Short Fiction: The Ten Dollar Dream
[In the following essay, Reed categorizes Capote's short fiction in terms of the settings of the stories.]
Capote remarked once to an interviewer that his “more unswerving ambitions still revolve around” the complex art of the short story. “When seriously explored,” he continued, “the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I have,” he said, “I owe entirely to my training in this medium.”1 The expression “my training” should be borne in mind especially, for in a general way, Capote began as a writer of short fiction before turning his attention to the novel-romance. Finally, except for a foray or two into the theater, he developed the craft of reportage which became the artistic mainstay of his more recent years. Still, the great bulk of his short fiction was written in the 1940s, beginning most notably with “A Tree of Night” which was published originally in 1943. The more recent of his shorter fiction, however, is the chronologically isolated “Mojave” which appeared in 1975.
An examination of the tales in order of chronology, however, does not altogether illuminate the intriguing diversity of the shorter pieces. Much depends on Capote's keen sense of place, and the diversity of his short stories is compounded by his tendency to select either the rural South or metropolitan New York as the locality-setting for most of his work. Undoubtedly, the kinds of characters that appear, as well as the particular kinds of dilemmas in which they find themselves, are closely related either to the urbanized impersonality of city life, or to the hidebound agrarian personality of the southern mode of life as it is lived mostly in Louisiana and Alabama. It is impossible that the southern tales could have been rewritten with New York as the setting, nor could his citified stories been adapted to the isolated backlands of rural Alabama.
I. TALES OF NEW YORK
Eight of the stories, namely “The Walls Are Cold” (1943), “A Mink of One's Own” (1944), “Miriam” (1945), “The Headless Hawk” (1946), “Shut a Final Door” (1947), “Master Misery” (1949), “Among the Paths to Eden” (1960), and (to a limited extent) “Mojave” (1975), are tales of New York. In general, the care and the subsequent artistic quality with which the pieces were written, tended to improve, predictably enough, with Capote's growth as a writer. The stories gradually become richer both in linguistic skill as well as in dark thematic implications—so much so, in fact, that the earlier tales show surprisingly little stylistic resemblance to the later ones.
For example, “The Walls Are Cold” is perhaps closer to a vignette than to one of Capote's later and far more finished short stories. The scene is set in one of the upper floors of a relatively plush city apartment building where a drinking party, presided over by a fickle sixteen-year-old girl named Louise, is well in progress. The hour is two o'clock in the morning, and among the guests is a group of sailors, all of them strangers to Louise. She singles out one of them, a Mississippian known only as Jake, and proceeds to tease him with a succession of sexual overtures, eventually inviting him into the confines of her bedroom where the walls are done in a “cold green.” When, after some hesitation, he accepts her invitation to kiss, he also moves his hand against her breasts. She reacts by giving him a “violent shove” that sends him “sprawling across the cold, green rug,” and he in turn reacts by vacating the premises. Louise then resolves to sleep that night in the security of her mother's bedroom where “the walls were pale rose and warm.”
There are contrasting elements in this brief narrative that give it some slight significance. The first of these is Louise herself, a spoiled and indulged citified adolescent girl living in the midst of fairly opulent circumstances, and Jake, a hapless and far less privileged young person, eight months into a wartime interlude with the Navy. Another of the contrasts is the more pastoral life Jake had known back in Mississippi versus the life he sees at the party: “I never saw anything like it,” he exclaims as she ushers him around her apartment. Still another contrast is the change that the girl's adolescent temperament undergoes, a jolting shift from being coyly seductive to outrightly belligerent within the space of a few minutes.
But the story, such as it is, belongs to Louise, whose lack of empathy toward others such as Jake, who are actively involved in the waging of a war, prefigures the otherwise nameless “white pompadoured woman” in “The Shape of Things” which was published a year later. Otherwise, Louise is like the walls of her bedroom: both cold and green. Jake, on the other hand, is at least partially initiated into some of life's more unpleasant realities, and perhaps as a result of this he lives a less self-absorbed, narcissistic way of life. He is forced to accept, after all, the regimentation of military existence in spite of his aversion to it: “I don't take to this kind of life, I don't like others bossin' me around.”
“The Walls Are Cold” shares with “A Mink of One's Own” a certain vague consciousness that somewhere in the distance there is indeed a war being waged, except that in “A Mink of One's Own” Capote chose to intensify the elements of irony and deception. Set in New York, it is a wartime story centering upon Mrs. Bertha Munson, a vaguely discontented middle-aged woman who, as the story opens, nervously anticipates brightening one of her otherwise dreary afternoons with a visit from a younger woman named Vini Rondo who has supposedly lived a far more colorful, and altogether more privileged, existence than Mrs. Munson ever had. Vini, an American living in Paris until the German occupation, has (according to newspaper gossip columns) been married to “some Count or Baron or something.”
The story's irony becomes evident when Vini Rondo arrives at Mrs. Munson's apartment door on this January afternoon with her hair uncombed, her teeth unbrushed, her nails revealing chipped enamel, her fingers “jewel-less,” and her body clothed only in a summer print dress. She carries a large pink box containing a mink coat and says that she wants Mrs. Munson to have it, meaning that she expects Mrs. Munson to offer her money for it. (“I feel I should get something back on my investment,” she says.) Distinctly ill at ease, Mrs. Munson tenders an offer of $400.00 which she evidently cannot afford, judging from her standard of living. She writes Vini Rondo a check, primarily, no doubt, to terminate the strained and difficult conversation between them. But once Vini has accepted the check and departed, Mrs. Munson gives the coat “a little yank” and is “terrified to hear the sound of ripping.” The coat has disintegrated.
The chief deception in the story is evident at this moment when Mrs. Munson realizes that the coat is literally rotten and therefore worthless. Too late to rectify the situation, she realizes also that “Vini wouldn't phone tomorrow or ever again,” and that she must somehow justify the expenditure to her husband, admitting that she has “been taken and taken good.” And yet it is not Vini who provides all of the story's deceptions, for when she alleges that for the past year she has been living in California, Mrs. Munson replies, “Oh California, I love California!” even though “she had never been farther west than Chicago.”
“A Mink of One's Own” is not a memorable piece of fiction from any point of view, although there are signs to be found in it that point the direction that Capote's writing was about to take. Vini Rondo herself is the forerunner of certain other emotionally disturbed, urbanized young women characters, especially Miriam (in the story of the same name), D. J. in “The Headless Hawk,” Sylvia in “Master Misery,” and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. As an easily intimidated New York apartment dweller, Mrs. Munson bears an obvious similarity to the neurotic Mrs. Miller in “Miriam.” Furthermore, the deceptions used against these women are fairly typical of Capote's use of deceptions in his 1943 story “A Tree of Night” as well as in a good deal of the fiction he had yet to write, especially “Preacher's Legend,” “The Headless Hawk,” “Shut a Final Door,” “Children on Their Birthdays,” “Master Misery,” “Jug of Silver,” “House of Flowers,” “Among the Paths to Eden,” The Thanksgiving Visitor, and the more ambitious Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, and Breakfast at Tiffany's.
“Miriam” is a far better story than either “The Walls Are Cold” or “A Mink of One's Own” primarily because of its growing and sustained dramatic intensity and because of its improved handling of psychological crisis. Capote himself evidently cared little for it. “I like … several of my short stories,” he revealed once during an interview with The Paris Review, “though not ‘Miriam,’ which was a good stunt but nothing more.”2 “Miriam” is, in fact, a kind of tour-de-force, but perhaps no more so than several of the other stories published by that time, especially “A Tree of Night.” His lack of enthusiasm for it was apparently a question of personal taste.
“Miriam” has to do with the progressive emotional disintegration of a sixty-one-year-old woman named Mrs. H. T. (Miriam) Miller, a widow who, until the story opens, had led a comfortably conservative private existence in a remodeled brownstone close to New York's East River. Her sedate life and habits are interrupted, however, by the appearance of a child, also named Miriam, whom the woman encounters for the first time on a cold and snowy night while they both queue up for tickets to a movie house. From this point on the child subtly torments Mrs. Miller by making personal visits at unlikely hours of the night, and by moving, bag and baggage, into Mrs. Miller's two rooms with kitchenette. Mrs. Miller's response to this outlandish series of events is first puzzlement, then outrage, and finally desperation to escape the veiled threat to her sanity that Miriam has come to represent. Mrs. Miller gradually loses her composure, as indicated by her inability to keep track of the days as they pass, and then by her inhaling from the wrong end of a cork-tipped cigarette. Driven to desperation, Mrs. Miller eventually runs down the hallway outside of her apartment and down one landing, where she attempts to seek help from another tenant in dealing with her child-intruder, who by this time has provoked her into genuine fear. When the tenant returns with Mrs. Miller, however, there is no sign of the child. Only when Mrs. Miller comes back by herself to her apartment is the girl once again in evidence. “In times of terror or immense distress,” Capote writes, “there are moments when the mind waits, as though for a revelation, while a skein of calm is woven over thought; it is like a sleep, or a supernatural trance.” When last seen, the woman “stiffens” to Miriam's “dull, direct stare.”
“Miriam” contains the not unusual pattern in Capote's writing of the victim and the victimizer, wherein the victim's will is besieged until it finally weakens and collapses into submission. Mrs. Miller is a likely victim, however, since she obviously has not far to travel before she is forced over the line that divides rationality from despondency. She is also easily threatened and intimidated, as in the scene where the child takes possession of the cameo Mrs. Miller's late husband had given her. Like Mrs. Bertha Munson in “A Mink of One's Own,” Mrs. Miller is an inconspicuous, plain woman living in a state of isolation in the midst of a huge, densely populated, and largely indifferent city where she is an ideal target for petty tyranny. In both of these stories the main characters are threatened by females different in both age and temperament. Moreover, and this is quite significant in the development of Capote's fiction, Mrs. Miller chances at one point to come upon a version of the “wizard man,” a threatening and recurring male figure in Capote's consciousness; for on the corner of Third Avenue she becomes aware of “an old man, bowlegged and stooped under an armload of bulging packages” who gives her a sinister smile. And although she walks some five blocks, she continues to be aware of “the steady crunch of his footfalls” in the city snow. There is the vague suggestion that he is the same man with whom the child Miriam had last lived, for she has said that “he was terribly poor and we never had good things to eat.”
Capote was rather clearly concerned with the question of identity when he wrote “Miriam,” for at the end of the story Mrs. Miller is not altogether certain whether she ever did, indeed, “really [know] a girl named Miriam,” or whether the encounter she supposedly had with the child was some kind of trick of her own imagination. “For the only thing she had lost to Miriam was her identity,” and until the story's final two lines, she believes that she has recovered that illusive identity once more. The question therefore arises whether the child is the alter-ego of the woman, and as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's celebrated short story “Young Goodman Brown,” the reader can scarcely distinguish between the dream and the reality of what he has witnessed. Besides the name that the two protagonists share, there is the remark, made on the story's second page, that the child is “lacking [in] any childlike quality whatsoever.” But whether literally or figuratively, the child is an expression of the emotional dislocation that lurks just beneath the neat and orderly surface of the upper middle class world of Mrs. Miller.
Perhaps the least interesting of the New York group of stories is “The Headless Hawk” which, because of its structural diffuseness and consequent lack of artistic unity, makes it less compelling than a number of Capote's other pieces. The center of the narrative belongs not, as it would first appear, to a thoroughly perverse runaway from a mental asylum, a girl known only as “D. J.,” but to the New York picture gallery manager, Vincent Waters; for it is he, and not the seventeen-year-old girl, who is alluded to in the story's preface from Job as one of “those that rebel against the light.”
The story is as enigmatic as its two protagonists. Vincent meets the girl when she enters the gallery in the despondent hope of selling her painting which was apparently done in the secure confines of a mental hospital. Too preoccupied to pay her much attention, Waters asks the girl to leave her address, and agrees to send her a check amounting to thirty dollars for the painting. The address, however, turns out to be only “D. J.—Y. M. C. A.” which is far too cryptic a guide to tracking down a young woman in New York. He takes the painting back to his basement apartment and eventually begins to form a certain identification between himself and the picture's provocative content, consisting of “a headless figure in a monklike robe reclining complacently on top a tacky vaudeville trunk; in one hand she held a flaming blue candle, in another a miniature gold cage, and her severed head lay bleeding at her feet: it was the girl's head, but here her hair was long, very long, and a snowball kitten with crystal spitfire eyes playfully pawed, as it would a spool of yarn, the sprawling ends. The wings of a hawk, headless, scarlet-breasted, copper clawed, curtained the background like a nightfall sky.”
There can be little question but that the headless girl reclining on the vaudeville trunk represents the mentally ill D. J., whose aimless peregrinations have extended from New Orleans to New York. Nor can there be much doubt that the headless hawk is a representation of Vincent Waters himself, for the reader is told that Waters also is not emotionally fit; he has, like D. J., absorbed a succession of painfully thwarted quests. He finds himself at the age of thirty-six “a man of the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed.” He is furthermore, and by his own admission, “a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved … someone, in short, without direction, and quite headless.” As one of those who, again in the words from Job, “Know not the light,” Vincent is depicted early in the story “tap-tap-tapping” with his umbrella-cane down the sidewalk in the manner of a blind man. Later, in an act of self-destruction, Vincent impulsively stabs the hawk's heart with a pair of scissors, causing the canvas to flake dried paint on the floor.
Like “The Walls Are Cold,” “A Mink of One's Own,” and “Miriam,” “The Headless Hawk” centers upon mental and emotional disintegration, although D. J. proceeds further and more permanently over the line of irrationality than Capote's earlier characters had. “The Headless Hawk” also illustrates Capote's growing interest in characters with no particular concrete identity, for, like the child Miriam, D. J. seemingly has no origins, and is on the loose in New York. She does as Miriam does, moves in on a person she does not know and who does not know her. Waters never discovers D. J.'s true name or her background, but regards her with the same “feeling he's had as a child toward carnival freaks.”
D. J.'s shadowy references to a certain Mr. Destronelli suggest that this person, somehow connected with her mental hospital experiences, is another of Capote's wizard men whose foreboding presence is felt in the story even though he never appears. If “The Headless Hawk” were not so consistently dark and pathetic, it would, in its outward characteristics, be not so far removed from the setting and tone of Breakfast at Tiffany's where the character of Holly Golightly can be recognized as a cheerful, delightfully self-possessed D. J.
Instead, the story has certain technical and structural flaws that prevent its being the finished piece of fiction that it might have been. It is, for one thing, full of details that appear to have no function in the story as a whole. The reader may wonder, for example, why he finds Vincent Waters absorbed in a story by James Thurber in an old issue of The New Yorker, and why he observes the same character taking such an unusually narcissistic pleasure in his own nakedness. Why does Waters pay twenty-five cents to view the moon and stars? What is the function of Ruby the popcorn man? Such apparently nonessential tag ends detract from the story's real center: Vincent's lonely and vacant urban existence, his “talents unexploited, voyages never taken, promises unfulfilled,” as well as his many abortive love affairs with men and women alike. Neither is there the slightest ray of illumination leading to self-understanding in the hopelessly confused mind of D. J., who, like her friend Waters, becomes more pitiable (if not tending to invite sympathy) as the story reaches its conclusion.
Capote once revealed that “Shut a Final Door” was one of his favorites among the short stories,3 and the reasons for his preference are not difficult to ascertain. Unlike “The Headless Hawk,” it has both thematic and tonal control, as well as a keener sense of purpose and direction. Nevertheless, there is an element in “Shut a Final Door” that evades rational explanation, for the story centers around a character named Walter Ranney, an unsuccessful businessman who receives two unnerving and sinister long-distance telephone calls. His anonymous caller possesses an uncanny ability to reach him in unlikely and far removed places. The caller reaches him once in New York (“Oh, you know me, Walter. You've known me a long time”), and locates him again in the hotel room belonging to a club-footed woman under scrutiny at a medical convention in Saratoga. This aura of mystery, as unexplained as the child in “Miriam” or the character of D. J. in “The Headless Hawk,” is by no means untypical of the perplexing enigmas present in most of Capote's writing.
The most imposing theme of the story is failure, and, although such earlier characters as Mrs. Miller and Vincent Waters were also in one sense or another portraits in failure, Walter Ranney's propensity for losing life's battles is drawn into sharper focus than had been the case with these and other earlier characters. At the beginning of “Shut a Final Door” Ranney has managed to alienate his friend Anna by gossiping about her. After that, he spoils his relationship with another woman (Margaret) when he becomes an assistant in an advertising house and fawns too much on the boss (who subsequently fires him). The reader learns that as a child Ranney had been caught plagiarizing a poem that he had published in the school magazine under his own name. On another occasion he had blatantly provoked a homosexual liaison, only to jump into a waiting taxi, slam the door, lean out a window, and laugh contemptuously at the man he had allowed to follow him for several blocks: “the look on his face, it was awful, it was like Christ.” About his friend Rosa Cooper, he had apparently leaked the erroneous information to Walter Winchell's newspaper column that “big shot ad exec Walter Ranney and dairy heiress Rosa Cooper are telling intimates to start buying rice.” To all appearances, he thrives on failure: “It was like the time he'd failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties.”
Beyond the emphasis on failure is the almost unendurable isolation that Walter Ranney, as well as a number of his fictional predecessors, has been forced to withstand. At the outset of the story he is at his nadir, installed in a hot and seamy little New Orleans hotel room, eating peanut butter crackers, washing them down with a finger of Four Roses, and finally vomiting in a wastebasket. Like Saul Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day, Ranney is the pitiably isolated and unloved loser who is forced eventually to own up to the reality of his condition, for he sees that “no matter what you did or how hard you tried, it all came finally to zero.”
A substantial number of Capote's stories have what, for want of a better term, can be called grotesques. It was Vincent Waters in “The Headless Hawk” who found that he could love only those who had “a little something wrong [or] broken” about them, and “Shut a Final Door” has its share of such people. Margaret, for example, with her bulging eyes and her teeth reddened by lipstick, dresses like a ten-year-old child. Her friend Irving looks “like a little boy playing grownup,” his legs too short to reach the footrest on a barstool. Others are still more within the category of the comic-grotesque. Rosa's companion Anna Stimson is “almost six feet tall, wore black suits, affected a monocle, a walking cane, and pounds of jingling Mexican silver.” Stimson's son by a former husband (“Buck Strong, the horse-opera idol”) is currently incarcerated in a “corrective academy” for having stolen from Woolworths, throwing things, and taking “potshots out the window with a.22.” At a bar in Saratoga, Ranney encounters such “summer-season grotesques” as “sagging silver-foxed ladies, and little stunted jockeys.” Chief among the grotesques, however, is the unnamed woman afflicted with a club foot who explains that “my doctor's … going to talk about me and my foot on account of I'm pretty special.” Because all of the other hotel rooms are occupied, Ranney accepts an invitation to share hers. It is here that the anonymous telephone call reaches him, after which he clutches her in dismay. Her comment is to the point: “we're awfully alone in this world, aren't we?” Thus in each of Capote's stories discussed to this point (1947), the chance encounters that happen lead to emotionally debilitating results. For when last seen, Walter Ranney is, like Louise in “The Walls Are Cold,” pushing his face into a pillow in a final gesture of anguish. Indications are that, just as the demonic child in “Miriam” is a projection of Mrs. Miller herself, the sinister long-distance telephone caller is in reality an expression of Ranney's conscience and his fear.
“Master Misery” is another of the New York group of stories dealing in failure and broken dreams. Its protagonist, a young woman named Sylvia, lives for a time with her friends Henry and Estelle (a Columbia law student and his wife), whose “trouble” in Sylvia's estimation, “was that they were excruciatingly married.” But Sylvia has other problems. She loses her dreary job as a typist for an underwear manufacturing company known as Snug Fare, sells her watch, her beaver coat, her gold mesh evening bag, and finally, her dreams. Having moved into a depressingly furnished room in the East Sixties, she has fallen into the company of an ex-clown, the hopeless alcoholic Mr. Oreilly, whose spiritual bankruptcy parallels her own. Walking the crowded streets of Manhattan, she sees on different occasions the symbol of herself and Oreilly; in the window of a Madison Avenue shop she encounters “a life-sized, mechanical Santa Claus” who slaps his stomach and rocks “back and forth in a frenzy of electrical mirth.” In the same window at a later time Sylvia and Oreilly find another exhibit that is no less suggestive; this time it is “a plastic girl with intense glass eyes [sitting] astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace” and although “its wheel spokes [spin] hypnotically, the bicycle never [moves].”
In need both of money and spiritual “meaning” in her life, Sylvia overhears a conversation between two men at an Automat, to the effect that a certain Mr. A. F. Revercomb on East Seventy-eight Street is a broker in dreams (“regular night-time dreams”), and will pay, according to their intrinsic merit, cash for the disclosure of anybody's dream experiences. Revercomb, whose name denotes his occupation, has no dreams of his own, as suggested by his very appearance: His “flat gray eyes planted like seed in the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses.” Revercomb, however, is no fraud; he knows the real dream-article from mere imaginary fabrications of dreams.
Oreilly, however, recognizes Revercomb for what he really is, another version of the wizard man (although not referred to as such); the dream broker is “the same fellow,” says Oreilly, that Sylvia must have been aware of as a child. “All mothers tell their kids about him,” Oreilly says. “He lives in hollows of trees, he comes down chimneys late at night, he lurks in graveyards, and you can hear his step in the attic. The sonofabitch, he is a thief and a threat: he will take everything you have and end by leaving you nothing, not even a dream.” Sylvia is aware of Revercomb's identity: “My family called him something else. But I can't remember what.” Oreilly knows him as Master Misery.
Sylvia and Oreilly share the same world of loneliness, stress, and unproductivity that is captured in the fragments of the newspaper headline before her: “Lana Denies, Russia Rejects, Miners Conciliate.” The external New York scene, with its frigid temperatures, snow and ice, contribute to the sense of desolation that they both feel. Sylvia's childhood friend, Estelle, feels that her predicament would be solved if she were to get married. (“I'm here to tell you, honey, that there is nothing like lying in bed at night with a man's arms around you and. …”) But the man that Sylvia was to marry, whoever that might be, “must've fallen down a manhole,” for every ostensible candidate for marriage that she has identified in New York “who seemed the slightest bit attractive was either married, too poor to get married, or queer.” Her desperation causes her to lose track of reality for short periods, and her signs of emotional instability are not dissimilar to Capote's other women characters introduced earlier.
Oreilly, too, is reminiscent of certain other emotionally depleted characters in Capote's earlier fiction, not the least of whom are Vincent Waters and Walter Ranney. He has sought a number of solutions to his spiritual dilemma, as hinted at in the song he jauntily sings: “cherryberry, moneyberry, happyberry pie, but the best old pie is a loveberry pie. …” Later in the story he changes the ending of his song to “the best old pie is a whiskeyberry pie!” Irretrievably alcoholic, Oreilly has sold all his dreams to Master Misery and used the money to satisfy his habit and also, he hopes, to create a few more marketable dreams. When “you get a couple of bucks,” he tells Sylvia, “you rush to the nearest liquor store—or the nearest sleeping-pill machine.” When he runs out of cash, he either borrows more money or steals the whiskey he is seeking. Realizing that alcoholism is Oreilly's last hold on life, Sylvia is last seen slipping a five dollar bill into his pocket as she kisses him. And when, in the story's final paragraph, two boys emerge from a bar and stare menacingly in her direction, she knows she is no longer afraid because “there was nothing left to steal.”
Still, there is nothing particularly pathological about Sylvia's morbid depression and loneliness. Her former job at the underwear company (where in a single day she has typed some ninety-seven letters) is no more pointless than the plastic girl in the storefront who monotonously spins the wheels of her bicycle, but goes nowhere. Equally devoid of meaning, to her mind, is the delusion of marital harmony and bliss as represented by her struggling married friends. Only in her dreams, the essentials of which are kept hidden in a music box, can she arrive at any possibility of meaning. Eventually, however, her dreams are extracted from her by Revercomb for money, and she is left with nothing. The difficulty of Sylvia's facing another day is emphasized by the “disorganized version of ‘Oh How I Hate To Get Up in the Morning’” that emanates from within her music box.
There is nothing amusing in “Master Misery,” but the same cannot be said with respect to “Among the Paths to Eden” which is a dark tale with oddly humorous overtones. It is also one of the simpler, more anecdotal of the Capote stories. The scene is a huge cemetery in Queens which, besides being a haven for the deceased, offers “an unhindered view of Manhattan's skyline” for the living. On a chilly and windy day in March, a fifty-one-year-old Jew named Ivor Belli arrives at the cemetery bearing “a fine mass of jonquils” to place at the grave of his wife who had once been “a woman of many natures, most of them trying.” His motive for coming out this day is less to pay tribute to his wife's memory than it is an opportunity to breathe the fresh air. He wishes also to be able to assure his two married daughters that he has paid his respects to their mother.
As he stoops “to jam the jonquils into a rock urn,” he takes a certain secret comfort in the knowledge that “the woman's tongue was finally stilled.” Turning to leave the gravesite, Belli encounters a husband-stalker who introduces herself as Mary O'Meaghan who detains him by feeding him peanuts while she leads him to believe that she has come to the cemetery to visit the grave of her father. Her late father, however, has “absolutely refused” burial, and has been cremated and left “at home.” After some preliminary ploys, Mary O'Meaghan emphasizes her prowess as a cook and then launches into an imitation of Helen Morgan while perched on the late Sarah Belli's gravestone. This much accomplished, she comes to her point by asking Belli “a very personal question,” to wit, if he had “considered marrying again.” With twenty-seven years of matrimony behind him, Belli replies in all candor that that much marriage is “enough for any lifetime.” But by this time, her inattention to his words is revealed by “her eyes [that] played hookey, [roaming] as though she were hunting at a party for a different, more promising face.” Finally, “a new pilgrim, just entering through the gates of the cemetery” attracts her interest, while Belli takes the opportunity to make as graceful an exit as the occasion allows. He thanks Mary O'Meaghan for the peanuts and wishes her good luck.
Mary, as eccentric and as uninhibited as she is, evinces the desperate, underlying loneliness of certain other of Capote's earlier women characters. Capote, however, does not allow the pathos of Mary O'Meaghan to preclude a slight comic effect, for while Mary is not altogether unattractive, she wears “shoes which were of the sturdy, so-called sensible type,” and “her chunky cheeks” assert themselves “under a drab felt hat.” Although Belli does not view her as obese, neither can he “imagine that she mounted scales too cheerfully.”
Consistent with a number of Capote's short stories, “Among the Paths to Eden” develops from the moment when complete strangers meet and interact. The idea of matrimonial disharmony, a not unusual element in his fiction, is present here, as well. The apparent significance of the title is in itself matrimonial in implication inasmuch as the story concerns itself primarily with Mary's effort to locate a husband who, for as much time as remains, will suffice as her Adam. For the time being, however, she has taken the wrong path toward her dreams of Edenic bliss.
Nor is there anything blissful about the digressive “Mojave,” which did not appear until the June, 1975 issue of Esquire. “Mojave” is a different kind of a story which examines with still greater intensity (and far less whimsy) the ironic complications of mature love relationships. The story has a point to make, and that point is reinforced a number of times. It is articulated, however, only toward the conclusion: “We all, sometimes, leave each other out there under the skies. And we never understand why.” “Mojave” does not suggest “why,” but it does explore the theme of love and its betrayal to a considerable extent.
The protagonist is Sarah Whitelaw, thirty-six, wife of the wealthy New Yorker George Whitelaw, fifteen years older than she, and a man who “had graduated third in his class at Yale Law School, never practiced law but had gone on to top his class at Harvard Business School, [and who] had been offered a Presidential Cabinet post, and an ambassadorship to England or France, or wherever he wanted.” Married at the age of twenty-four, two months after the death of her father, Sarah had once seen in George the approximation of “her great lost love”—her father. Nevertheless, the opening scene of “Mojave” finds Sarah Whitelaw in the midst of one of her regular acts of infidelity with the oafish Dr. Ezra Bentsen, “formerly her psychoanalyst and presently her lover.” But after George Whitelaw, Ezra Bentsen is an unlikely sexual partner (“two hundred and twenty pounds of shortish, fiftyish, frizzly-haired, hip-heavy, myopic Manhattan Intellectual”) whom Sarah actively loathes.
It is her husband she loves, and betrays, for the company of Bentsen, whose greed demands that she present him with expensive gifts at each of their trysts, until she breaks their liaison. Meanwhile, Bentsen has told Sarah of the breach that erupted the previous evening between himself and his child-psychiatrist wife: “I slapped Thelma. But good. And I punched her in the stomach, too.” Sarah's mind had earlier ranged over a not-unrelated incident that had happened to her the day before: Jaime Sanchez, her hairdresser, has told her that he intends to murder his homosexual companion Carlos, a dentist, because Carlos has fallen in love with Sanchez's cousin Angelita. But Carlos does not fully comprehend Sanchez's admonition to him: “You love or you do not. You destroy or you do not.”
When George Whitelaw enters the story, he tells Sarah about the summer after he left Yale when he had hitch-hiked to New Mexico and California. He goes on to say that he had met an abandoned, seventy-year-old blind man named George Schmidt on the highway in the Mojave desert. Schmidt had told him a story of his betrayal by two women, one of whom (the ex-stripper Ivory Hunter, his wife) was responsible for his abandonment “helpless, in the middle of nowhere.” But whereas Schmidt is wary of women (“women are like flies: they settle on sugar or shit”), he is also understanding (“a woman can do you like that, and still you love her”).
George Whitelaw, it develops, has betrayed his wife Sarah, but not without her aid, “for when they had stopped sleeping together, they had been discussing together—indeed, collaborating on—each of his affairs.” Neither is his involvement with other women without its consequences, for it has triggered still other betrayals:
Alice Kent: five months; ended because she demanded he divorce and marry her. Sister Jones: terminated after one year when her husband found out about it. Pat Simpson: a Vogue model who had gone to Hollywood, promised to return and never had. Adele O'Hara: beautiful, and alcoholic, a rambunctious scene-maker; he had broken that one off himself. Mary Campbell. Mary Chester. Jane Vere-Jones. Others. And now, Christine.
If the truth be known, however, George Whitelaw feels secretly “emasculated by women.”
The relation between “Mojave” and some of Capote's earlier work is apparent enough. Although “Mojave” is basically a story of New York, it contains scenes of the Southwest that echo some of his earlier excursions into local color fiction. In that part of the country, he writes, “there wasn't any shade. Nothing but sand and mesquite and this boiling blue sky.” The character Freddy Feo, who takes up with Ivory Hunter, is a carry-over from another Capote character, Tico Feo, the prisoner in “A Diamond Guitar” (1950). Both Tico and Freddy are closely identified with guitars decorated in rhinestone. Capote's attention to problems related to homosexuality (such as exists in Other Voices, Other Rooms and In Cold Blood) is evidenced once again in the strained relations between Jaime and Carlos, as well as in Freddy Feo, recently hired by a trailer park manager who “had picked him up in one of those fag bars in Cat City and put him to work as a handyman.”
Capote's fascination with snow, a symbol of isolation and estrangement in such works as Other Voices, Other Rooms and in the short story “Master Misery,” is again present in “Mojave.” When, for example, Sarah and George embrace, “the flesh against her lips felt as cold as the snowflakes at the window.” In the next-to-last paragraph in the story the heavy silk window draperies in the Whitelaws' apartment conceal “the night river and the lighted riverboats, so snow-misted that they were as muted as the design in a Japanese scroll of winter night.”
The New York stories are those in which a cold, impersonal, and uncongenial environment seems to foster characters who are, in the main, the victims of loneliness, alienation, and despair. As a consequence, their behavior not infrequently hovers somewhere between the engagingly eccentric and the certifiably deranged. Generally humorless, the New York fiction lacks some of the occasional warmth and familiarity that is often (but certainly not always) present in Capote's southern stories.
II. STORIES OF THE SOUTH
The earliest (1944) of these is “The Shape of Things” which, like “A Mink of One's Own,” is a wartime narrative. It brings four characters together on a moving train somewhere between the Carolinas and Virginia. Three of them are related directly in one sense or another to the war itself, and they are brought in touch with one another on a railway diner for a brief interlude that is perhaps more felt than articulated. The three consist of “a ruddy-cheeked marine and a heart-faced girl” (his wife), as well as a severely battle-fatigued corporal from the Army. The fourth character, and the central one, is “a wispish-sized, white pompadoured woman” who, at least ostensibly, has no relation to the war and its attendant human dilemmas. She regards the girl (who comes from Alabama) merely as a “war bride.” When the corporal suddenly makes his appearance in the dining car and lurches “awkwardly toward them and [collapses] in the table's empty seat like a rag,” she regards him as a drunk. The marine, by contrast to the woman, understands the corporal's condition and evinces some degree of sympathetic understanding: “Listen, fella, you better get a doctor.” The corporal, in spite of his erratic, nervous behavior, is aware of his own condition and attempts to reveal this understanding to the other three by saying “D'ya think I want to sit down at a table with … someone like you and make ‘em sick? D'ya think I want to scare a kid like this one over here and put ideas in her head about her own guy! I've been waiting months, and they tell me I'm well, but the first time …” With this somewhat stilted outburst he bolts out of the diner, leaving the three alone again. The white-pompadoured woman's response to this is merely to pay for the coffee that the corporal has left behind.
Capote also used the unifying device of characters brought together on a train in his next story, “A Tree of Night,” although the implications of “The Shape of Things” are quite different. In the latter story the central idea is one that is anything but unusual in war-related literature—William Faulkner had used it in Soldiers' Pay in 1926, for example—that persons like the white-pompadoured woman who are well insulated from the unspeakable realities of war seen unable or unwilling to comprehend the effects of war upon those who have been touched directly by it. “The Shape of Things” is therefore partly an exercise in point of view wherein the woman is somewhat ironically unable to imagine the grave predicaments faced by others in her midst, and reacts mostly by silence and indignation.
As a short story, “A Tree of Night” succeeds much more than “The Shape of Things” for a number of reasons. It is, first of all, well sustained in its tone. The icicles that are suspended from the remote southern railway depot at night, are “like some crystal monster's vicious teeth,” and they establish the prevailing mood for the rest of the narration. On the lonely railway platform it is windy, cold, and dark, except for “a string of naked light bulbs.” As the story's protagonist, a college sophomore named Kay, climbs aboard the last remaining dingy railway coach, the gloom of the deserted depot extends to the tawdriness of the coach's interior, with its disarray of partly eaten sandwiches, remnants of apples and oranges, discarded paper cups, newspapers, and soft drink bottles—all of which combine with the staleness of tobacco smoke, the prospect of dozing travellers, and a leaking water-cooler to produce a singularly depressing scene.
The story traces the gradual undoing of Kay, who is finally coerced into surrendering the contents of her purse to a hypnotically grotesque pair of travelling con-artists. The man and woman who with ironic subtlety break her will as she falls into a macabre trance, accomplish their ends not only by their relentless insistence, but also by the lighting on the train and by the cadence of the moving locomotive. Kay, a nineteen-year-old, is on her way back to college after having attended the funeral of an uncle who has willed her a green Western guitar. Her decidedly funereal point of view is heightened by other elements in the story, such as the ghoulish monster teeth suspended from the station house and the gloom of entering the coffin-like interior of the last coach on this dreary, nocturnal passenger train. Kay settles in the car's only vacant seat where across from her are situated the two con-artists, she in her lavender hat with its cluster of celluloid cherries drooping from it, he deaf and dumb. Their game, as it turns out, is the reenactment of live burial for the entertainment of the curious in “every tank town in the South.” The woman's advertising handbill comes, no doubt, as an unpleasant reminder of the funeral from which Kay has just returned:
LAZARUS
The Man Who Is Buried Alive
A Miracle
See For Yourself
Adults, 25¢—Children, 10¢
With a description that invites comparison with Eudora Welty's story “Petrified Man,” the eccentric woman explains to Kay their routine reenactment of his mock funeral: “He wears a gorgeous made-to-order bridegroom suit and a turban and lotsa talcum on his face,” she states matter-of-factly. “After the hymn, after the sermon, we bury him.” The deaf-mute, she says, has the ability to lie motionless for hours in a coffin by putting himself into a hypnotic trance. Then people come to view him in a storefront window. “Stays there all night stiff as a poker and people come and look: scares the livin' hell out of ‘em. …” The details of their act are ludicrous, even funny, except that both the present moment and certain of Kay's sinister childhood memories each conspire against her, breaking her will. The coldness of the car's platform makes her head ache, and outside the coach window the tall trees seem “misty, painted pale by a malicious moonshine.” The stars overhead remind the reader of the stars painted on the lid of the mute's casket, and the mute himself recalls for Kay the white image of her dead uncle's head resting on its casket pillow.
She is reminded too, and this is central to the story's “meaning,” of her childhood memories “of terrors that once, long ago, had hovered above her like haunted limbs on a tree of night,” and of “the unfailing threat of the wizard man.” For her, the mute quite obviously becomes the living embodiment of the dreaded wizard man of her girlhood imagination. His desire is to sell her a love charm in the form of a shellacked peach seed. Too terrified either to ask the railway conductor to find her another seat, or to cry out and thus awaken the deathlike slumber of those around her, she submits, pulling her raincoat up “like a shroud” as the woman takes possession of Kay's purse.
“A Tree of Night” contains certain ironic elements, not the least of which is the complete surrender of an apparently rational and intelligent young college woman to the purely emotional forces of the moment and to the wiles of an exceedingly crude (and yet not unskilled), partially drunken, self-proclaimed fraud and her afflicted partner who utters not a single word. In spite of Kay's protestations, she is emotionally seduced into cooperating with the couple when the woman tries to force her to drink some cheap gin, although Kay finally manages to pour the paper cup of gin into the sound hole of her green guitar.
Other ironic details are also present; at one point the woman admonishes Kay for not telling the truth when Kay has tried to break away, allegedly to meet a friend on the same train; it is the woman and her accomplice, of course, who trade professionally in lies. The woman then suggests that for Kay to leave her seat would hurt the mute's feelings. Only a page later, however, the woman notes that her companion is immune to having his feelings trampled on by incredulous “smart alecks” because “he's afflicted.” A short time later the woman hoists her skirt and blows her nose enthusiastically on the ragged hem of her petticoat, only to rearrange her skirt “with considerable primness.” As for the rest of the passengers seated in this veritable mobile garbage dump rolling through a siege of foul weather in a dimly lit and offensive-smelling antiquated railway car, they seem “not … at all conscious of any discomfort” because they are asleep.
The story is made coherent by a series of leitmotifs and images. The most imposing of these is the awareness of death as suggested by entombment, morbid fear of supernatural forces, bodies, shrouds, and caskets. Another recurring image in the tale is that of devoured fruit. On the floor of the coach are apple cores and orange hulls. The lacquered peach seed that the mute desires to palm off on Kay is another such image, as is the cluster of faintly comic artificial cherries that are sewn to the woman's hat. Such images are but a reminder of the otherwise spent and artificial atmosphere that engulfs the whole narrative, particularly the funeral that Kay has just witnessed, and later the gloomy interior of the coach. The result of these unpleasant experiences for her is but another step in the loss of her youthful innocence.
Capote's early fiction is characterized in part by an unevenness in artistic quality. There is probably no better illustration of this than the differences that exist between “A Tree of Night” and “Preacher's Legend,” both of which appeared in 1945. The deficiencies of “Preacher's Legend” lie in both its narrative style and its dubious thematic import. The story centers around “an old colored man” of advanced age (“ninety or a hundred, maybe”) who lives alone in the rural South and who is preoccupied by the passing of his wife Evelina long ago, as well as by certain fundamentalist religious persuasions. At one juncture in the story he retires alone into the woods to pray at a location known to him simply as The Place. But when he opens his Bible, clasps his hands, and lifts his head, he is interrupted by two sinister white hunters bearing a slain wildcat. The hunters are identified only as Curly Head and Yellow Hair. Owing to his generally confused state and to his preoccupation with the Bible (despite the Preacher's illiteracy), “he knew who the strangers were—knew it from the Good Book.” Accordingly, he addresses one of the hunters as “Mistuh Jesus,” and the other as “Mistuh Saint,” evidently believing that the two have come to deliver him to his heavenly reward.
But Preacher is not ready to go. To Mistuh Jesus he says, “I'se been turnin' de whole mattah ovah an' I'se come to conclude I don't wants to go wid y'all.” Curly Head and Yellow Hair do not take the old black man seriously, and are of the opinion that “he's just been sitting in the sun too long, that's all.” As the two make their departure, however, Preacher asks Mistuh Jesus to do him one favor: “If you can see yo' way clear to do me one mo' favuh, I'd ‘preciate it if you evah gits de time iffen you'd find my ol’ woman … names Evelina … an' say hello from Preacher an' tells her what a good happy man I is.” Curly Head promises to fulfill Preacher's request “first thing in the morning,” but as the two hunters make their way down the road they burst into derisive laughter.
The story has relatively little to say. Capote reveals something of Preacher's private world, a world of myth and memory that is contrasted in the story with some harsher realities of the intrusive “outside” world of violence and cynicism represented by the two hunters. Preacher's remarks to himself, and to them, make the narrative partly a dialect story, and the Preacher himself is sketched in the tradition of the childlike, subservient, equivocal black man of the Uncle Remus stories.
Some of Capote's early interest in the gothic mode that found its flowering in Other Voices, Other Rooms is to be found in “Preacher's Legend,” just as in “A Tree of Night.” Evelina had been “dead and buried two springs ago,” and Preacher is mindful that some of his own children have gone “to their graves” and that “on the eve of his puppy's death, it was said, a great red-winged bird with a fearsome beak had sailed into the room from nowhere.” Other images and suggestions reinforce the morose tone of the narration. From his wall stares “a wonderful poster-picture of a golden-haired girl holding a bottle of NE-HI [that is] torn at the mouth, so that her smile was wicked and leering.” Outside, meanwhile, a rooster crows and the dogwood blossoms. Preacher recalls Evelina's admonition to him against believing in spirits: (“I ain't gonna listen to no mo' of dat spook talk.”). And yet, when he first hears the approach of the hunters in the woods, he regards them as apparitions. Such details as these point to the story's affinity with local color tradition as evidenced by its whole cultural milieu, its rural southern setting, its reuse of black colloquialisms, and its somewhat paternalistic view of the black man.
After “Preacher's Legend,” comedy prevailed in Capote's southern stories, and one of the better comic tales is “My Side of the Matter” which is written (uncharacteristically for Capote) in the first person. The narrator is a seriocomic sixteen-year-old bridegroom and expectant father who, to his infinite regret, has been persuaded to relinquish his “swell position clerking at the Cash'n'Carry to accompany his bride to her aunts' house in Admiral's Mill” which, he says, “is nothing but a damn gap in the road any way you care to consider it.”
Domestic differences of opinion have culminated in his being attacked by his wife Marge's two aunts. One of them, Eunice, has threatened him with a Civil War sword, and the other (Olivia-Ann) has brandished a “fourteen-inch hog knife” against him. The result of these disputes is the young man's barricading himself in the family parlor by pushing heavy furniture against the doors, locking the windows, and lowering the shades. Last seen, he is “munching a juicy, creamy, chocolate cherry” from out of a “five pound box of Sweet Love candy.” As his would-be attackers plead for him to surrender, his reply is to give them “a tune on the piano every now and then just to let them know” that he is still “cheerful.”
The story is as light and comic as most of the others were dark and serious, and yet throughout his career Capote persists in concentrating upon the grotesque characters he had used before, except that in “My Side of the Matter” they are devoted to comic ends. Here the narrator himself admits to being “slightly stocky,” but he attributes that to his not having “got [his] full growth yet.” Eunice, seeing him in a less understanding light, regards him merely as “the runt of the litter.” But Marge protests: “you seem to forget, Aunt Olivia-Ann, that this is my husband, the father of my unborn child.” Eunice then makes a nasty sound. “Well, all I can say is I most certainly wouldn't be bragging about it.”
The other characters are scarcely more appealing. Marge, the child bride, according to her husband, “has no looks, no body, and no brains whatever,” and on top of those shortcomings, “ups and gets pregnant” after the couple are betrothed less than three months. Eunice, on the other hand, has “a behind that must weight [sic] a tenth of a ton,” and tries vainly to chew her tobacco with ladylike decorum. Olivia-Ann, according to the sixteen-year-old, is worse still, “for she is a natural-born half-wit and ought really to be kept in somebody's attic.” To make matters worse, he says, “she's real pale and skinny and has a mustache. She squats around most of the time whittling on a stick with her fourteen-inch hog knife.”
The women make no pretense about their disapproval of the young man, compelling him as they do to sleep apart from his wife on a cot erected on the screenless back porch, which is besieged both by mosquitoes “that could murder a buffalo” and by “dangerous flying roaches and a posse of local rats big enough to haul a wagon train.” With continued vehemence, the women accuse him of ineptitude and outright laziness. Says Eunice, “if you think I'd let that runt drive my just-as-good-as-brand-new 1934 Chevrolet as far as the privy and back you must've gone clear out of your head.” Alluding to his laziness, she continues, “if he's ever so much as driven a plow I'll eat a dozen gophers fried in turpentine.”
The humor of the tale is at once sophisticated and slapstick, for while the narrator retains an astutely ironic point of view throughout, he also speaks with an ingenious crudity. In the end, the story turns into a free-for-all. Marge hands Eunice a Civil War sword with which to restrain the narrator, while Olivia-Ann rushes into the yard bellowing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The effect of all this is hilarious Faulknerian fun, as pointless, perhaps, as it is funny.
Like a number of stories before and after it, “My Side of the Matter” concerns a less-than-welcome guest in an alien household, a circumstance that Capote uses in such stories as “Miriam,” “The Headless Hawk,” “Shut a Final Door,” “Master Misery,” as well as in Other Voices, Other Rooms. And although the young man's involuntary exile in “My Side of the Matter” is comic, he is still another of Capote's isolated and unloved outcasts.
“Jug of Silver” is another comic story, and the chief difference between it and “My Side of the Matter” is that the former is a much more charming narrative, though no less enigmatic in its message. It is the story of a waifish boy known only as Appleseed who is credited with guessing the amount of money ($77.35, in all) contained in a gallon jug that had once contained “store-bought” Italian wine.
The scene is a small town in the deep South where the narrator, looking fondly back to his boyhood, recalls Mr. Ed Marshall, his uncle, “a squat, square-faced, pinkfleshed man with looping, manly white mustaches” who owns and manages the Valhalla drugstore. Early in the story Marshall appears as “a renowned teetotaler” drinking red wine with his companion, a somewhat mysterious, supposedly Egyptian, dentist named Hamurabi who unaccountably possesses no foreign accent, and who, in the opinion of the narrator, “wasn't any more Egyptian than the man in the moon.” Marshall, a little tipsy from the wine, and a great deal concerned about the sudden appearance of an old man named Rufus McPherson who has opened a rival drugstore across the town square, decides to fill the jug with nickels and dimes. His idea is to promote business by allowing his customers to estimate the value of the jug's contents, and to award the same contents on Christmas eve to the nearest estimator. To Hamurabi, the jug represents “the pot at the end of the rainbow,” but to Marshall, it is a sensational piece of business promotion. He tells his customers that “the more you buy, the more chances you get. And I'll keep all guesses in a ledger till Christmas Eve, at which time whoever comes closest to the right amount will get the whole shebang.”
The plan succeeds enormously. “Why,” the narrator says, “the Valhalla hadn't done so much business since Station Master Tully, poor soul, went stark raving mad and claimed to have discovered oil back of the depot, causing the town to be overrun with wildcat prospectors.” But moral and sentimental problems confront Marshall and Hamurabi when Appleseed arrives on the scene and claims to live on a farm outside the town limits. Appleseed also claims to be twelve years old, but his sister Middy (“a sad looking kid” who resembles “a regular bean pole” and who has something wrong with her teeth) says that her brother is only eight. Obviously down on his luck, Appleseed never changes his outfit which consists of “a red sweater, blue denim britches, and a pair of man-sized boots that went clop clop with every step.” His mother, he says, weighs but seventy-four pounds, his brother plays the fiddle at weddings for a fee of fifty cents, and his father is apparently one short step ahead of the sheriff.
Appleseed resolves to ascertain the correct amount contained in the jug, but instead of taking a mere educated guess, he intends somehow to count the money: “Now, the way I got it figured, there ain't but one sure-fire thing and that's to count every nickel and dime.” Hamurabi is incredulous: “Count! You better have X-ray eyes, son, that's all I can say.” Moved by the sight of the pathetic boy and his even more pathetic sister, Hamurabi has not the heart to see the child's face on Christmas Eve when he, in all probability, will be grievously disappointed: “I don't want to see that kid's face. This is Christmas and I mean to have a rip-roaring time.”
At the climax of the story at the Valhalla on Christmas Eve, the store fills with an anxious assemblage in only twenty minute's time. Capote's handling of the suspense element is perfectly timed. Appleseed is accorded the honor of opening an envelope containing a slip with the prize-winning figure on it, and it becomes clear that Marshall, in the spirit of yuletide charity and holiday good will, has altered the figure to coincide precisely with Appleseed's estimate. Only the town drunk who masquerades as Santa Claus and “who had a snootful by this time” causes a rumpus, although it develops that he has been paid to do so by Rufus McPherson.
The story is related with an engaging oral quality in the tradition of the American tall tale. Appleseed wins the contents of the jug, so Capote's explanation goes, because he had been fortuitously born with a caul over his head. But all this happened long ago. In the ensuing years Appleseed moved with his family to Florida and was never again heard from. In the remaining time before his death, Marshall “was invited each Christmas day to tell the story of Appleseed to the Baptist Bible class.” Later, Hamurabi had recorded the “legend” of Appleseed and had attempted to interest an editor in publishing it, but was unsuccessful. Capote's story ends on still another ironic note, for the editor who had turned down Hamurabi's version of the story had done so because Hamurabi had not stressed the fact that Middy supposedly “turned out to be a movie star” after she acquired enough money to pay for false teeth. “But that's not what happened,” says the narrator, “so why should you lie?” The real center of the story is, of course, predicated on Marshall's charitable distortion of the truth.
As in so many of Capote's short stories, “Jug of Silver” offers the reader an array of colorful and eccentric characters, especially in the form of precocious, determined children. The children in the story are much like those in “Children on Their Birthdays” which appeared next, and which is similar in situation, setting, and atmosphere. “Jug of Silver” also shares with a number of other stories, such as “A Tree of Night,” “Miriam,” and “The Headless Hawk,” a certain counterrealistic quality which, if it makes the story no less believable, is still considerably removed from stark, photographic reality. It makes effective use of some genuinely warm and comic southern local color elements; but comic or not, it contains a touch of sadness growing out of the use of deprived characters that makes the texture of the narrative decidedly bittersweet.
That same bittersweetness prevails in another of Capote's favorite stories, the hilarious “Children on Their Birthdays.” The tale begins and ends on a poignant note, however, for the protagonist (an enigmatic ten-year-old named Miss Lily Jane Bobbit) is eventually run over and killed by the same six o'clock bus that had originally brought her and her mother to the tiny southern town which is the scene of the narrative. The story, withal, is a remarkable piece of local color narration told by an anonymous first-person observer. Much like “My Side of the Matter,” “Children on Their Birthdays” has no imposing thematic point to make, although it is rich in a variety of kinds of suggestiveness.
Structurally, the story is framed by Miss Bobbit's arrival and would-be departure, for as she runs toward “those moons of roses” prepared by her childhood friends as a going-away tribute, she runs into the path of the bus and is killed. The story itself ends on this note, and the immensely comic aspects of the story are therefore tempered.
Still, “enigmatic” is the word that applies best to Miss Bobbit's character and behavior. From the moment she makes her appearance in town, there is a certain disruption of the usual patterns of social and psychological behavior among a whole colony of provincial southern children in whom change is ultimately brought about. The “wiry little girl in a starched, lemon-colored party dress [carrying a] spinsterish umbrella” proceeds to evoke a wide range of responses (jealousy, awe, admiration, outrage, and finally love) among those children who are attentive to her. Miss Bobbit is another of Capote's somewhat disarmingly precocious child characters. The narrator's Aunt El, for one, is bothered by this ten-year-old child's wearing makeup, but aside from that, Miss Bobbit possesses an adult dignity, for “she was a lady, and, what is more, she looked you in the eye with a manlike directness.”
The story consists of a series of loosely related anecdotes involving the child, each of which is progressively more comic and revealing of character. At the outset, the eccentric child moves into an eccentric-looking house, “an old dark place with about two dozen lightning rods scattered on the roof.” The gossipy Mrs. Sawyer who owns the place and who is terrified by storms, spreads the rumor that the child's father, “the sweetest singing man in the whole of Tennessee,” is serving time in a state penitentiary, and that Miss Bobbit and her suspiciously silent mother subsist on a raw vegetarian diet. When the child befriends a young black girl named Sister Rosalba (“baby-fat and sugar-plum shaped”), Mrs. Sawyer tells Aunt El “that it went against her grain to have a nigger lolling smack there in plain sight on her front porch.” And when Miss Bobbit announces that Rosalba is to be considered as her sister, the initial racial slurs from the white population are finally discontinued. On the occasion when Miss Bobbit becomes incensed over the dogs that station themselves under her window at night and keep her awake, she and Sister Rosalba take the matter into their own hands after the sheriff refuses to do anything, and after Sister Rosalba reveals that she does not regard them as dogs at all, but as “some kind of devil.” The two are “seen stalking through town carrying a flower basket filled with rocks.” When they come upon a dog, Miss Bobbit scrutinizes it, and if it is one of the condemned, Sister Rosalba, “with ferocious aim, would take a rock from her basket and crack the dog between the eyes.”
Later, when Miss Bobbit becomes the county subscription representative for a list of magazines that include “Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics, Dime Detective and Child's Life,” she enlists the help of the unruly Billy Bob and his exceedingly ornery companion who is ironically misnamed Preacher Star. Sister Rosalba, meanwhile, begins to market an assortment of cosmetics called Dewdrop, and also hires the boys to make deliveries. The work is surprisingly difficult, for “Billy Bob used to be so tired in the evening that he would hardly chew his supper.” But the most comic part of the story involves the appearance of the town con-man (Manny Fox) who, in the manner of Mark Twain, promotes a show featuring a “Fan Dancer Without the Fan” as well as an array of local talent elicited from among the townspeople who will compete for “A Genuine Hollywood Screen Test.” The fanless dancer (clad in a bathing suit, much to the disappointment of the local hangers-on) turns out to be none other than Mrs. Manny Fox (“A deadpan pimento-tongued redhead with wet lips and moist eyelids”), currently residing at the Chucklewood Tourist Camp.
The main attraction for the narrator and his companions is Miss Bobbit, the ladylike Miss Bobbit, who has been practicing her “act” behind drawn window shades at Mrs. Sawyer's. When another local performer (Buster Riley) has finished “Waltzing Matilda” on a saw, Miss Bobbit proceeds to shock the townfolk by singing in “a rowdy sandpaper voice”: “I was born in China, and raised in Jay-pan … if you don't like my peaches, stay away from my can oho o-ho!” Aunt El gasps as, “with a bump [Miss Bobbit] up-ended her skirt to display her blue-lace underwear.” Her act terminates in a grand flourish when “in the midst of a full split” a Roman candle bursts “into firey balls of red, white and blue,” as the audience rises for her to bellow out “The Star Spangled Banner.”
In the meantime, Manny Fox skips town, and after two weeks of non-action on the promised Hollywood screen test, Miss Bobbit organizes the “Manny Fox Hangman's Club” which leads eventually to his arrest in Uphill, Arkansas. For her efforts, she receives the “Good Deed Merit Award” from the Sunbeam Girls of America, of which she takes a dim view because of “all that rowdy bugle blowing.” By the time the Hangman's Club proposes to send her to Hollywood for a screen test (in return for ten percent of her lifetime earnings) Billy Bob has fallen in love with Miss Bobbit. But after the farewell festivities which involve “boys in flower masked faces,” she runs into the path of the bus.
Miss Bobbit, remotely the same kind of self-determined, totally independent, and enterprising child that Capote's Miriam had been, can be viewed as the forerunner of certain other characters yet to be created, not the least of which are Idabel Tomkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Similarly, Billy Bob's habit of escaping up the nearest tree in moments of stress prefigures The Grass Harp where a whole colony of characters select the same arboreal refuge. Capote's attention to the elements of hoax and childhood problems, also evident in “Jug of Silver,” foreshadows The Thanksgiving Visitor.
But Capote's next story in the southern group was “A Diamond Guitar” which appeared in 1950 and which belongs among the darker of his short stories. The scene is a prison farm set in the midst of a pine forest in the South, where the prisoners pass their days tapping the trees for turpentine. The protagonist is a certain Mr. Schaeffer who is serving a sentence of ninety-nine years and a day for having killed a man who, according to the omniscient narrator, “deserved to die.” Schaeffer enjoys a limited measure of prestige among the prison guards and inmates, in whose eyes he has “a mask of special respect.” He is literate, for one thing, and prisoners not infrequently bring letters from outside for him to read aloud, although he has the habit of improvising “more cheerful messages and does not read what is written on the page.”
One Sunday a truck arrives bearing a young Cuban named Tico Feo, “a knifer” who has allegedly “cut up a sailor in Mobile” and who brings with him, among other cherished items, “a guitar studded with glass diamonds.” Given to telling outlandish lies, the young Cuban causes most of the men in the green wooden sleep house to feel a kind of love for him, inspired, perhaps, by his songs sung to the accompaniment of his guitar. “Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so,” the narrator says, “they were as lovers.”
Tico reveals to Schaeffer that he has a friend named Frederico in Mobile who will put them on his boat and carry them to freedom if they can first manage to escape from the prison camp. And as Schaeffer fantasizes about his prospects for making an escape, he hears the sound of a coffin being assembled in the yard for one of the prisoners who has died. Thinks Schaeffer, “This is for me, it is mine.” But it is Tico's plan to hide in a tree until dark, and then make an escape by running through a creek and thereby leave no scent for search dogs to follow. The last act that Tico performs before attempting his escape is to put his guitar in tune. When the moment of their prison break comes, the two men run through the creek as “icy geysers [spray] around them.” While Tico makes his successful escape, Schaeffer breaks an ankle when he runs into a fallen tree. The captain of the guards ironically interprets the whole episode to mean that Schaeffer has been injured in an attempt to capture Tico, for which he is honored by having his picture in the local newspaper. Tico, meanwhile, makes good on his bid for freedom, and, in his typically romantic fashion, is said to have entered the home of a spinster woman, kissed her twice, and fled.
Three winters go by, and Schaeffer's hair has become progressively whiter. He still keeps the “diamond guitar with its glass gems turning yellow with age.” A new prisoner is assigned to the sleep house, and although he is said to be an accomplished guitar player, his songs come out sour, “for it was as though Tico Feo, tuning his guitar that last morning, had put a curse on it.” When last seen, the guitar is beneath Schaeffer's cot, where in the night the old man “sometimes reaches it out, and his fingers drift across the strings: then, the world.”
Like so many other Capote tales (such as “A Tree of Night,” “Miriam,” “My Side of the Matter,” “The Headless Hawk,” “Shut a Final Door,” “Jug of Silver,” and “Master Misery”) “A Diamond Guitar” is set in motion when complete strangers begin to interact. Tico Feo's rather brief influence over the dreary, hopeless life of Schaeffer has provided the old man with not only a ray of hope for an eventual escape, but also some colorful memories to fuel his romantic imagination. Tico himself shares with Billy Bob (of “Children on Their Birthdays”) the notion that one can find solace and safety if he will but climb a tree. But in general, Tico is another of Capote's array of fiercely independent characters who, like Miss Bobbit and Holly Golightly, are far more motivated from within than from without.
In “A Diamond Guitar,” Schaeffer functions as the protagonist because he is the person to whom development occurs. And although Tico himself undergoes no significant change, the monotony of Schaeffer's life is alleviated by Tico's brief presence. Tico, with his “bottle of Evening in Paris cologne” and his “Rand McNally map of the world,” enjoys a kind of life far removed from Schaeffer's; for to Tico, being alive “was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.” He leaves behind him only the diamond guitar, an emblematic reminder of himself.
The most warmly engaging of all Capote's ventures into short fiction is “A Christmas Memory” (1956), a blend of fiction and autobiography concentrating once more on the author's remembered life in the South. His powers of description in “A Christmas Memory” are quite possibly unparalleled anywhere else in his work. When the book begins, it is “a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.” Capote remembers himself at the age of seven. His guardian, “a woman with snow white hair,” is at the window “wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summer calico dress,” and looking like “a bantam hen.” Because “it's fruitcake weather,” the boy and the old woman set out in a buggy, the wheels of which “wobble like a drunkard's legs” to find the ingredients necessary to bake thirty cakes: “cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings. …”
Like much of his earlier fiction (such as Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp), “A Christmas Memory” can be read as a moving expression of lost childhood innocence and idyllic simplicity. The texture of the prose is also similar to those earlier pieces, for it is both subtle and impressionistic. There is probably no better instance of this kind of writing in “A Christmas Memory” than Capote's description of a late fall southern dawn:
Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter weeks. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep, rapid-running water, we have to abandon the buggy. Queenie [a dog] wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints at the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and melted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels. Another creek to cross: a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend [Miss Sook Faulk] shivers too: not with cold but enthusiasm. One of her hat's ragged roses sheds a petal as she lifts her head and inhales the pine-heavy hair. “We're almost there; can you smell it, Buddy?” she says, as though we were approaching an ocean.
Curiously enough, Capote once said that “A Christmas Memory” was the only piece he ever wrote “that depended on its southern setting. The moment I wrote that story I knew that I would never write another word about the South. I'm not going to be haunted by it anymore.”4 Haunted or not, Capote succeeded in creating in “A Christmas Memory” a high watermark of personal feeling and dramatic intensity; he recalls at one point that for Christmas he had wanted a bicycle, but that because of his guardian Miss Faulk's impoverished state, he anticipated receiving a kite (made by her), along with “socks, a Sunday school shirt, some handkerchiefs, a hand-me-down sweater and a year's subscription to a religious magazine for children.” This will be the last Christmas with Miss Faulk. Her mind begins to fail, and the boy is to be sent to a series of military schools, “a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim, reveille-ridden summer camps.” Back in the present, some twenty years after these childhood experiences, he learns of her death, which he regards as a “severing [of an] irreplaceable part of [himself].” He concludes, “that is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”
Capote's The Thanksgiving Visitor shares with “A Diamond Guitar” and “A Christmas Memory” not only a remote southern locality, but also a tone of wistfulness born out of the narrator's sense of profound loneliness. The narrator in The Thanksgiving Visitor, however, is a child, and the story itself can be read in more than one light. Perhaps the most obvious way of seeing the narrative is as a documentary of life in rural Alabama in one of the worst of the Depression years, 1932. At the climactic Thanksgiving dinner, Uncle B (one of the narrator's four guardians) offers a prayer appropriate to the occasion: “Bless You, O Lord, for the bounty of our table, the varied fruits we can be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day of a troubled year.” Buddy, a Capote self-portrait, recalls having been fed magnificently on “cockcrow repasts of ham and fried chicken, fried pork chops, fried catfish, fried squirrel (in season), fried eggs, hominy grits with gravy, blackeyed peas, collards with collard liquor and cornbread to mush it in, biscuits, pound cake, pancakes and molasses, honey in the comb, homemade jams and jellies, sweetmilk, buttermilk, coffee chickory-flavored and hot as Hades.” But he is understandably troubled by the thought of those who have to make do with less. “Throughout the Depression Years,” he says, “our school distributed free milk and sandwiches to all children whose families were too poor to provide them with a lunch box.” But a few children were still harder hit by the bad times: “some boys, girls too, were forced to go barefoot right through the bitterest weather—that's how hard the Depression had hit Alabama.”
For Buddy, the times were also difficult, but for reasons somewhat independent of the country's depressed economy. An autobiographic story, The Thanksgiving Visitor is a bittersweet, retrospective, illumination of his early life with three aunts and an uncle. The protagonist is Buddy's only “friend,” Miss Sook Faulk, for “as she was a child herself … she understood children, and understood me absolutely.” Even so, Buddy's life is not an easy one, inasmuch as they “had taken me under their roof because of a disturbance among my more immediate family, a custody battle that, for involved reasons, had left me stranded in this somewhat eccentric Alabama household. Not that I was unhappy there: indeed, moments of those few years turned out to be the happiest part of an otherwise difficult childhood. …”
The conflict in the story centers around Buddy's unhappy relations with a twelve-year-old contemporary named Odd Henderson. “Talk about mean!” says Buddy, “Odd Henderson was the meanest human creature in my experience.” Odd, who has failed the first grade twice, vents his hostilities on the more passive Buddy by knocking him to the ground and rubbing prickly cockleburs into his scalp as “a circle of kids ganged around to titter, or pretend to.” Malicious acts of this nature cause Buddy to find excuses not to attend school, and when Miss Sook comprehends the problem, she develops a stratagem to solve Buddy's dilemma, while she finds a way to advance the cause of Christian charity at the same time. Convinced that Buddy must somehow “come to terms with people like Odd Henderson,” Miss Sook pays a call on Molly Henderson, Odd's destitute, toothless mother who is faced with a house full of children and an absentee, jailbird husband. Miss Sook extends an invitation to Odd for Thanksgiving dinner.
The dinner itself ends in a debacle when Odd steals Miss Sook's prize cameo. At the dinner table, Buddy does what he can to expose the crime, but with continued holiday charity, Miss Sook covers up for Odd's act of petty theft. Because, in Buddy's judgment, “she'd lied to save his skin, [and] betrayed our friendship,” Buddy is all the more disconsolate. Even so, the Thanksgiving invitation solved the original problem of Odd's harassment of Buddy, for “afterward, Odd Henderson let me alone,” Buddy recalls.
But the object of the story lies much deeper than the alleviation of Buddy's problems with Odd Henderson. “The whole family (there were ten of them, not counting Dad Henderson, who was a bootlegger and usually in jail, all scrunched together in a four-room house next door to a Negro church) was a shiftless, surly bunch, every one of them ready to do you a bad turn; Odd wasn't the worst of the lot, and brother, that is saying something.” The story makes use of the somewhat outmoded philosophy of determinism to some extent, for Odd himself is depicted as “a skinny, freckled scarecrow in sweaty cast-off overalls that would have been a humiliation to a chaingang convict,” and the conditions of his environment shape his behavior. As Miss Sook puts it, “this boy can't help acting ugly; he doesn't know any different. All those Henderson children have had it hard.”
There is much more to her understanding of the Hendersons: at the end of the story, Miss Sook puts her arm around Buddy's shoulder. “There's just this I want to say, Buddy. Two wrongs never made a right. It was wrong of him to take the cameo. But we don't know why he took it. Maybe he never meant to keep it. Whatever his reason, it can't be calculated. Which is why what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It was deliberate. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. Do you understand me, Buddy?” Miss Sook's words are central to an understanding of The Thanksgiving Visitor. Furthermore, they have far-reaching implications in Capote's system of values because they clarify some of the perplexities of evil and its origins that occur in the pages of In Cold Blood. In that book, the murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith are, in a very real sense, prisoners of their pathological childhood. As a consequence, their crimes are rendered understandable, but not forgivable.
In its narrative style, The Thanksgiving Visitor is one of the more quotable of Truman Capote's stories because of his occasional flashes of linguistic brilliance. As Miss Armstrong (a strong-armed schoolteacher) beats Buddy's hands for having called Odd a “sonafabitch,” Odd looks on with “a small citric smile.” Somewhat later, Buddy comments that “my mind wandered through a maze as melancholy as the wet twilight.” Observing Odd's ears, Buddy regards them as “a pair of eye-catchers, like Alfalfa's in the Our Gang comedy pictures,” and as he watches Odd urinate, he sees him “unbuttoning his trousers and letting go with a forceful splash [as] he whistled along, jaunty as a jaybird in a field of sunflowers.”
Capote's stories are frequently invested with certain gothic elements. In a fight with a tomboy named Ann “Jumbo” Finchburg, Odd suffers “a broken thumb, plus scratch scars that will stay with him to the day they shut his coffin.” And of the “Henderson breed,” he writes that they might well “gouge the gold out of a dead man's teeth.” While Odd's act of thievery is being exposed at the Thanksgiving dinner, he “seemed calm as a corpse,” and as Buddy fantasizes about his own funeral, he says it would be “worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie's howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.”
III. “HOUSE OF FLOWERS”
“House of Flowers” (1950) must be considered among the lighter tales, although like those it is not altogether made up of sweetness and light. The central character is a comely prostitute named Ottilie who in the early part of the narrative is in the employ of a “spinsterish, smooth-looking invalid” woman who operates the Champs Elysées bordello in Port-au-Prince from an upstairs room. Ottilie, notwithstanding her pleasant and engaging manner, has not passed an easy life. Her mother has died, her father has returned to France, and Ottilie herself has been left in the custody of “a rough peasant family, the sons of whom had each at a young age lain with her in some green and shadowy place.” At fourteen, she had walked two days and a night to Port-au-Prince carrying what was originally a ten-pound sack of grain. To ease the strain, she has allowed the grain to run out gradually until there was little of it remaining at her arrival. “A jolly nice man” has dried the girl's tears and has taken her “to see his cousin,” the proprietress of the Champs Elysées, where she has become the only employee under thirty, and easily “the most talked about girl on the road.”
At a cockfight she meets Royal Bonaparte who spirits her away as his wife to his house of flowers. Convinced by a Houngan in the hills above town that love has come to her at last, she has also been led to believe that if she clutches a wild bee in her bare hand, and if the bee does not sting, then love is real. Although this test has disproven her love for a bordello customer named Mr. Jamison, it indicates the genuineness of her attachment to Royal. Her main problem after five months of marriage to Royal is not so much that he has been spending great amounts of time at cafes and cockfights, but that she has been tormented by her mother-in-law, a more than petulant woman known as Old Bonaparte. The old woman not only spies on Ottilie's love-making, but also harasses her by placing the severed head of a yellow cat on Ottilie's sewing basket. Later, Old Bonaparte places other things in the basket, such as a green snake, spiders, a lizard, and a buzzard's breast. Ottilie retaliates by incorporating such morsels as these in her cooking for the old woman. She drops the cat head into a boiling pot and serves Old Bonaparte a soup that turns out to be “surprisingly tasty.” But when Ottilie reveals her culinary practices to her mother-in-law, the shock is so extreme that the woman dies by nightfall. Ottilie, however, imagines at night that “Old Bonaparte was dead but not gone,” and she confesses to her husband that she has served the old woman such things as snake stew. Royal concludes that she must be punished by being tied to a tree for an entire day without food or water as “the goat Juno and the chickens [gather] to stare at her humiliation.”
Still tied to the tree, Ottilie thinks she is dreaming when Baby and Rosita, two of her former associates from the Champs Elysée, arrive in an automobile hired by Jamison, and attempt to bring Ottilie back to Port-au-Prince where her absence has caused trade at the bordello to fall sharply. They untie the girl and drain a bottle of rum in “a toast to old times, and those to be.” Finally, Ottilie insists on being retied so that, as she explains, “no bee is ever going to sting me.” Thus, rather than being “dead,” as the invalid proprietress has said of Ottilie, Ottilie is not only alive, but in love. “Chewing eucalyptus leaves to sweeten her breath,” Ottilie throws “her arms akimbo, [lets] her neck go limp, [and lolls] her eyes far back into their sockets [so that] seen from a distance it would look as though she had come to some violent, pitiful end.” This, she concludes, will give Royal “a good scare.”
In spite of the story's sometimes unsavory and unfunny elements, the narrative is not only witty, but curiously innocent and romantic, inasmuch as Ottilie possesses a childlike mentality and lives a life (in spite of her shady past) that seems idyllic. Ottilie's story is fundamentally consistent with the pattern established by other Capote protagonists, for she is a virtual stranger whose influence is strongly felt by those with whom she comes into contact. At seventeen, her precocity at handling people and situations invites a comparison with (for example) Lily Jane Bobbit of “Children on Their Birthdays.” Both characters prove to be virtually irresistible to those around them, and it is precisely this irresistibility that distinguishes some of Capote's other key short-story protagonists such as Appleseed (“Jug of Silver”) and Tico Feo (“A Diamond Guitar”). Moreover, Capote's three longer narratives (Other Voices, Other Rooms; Breakfast at Tiffany's; and The Grass Harp) have as central characters individuals with considerable personal appeal. Gone are such unattractive and audibly introspective personalities as Mrs. Miller (“Miriam”), Walter Ranny (“Shut a Final Door”), and Sylvia (“Master Misery”).
Notes
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Malcolm Cowley (ed.), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, (New York, 1960), p. 287.
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Ibid., p. 290.
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Ibid.
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Roy Newquist, Counterpoint (Chicago, 1964), p. 80.
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Surprised by Joy: Stories of the Fifties and Sixties
The Room Was Locked, with the Key on the Inside: Female Influence in Truman Capote's ‘My Side of the Matter’
