MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS, BY TRUMAN CAPOTE.

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS, BY TRUMAN CAPOTE.

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Books of The Times

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).

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