Fragments of Fragments
Answered Prayers.
by Truman Capote.
Random House. 180 pp. $16.95.
Almost thirty years ago, Norman Mailer wrote of Truman Capote:
. . . he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. . . . Capote has still given no evidence that he is serious about the deep resources of the novel, and his short stories are too often saccharine. At his worst he has less to say than any good writer I know. I would suspect he hesitates between the attractions of Society which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and the novel he could write of the gossip column’s real life, a major work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world. Since I have nothing to lose, I hope Truman fries a few of the fancier fish.
I offer Mailer’s observations not only because his snap literary judgments are seldom wrong, but because Mailer’s career offers a curious parallel to that of Capote. Both were floundering novelists who achieved second lives as journalists, earning far more esteem (and money) from factual reportage than they had from their not quite rereadable novels. But neither was able to shake off the notion that he had a great novel in him, one that would finally get down on paper the sprawling social realities of America in a way that no contemporary novelist had done. Both published a few silly fragments of the supposed work in progress and then—nothing. They seemed, in fact—rather like Bo Belinski holding poolside press conferences at the Los Angeles Angels spring-training camp when he was a non-roster rookie pitcher—to spend more time talking about these books than writing them.
Some of the remarks that Capote made to interviewers, however, did seem to promise the sort of inside reportage about the American upper classes that we have not had since Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Certainly no novelist who has set up shop as a social chronicler in the past fifty years—John P. Marquand and Louis Auchincloss, for example—could have come up with the following observation, which is to be found in Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Capote: “No, no. The real difference between rich people and regular people is that the rich people serve such marvelous vegetables. Delicious little tiny vegetables. Little fresh-born things, scarcely out of the earth . . . little lambs that have been ripped out of their mother’s wombs. That’s the real difference. All of their vegetables and their meats are so incredibly fresh and unborn.” A minor and slightly nauseating item, perhaps; but we read novels precisely to get this sort of information.
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The notion that Capote could write a “big” novel would be absurd if he had not written In Cold Blood. His two early attempts in the form, Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp, are little more than gothic curio cabinets. In these two brief books, as well as in his early short stories, Capote creates a hermetic world of misfits and dreamers which is not penetrated by a single mature thought or emotion. He is most comfortable writing about children, but the children in his fiction are disturbingly precocious; they have access to the wrong adult emotions and make us uneasy in the way of 19th-century photographs of children with worn adult faces. Their seniors meanwhile pass their lives in a state of dreamy regression; the adults in the 1949 collection of stories, A Tree of Night, for example, always seem to end curled up like fetuses on their beds in the middle of the afternoon.
If Capote’s early fiction is finally too precious, the stories and occasional pieces he published in the middle 50’s are charming and evocative. “A Christmas Memory” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” are flawless in their limited way and hold up after many rereadings. Capote’s writing improved to a remarkable degree in those years. He purged the cloying adjectives and awkward constructions and fashioned a style that is chaste and subtle—delicately “classical” in a way that makes one think of certain French writers. If Capote had stuck to such pieces he might have acquitted himself as the sort of minor writer who is in short supply on this side of the Atlantic, one who knows his limitations and achieves a kind of perfection within them. But, in the American manner, Capote felt obliged to swing for the fences and come up with the big one. And, unlike most of his contemporaries, he succeeded.
It is pointless to argue whether In Cold Blood (1966), about the real-life murder of a family of Kansas farmers by two criminal drifters, is a novel or a work of journalism. It reads like a novel and is generous with the pleasures that are deliberately held back by many “serious” contemporary novelists: compelling narrative, vivid characterization, and the sense of a created “world” which lingers long after one has put down the book. In a remarkable technical feat, Capote manages to keep himself invisible throughout the narrative, and he draws no “moral” for the reader about the senseless crime. After the execution of the murderers and a brief epilogue in a Kansas graveyard, we are left simply to wonder at the mysterious disposition of human affairs; the narrative has fulfilled the Jamesian formula, a deep and comprehensive impression of life has been intensely rendered, and that is enough. The transcendent effort of a minor writer, In Cold Blood remains one of the best documentary books written by an American.
The amazing critical and commercial success of the book turned Capote, who had already shown considerable gifts for self-publicity, into a media doll. When he gave his masked ball at the Plaza in 1966, bringing off, in Tom Wolfe’s words, “the greatest single one-shot social climb” in the history of New York, he spilled into the consciousness of the general public in a way that few American writers have matched. It was about this time that he began to tell interviewers he was embarked on a great Proustian novel about the American upper classes. The first (and only) fragments of this novel did not appear for almost a decade. In the meantime, Capote kept turning out the occasional magazine piece; but his personality as a writer underwent an unfortunate sea-change during these years.
Capote had never made much of a secret of his homosexuality, but until the late 60’s he had kept his sexual preoccupations at bay in his writing, much as E.M. Forster did, sometimes following what one critic has called the “Albertine strategy” of gender transposition. Forster, of course, wrote at a time when an author had to be circumspect in such matters if he wanted to publish; after A Passage to India, he decided that he could no longer abide writing novels in which men could go to bed only with women and lapsed into his famous “silence,” during which he wrote tales of homosexual longing that he showed to friends and that were published after his death. By the late 60’s in America, there was no need for any such discretion.
It has been said that there are writers who happen to be homosexual, and homosexuals who happen to be writers. In the course of his career, Capote took a long dive from the former to the latter. Both in his prolific interviews and in his increasingly less prolific writing, there surfaced a leering obsession with sex and the bodily functions along with a total disengagement from the usual preoccupations of the mature adult male. George Orwell wrote of Salvador Dali, another artist whose creative life was smothered by sexual preoccupations: “. . . in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as antisocial as a flea.” The world as an ongoing enterprise is of no account to such a person, so why not smirk and make dirty jokes?
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In the opening pages of Answered Prayers, the posthumous collection of what fragments we have of Capote’s Proustian epic, the narrator/hero P.B. Jones plunges the reader right away into the literary equivalent of bathroom graffiti. Every page that follows is a mixture of sexual tittering and nasty gossip, the latter mostly about dead or sequestered celebrity—Montgomery Clift, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger, Garbo. We all know people who say they have accumulated so much good gossip they are going to sit down and write a novel some day. But literature is not anecdotes. There is not a hint of creative inspiration in Answered Prayers; it seems that Capote simply pasted together some of the less pleasant jottings in his diaries while helping himself to material from his previous journalism, such as his report of a visit to the French writer Colette.
If Capote had been able to marshal the sort of literary discipline that saw him through In Cold Blood, a reader would be able to countenance much nonsense from him. But these few “chapters,” which were published in Esquire in the mid-70’s and caused a commotion among people who feel obliged to emote on such occasions, are a mess; they are no more than fragments composed of fragments, a series of sterile, disjointed, mostly smutty incidents. In trying to write an American A la recherche du temps perdu, Capote was producing instead a Jean Santeuil, Proust’s apprentice novel whose description by his biographer George Painter exactly fits Answered Prayers: “It is a novel of revenges, of resentments felt and gratified, of self-adoration and self-pity. The hero is an ill-used young man . . . insulted by wicked hostesses . . . and pseudo-artists; a benevolent Providence ensures that he invariably scores off them all. . . .” If you add that the hero is willing to perform any sexual service for modest recompense, you have Capote’s alter ego, P.B. Jones. Proust as an artist managed to grow out of all this, while Capote, reacting to very different pressures at a different time, only got worse.
Capote never entirely lost his powers of observation and delicate phrasing, however, and the book has its passing felicities. Jean Cocteau, for example, is described as “a walking laser light with a sprig of muguet in his buttonhole.” That is as good as a Beerbohm caricature. And the writing as a whole has a kind of raunchy vitality, rather like Henry Miller at his best, which keeps the reader going from page to page. But finally we must judge Capote unable to imagine adult characters for the purposes of fiction. We are left, then, with a minor writer who produced some charming magazine pieces and one book which is a permanent classic.
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