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