[In the following essay, Hassan identifies the Narcissus theme as the unifying motif of Capote's work.]

The name of Truman Capote is already legend, and the picture of his boyish face—the famous bangs, the wide, mysterious eyes—is on the cover of all his books to give the legend credence. To some, Capote is the sprite with a monstrous imagination, the lonely child—“I had the most insecure childhood I know of. I felt isolated from all people”—living with his aunts in Alabama, painting flowers on glass and tap-dancing on the Mississippi boats. To others he is simply the ephebic purveyor of Gothic extravaganzas, the fashionable opportunist of a mid-century madness. Whatever the faults of Capote may be, it is certain that his work possesses more range and energy than his detractors allow—witness the clear ring of The Muses Are Heard, the crackling impressions of Local Color, the crazy humor of his filmscript, Beat the Devil—and it is equally certain that no faddish estimate of his work can suggest his real hold on the contemporary imagination.

Yet it is, of course, as a Southern and Gothic writer that we insist on knowing Capote. Southern he is by accident of birth more than natural affinity; he once said, “I have lived in many places besides the South and I don't like to be called a Southern writer.” He is right. We are quick to sense that the elemental quality in the fiction of Faulkner, Warren, or McCullers is consciously poeticized in his fiction, and their loving adherence to the manners of Southern life often vanishes before the surrealist appearance of his romances. Romance, as practised by Capote and defined by Henry James, is “experience liberated … experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered,” and as such it remains open to the Gothic impulse which is one of its elements.

The idea of romance, about which Richard Chase has ably written, is informed by the modern techniques of symbolism and analysis, and defines the general character of Capote's work. We begin to perceive the specific concerns of Capote's fiction when we note the division between his “daylight” and “nocturnal” styles, and when we understand both as developments of a central, unifying, and self-regarding impulse which Narcissus has traditionally embodied. The impulse brings together dread and humor, dream and reality, insight and experience. The difference between “Miriam” (1945) and “House of Flowers” (1951), between Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951) distinguish the two styles of Capote; the chronological development suggests a deepening awareness of the tensions between self and world, a redistribution of love between ego and object, a movement towards light which retains the knowledge of darkness. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) carries these developments a step farther, and though it appears to elude some of the distinctions we make, is confirms the emergent patterns of Capote's work.

The nocturnal style of Truman Capote—and it is the style we are likely to identify with his achievement—makes the greater use of uncanny trappings and surreal decors. The sense of underlying dreadfulness, which Tennessee Williams called the black root of all modern art, compels the style to discover “the instant of petrified violence,” the revelation which only the moment of terror can yield. In stories like “Miriam,” “The Headless Hawk,” “A Tree of Night,” or “Shut a Final Door,” fear seems to take the characters by their entrails and reduce them to that curious condition of insight and paralysis which is the best expression of their predicament. “All our acts are acts of fear,” Capote writes in the last story, and so man is consigned to perpetual solitude, not so much because he cannot love or be loved—these are merely the symptoms—but because his dreams must remain unsharable and his night world must rise continually against his daily actions. It is this recognition of the unconscious, and all that it holds of wish and terror, that specifies the nocturnal mode of Capote's writing. The recognition is impelled by a force which D. H. Lawrence noted in Poe's work: the disintegration of the modern psyche. Like Poe, like Carson McCullers, Truman Capote shows, in his nocturnal mood, that his image of the modern psyche is preeminently isolated and Protestant. Hence Capote's interest in the theme of self-discovery—Narcissus may have been the first Protestant—and in the technique of character doubles or alter egos—“Miriam,” “Shut a Final Door,” etc. Hence also the omnipresence of dreams in Capote's fiction. Dreams in the earlier stories do not only constitute a private and self-sufficient world, and do not only contain the destructive element of our psyche (“it is easy to escape daylight,” Randolph says in Other Voices, Other Rooms, “but night is inevitable, and dreams are the giant cage”); dreams also reveal, in the later stories, the creative element of the unconscious, and permit that release of the imagination which, as Capote implies, is the prerequisite of love. “But a man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat: he stores up a lot of poison,” Judge Cool tells Verena in The Grass Harp when the latter derisively calls his marriage proposal to Dolly, his confession of love, a dream. If Capote's darker style seems uncanny, it is precisely because uncanny effects are produced, as Freud knew, “by effacing the distinctions between imagination and reality,” by seeing, as Rimbaud did, a mosque at the bottom of a lake.

But in effacing the distinctions between reality and imagination, the nocturnal style does not only evoke the shapeless world of our dreams; it evokes, no less, the fabulous world of myth and fairy tale. In our age, alas, dream, myth, and fairy tale are no longer allowed to drowse in their separate corners. Freud has noted the occurrence of material from fairy tales in dreams, and Geza Roheim has argued, in The Gates of the Dream, that myth, animistic thought, and in fact culture itself, find a common source in oneiric phantasies. In Capote's work, the familiar figure of the Wizard Man partakes both of dream and archetype, and it is there to remind us that our archaic fears must be forever conquered, our childish past reenacted. Such fabulous evocations must reclaim the universal symbols of human experience. Yet it is wise to remember that Capote once said, “All I want to do is to tell a story and sometimes it is best to choose a symbol. I would not know a Freudian symbol as such if you put it to me.” In the end, the nocturnal style of Truman Capote appeals to the qualities which Henry James found essential to all fiction of the supernatural, appeals, that is, “to wonder and terror and curiosity and pity and to the delight of fine recognitions, as well as to the joy, perhaps sharper still, of the mystified state.” Of these qualities, and of the human failings which these qualities silently criticize, the supernatural element in Capote's fiction is a metaphor.

But if the supernatural defines the nocturnal mode of Capote, humor defines his daylight style. The style, evident in “My Side of the Matter,” “Jug of Silver,” “Children on Their Birthdays,” The Grass Harp, and Breakfast at Tiffany's assumes the chatty, first-person informality of anecdotes. It also specifies character and admits the busy-ness of social relations more than its darker counterpart. And the scene which it lights upon is usually the small Southern town—not the big city which witnesses in abstract horror the so-called alienation of man from his environment. (The one notable exception, of course, is Breakfast at Tiffany's.) Now it is true that humor, like the supernatural, must finally rise to universal implications. But if one may judge from the differences between Twain and Poe, between the American tall tale and the native ghost story, humor is always more of this earth; it is apt to individualize rather than generalize; and it can rise to universal meanings but gradually. Humor has also a social reference. Humor—which may be called a catholic if the supernatural can be called a protestant impulse—binds rather than separates: it is as much a mode of communion as the Gothic is a mode of self-isolation.

I have suggested that humor and the supernatural, metaphors of the daylight and nocturnal styles of Capote, reflect the central and unifying motive of his fiction. The motive will be understood when the relation between the two elements which express it is further clarified. In his essays “On Narcissism” and “The Uncanny,” Freud has some interesting things to say on the subject. The uncanny, Freud believes, derives from an animistic conception of the universe occasioned by a narcissistic over-estimation of the self. Freud also characterizes humor as a triumph of the pleasure principle, and “of narcissism, the ego's victorious assertion of its own invulnerability.” His essays make it evident, however, that a humorous comment, while it begins by recognizing the threat of reality—and to that extent we are justified in seeing humor as a movement towards objectivity—ends by refusing to meet the threat. Humor, therefore, is like the uncanny in that both suggest a reactionary or regressive impulse towards the security of the narcissistic state.

This may sound more simple than art should be allowed to sound. A more sensitive observation is made by Wylie Sypher when, taking his cue from Bergson as well as Freud, he says, “The comic gesture reaches down toward the Unconscious, that dim world usually assigned to tragedy, the midnight terrain where Macbeth met the witches. The joke and the dream incongruously distort the logic of our rational life.” The bulk of Capote's work persuades us, in the same way, that both humor and the supernatural are acts of the imagination intended to question our surface evaluations of reality, and indeed to affirm the counter-reality of phantasy. The prevalence of dreams, the interest in childhood, the negative conception of adolescent initiation, the concern with self-discovery, the emphasis on homo-eroticism, and the general stasis of the mythic world of Truman Capote—all these must confirm the central narcissistic impulse of his fiction, an impulse which serves both as a critique and a crooked image of American reality. Ancient paradigm of the Artist, the Lover, and the Dreamer, Narcissus must also reconcile appearance and reality within the scope of romance, that “neutral territory,” as Hawthorne said, “somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” This is the aesthetic burden of Narcissus. His moral burden in the contemporary world, which Tate's “Ode to the Confederate Dead” presaged some decades ago, is still self-transcendence in the moment of action or love. The former seems to us now irrecoverable, the latter, it appears, our only hope. But there is always Holly Golightly to reckon with, and the peculiar image of freedom she invokes.

The contrast between the two styles of Capote can be observed in his stories, of which the best are included in A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949) and can be even more sharply discerned in his two novels, Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp.

The peculiar mixture of phantasy and reality in Capote's first novel begs for allegorical interpretation. Carvell Collins has suggested the quest of the Holy Grail as a possible framework for the action, pointing out numerous parallels between the details of Joel Knox's story and those to be found in Jessie Weston's account of the Grail myth. John Aldridge, on the other hand, has seen Joel's story essentially as an archetype of the Boy in Search of a Father. Both views correspond to genuine analogues of the narrative. But Joel Knox is not only a miniature Dedalus-Telemachus in Dublin-Ithaca, or Parsifal-Galahad at the Chapel Perilous. He is also a smaller model of Castorp-Tannhauser at Davos-Venusberg, and Narcissus sitting by his pool. Above all, he is simply Joel Knox who, no matter how much or little he may resemble Capote, is still a character in a work of fiction.

Joel is in search of an image which reflects darkly his own identity, his reality, and, ironically, which becomes available to him only when reality is dispelled in the palace of pleasure, the secret house of dreams. (To call Other Voices, Other Rooms a story of initiation is to recall how shrunken the range of initiation has become since Huck Finn bounced down the Mississippi on his raft.) What Joel elects is what the enchanted world of Skully's Landing forces upon him, and what he finally accepts is beyond good and evil, as dreams are, which alone are real. Love, which used to be an anchor of reality, is set adrift in the darkness of the human heart—“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” is the epigraph of the novel, taken from Jeremiah. Love returns upon itself as the mirror image turns to the beholder and absents itself with his absence. The search for the Other, who may be god, sweetheart, or father, ends in the discovery of the Self, and initiation to the world amounts to regression to the world of infantile phantasy in which the father is also a lover. Such is the apotheosis of the love between Joel and Randolph at the spectral Cloud Hotel towards the end of the novel.

The novel begins with Joel's arrival at Noon City, an oasis in the busy world, less pre-Civil War than legendary, near which is the even more legendary mansion of Skully's Landing, where he expects to meet his father for the first time. He is glad to leave Aunt Ellen's house behind: “It was as if he lived those months wearing a pair of spectacles with green, cracked lenses, and had wax-plugging in his ears, for everything seemed to be something it wasn't, and the days melted into a constant dream.” But Joel does not see his father, Mr. Samson, for a long time. He roams the wild, incredible garden of the Landing which, like some lost ruin, is haunted by the enfabled past; and, true to Capote's vision, he perceives in an “instant of petrified violence,” the apparition of a strange lady in a window. This is his first glimpse of Randolph, of his own fate. Randolph, prototype of the Evil Magician, the artist, the teacher, and the criminal, whose eloquence and learning are like echoes of a spectral chorus, is the genius who dominates the Landing. Exquisite in his cultivation and irrelevance, at once languid and sinister, lucid and depraved, Randolph has all the “unpredictability and perverted innocence” which qualify him for becoming the mentor and lover of Joel. Whether he is exposed to the half-pagan Sabbath ceremonies of Jesus Fever and His daughter Zoo, or the primitive magic of Little Sunshine, the wizened Negro hermit who haunts the Cloud Hotel, or the talcumed world of invalids, lunatics, and perverts who inhabit the Landing, Joel's sense of reality is constantly subverted by his environment. Like Little Sunshine, who acts, together with Randolph, as father-substitute, Joel is drawn to the terrible Cloud Hotel: “for if he [Little Sunshine] went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.” The progressive attenuation of external reality is evident as Joel moves from Aunt Ellen's to Skully's Landing to the Cloud Hotel; the movement is indeed a descent into Hades, a journey, in various stages, towards the darkest unconscious, or perhaps towards the womb of death. Dreaming of the Cloud Hotel, Joel realizes that it was not and never had been a real hotel: “this was the place folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead.” And dreaming of his journey through its rooms, he sees himself “in the dust of thorns listening for a name, his own, but even here no father claimed him.”

The second part of the novel opens with a climactic incident. Joel finally meets his father, and finds him a paralytic with two glinting eyes, who can only communicate with the world by dropping red tennis balls. Meanwhile, we are apprised in a grotesque tale of love and violence that Randolph is responsible for Samson's condition. Joel's resistance to Randolph, and to all that he stands for, receives its first check when Joel discovers that his real father is nearly a zombie. His resistance is further weakened when his relation to Idabel Tompkins fails to confirm his groping manhood. When Joel attempts to kiss Idabel on a fishing trip, she fights him off viciously and overpowers him; and on their excursion to a decayed mill, it is she who kills the water moccasin with Jesus Fever's old Civil War sword. The snake has the eyes of Joel's father, and the boy fails equally in asserting his manhood with Idabel as in conquering the phantom of his father with the ceremonial symbol of the past. Thus it is in failing the traditional ordeals, which in overcoming he might have earned his manhood, that Joel makes himself eligible to the insidious knowledge of the Cloud Hotel. Three further incidents clinch Joel's failure, and therefore clinch his regression, the form that his initiation takes. An appeal he sends to Aunt Ellen in the form of a letter is intercepted by Randolph. When Idabel and Joel decide to run away, they encounter in the woods two Negroes making passionate love. The scene reawakens Idabel's hostility towards Joel; it is a firm intimation that between them no stable relation can obtain. A little later, both find themselves at a fair, and they strike up an excited companionship with a wistful midget, Miss Wisteria. They all ride a ferris wheel. Then Miss Wisteria begins to take special interest in Joel:

She placed her hand on his thigh, and then, as though she had no control over them whatsoever, her fingers crept up inside his legs … and Joel, disturbed but knowing now he wanted never to hurt anyone, not Miss Wisteria, nor Idabel … wished so much he could say: it doesn't matter. I love you, I love your hand. The world was a frightening place, yes, he knew: unlasting, what could be forever? or only what it seemed? rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm?

On the ferris wheel the vision of love, loneliness, and mutability is suddenly illuminated in Joel's mind, and it is in the name of love that he renounces the willfulness of sexual possession. At the same instant he glimpses Randolph staring fixedly at him from the ground underneath.

The discovery of reality and the search for fulfilment in heterosexual terms fail. Zoo, who dreams all her life of journeying to Washington after her father dies, does not get very far. She is raped by three white men and a Negro driving a truck and returns to the Landing crushed, her dream desecrated. Even Idabel, who makes good her escape, winds up with Miss Wisteria as companion. With Idabel away—she and Randolph, like images of day and night, are never seen together in the novel—Joel can only turn to Randolph.

Part Three opens with the return of Joel to the Landing. He returns in a coma, his world contracted, appearance and reality altogether fused, and when he recovers from his illness, he is finally at peace, fully attuned to the enchantments which await him: “lo, he was where he'd never imagined to find himself again: the secret hideaway room in which, on hot New Orleans afternoons, he'd sat watching snow sift through scorched August trees.” It is with Randolph, not Idabel, that he finally visits the Cloud Hotel, while Aunt Ellen looks for him in vain. But for Joel there is no going back to the old realities; like Randolph, like Little Sunshine, he finds at last his Other Room in the Hotel—with a hanged mule in it for effect. And strangely enough, the last acts of Joel indicate not surrender but liberation. Faithful to the Jungian archetype of the Descent into Hades, Joel re-emerges somewhat healed, possessed of a dangerous and ambiguous knowledge. “‘I am me,’ Joel whooped. ‘I am Joel, we are the same people,’” he shouts exuberantly on his way back from the Cloud Hotel. And he is suddenly wise enough to see “how helpless Randolph was: more paralyzed than Mr. Samson, more childlike than Miss Wisteria, what else could he do, once outside and alone, but describe a circle, the zero of his nothingness?” At the end of the novel, when Zoo overturns the cracked, moss-covered bell with which the old plantation owners used to summon their slaves, ancient symbol of a vanished order, and when Randolph appears in a window, beckoning in his female attire to Joel, we are not sure whether it is in triumph or defeat that Joel responds to this mute appeal. We can only sense that the traditional modes of behavior are no longer in command of life.

Mr. Aldridge has objected to the self-contained quality of evil and guilt in the novel, to the failure of the book to “stand in some meaningful relation to recognizable life,” and to the feeling that Capote's world “seems to be a concoction rather than a synthesis,” its purity “not the purity of experience forced under pressure into shape” but rather the “sort that can be attained only in the isolation of a mind which life has never really violated.” The objections appear serious; but as usual, the impatience of Mr. Aldridge is not entirely justified. We need to remember, however, that Capote's work is, in its intentions, at least, a novel-romance, and that it attempts to engage reality without being realistic. Evil and guilt in it are self-contained only in the sense that they are defined by the individual consciousness without reference to an accepted social or moral order. Evil, in other words, is mainly poetic and archetypal; its moral issue is confined to the predicament of the victim without visible oppressor, and of the beloved almost without a lover. The result is a sharp, narrow focus, a reflexive vision seeking constantly to penetrate the arcana of personality. “They can romanticize us so, mirrors,” Randolph says to Joel, “and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist … he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love.” Experience is limited to what a mirror reveals of the beholder, and if the novel sometimes appears to be a concoction rather than a synthesis, it is perhaps because the job of dramatic resolution is surrendered to ambience and verbal magic. Here is the context of Joel's final revelation at the Cloud Hotel:

(He looked into the fire, longing to see their faces as well, and the flames erupted an embryo; a veined, vacillating shape, its features formed slowly, and even when complete stayed veiled in dazzle; his eyes burned tar-hot as he brought them nearer: tell me, tell me, who are you? are you someone I know? are you dead? are you my friend? do you love me? But the painted disembodied head remained unborn beyond its mask, and gave no clue. Are you someone I am looking for? he asked, not knowing whom he meant, but certain that for him there must be such a person, just as there was for everybody else: Randolph with his almanac, Miss Wisteria and her search by flashlight, Little Sunshine remembering other voices, other rooms, all of them remembering, or never having known. And Joel drew back. If he recognized the figure in the fire, then what ever would he find to take its place? It was easier not to know, better holding heaven in your hand like a butterfly that is not there at all.)

The recognition of Joel is, to a large extent, the event upon which the dramatic unity of the novel depends. It is characteristic of Capote's nocturnal mode that the event should be presented in the guise of a trance or hallucination, a verbal tour de force, and that its moral effect should be muffled by “atmosphere.”

Of his first novel Capote has recently said, in Writers at Work, “I am a stranger to that book; the person who wrote it seems to have little in common with my present self. Our mentalities, our interior temperatures are entirely different.” The remark accentuates our transition to Capote's second novel, The Grass Harp, which is indeed a different story. That the book contains much autobiography is evident from a later story Capote wrote, “A Christmas Memory,” in which the prototypes of Collin and Dolly are shown to be, in words and picture, young Capote (then an urchin with a happy, toothless grin) and his elderly female cousin. The narrative, written in the “daylight” style, is told in the first person by young Collin Fenwick. The story is not “strummed in dreams,” as in Other Voices, Other Rooms; it is strummed by the wind on a field of Indian grass adjoining a cemetery—the Grass Harp. To be sure, the contrast between the two novels is not as striking as if Poe had taken up residence at Walden Pond, but it suggests, nevertheless, a welcome restoration of reality to the surface of things, and an expansion in social awareness. The Grass Harp, at any rate, sings the story of all people, as Dolly Talbo says, people alive and dead, and to sing one needs more space than the Cloud Hotel affords.

The “initiation” of Collin Fenwick results less in a regression to the oneiric fastness of childhood than in a nostalgic awareness of past innocence and lost love. Collin is an eleven-year-old orphan when he comes to live with Verena and Dolly Talbo, two elderly cousins of his father. The two women are as dissimilar as cactus and violet. Verena, who represents the ruthless, practical world, is shrewd, grasping, and masterful. Her single weakness, the memory of a liaison with a certain Maudie who leaves Verena to get married, enhances her apparent toughness. Dolly, on the other hand, is shy and retiring—her “presence is a delicate happening.” She lives in a tender, wistful world, gathering herbs for her dropsy cures, feeding only on sweets, and extending her sympathy to all created things. Her devout friend, Catherine, and old Negro who claims to be of Indian descent, calls her Dollyheart, and calls Verena, That One—the Heart, the Self, versus the Other, the World. With Dolly and Catherine, Collin enters into a spiritual sisterhood dedicated to preserve everything frail, lovely, and unique.

But the trouble comes when Collin is sixteen. The world, in the person of Verena, decides to ask the unworldly trio to account for itself. Verena bullies Dolly to obtain from her the formula of the dropsy cure which has commercial possibilities. When force and persuasion fail, Verena humiliates Dolly by reminding her of her uselessness and dependency. The trio takes to the road, finding refuge in a tree-house, “a raft floating in the sea of leaves,” up an old chinaberry tree.

The tree-house, of course, is the last refuge of innocents abroad. But though it is unlike Huck's raft in that it offers limited opportunities of experience, it is not so much a vehicle of escape, Capote would have us believe, as a harbor of lost values. For Dolly teaches Collin that the tree-house is a ship, “that to sit there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every dream.” At peace in the tree, the two women and the boy feel at one with their surroundings: “we belonged there, as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.” But most important, they feel at one with one another, and with the two “outcasts” from town whom they attract, Riley Henderson and Judge Cool.

Inspired by the enraged Verena, and led by a brutal sheriff, the representatives of Church and State attack the tree and are repulsed time and again in hilarious scenes of impotent fury and gentle mockery. The spirit of the chinaberry tree, the presence of Dolly, the insight into their separate predicaments, unite our five refugees as the sheriff's posse can never be united. “I sometimes imagine all those whom I've called guilty have passed the real guilt on to me: it's partly that that makes me want once before I die to be right on the right side,” the Judge, who is the voice, as Dolly is the heart of the group, says. He continues: “But here we are, identified: five fools in a tree. A great piece of luck provided we know how to use it: no longer any need to worry about the picture we present—free to find out who we truly are.” As usual, the search for identity in Capote's work precedes the discovery of love. But here, for the first time, both the reflexive and the outgoing impulse are caught in a single vision.

The outgoing impulse, the burden of love, is defined when Judge Cool says to Riley—and his message is identical with that of the hobo in Carson McCullers' “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.”—“We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. … No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime.” At which Dolly with a sharp intake of breath cries, “Then … I've been in love all my life.” Yet Dolly is not so out of touch with reality that she can accept the world, like Polyanna, on immitigable faith. The persecutions of Verena, the fact that her friend Catherine is “captured” and thrown into jail, force her to ask Collin—and how ironic that an old woman should ask an adolescent questions about the world—force her to ask him in pain and perplexity, “Collin, what do you think: is it that after all the world is a bad place?” Collin is wise enough (almost too wise) to reflect: “No matter what passions compose them, all private worlds are good, they are never vulgar places: Dolly had been made too civilized by her own, the one she shared with Catherine and me, to feel the winds of wickedness that circulate elsewhere.”

We are never quite sure whether the novel portrays the disenchantment of an elderly woman or the initiation of a young man. But of this we can be more certain, that Dolly in renewing her powers of universal sympathy by drawing constantly on the resources of her inner world strikes a parable of the artist who, secure in the freedom of his imagination, reaches out to free ours. In this sense, the healing powers of Dolly can be said to extend, through the medium of the Grass Harp, not only to the fictive community of tree-dwellers but also to the real community of book-readers. The idea of the artist as healer is, of course, quite ancient. What makes the idea interesting in the works of such contemporary authors as Salinger and Capote is the particular form it acquires. In both writers the concern with lovelessness seems to have allied itself with a criticism of the new philistinism, the implication being that the poet and lover, to leave out the lunatic, are of one imagination compact. Hence Salinger's interest in Zen and haiku poetry, which bring the aesthetic and spiritual to meet at a still point, and Capote's interest in Narcissus whose adoration of beauty may be considered an act both of love and cognition.

The reaction against a grim and unlovely world, which insists that all private worlds are good and beautiful, tends to perpetrate the myth of the Noble Unconscious. It may also lead to the myth of the Noble Freak. Of this Dolly is an example, and Sister Ida, with her revivalist tribe of fifteen children all sired by different fathers, is another. Ida's wandering brood, whose slogan is Let Little Homer Honey Lasso Your Soul For the Lord, brings into the novel a good deal of bustle and folksy humor. They also reveal a certain outgoingness, an attitude which, in its vigor and acceptance, qualifies the pathos of Dolly. But the impression remains that though Dolly and Ida have suffered much, their idea of freedom is undoubtedly romantic and the form of their rebellion extravagant.

Nothing is very extravagant about the denouement of the novel. Verena, robbed and deserted by the infamous Dr. Ritzy, is utterly broken. In a candle-lit, tree-house scene, while rain pours and thunder rages, Verena, who had actually climbed the china tree, confesses to Dolly: “Envied you, Dolly. Your pink room. I've only knocked at the doors of such rooms, not often—enough to know that now there is no one but you to let me in.”

Dolly's “pink room” is a place for Collin to start from; Joel's “other room” at the Cloud Hotel is a place to which he can and must return. When Dolly dies, it is as if a ceremony of innocence and beauty had come to an end, and behind each character the Garden of Eden had clanged its gates shut. But life continues. Riley Henderson goes on to become a public figure, and Collin journeys north to study law. Reality does not surrender to the dream; it is merely redeemed by it. The childish self-absorption of a Joel yields to the wider horizon of a Collin. Seen in retrospect from Collin's point of view, the novel still appears as a pastoral elegy to irrevocable innocence. But the elegy is also mythicized; it is sung by the field of Indian grass, “a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story.” The elegy is present and continuous; it may even affect the future. Yet Collin confesses, as Huck would never confess, that “my own life has seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of the spiral.”

With Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), the closed rings begin to evolve into a spiral, some open and continuous motion of the hero's spirit, or rather of the heroine's, the amazing Miss Holiday Golightly, traveling, as her Tiffany cards insist. But whether the driving motion of a spiral, so endless and implacable, possesses more freedom than a circle affords is a conundrum only Euclid may solve.

Holly, like Capote's other protagonists, is not yet out of her teens: “It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.” But her initiation began long ago, before she became the child-bride, at fourteen, of Doc Golightly, a horse doctor in Tulip, Texas; began, probably, when she lost father and mother and was dumped with her brother Fred, half starved, on “various mean people.” The process of that initiation remains secret—there are intimations of outrage and misery beyond the limits of a child's endurance—for Holly behaves as if past and future were no more tangible than the air she breathes; but its result is nonetheless permanent: a wild and homeless love of freedom. When we see her during the war years in that New York brownstone of the East Seventies, she is fully nineteen, and she strikes us as an improbable combination of the picaro, the courtesan, and the poète maudit.

Improbability is indeed the quality she uses to criticize a dreary and truth-less round of existence, and artifice—she is an inspired liar—to transform it. “I'll never get used to anything. Anybody who does, they might as well be dead,” she cries at one point, and we realize that her rebellion against the given in life, the useful and prudential, is one of the sources of her vitality. It is as her dwarfish friend and Hollywood agent puts it, the “kid” is a “real phony,” and her specialty is presenting “horse-shit on a platter.” Screwball, phony, or saint—some will find it more convenient simply to say “sick, sick, sick”—it does not take us very long to recognize, to admire, Holly's hold on experience. Her philosophy is quite elementary—and hopelessly at odds with our times. “I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous,” she tells the narrator. “That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.” When Holly's dream comes true—the vision symbolized by the “ordre, luxe, et volupte” of Tiffany's which she uses to cure her spells of angst, “the mean reds”—she wants to be no other than herself. In this respect, she seems the opposite of Salinger's Holden Caulfield with whom she shares the quixotic gift of truth, and shares the ability to gamble everything on a wayward love for, say, Man O' War—Holden's ducks in Central Park—or her brother Fred—Holden's sister Phoebe. But also unlike Holden, whose stringent idealism limits the scope of his commitments, his joy, Holly's truth refers to no self-transcending concept. As she candidly admits:

Good? Honest is more what I mean. Not law-type honest—I'd rob a grave, I'd steal two-bits off a dead man's eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day's enjoyment—but unto-thyself-type honest. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.

Her loyalty to others—the inmate Sally Tomato, for instance—is a loyalty to her own feelings for which she is willing to risk all.

Morality, we see, is still defined in the privacy of the passing moment. But privacy has many shades that we cannot afford to ignore. As the phantasmal vision of young Knox at the Cloud Hotel was followed by the elegiac insight of a more mature Fenwick; so does the latter give way to Holly's sustaining faith, belligerent almost, on the honesty of the heart. The last allows Capote's heroine to implicate herself in a wider range of experience that her predecessors could encompass; it permits her to check her code against the play of reality in manner Knox and Fenwick would have been powerless to command. But the crazy valor of Holly does not prevent her from carrying the customary burden of pain; the price of unorthodoxy, the intensity of her involvement with life, is fully paid. In this she is not unlike the hipsters whose badge, the dark glasses, she constantly wears. Holly has no possessions other than the moment requires—she is “camping out” in New York. Like the ugly tom cat she picks up by the river one day, her existence is thoroughly improvised: “I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.” And like a wild thing she lives in the open sky; but she knows, too, that “it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.” When her beloved brother, Fred, dies in the war—her brave soul goes berserk, the jaunty dark glasses are shattered, and her true piteous human nakedness is revealed—when her Brazilian lover abandons her pregnant, when she becomes involved in a narcotics scandal and the friends who fed on her emotional bounty desert her, when she jumps bail and takes off for Latin America, and thence to darkest Africa, the defiant spiral of her life, swirling into the unknown, leaves us breathless and afraid that so much light can diffuse itself into darkness, that such brave exuberance could be the product of greater desperation. And indeed Holly herself becomes afraid. On her way to the airport she stops in Spanish Harlem to let “her” cat off, admonishing it in a scene frankly sentimental to find a proper home for itself. Then she breaks down: “I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away.”

Holly Golightly may be what we should all like to become if we could deposit comfort and respectability to an insured bank account; and her breezy excesses of fancy as of intuition may be, again, just what our stuffy age most requires. In her case the misfit hero certainly shows a fitting genius for living—rebellion here is secondary, spontaneous. But Capote himself is not entirely taken in by Holly's verve and piercing glitter. His tale, though lovingly told, has wit and sharp precision. As Holly sweeps through her zany adventures, one becomes conscious of a groundswell of gentle criticism. Mildred Grossman, the grind whom the narrator recalls from his schooldays, may be a “top-heavy realist,” but Holly by the same token must be considered a “lop-sided romantic”; and antithetical as the two girls seem, both “walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left.” Even Holly's incorrigible tomcat finds at last a home with potted palms and lace curtains, a home and a name; but for Holly the narrator can only pray that she may be granted, sometime, somewhere, the grace of knowledge and repose. Narcissus found both in a reflected image; Holly, whimsical child of old Faust, looks for them beyond a vanishing horizon. For Holly—sooner or later we must say it—is a child too. She is premature in ways both delightful and regressive. (The latest avator of Capote's Wizard Man is the “fat woman” who haunts Holly's “red nightmares,” threatening to inflict punishment, withhold love, or destroy everything high and rare.) But does not childhood itself, to which adults wend such tortuous ways, present a criticism of maturity for which we seldom have a ready answer?

Criticism, the interplay of views, is sustained by right form. The form of Breakfast at Tiffany's approaches perfection. It has pace, narrative excitement, a firm and subtle hold on the sequence of events from the first backward glance to the final salutation. A novelette in scope, it still manages to treat a subject usually accorded the fuller scope of the picaresque novel with marvelous selectivity. The point of view, the tone, the style herald no technical discoveries in the field of fiction: they simply blend to make the subject spring to life. Capote allows the story to be told in the first person by a struggling young writer whose vantage of perception, now in the shadow, now in the light, captures the elusive figure of Holly with the aid of such minor figures as Joe Bell and O. J. Berman. The device is both revealing and discreet, for there is no doubt something about Holly's complexion that cannot bear too sharp a light. By establishing the right relation between his narrator and subject, Capote also strikes the right tone. For though the whole story is unfolded backwards in one sweeping flashback, the tone is not, like The Grass Harp's, elegiac. Elegy, where so much hope is called to question, is out of place. The tone comes closer to that of an invocation, a blessing: hail, Holly, and farewell. Criticism, as we have noted, is implied, patronage never. What keeps the tone from becoming patronizing—look at that wonderful spoiled child!—is the style. The style matches the exotic quality of the subject with its clear-headedness, matches whimsy with wit, though here and there, as in the description of the cat, Capote indulges himself in a superfluous flourish of imagery. Holly's lack of self-criticism is balanced by the searching temper of the narrator. Tension and control are maintained. This is evident in the most casual bit of description. Here is one of Holly:

She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the rag-bag colors of her boy's hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes.

Holly Golightly will remind a good many readers of Isherwood's Sally Bowles, and remind the greater community of movie-goers of Julie Harris' fine rendition of that role. But it is not chauvinism, we hope, that compels us to recognize her peculiarly American quality: her quixotic ideas of hope, sincerity, truth. (Sally may or may not have stood up for the gangster Tomato, while Holly could not have done otherwise.) Though Holly's life is completely open-ended, and her “initiation,” once again, brings with it no confirmation or knowledge—neither does it bring nostalgia—it is a life, like Verena's, that leaves behind it a trail of love and affection. Secret doors, which might have remained forever closed, are unlocked when she passes, and even savages commemorate her presence in carved images. She is in this, we see, like other heroes of contemporary fiction, scapegoats and liberators all, and if we refuse to emulate them or accept their painful destiny, noting in our wisdom its shortcomings, we cannot in good conscience ignore the truth their proud fate so urgently implies.

The nocturnal style of Capote revealed a sea-green world of silence and sudden violence; characters vanished and appeared in mystery; things happened, as it were, intransitively; connectives of motive as of syntax were omitted; time was suspended; and the liquid, dreamy density of sentences absorbed the shock of action and thrust of sense. Against the former mode, the daylight style commits itself to the autobiographical stance; it feigns literalness, personal authenticity; it seeks to clarify temporal and spatial relations; and it acknowledges the external claims of reality by yielding to a kind of humorous naiveté. Here is Collin's moment of illumination to stand against the witchery of Joel's vision at the Cloud Hotel:

Sister Ida chose a place on the bank from which she could supervise the bathing. “No cheating now—I want to see a lot of commotion.” We did. Suddenly girls old enough to be married were trotting around and not a stitch on; boys, too big and little all in there together naked as jay-birds. It was well that Dolly had stayed behind with the judge; and I wished Riley had not come either, for he was embarrassing in his embarrassment.

Those famous landscapes of youth and woodland water—in after years how often, trailing through the cold rooms of museums, I stopped before such a picture, stood long haunted moments having it recall that gone scene, not as it was, a band of goose-fleshed children dabbling in an autumn creek, but as the painting presented it, husky youths and wading water-diamonded girls; and I wondered then, wonder now, how they fared, where they went in this world, that extraordinary family.

The contrasts between the two passages, style and context, are obvious. Joel is led to his insight by departed spirits, once the guests of the Cloud Hotel; Collin is led to his meditation by naked children bathing in the sunlight. Joel ends by choosing “a butterfly that is not there at all,” by embracing a qualified autism; Collin ends on a note of “objective sympathy,” wondering about the fate of “that extraordinary family.” In short, the earlier passage looks inward, the latter outward. Narcissus, having plumbed his ultimate shallowness, harks once again to Echo.

Holly's parallel insight into her situation—these are all flashes of self-knowledge—takes her even farther towards finding a dramatic correlative to private intuitions. In the crucial passage already quoted, Holly confesses her fear of perpetual homelessness in a rented car speeding towards an airport, and confesses all to a real listener. The bounds of autism, of pure self-reflexiveness or even reflection, are finally broken. Holly's voice answers both Knox and Fenwick: it insinuates that beyond the imperatives of self-discovery, beyond love itself, lie the wider horizons of freedom.