Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Capote, Truman (Vol. 19) - Carlos Baker

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CARLOS BAKER

If the Mad Hatter and the Ugly Duchess had had a child, and the child had almost grown up, ["A Tree of Night and Other Stories"] are almost the kind of short stories he could be expected to write. Reading Truman Capote's first collection is, in fact, a good deal like a trip down the rabbit hole with a metropolitanized Alice, for the fey quality which underlay Mr. Capote's first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," is here fortunately absent.

In all eight stories, Mr. Capote appears to be concerned with what might be called the esthetics of unlikelihood….

Perhaps it is because Mr. Capote's people are so full of eerie compulsions which they make no protracted attempt to resist that the reader's resistance to them is accordingly steeled and hardened. Who wants, really, to crawl back into the twilit cave and roll the papier-mâché stone over the doorway? Who would want to let Alice's wonderland serve as the myth around which he organized his...

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1. Introduction
2. Carlos Baker
3. Leslie A. Fiedler
4. Virginia Bennett
5. Granville Hicks
6. Richard Hayes
7. Eric Bentley
8. Henry Hewes
9. Paul Darcy Boles
10. William Goyen
11. Gordon Merrick
12. John Hollowell
13. BENJAMIN DeMOTT
14. Stefan Kanfer
15. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
16. Helen S. Garson
17. Copyright

1. Truman Capote