SOURCE: “The Caravan Moves On: Last Stories,” in Truman Capote: A Study of Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 63–73.

[In the following essay, Garson provides a thematic analysis of Capote's later work.]

“DAZZLE”

“Dazzle,” which appeared first in Vogue in 1979 and then in the collection Music for Chameleons in 1980, has multiple connections to the new kind of fiction Capote was writing by this time. Although the story is more focused than the pieces in the unfinished Answered Prayers, the works are similar in their revelations of details from the author's life. “Dazzle” also has links to his final story, One Christmas, for both these pieces share subject matter and setting related to Capote's early childhood experiences in New Orleans. Like all the intimate and rather bitter pieces written in the last decade of his life, here the writer offers another version of himself and the people who were part of his often unhappy boyhood.

In the 1987 compilation A Capote Reader, the editor divided Capote's writings into genres and placed “Dazzle” with the essays. The logic behind the decision is puzzling, but perhaps the editor was misled because Capote himself called “Dazzle” nonfiction. Capote's categorization raises a number of questions, given his view that all truth is altered when it becomes a story. What, then, is “truth” in “Dazzle”? Is there any great difference, insofar as the labels “fiction” and “nonfiction” are concerned, between works in which the author does not appear or appears only as a minor character (Breakfast at Tiffany's for example), and works in which he takes the major role? Why should we think that, “Dazzle” is less fictional than “A Christmas Memory,” since both are remembrances of childhood?

The answer may lie in Capote's decision to end “Dazzle” by returning to the present and, without mask or other distancing device, introducing an episode that focuses on the relationship between himself and his lifelong nemesis, his father, Arch Persons. The major part of “Dazzle” is set in the past: Capote relates a mortifying childhood event that reflects his youthful confusion about his sexual identity. But at the end of this part of the story, he abruptly shifts to the present and introduces his father, who played no part at all in the incident recalled. We leap ahead 44 years. The grandmother, who had a major role in the disturbing incident, has died, and her grandson, Truman, did not attend the funeral. The drunken Truman Capote has an angry telephone conversation with the father he reviles, yet still fears. Is this the nonfictional aspect of the story? Perhaps. Though the feelings between father and son seem real enough, the dialogue does not sound realistic or truthful. The father's angry and sentimental statement that Capote's grandmother died with Truman's picture in her hand reads too much like nineteenth-century melodrama.

Apparently Capote in his late stories was trying to write autobiography as a means of explaining and justifying his life. Yet the resulting pieces contain too much fiction to be categorized as “real” autobiography. In “Dazzle” too many of the details sound like bits and pieces from Capote's early fiction: The mysterious Mrs. Ferguson, unmarried with “a raft of children,” suggests Sister Ida of The Grass Harp. Mrs. Ferguson's praise of the boy's girlish beauty reminds us of Sam Radclif's comments in Other Voices, Other Rooms, and the little boy's journey to the Ferguson home also reminds us of that novel. Mrs. Ferguson's son, Skeeter, happens to have green eyes, always a significant symbol in Capote's stories. A belief in magic, witchlike characters, charms, and spells are all characteristic of the writer's fiction, and all appear in “Dazzle.”

The story itself tells of a theft the boy commits while staying with relatives in New Orleans. To achieve a hoped-for transformation from male to female, he seeks the magical help of a local sorceress, Mrs. Ferguson. Mrs. Ferguson demands that he steal his grandmother's yellow, rock-crystal stone and give it to her as payment for her magic. The boy succeeds in taking the jewel without ever being discovered, but Mrs. Ferguson's sorcery fails. Not only is the boy's desire for a female identity disappointed, but the guilt he feels as the result of stealing from and betraying his grandmother stays with him throughout his life in memory. His grandmother's death revives the entire experience for him. However, his inability in middle age to handle his sense of shame, and the hostile confrontation with his father, seem completely separate from the other parts of the story. The mood and tone shift too abruptly as the narrator moves from past to present, and even the last words of the story, invoking the power and appearance of Mrs. Ferguson, do not succeed in bringing back to the reader the boy's sense of the frightening knowledge of that witchlike figure.

Should readers care whether “Dazzle” is fiction or nonfiction? Perhaps. Certainly we must exercise caution in accepting all the author tells us about his own reality. Georges Gusdorf, author of a study on autobiography, has said that there are two types of autobiography: one is a form of confession; the other is “the artist's entire work, which takes up the same material in complete freedom and [is] under the protection of a hidden identity.” Unquestionably, some of Capote's works are forms of confession, and all of his works offer a composite, psychological autobiography by means of characters that serve as masks for Capote himself. Gusdorf also states: “Autobiography appears the more or less anguished uneasiness of an aging man who wonders if his life has not been lived in vain, frittered away haphazardly, ending now in simple failure. In order to be reassured, he undertakes his own apologia” (39). This analysis appears to fit as explanation for the last cycle of Capote's stories. Retracing segments of the past, he appears to be saying that this is true, that was not true. However, intended or not, the parts are all pieces of the whole, fragmented though they may be.

ANSWERED PRAYERS

“Dazzle” was printed when Capote was struggling to recover from the aftershock of social and professional rejection brought about by the publication of fragments from a projected new novel. However, neither “Dazzle” nor publication of a well-regarded collection a year later could restore him to his previous position. Although much of Capote's writing had excited strong reactions from readers over the years, only his late stories provoked outrage. Supposedly conceived as part of his long-promised new novel, Answered Prayers, these pieces were first published in Esquire in the 1970s. The earliest story, “Mojave” (1975), was republished in the collection Music for Chameleons (1980). After Capote's death in 1984, his editor put together the remaining three stories as the work that was retitled Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (1987).

To whet the appetite of the public, Esquire began “Mojave” on the cover of its June issue. It was Capote's first story in many years, and it elicited both negative and positive responses. Some who praised this so-called beginning of Answered Prayers were to change their minds when other stories followed. Capote, however, reportedly was delighted he had overcome the writing problems that had set in after the high point in his career in the late sixties.

“Mojave” uses the techniques of the frame, that is, a story within a story, and of doubling. What is unusual in this approach is that the second story is made the double of the first. Both are about women who betray the men who love them, although one betrays in secret, and the other does it flagrantly and cruelly. One woman is young, the other old; one is rich, elegant, upperclass, and idle; the other is poor and lower class, a former burlesque queen and stripper. Both give their lovers gifts, paid for with their husband's money. Through the doubling of the two women, a theme is developed that surfaces throughout all the stories in Answered Prayers: beneath the skin all women are the same, “the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady.” Capote's animus toward women is epitomized in a sneering remark about women and snakes: “The last thing that dies is their tail,” says the old man, a central character in the inner story of “Mojave.” That Capote shares the old man's attitude becomes clear when Capote repeats the same statement in the later piece “Unspoiled Monsters,” here without benefit of an intermediary, apparently having forgotten he had already used this abusive remark in “Mojave.”

The doubled women are matched with doubled husbands. Actually, the doubling is made even more emphatic with the men because both share the same first name: George. On the surface the first George, George Whitelaw, appears to be the opposite of the second, George Schmidt, whom the former meets when he is just out of Yale, hitchhiking across the country. George Schmidt is old, fat, and blind, a man who has been a masseur for 50 years. (Capote seems to favor this occupation as a plot device that enables the masseur character to learn intimate details about the lives of the rich and famous people he serves; in this story of the device seems acceptable enough. However, when Capote repeats this device with his major figure, the narrator of “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” in Answered Prayers, it becomes inappropriate, given the narrator's other talents and his social milieu.)

Twenty years after this meeting in the Mojave Desert, George Whitelaw tells his wife, Sarah, the story of his encounter with Schmidt. The blind Schmidt had been abandoned by his wife, Ivory, perhaps to die in the intense heat. In the course of a ride out of the desert with a truck driver, Schmidt tells Whitelaw about his meeting, courtship, and marriage to Ivory Hunter, who betrays him almost immediately with a younger man. Ivory Hunter lives up to her much too obviously symbolic name by taking all of her husband's possessions and driving off with her lover after leaving George alone amidst the “sand … mesquite and … boiling blue sky.”

Sarah Whitelaw is far more subtle than Ivory Hunter when she betrays her husband. Refusing to share George's bed because she has had two unwanted children and fears having another, Sarah slyly takes a lover. Ivory never refuses to have sex with her husband—quite the opposite—and her relationship with her lover is scarcely concealed. Ivory's motivation for her treachery is sexual passion, but Sarah's motive is unclear. Sarah choses as her lover her former psychoanalyst, a man described in most unattractive terms: he is short, fat, and wears dentures, and he is a vulgar and greedy man who grunts and grimaces and expects gifts and money from her. Sarah derives no sexual pleasure or other satisfaction from this relationship. The pointlessness of Sarah's affair seem to suggest that betrayal for no motive other than betrayal itself is women's nature.

Capote provides no realistic cause for Sarah's deceitfulness, drawing her as a superficial, selfish, even prudish woman who chooses to ignore her husband's obvious suffering. She takes on the role of his pimp in order to keep him, as well as to keep him satisfied. Capote apparently recognized that Sarah is the least successfully drawn character in “Mojave,” and therefore in an attempt at providing a psychological motive for her actions, he says that Sarah married George because of his resemblance to her father. But this damage control does not work. The bits and pieces of her character and personality are an uncoordinated mixture: she is an anxious poseur with her husband; cruel and insulting to her lover; confiding, sympathetic, but also cynical to her hairdresser, whose pain at his betrayal by his lover she dismisses by telling him there is always someone else.

Her cynicism is leavened with fear the night her husband tells her his tale about George Schmidt and Ivory Hunter. As Sarah listens to her George he seems to become the other George, coarse and street-smart, blind, but possessed of a clear inner vision. Tired and feeling old, for the first time in their marriage George artfully hints to Sarah that he knows about her affair. When George turns to his wife for solace, she gives him the same comfort she had earlier given her hairdresser: there is always another lover down the road. Yet what her husband has given her is a far greater and deeper kind of love than the love that George Schmidt had given Ivory, for it includes forgiveness both for her refusal to share her bed with him and for her betrayal of his trust.

George tells Sarah that everyone, at some time, leaves the “other out there under the sky” and never understands why. This is one of Capote's themes in the story. Another theme, more hidden and dark, in the last part of the story, briefly reveals the Capote touch of earlier days. As Sarah draws the heavy silk draperies against the snow-misted night, the images leave us with the subliminal recognition of the swift passage of time, of the coming of night and the long winter of death that no draperies can block out.

“La Côte Basque,” the second story published in Esquire, was a disaster for Capote. Although general readers took pleasure in the entrée the story provided into the secret world of stars, artists, and high-society glitteratti, those who belonged to that world were outraged by Capote's revelations. Capote's jet-set friends and acquaintances felt that he had betrayed them.

From the moment “La Côte Basque” appeared in 1975, Capote lost almost every society friend he had. The stories in Answered Prayers were all based on true incidents from or gossip concerning the lives of people in Capote's rich and famous circle. Once these people read “La Côte Basque” and recognized what he was doing—how he was turning the sordid details of their lives into stories for the public to read—they closed ranks and turned on him. Overnight, his friends became enemies; the reviews savaged him; and his career was destroyed. Soon he was reduced to appearing on talk shows, where often obviously drunk or under the influence of drugs, he pathetically tried to defend himself and to attack the people who had rejected him.

Whether the unfinished “novel” would ever have been printed had there not been so much publicity about it following Capote's sudden death is a matter of speculation. For a number of years Capote and a few loyal supporters insisted the work was almost complete. But no manuscript has been found. For a time rumors that some people had seen, or read, or heard Capote read other parts of the book circulated. Speculation about a more complete manuscript version of Answered Prayers continues, but whether Capote actually wrote more than we have is doubtful considering his imaginative decline in the years before his death.

In book form, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel is much the same as the stories Esquire published. There are only two significant differences. Where the sequence in the magazine was “Mojave” (June 1975), “La Côte Basque” (November 1975), “Unspoiled Monsters” (May 1976), and “Kate McCloud” (December 1976), the book places “Unspoiled Monsters” as part 1, “Kate McCloud” as part 2, and “La Côte Basque” as part 3. The second change is the removal of any references to the story “Mojave.” In the magazine version of “Unspoiled Monsters” the major character speaks about beginning to write “Mojave,” and in the first lines of the Esquire “Kate McCloud” he notes having spent a week writing “Mojave.” Clearly, Capote made almost no changes in the work, although for years he and his publisher announced he was revising it.

Where “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” have some slight connection to one another, “La Côte Basque” has nothing in common with either except that it, like the other two, is supposedly told by a narrator named P. B. Jones. One wonders about the publisher's choice of the term “novel” to describe the work, although it is the word the author himself used. If Capote had some large overall plan for the structure of his book, the plan is not revealed by the fragments that he managed to complete.

The first two stories make some attempt at plot, but plots so steamy and fitful as to appear ludicrous to the reader. Although Capote and a few other people spoke of the planned work as Proustian, the plots and characters in “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” might have been borrowed from a combination of popular romance and pornographic film and fiction. The third story, while recounting gossip, as do the other two, has no plot at all.

P. B. Jones, identified by various people (including Capote's editor), as a “dark doppelgänger” of the writer, is a strange peripatetic figure, who, for no clear reason, flits between New York and the Continent. At some point he remains an expatriate for 12 years. He is a failed writer, a prostitute, and a masseur. While the reader quickly discovers that Capote often intends Jones to be himself, the secret self Jones seems to embody is like the painting of Dorian Gray. Almost nothing of the charming, witty, poetic writer remains. Instead, there stands in his place, a vulgar, vicious purveyor of gossip, a one-time man about town, who now is little more than the teller of dirty jokes. In many respects Jones is an older, more worldly, and more world-weary Walter Ranney from the early dark story, “Shut a Final Door.”

In “Unspoiled Monsters” the narrator tells us more about himself than anyone else in the story. The story consists of a number of vignettes about people whose names are household words. Many appear with names unchanged; others are given pseudonyms, but most of the pseudonymous characters can be easily identified. In “Kate McCloud” the focus shifts from the narrator and his angst to a soap-opera plot that is larger than the cardboard characters. And in “La Côte Basque” the narrator serves as little more than an ear for the malicious gossip of his luncheon companion.

In all this work, Capote used some of the techniques of earlier years: circularity, remembrance of things past, time shifts, cinematic devices, humor, and the poetic configuration of images and symbols. Yet the things that worked so well for him before rarely succeed here. “Unspoiled Monsters” and “La Côte Basque” have circularity of structure: each begins in the present, goes back to events in the past, and ends back in the present. “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” include remembrances of the past, nostalgia for beginnings, and time shifts of multiple kinds; cinematic devices are strongest in these two stories as well, with collage and stills and scene shifts. All three pieces are very visual, but without the symbolic implications of previous fiction. An important component of each work is humor; much of this humor is farcical and sexually oriented; the gossip, which is meant to be funny, is almost entirely of a sexual nature.

The person seeking to learn more about Capote—his likes, dislikes, attitudes, visions of himself in middle age—will find “Unspoiled Monsters” interesting. A mask is removed, but are we to believe what appears? In part, yes. Here is Capote taking vengeance on the academic world, mocking the scholars who either ignored him or considered his work insignificant. Jibing at them, suggesting they spend their time in tiny, petty pursuits, he calls attention to his use of alliteration, to his recognition that he is indeed borrowing the name of a graceless character out of a Flannery O'Connor story. He sneers at the process of obtaining grants, at writers-in-residence programs, at those writers whose work is read only by intellectuals. Having scorned the latter, he procedes to tell the kind of story he seems to have suggested they would never write.

Hostility permeates segments of the story, although it is meant to be humorous and honest about the way the world turns. In striking out at critics and reviewers, he suggests that much that is published under an author's name is not the work of that author, himself as Jones, for example. He claims that many writers get into print because they trade sexual favors for assistance from editors, publishers, or other famous writers.

Self-hatred is very strong in this first story. Jones describes himself as a failure, something Capote undoubtedly felt at this point in his career. But the author shifts gears at times, briefly separating himself from Jones. Unlike Capote, Jones has had only one book published, and that was a flop. But Jones's failed book was called Answered Prayers. Capote appears to be saying he knows in advance that the public will reject his novel. Further, Jones is planning to rewrite Answered Prayers, an act Capote himself planned but did not accomplish during his sad last years. Doubling is used in the description of an attention-getting book-jacket photograph, although the picture of Capote used for his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms was taken by Harold Halma, and Jones's portrait for Answered Prayers was done by Beaton, the photographer who became a very close friend of Capote after the publication of that first novel.

The subject of Jones's book, he tells an acquaintance, is “Truth as illusion,” surely an important theme in all Capote's work. Briefly, Jones becomes the reflective writer, the thoughtful Capote, mulling over questions he has addressed before in other works. What is truth? What is fiction? How does the artist use them? Writers turn everything into stories. Do stories become lies when altered by the transforming imagination?

This conversation about writing, truth, life, and fiction occurs during a discussion Jones has with his friend about ways to make a living. The friend convinces Jones he can make easy money by selling his services as a prostitute. At first the shift in the conversation from writing to prostitution appears to be little more than another instance of the meandering structure of the story. Yet the juxtaposition of these two subjects presents a Jones/Capote view of the writer, part of the darkness, the hatred within: the writer as prostitute, prostitute of the self, or prostitute for the self, two very different views, yet each a cruel vision, albeit concealed by humor.

Capote's Jones mask is held up to hide his own face, shifted to reveal a piece of his face, or dropped entirely at various times in this and the other two stories. At times Jones seems to disappear, or perhaps he and Capote become one and the dark side is hidden from view. Some of the melding takes place in episodes that remind us of the early poetic writer. When he is still a young, hopeful novelist, Jones, like Capote, met the French author Colette. When Jones described this meeting we hear not Jones, but the familiar voice of Capote talking; specifically, we hear the Capote of “The White Rose,” when he remembers Colette and his introduction to her symbolism of paperweights.

In “Unspoiled Monsters,” Capote places the Colette episode immediately before his discussion of prostitution of the self. He uses it to allow Colette to talk about art, about the penalties the artist must pay, the sacrifices he must make. Although life is flawed, it is warm compared to the coldness of art. The artist's life does not matter. What matters is the purity of art—a true enough point, but one Capote was making defensively at this stage in his career.

Scattered throughout the story are a few other poetically wrought depictions of people and places. Still, the general tone is that of a writer suffering malaise. The cities described in Capote's collection of travel pieces, Local Color (1950), cities that once were magical, become now, through Jones's eyes, unattractive, unappealing places.

The touch of the painter-poet, Capote himself without the Jones/Hyde element (even though Jones remains the narrator), is seen twice more, in the endings of “Kate McCloud,” and “La Côte Basque.” A dream concludes “Kate McCloud,” a dream described as resembling a late-nineteenth-century painting, though one might also imagine it as a haunting scene created by a cinematic artist. Images of color, of delicate, graceful motion, and the shimmer of the sea remind us all too briefly of ways the writer once captivated us. So too does the final paragraph of “La Côte Basque” hold us momentarily with its description of the waning afternoon, the words “exhaustion” and “failing” creating the air of melancholy often found at the close of Capote's best stories.

The least satisfactory of the three stories, “Kate McCloud” is disjointed, and, far worse, uninteresting. The major character is a composite, fantasized figure drawn from several women Capote knew or had heard about. The story, told by Jones (here as masseur, with no sign of the novelist), moves back and forth between past and present, shifting abruptly at times, recounting the inevitable dirty jokes, gossip, and episodes that have absolutely no relationship to the story of Kate.

In contrast to “Kate McCloud,” “La Côte Basque” is a well-structured piece, although the headnote, a salacious joke, at first seems unrelated to what follows. The jest, or prologue, is told by two ordinary people in an ordinary bar in the west. Yet the short story turns out to have many resemblances to it. Both are bawdy and are told by two people over drinks. No matter that the two luncheon companions are themselves widely known, that the restaurant, a real one, is elegant and expensive, or that the drink is Roederer's Cristal, one of the most costly champagnes. Everywhere life is a joke, we are being told, and a dirty one at that.

The story takes place in the course of a single afternoon. Here the function is extremely simple as compared to the two previous pieces: its entire concern is gossip, the telling of unpleasant truths about the private lives of people. There are two narrators, Jones, again the tale-bearing, wittily cruel persona, who moves among the monied celebrities of international society, and his hostess, Lady Coolbirth (Capote's playful naming of a friend whom a number of readers were easily able to identify). Jones's narrative function is limited, for it is really Lady Coolbirth who provides most of the gossip, taking great relish in demolishing the reputations of people in the restaurant and other people she and Jones (and Capote) know—and the reader may know of.

“La Côte Basque” adds nothing to what we have learned about Jones. The story is set in the present, and there is no clue about Jones's status either as writer or gigolo. That he is still “in” as part of the jet-set is suggested by the intimate knowledge he reveals concerning fellow members. In retrospect, however, the reader recognizes with some regret that it is this story which brought Capote's fall from grace, the finish to his charmed life, and those last imagistic words of the story, “exhaustion” and “failing,” seem all too apt a description of the end of his meteoric career.