Criticism, Trudy Ring with Capote
By Trudy Ring
Trudy Ring is a frequent writer, editor, and
reporter on literary subjects.
In the following essay, she gives an overview
of Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” concentrating on the portrayal of the
character of Buddy’s cousin.
“Over the years, some critics have pronounced ‘A
Christmas Memory’ overly sentimental, but most of them, along with the reading
public, have found it genuinely moving.”
Truman Capote often drew on his Southern childhood in
finding material for his fiction. He also frequently focused his stories on
unconventional, strangely appealing women. “A Christmas Memory” is possibly the
best example of a Capote story that exhibits both of these features. Capote
described it as his favorite among his stories, and it showed his writing
shifting from a preoccupation with the darker aspects of life to warmer and
more sentimental subject matter. (He would return to darker subjects later,
with In Cold Blood, his account of the murder of a family in rural
Kansas.) Capote said he liked “A Christmas Memory” because of the truth in it,
but the story is actually an idealized and embellished portrait of his
childhood and of his elderly cousin, Sook, who provided much of the warmth and
companionship he knew as a youngster.
Capote’s parents were divorced when he was four years
old, and his mother placed him with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, while
she went to New York City to look for a job. Young Truman lived most of the
time with four cousins, all much older than he. The one with whom he formed the
closest relationship was Nanny Rumbley Faulk, nicknamed Sook. She was reclusive
and many people considered her peculiar. Relatives later pointed out after
characterizations of her began showing up in Capote’s work, however, that she
was more intelligent and less naive than she appeared. At any rate, she was
able to relate to Truman almost as if they were both children. Later, like
Buddy in “A
Christmas Memory,” Truman was sent away to boarding
school. Unlike his fictional counterpart, he went through an emotional break
with his cousin. Capote’s family members, including Sook, were unable to accept
his homosexuality or deal with his alcoholism and drug abuse.
Capote modeled several of his characters on Sook. In
addition to the kindly and eccentric woman of “A Christmas Memory,” she is
represented in Dolly Talbo in his novel The Grass Harp. Some other
Capote heroines are based less directly on Sook, but are closely related to
her. One of them is the character who is perhaps Capote’s most famous creation,
Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. William L. Nance, a literary
scholar who has written extensively about Capote, referred to Holly as “a
dreamer-heroine whose prototype is the elderly friend of ’A Christmas Memory.”’
Nance also noted that these characters are evidence of Capote’s nonsexual yet
strong attachment to women, especially women who do not quite fit into
mainstream society.
The elderly woman of “A Christmas Memory” certainly is
out of the mainstream. Buddy says that his cousin, although in her sixties, “is
still a child.” She is not stupid, but she does not live her life according to
an adult idea of what is sensible or practical. She has a sense of fun that
appeals to the boy. Buddy is tolerant of his cousin’s eccentricities, which
Capote describes in detail and with affection. Her appearance, described in the
story’s second paragraph, marks her as an unorthodox person. She wears tennis
shoes and a baggy sweater with a lightweight calico dress; her “remarkable”
face is craggy yet delicate. Later, the narrator, the boy grown up, relates
more facts about her. “She has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than
five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny
papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie
on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry,” Capote writes. Then he tells us the
things she does: “tame hummingbirds . . . tell ghost stories . . . so tingling
they chill you in July, talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the
prettiest japonicas [a flowering shrub] in town, know the recipe for every sort
of old-time Indian cure.” The story provides fewer details about the little
boy, but it is obvious he is a precocious child, something that inspires admiration
in his cousin. She loves to have Buddy tell her the stories of the movies he
sees; she will never go to a movie because she wants to save her vision for
when she sees God.
Buddy and his cousin create a happy world of their
own. They “are not, on the whole, too much aware” of the other relatives who
live with them; instead, they find joy in each other’s company. Incidents
throughout the story underline their attachment to each other and their
distance from the rest of their family. Because Buddy and his cousin have
little money, most of their pleasures are improvised, from gathering pecans
left on the ground after the harvest to making their own Christmas gifts and
ornaments. They are enthusiastic about their various moneymaking schemes, from
entering contests advertised on the radio to setting up their homemade museum,
even though these schemes are more often failures than successes. They enjoy
interacting with people outside of the world of their conventional relatives
and neighbors — such as the bootlegger Haha Jones or the strangers and
near-strangers to whom they send their Christmas fruitcakes. The old woman lets
Buddy drink whiskey, which gets her in trouble with the rest of the family. And
while the other family members give him disappointingly practical Christmas
gifts, she gives him a kite. That’s what he gives her, too, in an exchange of
gifts that, as critic Stanley Edgar Hyman once pointed out, is as corny and as
emotionally effective as the exchange in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”
Over the years, some critics have pronounced “A
Christmas Memory” overly sentimental, but most of them, along with the reading
public, have found it genuinely moving. It is particularly heartrending when
Capote moves from the idyllic Christmas Day that Buddy and his cousin spend
flying their kites to Buddy’s separation from his friend — a separation created
first by distance when Buddy goes away to school, then by the old woman’s
death. It is indicative of their bond that Buddy feels her death before he is
told of it. In life, Capote’s bond with Sook was so strong, and so painful to
break off, that he was driven to recreate it along with similar relationships
in his fiction for many years afterward. “A Christmas Memory,” according to
Nance, “has a unique importance” among Capote’s works because it is so much a
model for his later stories, often centering on unusual women who live in a
world of their own and who inspire love that has little to do with sex. “The
pastness of the experience is also essential; Capote’s is a fiction of
nostalgia,” Nance observed. ” ’A Christmas Memory’ is one of his best and most
satisfying works because it places the feelings he can dramatize most
powerfully in the setting which is best suited to them.”
Source: Trudy
Ring, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.
Compare
& Contrast
- 1930s: Schools and
most other public facilities across the South are segregated by race.
1956: The University of Alabama expels its first black student in defiance of a federal court order; Southern congressmen issue a manifesto pledging to use “all lawful means” to defy desegregation.
Today: Schools and public facilities are open to all regardless of race, but economic inequality is still seen by some as a barrier to full integration. - 1930s: The first
“talkie” was produced in 1928; a few years later all films have sound.
Elaborately staged musicals become one of the movie industry’s most
popular genres.
1956: As a result of the country’s rising prosperity following World War II, television is introduced to many homes, providing cheap, nearly endless entertainment. Movie attendance falls by millions, and many theaters close. The industry fights back by developing thousands of drive-in movie theaters.
Today: New forms of mass media include cable television and the Internet. - 1930s: At the
height of the Depression unemployment is nearly 25%. President Franklin
Roosevelt attempts to stimulate economic growth through his New Deal
programs.
1956: Post-war prosperity makes the United States a dominant world power. President Eisenhower warns of the “military-industrial complex” at the heart of the country’s economy, but government continues to expand.
1990s: Both Democrats and Republicans proclaim an end to the era of big government, but true economic and social reforms are slow to impact people’s lives. - 1930s: Fascist
dictatorships and militant nationalists gain power in Europe as the Great
Depression throws countries into economic and social turmoil.
1956: The fear of communism fuels the Cold War. The arms race escalates, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev tells the U.S. government, “History is on our side. We will bury you!”
1990s: Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been replaced by democratic-style governments. China, the last significant communist power, enacts many capitalist reforms.
What Do I Read Next?
- “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” a 1968 story also by Capote, is a companion piece to “A Christmas Memory” and recounts further adventures of Buddy and his friend Sook, as well as Buddy’s run-in with Odd Henderson, the town bully.
- Capote’s novel The Grass Harp (1951) tells the story of a band of social outcasts, including a young boy and his older female relative, who disrupt their complacent community when they retreat to the woods and begin living in a treehouse.
- Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1936) is the story of Cousin Lyman, a traveling hunchback dwarf who brings excitement to a lonely Southern town when Miss Amelia falls in love with him and follows his suggestion to open a cafe.
- Black Boy is Richard Wright’s 1941 autobiographical novel, which vividly describes his harsh, hardscrabble boyhood and youth in rural Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. The book is a coming-of-age story that details how Wright worked to realize his dream of being a writer despite the constraints placed upon him by a racist society.
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is a nonfiction chronicle of the daily lives of Depression-era tenant farmers in rural Alabama with black-and-white photographs by Walker Evans and accompanying text by James Agee.
- Paper Moon, is a novel by Joe David Brown about a Depression-era traveling Bible salesman and the hassles he experiences when he is saddled with caring for his precocious daughter. Also filmed in 1973 under the same title; directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Ryan and Tatum O’Neal.
- John Dufresne’s 1994 novel Louisiana Power and Light is a comical send-up of the Southern Gothic tradition and revolves around the adventures of Moon Pie Fontana, a physically disabled child-star radio evangelist, and his family down in the Delta.
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