REVISITING CAPOTE by Richard Dyer

REVISITING CAPOTE

[THIRD Edition]

Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.

Author:	Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

     It's unclear how much of the projected 800-page novel [Truman Capote] actually wrote; at various times in interviews, he announced it was two-thirds done, or "almost" ready, or even in the hands of his publishers. After his death, his executors found no trace of the manuscript -- or of the notebooks, journals, diaries and correspondence that Capote said were his raw materials. Various explanations have been suggested. Perhaps a companion kidnapped the manuscript; perhaps it rests in a locker in the Los Angeles Greyhound depot. The novelist Jack Dunphy, Capote's closest friend, believes Capote wrote no more than he published; his editor at Random House, Joseph M. Fox, suggests that Capote may have written a few additional chapters but deliberately destroyed them.

     It is interesting and dismaying to compare passages from "Answered Prayers" with passages describing the same people and incidents in Capote's other writing (now collected in "A Capote Reader," which is being published simultaneously with "Answered Prayers"). In 1970, he wrote of his visit to Colette in "The White Rose," which, among other things, seems to be an exercise in trying to write in the style of Colette; in "Answered Prayers," everything has coarsened, and not just because P. B. Jones is supposed to be a coarser observer. "She received me in her bedroom. I was astonished. Because she looked precisely as Colette ought to have looked. And that was astonishing indeed. Reddish, frizzly, rather African-looking hair; slanting, alley-cat eyes rimmed with kohl; a finely made face flexible as water. . . rouged cheeks. . . lips thin and tense as wire but painted a really brazen hussy scarlet. . . A perfume -- some combination of roses and oranges and limes and musk -- hovered in the air like a mist, a haze," Capote wrote in "The White Rose."

     This emerges in "Answered Prayers" as, "It's true that Colette received me in her bedroom -- seated in a golden bed a la Louis Quatorze at his morning levee; but otherwise she seemed as indisposed as a painted Watusi leading a tribal dance. Her maquillage was equal to that chore: slanted eyes, luminescent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy blush, a kinky spray. The room smelled of her perfume (at some point I asked what it was, and Colette said, 'Jicky. The Empress Eugenie alway wore it. I like it because it's an old-fashioned scent with an elegant history, and because it's witty without being coarse -- like the better conversationalists.   Proust wore it. Or so Cocteau tells me. But then he is not too reliable') of perfume and bowls of fruit and a June breeze moving voile curtains."

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