twelve of the stories written in the 1940s - what might be called Capote’s apprentice period. Only ‘Jug Of Silver’ dates from that era. Reading those first dozen tales is to watch a great writer in utero, and growing. The first four stories are absolutely terrible- no plot, no point, no memorable scenes, characters, nor phrases. The first, 1943’s ‘The Walls Are Cold’, is a dull, trite tale about a young, flirtatious socialite, yet even this early the concerns and milieux are archetypically Capotean:
“The hostess straightened her trim, black dress and pursed her lips nervously. She was very young and small and perfect. Her face was pale and framed with sleek black hair, and her lipstick was a trifle too dark. It was after two and she was tired and wished they would all go, but it was no small task to rid yourself of some thirty people, particularly when the majority were full of her father’s scotch. The elevator man had been up twice to complain about the noise; so she gave him a highball, which is all he is after anyway. And now the sailors…oh, the hell with it”.
Even its trite end is predictably Capotean:
“She nodded and the hostess turned back down the corridor and went into her mother's room. She lay down on the velvet chaise lounge and stared at the Picasso abstract. She picked up a tiny lace pillow and pushed it against her face as hard as she could. She was going to sleep here tonight, here where the walls were pale rose and warm”.
Yet, even if one looks at the final eight tales, that span over thirty years, only three of them succeed, and do so when recalling true memories- or so Capote claimed. He even termed them his “nostalgic fictions”. It’s always been assumed that Capote turned to longer forms, novellas and novels, because his great financial success with ‘Other Voices’, ‘Other Rooms’, ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’, ‘The Grass Harp’, and ‘In Cold Blood’, made shorter forms less appealing. But, let’s give the writer his due in knowing his strengths and weaknesses. My guess is Capote knew he was not cut out to be a short fictionist, and was lucky that his financial success basically forestalled any real need to ‘prove’ himself in that genre.
Most of the tales deal with an assortment of prototypically Southern ‘white trash’ problems circa the 1920s through 1940s: religion, sexual crises, circus freaks, bullying elders, train rides to unknown parents, eccentrics galore, racism, social faux pas, romantic failures, poverty, schemes and scams, and silver jugs and diamond guitars. In many of the earlier tales the symbolism Capote uses is obvious, heavy-handed, and downright weak - an old mink stole that must be sold, a beautiful guitar that calms savage hearts, alluring but dangerous strangers, and, worst of all, the stereotype of the tormented artist wannabe, who endures the daily hell of preachers, accountants, gossips, and crooks.
For example, in ‘The Shape of Things’, from 1944, two women and a soldier on a train are threatened by another soldier heading home after being shellshocked. ‘A Mink Of One’s Own’, also published in 1944, has a woman visited by an old friend, back from Europe, after the Second World War. The friend gives a coat to the woman, and she pays four hundred dollars for it. Later, the woman realizes the coat is rotten. ‘Miriam’ is a 1945 tale that is steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, although set in New York City, about a little girl named Miriam who haunts an old widow of the same name. Is it the woman’s earlier self? Is it in her mind? Is she insane or haunted? It’s a typically Rod Serlingesque tale of the sort that dominates Capote’s 1940s oeuvre. ‘My Side Of The Matter’, also from 1945, has a Capotan narrator who is a prisoner of his wife and her family. ‘Preacher’s Legend’, also from 1945, follows a stupid old black man, who is hunted by two hunters he deludes himself into believing one of them is Jesus Christ. ‘A Tree of Night’, again from 1945, follows an innocent student, sitting on a train next to a slutty woman and her mute companion, who engages an old childhood fear. ‘The Bargain’, a highly trumpeted previously unpublished story from 1950, follows a suburban housewife’s ups and downs that parallels the earlier ‘A Mink Of One’s Own’, except that the recipient of the coat is a bit more savvy, and aware of the reality of the deal:
“Still trailing the clumsy coat, she went to a corner of the room where there was a desk and, writing with resentful jabs, made a check on her private account: she did not intend that her husband should know. More than most, Mrs. Chase despised the sense of loss; a misplaced key, a dropped coin, quickened her awareness of theft and the cheats of life”.
‘A Diamond Guitar’, another 1950 tale, is about a musical instrument that is the prized possession of a convict, and one of the few early tales that is not awful.
All of these tales have one, or at best, two dimensional characters that suffer and are put out of their misery, one way or the other, usually by simply accepting it - the cruelest form of spiritual death. These tales most remind me of a cross between Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, lacking the brocaded, inert nature of Welty’s tales, and not quite as grotesqued as O’Connor’s overrated stories. The few later tales are better, on the whole, but 1975’s ‘Mojave’ is another trite clunker about the estrangement of lovers:
“That is the reason I have to kill him. He could never have loved me, not if he could ignore my enduring such hell. He says, ‘Yes, I love you Jaime; but Angelita, this is different.’ There is no difference. You love or you do not. You destroy or you do not. But Carlos will never understand that. Nothing reaches him, nothing can- only a bullet or a razor.
She wanted to laugh, at the same time she couldn't because she realized he was serious and also because she well knew how true it was that certain persons could only be made to recognize the truth, be made to understand, by subjecting them to extreme punishment.
Nevertheless she did laugh, but in a manner that Jaime would not interpret as genuine laughter. It was something comparable to a sympathetic shrug. ‘You could never kill anyone, Jaime.’
He began to comb her hair; the tugs were not gentle, but she knew the anger implied was against himself, not her. ‘Shit!’ Then: ‘No. And that’s the reason for most suicides. Someone is torturing you. You want to kill them but you can’t. All that pain is because you love them, and you can’t kill them because you love them. So you kill yourself instead.’”
Ugh! Fortunately, his four holiday tales – ‘Jug Of Silver’, ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’, ‘One Christmas’, and most of all, the justly celebrated ‘A Christmas Memory’, represent a quantum leap upward. ‘A Christmas Memory’ is so chock full of great scenes and paragraphs that it seems to differ as fundamentally from the rest of Capote’s short fiction corpus as Robert Frost’s titanic poem ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’ does from the rest of his poetry, in both quality and tone. It starts with this great, rich and emotionally resonant, opening:
“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable- not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. ‘Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘it’s fruitcake weather!’
The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together- well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.”
Buddy and his cousin, who is likely the woman named Sook Faulk, from a few other of the tales, have good and bad, light and dark times, and the tale tells how these two eccentrics- a shy introverted boy and a weird old woman- help each other through life. Here is a typical description of their Southern survival:
“We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pine-apple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home”.
The tale details such elementally rich details as the old cousin’s superstitions and desire to have Buddy watch movies for her and tell her of them, to save the strain on her eyes, and then we get the sundering of the past, and the tale ends with this extremely powerful and moving coda on the death of Buddy’s old cousin:
“This is our last Christmas together.
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 1880s; 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.”
The two other Christmas tales are good, ‘Jug Of Silver’ and ‘One Christmas’ - which rivals its earlier, and more famous, Christmas predecessor, with an ending just as powerful, albeit less melancholy. That tale follows the same young boy alone on a trip to New Orleans to visit his absentee father, and his later recollections about what he missed out on during that trip - both then, and in the intervening time. ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’ is another very good story that follows Buddy, as he and Sook plan for a Great Depression era Thanksgiving. Sook invites an even poorer family to their home for supper, thinking a young boy, Odd Henderson, will make a good pal for Buddy. But, Odd has bullied Buddy at school and Buddy cannot stand him. He also feels jealousy over Sook’s fussing over Odd’s upcoming visit. When Odd comes he steals a brooch of Sook’s and Buddy finks on him. Sook covers for Odd and explains that Buddy’s intent to hurt Odd was worse than Odd’s thievery borne of poverty. Years go by and Sook’s kindness seems to have been a turning point in Odd’s life, yet the tale is not moralistic, and succeeds with a sharp end.
Capote died at the age of 59, in 1984, a withered shell who looked a good quarter century older - filled with hatred and spite, addicted to drugs and alcohol, yet somehow won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize for ‘Shut A Final Door’, one of his early pieces of dreck about a plagiarist. Yet, it is clear from this collection that the man simply was not adept with the form, save for a few pieces that could more easily be termed memoirs. The rest of the stories feature ill-formed characters that often veer into caricature, hazy premises and awfully contrived endings that ring too hollowly of artifice, and read like Southern Gothic lit lite. Fortunately, the short story form was merely a practice field for the too few greater works Capote would produce. Would that other writers’ failures bore such bounty in other fields, Elysian or made of pulp.

© Dan Schneider (Reproduced with permission)
http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/trumancapotethecompletestories.html

CAPOTE (2005) Film review

CAPOTE (2005) Film review
Dir: Bennett Miller
Reviewed by: Marc Goldin

By the time I caught up with Truman Capote, he was more the drunken buffoon making the rounds of tv talk shows than the serious brilliant writer he was supposed to have been. He had written a couple of novels, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’, ‘The Grass Harp’ and ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (1958), the latter having been turned into a movie which was a bit on the light side.
When his major work, ‘In Cold Blood’ hit the street, it made a huge impact on the literary world, as well as the rest of the reading public, and turned it on its ear. Billed as a non-fiction novel, it challenged the current concept of popular journalism and created a new genre of journalistic writing that read like fiction. It revolved around the very real grisly and brutal murder of the Clutter family in the remote small Kansas town of Holcomb in November of 1959.
His approach was a sort of fictional journalism – he had gone to the town and interviewed people who knew the murdered family and also became friendly with Alvin Dewey, the FBI agent in charge of hunting down the escaped and unknown killers. Two men, Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, were eventually caught and confessed. Capote connected with the two, more so with Smith, who somehow produced a strong response in Capote and he focused his interviewing and questioning on him, developing a bizarre and, some would say, manipulative relationship with the killer.
This is what the film chooses to examine – not the murders themselves, handled well in the film of the book, ‘In Cold Blood’ – 1967, but the writing of it. It deals with Capote and his relationships with some of the main characters in Holcomb, with his relationship to the two killers, specifically Smith, with his mixed fascination/ambivalence about the whole writing project and most of all, the exploitation that manifested itself during this time.
The film opens in New York, at one of the many hip literary parties that Capote frequently found himself attending, with all the crisp banter that usually accompanied these events, but shifts quickly to the cold flat great plains of the Midwest, as Capote hears of the murders and hightails it out to Holcomb with his close friend, the writer Harper Lee (‘To Kill a Mockingbird’). You see Capote’s first impressions of Holcomb in his and Lee’s shared sense of irony in their initial encounters with the townsfolk. After they settle in, there is a subtle shift as Capote and Lee become friendly with the people there and begin to develop the story. Then the killers are apprehended and a new angle figures in as Capote becomes intrigued with Smith and the two begin what appears to be a mutual manipulation, with Capote teasing personal details out of Smith to bolster the story while Smith plays the tragic figure who admits his guilt but manages to evoke a sense of sympathy for his hard life.
This stretches on for some time as Capote personally seeks legal aid for the two men following their initial conviction and sentencing. There is never a thought of exoneration, for there is no doubt about the men’s guilt, but as Capote gets more involved with Smith, he tries to have the death sentence appealed and changed to life. Here, the film begins focus sharply on Capote’s strange involvement in this event as it bounces back and forth between Kansas, New York and Europe. Capote carries on with his life while still trying to write the book, as the condemned men languish on death row. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, the side-by-side scenes of New York, Holcomb and the jail cell conversations. We see Capote’s self-induced impatience with how long the book is taking – self-induced because he is responsible for the legal appeals that are dragging things out. This is where it all comes to a sort of impasse – he feels that he can’t finish his book until there is some resolution, i.e., the men’s execution, but he continues to contribute to this particular sense of limbo.
Capote is beautifully played by the quirky, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who summons the spirit of Truman Capote – drifting back and forth between Capote’s glibness and dripping sarcasm, and his moments of real anguish. Catherine Keener (‘Being John Malkovich’) does a fine job as Capote’s close pal and confidante, Harper Lee. Perry Edward Smith, the killer who engaged with Capote, is played in an understated and sympathetic way by Clifton Collins Jr. The whole film is well cast and the acting is strong all the way through.
Finally, who can judge the exploitation and manipulation? It was apparent that Capote was manipulating Perry Smith for his own gain in writing his sensationalist piece but perhaps Smith was manipulating him as well. When Capote visited Smith’s sister, she commented about Perry that while he might play the pitiful alienated loner, he would also ‘kill you as soon as look at you’. Capote obviously felt some sort of homoerotic attraction to Smith but in the book, there were hints that Smith had latent impulses himself. There’s no getting around that there had been some strange but real bond between the two. Also, Capote had arranged for further legal help for Hickock and Smith and kept them alive through appeals and stays of execution for some years after. The two men were, by their own admission, guilty of committing this murder and no matter how sophisticated the legal intervention, would ultimately be executed, so prolonging the inevitable may have just been an unintentional cruel tease.
It’s all so complicated, as this film beautifully points out – Capote seemed to have entered into a sort of Faustian bargain, and after ‘In Cold Blood’ confirmed his literary stature, he never really finished another book and slowly drank himself to death over the following years. This film presents the dilemma of exploitation versus real groundbreaking gain. A new style of writing was developed that would certainly influence and inform future writers. Capote had an opportunity to do something special and achieved it through questionable means but ultimately traded himself for it – a heavy price indeed.

© Marc Goldin (Reproduced with permission)
http://www.laurahird.com/

The Muses Are Heard, by Truman Capote

The Muses Are Heard, by Truman Capote

The Muses Are Heard is an early journalistic work of Truman Capote. Originally published in The New Yorker, it is a narrative account of the cultural mission by The Everyman's Opera to the U.S.S.R. in the mid-1950s.
Capote was sent to accompany the Opera as it staged a production of Porgy and Bess. First published in two parts, it was later released as a short non-fiction book. The book's title comes from a speech given by one of the Soviet cultural ministry staff, who declared, “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent. When the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”
Narrative
The book opens with the cast, directors, support personnel and Mrs. Ira Gershwin waiting in West Berlin for their visas to be returned by the Russian Embassy. They are briefed by U.S. Embassy Staff, and among other questions, ask if they will be under surveillance, presumably by the K.G.B., during their visit. They also consider political issues and how to answer sensitive questions, especially those about the “Negro situation” - also whether it is safe to drink the water: the company includes several children. Capote, who is present in the narrative, returns to his hotel room to find a brown paper parcel of anti-Communist pamphlets.
After a train ride of several days (the first two without a dining car), the cast and crew arrive in Leningrad a few days before Christmas and are dispatched to a hotel, the Astoria, which boasts, as Capote writes, “a trio of restaurants, each leading into the other, cavernous affairs cheerful as airplane hangars.” The guest rooms are small, over-heated, and over-furnished with “a miasma of romantic marble statuary.” Capote claims that these rooms have been assigned according to each cast member's payroll status. According to Bolshevik logic, claims Capote, the less you make, the better the accommodations.
Predictably, the production of Porgy and Bess runs into a few snags. Programs are not printed in time for Opening Night. After the show, the directors cannot quite determine the Russian audience's response, beyond their appreciation for certain musical numbers and their disapproval of the opera's sexual themes.
Capote's treatment
It was hoped that Capote would paint the whole enterprise with a rosy brush, but instead, he highlights the culture shock, juxtapositions and humor wherever possible. He unapologetically describes the tawdry stores in Leningrad and denizens of the local working class bar. In true Capote fashion, he chooses the exact detail to set the scene: a cast member's jive talk, the crunchy pillow in the train berth smelling of hay, meals of yogurt and raspberry soda, when some had hoped for caviar, the wardrobe lady updating the only available American flag with three new stars.
While the cultural differences are so obvious, Capote does manage to show the East and West coming together at various times. The cast and crew are truly touched when the cultural ministry sets up a Christmas tree in the hotel lobby. The atmosphere warms up even more when the cast members commandeer a restaurant band's instruments and play a jumping “Sunny Side of the Street". Beyond the music, the two sides have one more thing in common; as a Norwegian businessman observes, they truly yearn for the love and approval of the rest of the world.
Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke states that The Muses are Heard was considered 'mischievous' when it appeared in print; for example, Capote puts into the mouth of another person (Priscilla Johnson) his own opinion of the troupe ('They're such a second-rate company'); his cameos of some of the cast, the entourage, and the Russian Ministry Staff verge on the grotesque. Clarke also reveals that several of the incidents in the story, including the encounter with the Norwegian businessmen, were entirely invented by Capote. This may have been a narrative device used by Capote to intrude his own opinions. John Steinbeck states that he used this 'third party' method in the journalism collected in his Once There Was A War.
Sources
• Capote, Truman. The Muses Are Heard. New York: Random House, 1956.
• Clarke, Gerald. "Capote: A Biography". New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988.

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS, BY TRUMAN CAPOTE

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS, BY TRUMAN CAPOTE.
Books of The Times
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

In his preface to "Music for Chameleons," a collection of his recent shorter writings, Truman Capote takes an unusual gamble. Writing about the difficulties of his craft, he reviews his own career and describes an artistic crisis he experienced while working on his long-awaited and much-publicized "nonfiction novel," "Answered Prayers."
The crisis began with his feeling that his writing was too dense for the effects he was achieving. This prompted him to re-read everything he had ever written, which, in turn led him to the alarming conclusion that for all he had learned during his long and varied career, he had never written with the full powers at his command, never combined "within a single form" all he knew "about every other form of writing."
So he began to rewrite "Answered Prayers" in what was for him a wholly new style. At first, he reports, "I" "felt like a child with a box of crayons." But eventually "I" "found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I know about writing. Later, using a modified version, I wrote a nonfiction short novel HANDCARVED COFFINS and a number of short stories. The result is the present volume: MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS."
Considerable Expectations
Now naturally enough this preface creates considerable expectations in the mind of the reader. So one is bound to feel initial disappointment when one discovers, first of all, that Mr. Capote's principal stylistic innovation consists of nothing more than setting himself center stage and reconstructing, "in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people"; and, second of all, that the result of this apparently modest experiment--that is, the contents of "Music for Chameleons"--does not immediately strike one as Mr. Capote writing with the full powers at his command.
After all, while some of the pieces here are very good indeed, particularly the title story, about an aristocratic Martinique lady who demonstrates to Mr. Capote that chameleons are attracted to music, or "Mojave," about the tenuousness of various loving relationships, or "Hello, Stranger," about a solid citizen's slipping into a desperate middle-aged crisis; others of the pieces suffer from a certain overcontrivance. In "A Lamp in the Window," a sweet little old lady who offers Mr. Capote the shelter of her home on a cold night turns out to have a freezer in her kitchen in which she has preserved the bodies of all the pet cats who have ever died in her possession.
In "Mr. Jones," the crippled blind man who once lived next to the author in a Brooklyn rooming house and entertained a steady stream of visitors, suddenly disappears mysteriously. Ten years later, Mr. Capote spots him, hale and hearty, riding in a Moscow subway car. Even the centerpiece of the collection, "Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime," seems ever so slightly tainted by a resolution that depends on the too convenient intrusion of Mr. Capote's fantasies about the suspected killer. In short, while nearly all of the collection displays the prose style, "clear as a country creek," that Mr. Capote claims to have striven for, it seems something less than the major innovation he has announced in his preface.
All the same, a little reflection makes one realize why these pieces seem so important to Mr. Capote. By setting himself "center stage" for the first time in his career, he has succeeded in projecting all the facets of his remarkable and varied personality. By telling such seemingly far- fetched stories as "A Lamp in the Window" and "Mr. Jones," he has indulged the side of himself that delights in making up whoppers. By making the resolution of "Handcarved Coffins" dependent on his fantasies, he is able to exploit his fascination with, and uncanny perception of, the criminal mentality--a talent that is further evinced in a remarkable interview, called "Then It All Came Down," which he conducts with a psychopathic killer distantly related to the Charles Manson family.
Talent for Friendship
Both "A Day's Work," in which Mr. Capote accompanies his cleaning lady on a day of her rounds, and "A Beautiful Child," in which he attends a funeral with Marilyn Monroe, show us something of the author's unusual talent for friendship with both the famous and the humble. In "Derringdo," about an escapade in which he disguised himself as a member of Pearl Bailey's chorus-boy entourage in order to escape a California subpoena to testify against a killer who had spoken to him in confidence, Mr. Capote juxtaposes the campy side of himself and the tough moral fiber.
In short, the pieces in "Music for Chameleons" have freed him to write about himself--even to confess, without a trace of self-pity or bravado, the agony he felt as a child over his secret desire "to be a girl." Yet these pieces can hardly be called an egotistical celebration of his personality. He does what he does with art. That art is a sort of music. We gather to listen and to blend ourselves into the composer's background. Just like the chameleons.

LEHMANN-HAUPT, CHRISTOPHER. Music for Chameleons, by Truman Capote. Books of The Times, New York Times (August 5, 1980).

Miriam (short story), by Truman Capote

Miriam (short story), by Truman Capote

Miriam is a short story written by Truman Capote. It was originally published in 1945 in Mademoiselle and reprinted in 1982 and was later included to The Selected Writings of Truman Capote. Miriam is one of Capote's first published short stories and he was awarded the O. Henry Award for the short story.
Miriam is about a 61-year-old widow named Mrs. H. T. Miller who wants to spend the remaining years of her life alone in her apartment on Park Avenue after her husband H. T. Miller died. She is very lonely, she has no friends to speak of and does not keep in touch with any of her relatives. One day while she is going into a movie theater, she meets this young but intelligent girl named Miriam. Miriam asks Mrs. Miller to buy her a movie ticket because the usher would not let her in. She gives Mrs. Miller twenty five cents and she buys the girl a ticket. They say goodbye as Mrs. Miller goes in search of a seat. When the movie ends, Mrs. Miller returns home. The following week, there is a knock on Mrs. Miller's door. When she answers it, she finds out it is Miriam, the girl she met at the movie theater. Mrs. Miller askes Miriam to go home but Miriam refuses and asks Mrs. Miller to make her a sandwich. After Miriam agrees to leave if given the sandwich, she goes into Mrs. Millers bedroom and finds a cameo brooch that was given to Mrs. Miller by her deceased husband. She asks Mrs. Miller if she can have it, and Mrs. Miller, despite her desire to stop her from taking it, relents in helplessness. Miriam then goes back to the couch and finishes her sandwich. Before leaving, Miriam asks Mrs. Miller for a kiss goodnight, but Mrs. Miller refuses. Miriam walks over to a nearby vase and smashes it on the floor and steps on the bouquet, then leaves. The next morning, Mrs. Miller leaves her apartment and spends the next day shopping at various stores around New York City. Upon arriving home, Miriam returns and proceeds to ring the doorbell. Mrs. Miller refuses to open the door. After the doorbell ringing ended, Mrs. Miller went to her door to see if she left. Miriam did not leave and rushed inside the house before Mrs. Miller could close the door. Miriam perches upon the couch and tells Mrs. Miller to bring in the large box she brought with her. Out of curiosity, she does. While commenting on the cherries, almond cakes, and white flowers that Mrs. Miller bought while she was shopping, Miriam tells Mrs. Miller to open the box. All she finds are clothes and a second doll similar to the one Miriam was holding. Miriam then tells Mrs. Miller that she is going to live with her. A frightened Mrs. Miller goes to the apartment downstairs where a young couple lives. Mrs. Miller tells them that a young girl keeps on appearing and won't leave her alone. She convinces the man living there to check upstairs while his wife comforts Mrs. Miller. The man returns downstairs and says that there is no girl upstairs. Mrs. Miller asks if there was a large box, and the man says that there wasn't. Mrs. Miller goes back upstairs and notices that no one is there. Scared more than ever at the startling emptiness of the house, she slumps onto the couch with no energy left. She closes her eyes and calms down, remembering that she is Mrs. H. T. Miller, the woman who lives alone and does everything for herself. She then becomes aware of another sound, the sound of a silk dress ruffling. She stiffens and fearfully opens her eyes to see Miriam staring at her. Miriam then says "Hello"

CAPOTE, Truman. Miriam, in: The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. New York: Vintage International. 2004: 37-50.
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