Late Capote by Julian Barnes
- Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote
Hamish Hamilton, 262 pp, £7.95, February 1981, ISBN 0 241 10541 2
Start at the back: with the
photograph. Traditionally, author’s vanity and publisher’s lethargy combine to
make a writer look much younger than he is. Truman Capote’s portrait does the
opposite, and for a particular reason. Study recent press photographs of Mr
Capote, or those published last year in Andy Warhol’s Exposures, and
what do you see? A plump, jowly figure in the flush of vital middle age,
capering into Studio 54 on the languid arm of a heavily beringed dress
designer: a man, it appears, of active sensuality verging on self-indulgence.
Now compare the Irving Penn photograph for the back jacket of Music for
Chameleons. Emaciated fingers delicately support a frail skull: without
their help, you feel, the head might simply snap off. One hand, indeed,
supplies the vertical hold, the other the horizontal. The skin looks as if it
might tear if grazed by a butterfly’s wing. The eyes stare hauntedly out. It
cannot be a living author, let alone a man of 55. It reminds one most of those
perfectly-preserved bog people dug up in Scandinavia and described by P.V.Glob.
In other words – or rather, in words – Mr Capote is announcing his Late Period.
The career began in
photographs, too. When Other Voices, Other Rooms was published, ‘the
press seized upon an infant prodigy,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan, ‘photographing him
crouched behind bushes, lurking in the depths of chairs, or rolling on rugs,
always with a lock of fair hair obscuring one wicked eye.’ The cover picture to
that first novel was itself notorious: the author, in check waistcoat and
bow-tie, lolled knowingly on a chaise longue, angelically diabolical. Shortly
afterwards Capote himself spotted two Philadelphia matrons gazing at a pyramid
display of his book in a Fifth Avenue shop window. The elder woman adjusted her
spectacles, motioned towards the photograph, and commented beadily: ‘Daisy, if
that’s a child – he’s dangerous.’ And not just to others, as it
transpired.
For the past 35 years,
Capote hasn’t merely written: he has presented his career. To begin with, there
was the matter of Streckfus Persons becoming Truman Capote. Subsequently, the
writer has always been at hand to guide us through his development: the
Southern Gothic phase; the New York phase; the confidant-to-criminals phase;
and now, the Late Period. These latter two phases have involved not just
rousing pre-publicity but also the trumpeting of a new aesthetic. In Cold
Blood, an assiduous and at times brilliant work, came packaged as the first
‘non-fiction novel’, as if Dreiser and Stendhal had never existed. And one
might add that it wasn’t altogether a new mode even for Capote himself. The
writer’s first published work, which appeared in the Mobile Press Register
when he was 10, was a prize-winning short story, ‘Old Mr Busybody’. Only one
portion of the work ever came out, because ‘somebody suddenly realised that I
was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second instalment never
appeared.’
Since In Cold Blood
(1966), Capote has published nothing but reprinted items. For the past few
years there has been the constant tease of Answered Prayers – that
promised concoction which will be half Proust, half Nigel Dempster – but in the
meantime a new aesthetic was getting overdue. The Preface to Music for
Chameleons, reprinted from Vogue, provides it. It opens with some
routine bravado – ‘Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are
willing to bite the bullet and walk the plank, have a lot in common with
another breed of lonely men – the guys who make a living shooting pool and
dealing cards’ – then turns to discuss ‘my fourth, and what I expect will be my
final, cycle’. This involves, we are told, radical shifts of stance and voice,
evolved during work on Answered Prayers. A new outlook has been provoked
by ‘my understanding of the difference between what is true and what is really
true’, while an all-encompassing technical problem has finally been faced down:
‘How can a writer successfully combine within a single form ... all he knows about
every other form of writing ... film scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the
short story, novellas, the novel. A writer ought to have all his colours, all
his abilities available on the same palette for mingling ... But how?’ Assuming
the advisibility (and the novelty) of this mixed-media quest, what is its key?
Rather surprisingly, it lies in the welcoming into the text of the
bullet-biting, plank-walking, pool-shooting writer himself: ‘I set myself
centre stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace
conversations with everyday people: the superintendant of my building, the
masseur at the gym ... After writing several hundreds of pages of this
simple-minded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a
framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing.’ A
grand claim: in fact, you can’t get claimier than that.
Music for
Chameleons divides into three parts, according to contents and to its fiction-fact
mix. It begins with six leisurely, untaxing short stories, with Capote
varyingly active as animator or agent. Then comes the most substantial piece,
‘Handcarved Coffins: a non-fiction account of an American crime’. Finally,
there are seven ‘Conversational Portraits’, interviews and rambles with friends
and celebrities: these are vivid, funny pieces of journalism, especially one in
which a quickly fatigued Capote follows his pot-smoking charwoman on her
rounds, rootling inquisitively in her clients’ apartments and getting squawked
at by a Jewish parrot. This section ends with the affable grilling of Capote’s
favourite friend and celebrity – himself (the piece, commissioned for Andy
Warhol’s Interview magazine, effortlessly attains the paper’s required
tone of frangible self-regard).
The Capote ear remains as
responsive as ever to a spectrum of diction, from psychopathic killer to
Martinique aristocrat; there are some wry digressions, and some interesting
information. But the pieces remain formally irritating. Take the second story,
‘Mr Jones’. Capote once roomed (or says he did) in a brownstone in Brooklyn;
next door lodged a blind cripple, Mr Jones, to whom Capote never spoke, and who
apparently lived off giving people advice. After a few months, the writer moved
out; returning later to collect some belongings, he was told that Mr Jones had
disappeared. How? Whither? No one knew. Ten years pass, Capote is on the subway
in Moscow when he spots Mr Jones, who isn’t blind, and has sound legs, sitting
opposite him. But before he can speak the man gets off.
The story hasn’t lost much
in abbreviation, being only two pages long to begin with. Given Capote’s new
aesthetic, there are three possibilities. If the story is entirely true, it is
quite interesting, surely worth $25 of the Reader’s Digest’s money for
their ‘My Strangest Experience’ column. If it is invented, then it still has a
quizzing echo, but is far too thin. If it is a mixture – say, if Capote added
the Moscow envoi to an otherwise true incident – it still doesn’t go far
enough. It’s not, especially, that one wants to be told the why of the
events (the answer, presumably, will be a palms-upturned ‘Search me; these
things happen’): the problem is simpler – there isn’t enough matter there to
fend off the mildest critical So What.
The non-fiction novel veers
about in its claims (though it never extends its denial of workaday truth to
the point of existential puzzlement, of the nouveau roman); sometimes it
merely seems to be asserting that the best journalism can be literature, and
that a byline may be fleshed out into a participant. But its proponents do have
one thing in common: a desire to have it both ways. They claim to be adding
their imaginative insights to their reporter’s facts, to be moulding brute
reality with artistry while never losing sight of the truth – the real
truth, as Capote prefers it: truth squared. If a reader is tempted to find
something boring – when he’s freezing to death on the tundra of The
Executioner’s Song, for instance – he’s told that it can’t be boring
because it’s true. On the other hand, when he complains that something isn’t
true – because, for example, the author couldn’t have been there, couldn’t have
heard a particular conversation – he’s told he’s a blockhead and ought to be
grateful for the deeper imaginative truth he’s getting given.
In fact, as Music for
Chameleons shows, you can’t have your cake and eat it, and the reader may
well discover in himself a self-contradictory stance to match the author’s: he
may prove capable of both admiring and despising the book at roughly the same
time. Having Capote physically present in all his pieces is rather like having
an estate agent show you round a house: you’re very grateful to begin with,
you’re pleased to be told how the place works, and then after a while you
terribly wish you were alone. It’s no coincidence that the best story in the
opening section, ‘Mojave’, a box-within-box tale of a couple’s emotional
withdrawal from one another (with a powerful, desolate central metaphor), is
the only one that fails to feature Capote directly.
Moreover, once the author
has put himself centre stage, he simply can’t avoid showing off. The estate
agent in him will insist on showing you where all the electric points
are, and telling you to mind your head on that obsolete gas-meter which you
didn’t need to know about in the first place. An interview-adventure with Pearl
Bailey dives off into a cute and pointless paragraph about an earlier
professional connection with her and with ‘many gifted men attached to that
endeavour: the director was Peter Brook; the choreographer, George Balanchine;
Oliver Messel was responsible for the legendarily enchanting decor and
costumes.’ Fey, Warholish asides about literature just can’t be shut out (‘I
like Agatha Christie, love her. And Raymond Chandler is a great stylist, a
poet. Even if his plots are a mess’); nor can assorted chunks of information
about the Capote life. It’s undeniably interesting to learn, for example, that
he once bedded Errol Flynn: but it’s a hard fact to lodge in an otherwise acute
and touching profile of Marilyn Monroe without its being the main thing we
remember from the piece. At one point Capote asks himself what he fears most,
and replies: ‘Real toads in imaginary gardens.’ It’s hard not to see the writer
at times as a toad squatting in among his own fiction.
‘Handcarved Coffins’,
Capote’s centrepiece and the direct descendant of In Cold Blood,
concerns a series of bizarre murders in a Western state (victims are despatched
by amphetamine-crazed rattlesnakes, liquid nicotine, beheading etc), and the
writer’s spasmodic involvement in the investigation. For most of its length it
is so compellingly narrated that you suspend inquiry into its literary mode;
and for once Capote’s own presence, his doubts and excitements, help things
along. He adroitly works into the narrative an incident from his childhood when
he was frighteningly baptised by a wayside Bible-puncher. This hedge-priest and
the supposed killer gradually coalesce in Capote’s mind, leading finally to a
climactic meeting (appropriately by a river, with the killer dressed in a
rubber suit, as if for mass baptism) in which the writer’s private hauntings
and the case’s public resolution join hands. It is a precisely calculated and
stunning finale. It is also much too good to be true.
Capote claims it is
all true – that only the names have been changed. And perhaps, the tempter
whispers, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not: isn’t Capote merely
offering an aesthetic construct, and shouldn’t we accept it as such? Perhaps,
but that’s asking rather a lot. For instance, if we knew that ‘Handcarved
Coffins’ was what it feels like – a skilful, pacey piece of fiction – we should
give it high praise and say that it reads like a cross between Harry Crews and
Ed McBain (with a few silly clichés, like having the hero play chess against
the villain, and letting the killer pseudo-confess in the last paragraph).
Whereas if we knew it was true, it would be hard to leave the story where
Capote leaves it. What about the case? What about justice? Is it the writer’s
task merely to muse elegantly on eight murders and then depart? We are back
with the questions Tynan put to Capote at the time of In Cold Blood:
questions about the exploitation of human material, about decadence – questions
which are both irrelevant and central at the same time.
Music for
Chameleons is more, and more simply, enjoyable than all of this suggests: it’s
light, funny, smoothly-written and smoothly readable. It’s also quite minor,
and the claims made for it by its author are risible. Most of all, one regrets
the way in which its qualities are visibly distorted by that worst of pressures
in American literary life: the demand for the writer as event. Capote, alas,
seems no longer capable of merely writing. He performs, he presents himself, he
happens. At the close of this book, he declares sympathy for the idea of an
after-life. He would like to come back ‘as a bird – preferably a buzzard. A
buzzard doesn’t have to bother about his appearance or ability to beguile and
please; he doesn’t have to put on airs.’ That should make a nice change.
BARNES, Julian. Late Capote. London Review of Books, vol. 3, no. 3,
February 19, 1981. P. 10-11
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v03/n03/julian-barnes/late-capote/print
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