Capote's essays show his talent for bringing his subjects to life By Kevin O'Kelly

Capote's essays show his talent for bringing his subjects to life By Kevin O'Kelly    

    After the movies "Capote" and "Infamous," most of us are likely to think of Truman Capote as a back-stabbing user, a man who ruthlessly mined the people he knew for good copy. Those with longer memories will recall the outrage provoked by the publication of "La Côte Basque," in which he betrayed the secrets of his closest friends. The use Capote made of two of his most intense compulsions - the insinuation of himself into other people's lives, and the drive to turn so much of what he knew and experienced into writing - was at times ethically dubious. But artistically it was indispensable, and "Portraits and Observations" contains some of the finest products of that combination.

     Organized chronologically, the collection begins with sketches of life in New Orleans and New York that predate his first novel and ends with a reminiscence of Willa Cather written the day before his death. And in the range of places he visited and the people he knew, "Portraits" is an invaluable window into the irretrievable. Capote knew New Orleans before Katrina, and Haiti before Duvalier; he lived gay life before AIDS. He moved about in North America and Europe at a time when air travel was slower, more arduous, and also more relaxed in ways unimaginable post-9/11. In one piece he recalls how he was smuggled past security (and local detectives) in the Los Angeles airport to avoid being subpoenaed by the San Diego sheriff's office. And the people Capote knew, or at least profiled, are a who's who of 20th-century culture: The list includes Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Bowles, and Tennessee Williams.

     What's remarkable about the best of Capote's celebrity sketches is that he actually succeeded at what so many other writers fail to do: replacing icons with personalities. His profile of the 32-year-old Marlon Brando, "The Duke in His Domain," shows us a man as intellectually confused and emotionally floundering as a college freshman. In "A Beautiful Child," we see Marilyn Monroe as an adolescent trapped in a woman's body and a celebrity's life, an insecure girl worried her hands are too fat.

     But "Portraits and Observations" is much more than a collection of period pieces and celebrity profiles. For all his snobbery, for all his intense yearning to be at the center of high society, Capote was capable (at least as a writer) of finding almost anyone interesting. "Handcarved Coffins," a terrifying account of a series of unsolved murders, is also a portrait of Jake Pepper, an obsessive and brilliant FBI agent. In "A Lamp in a Window," Capote recalls the eccentric widow who took him in when he was stranded in the middle of nowhere one icy winter night. In "A Day's Work" he follows his semiliterate pot-smoking cleaning woman through the apartments (and lives) of the other people she works for. Each one of these pieces provides a fully realized portrait: Pepper, the widow, and the cleaning woman couldn't be more vividly present if they were captured on film.

     But the person we get the fullest sense of in this collection is Capote himself. The charm that leads others to make endless confidences, the vanity that prods him to brag about sexual conquests that probably never happened, the self-absorption that causes him to miss a friend's wedding or his grandmother's funeral - it's all there. But above all, in the range of places visited, people known, we get a sense of a man who was greedy for life, for friends, for experiences in almost unmanageable quantities, and still possessed the furious energy necessary to get so much of it down on paper. Even without his problems with drugs or drink, it's easy to believe Capote still would have died before he was 60. These pages represent life and work pursued at a pace that made some kind of burnout inevitable.

Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote
Random House, 518 p.p., $28.95

Kevin O'Kelly is a regular reviewer for the Globe.

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