One of the things Capote’s perennially child’s-eye view of the world accounts for in this book is his striking preoccupation more with the killers, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, than with the victims, the Clutter family. The author’s presentation of the killers (particularly the “artistic” Smith) as children gone pathetically wrong, as poignantly misguided dreamers, was a terrible variation, but still a variation, on the type of child misfit that in his fiction he found irresistible. Capote’s boyhood friend Harper Lee, who accompanied him to Kansas to research the story, recalled that when Perry Smith, whose legs had been shortened as the result of a motorcycle accident, took his seat at his arraignment, Capote noticed he was so tiny that his feet didn’t touch the floor. “Oh, oh!” Lee remembered thinking. “This is the beginning of a great love affair.” Capote knew a kindred spirit when he saw one.
Capote the child is also much in evidence in the letters collected in Too Brief a Treat. (The title quotes the opening lines of a letter Capote wrote to Bob Linscott in May 1949: “Your letter was too brief a treat, but a treat all the same.”) Certainly there is much here that is charming. In his biography of Capote, Gerald Clarke writes of the “puppylike warmth” that was “basic to his personality,” and this aspect of Capote’s character goes a long way toward explaining why, despite his frequent malice, Capote was thought so adorable for so long by so many. But beneath the endearing, tail-wagging enthusiasm of his hyperbolic Southern salutations (“lover lamb,” “Magnolia my sweet”) lies, all too obviously, an infantile neediness. “Dear Marylou,” he wrote his Harper’s Bazaar editor, Mary Louise Aswell, in 1946, “everyone loves you so much! I am really jealous, because I love you more than anybody, but everyone keeps saying how much they love you without seeming to realize that you belong to me, and that I love you more than anyone.” You can almost hear him waiting to be told that she loves him more than anyone, too.
This, alas, sets a claustrophobic tone that never really lets up. It’s true that the letters will doubtless provide many tasty morsels for students of midcentury American social and publishing history. Some of the gossip is literary. (“Did you see the Guggenheim list?! Ralph Bates!”) And much of course is decidedly and exaltedly jet-set: in August 1953, he writes, “everything became too social—and I do mean social—the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan), the Oliviers (they let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time—the Doctor’s [sic] say no more.)” And some, of course, mark milestones both golden and black in Capote’s career. “The reaction,” he wrote to William Styron in January 1976 after one of the “Answered Prayers” chapters appeared in Esquire, “has ranged from the insane to the homicidal.”
But after nearly 500 pages of this, you can’t help noticing how small Capote’s world—and worldview—really was. What the letters don’t provide is, indeed, anything beyond the personal, the local, at any point in his life. (Here again, chronology is revealing: of this volume’s 452 pages of letters, almost 400 pages’ worth were written before Capote turned forty.) There are virtually no references to larger world events; nor are there substantial literary insights apart from what Capote thought of his own work and the occasional contemporary novel. For comparison’s sake, while reading these Letters, I took down a volume of letters by Evelyn Waugh—another writer whose literary substance was matched by a keen interest in Society—and opened to random pages. On one: musings on the history of heraldry and the nature of a stable social structure. On another: tart thoughts about religion in the novel, following the publication of Brideshead Revisited (“No one now thinks a book which totally excludes religion is atheist propaganda”). Another: Mme. de Pompadour’s disastrous influence on Louis XV’s foreign policy in the wars of 1759. And so on.
Or take the letters of another socially ambitious, adorably popular gay littérateur. Oscar Wilde’s correspondence sparkles with true wit rather than mean cracks, and the personal warmth that emerges is generous and adult, rather than childishly selfish. When you read these and other authors’ letters, in other words, you get a sense not only of them but of their time, the world. But to read Capote is to note how little interest he showed in any life but the social life, in any experience but his own. He prided himself on refusing to go on sightseeing tours of the exotic Mediterranean locales to which his rich ladies’ yachts took him (he preferred the nearest bar to ruins or museums); prided himself, too, on never having voted. Like a small, imaginative child, he was, to himself, the world entire.
The smallness of Capote’s world helps explain what is, in the end, so curiously unsatisfying in his work—even, to some extent, in In Cold Blood, with its distasteful attraction to the childlike, “gifted” killer. However appealing are the fantasies of freedom that recur in his writing, they are, at bottom, un-adult: if to be an adult means to grapple successfully with the unyielding realities of life, it’s interesting that this is something that so many of his characters—like Capote himself, in the end—never do. Capote may have written Lulamae/Holly a ticket to freedom at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but he knew, and we all know, too well what happens to the real Lulamaes. (The real name of Nina Capote, the author’s awful mother, was Lillie Mae.) The transformation of the monstrous Lillie Mae of real life into the adorable Lulamae of fiction seems, in fact, to be much more than conventional artistic chemistry that turns life into art. It may, rather, be seen as a symbol of Capote’s distaste for hard realities, as opposed to the kind of gossamer fantasies he spun in both his work and, increasingly, his life. (Before he died he dreamed, rather pathetically, of giving another grand ball, at which he planned to appear disguised in peasant clothing, “revealing his true identity only by the huge emerald that would sparkle from his forehead, dazzling all those who approached his royal presence.”)
This, in turn, provides the key to understanding one of the great puzzles of Capote’s career: why he had such notorious difficulty writing the endings of his works. In many of his letters he complains bitterly of the torture of completing everything from Other Voices to In Cold Blood—he took a three-month hiatus before tackling the final section—and you feel that difficulty, that struggle, in the finished product. “I couldn’t help feeling that you had gotten a little bit tired of the book,” Bennett Cerf wrote to him upon receiving the manuscript of The Grass Harp in 1951, “and were hurrying to close it in much shorter a space than you originally had intended.” Much, if not indeed most, of Capote’s fiction leaves you with a feeling of incompleteness; there’s often a sense of abruptness, of a failure to resolve. (Breakfast at Tiffany’s in particular simply grinds to a halt.) Here again, the image of a child comes to mind—one who, having toyed with a bit of tinsel, or an object that has caught his interest for a while, suddenly throws it away, as if he’d been distracted by something shinier or sweeter.
Or, perhaps, as if something had scared him away. Surely the most revealing expression of Capote’s difficulty with endings, and all that they represent, is the lyrical scene with which In Cold Blood ends. He liked to say that part of the appeal of writing the book lay in the discipline imposed by having to recount a true story: “I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me and I can do nothing about it. I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it.” The great sweep of the story he tells in In Cold Blood, with its severe and measured pacing—the discovery of the terrible crime; the search for the killers, craftily intercut with flashbacks to their wretched lives; the canny rhythms with which Capote presents the hasty trial and the prolonged delay before the executions—culminates beautifully in a final scene that takes place in a cemetery where, on a windswept day a few years after the killings, Alvin Dewey, the detective who solved the murders, encounters a young woman who had been the best friend of the teenage Nancy Clutter, one of the victims. A brief conversation between them pointedly gives both Dewey and the reader a gentle sense of closure, and the novel ends with one last alliterative evocatio
n of the bleak Kansas landscape: “Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”
The problem is that this ending is too artful: as it turns out, the scene was entirely fictional. Capote added it, he later told Clarke, because the ending that real life had provided him—the hangings of the killers—didn’t seem satisfying. “I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace.” Faced with an ugly reality, he withdrew into a beautiful fantasy—the kind of gentle peace that imbues his evocation of childhoods long past. (Gerald Clarke rightly notes that this final scene rehashes the ending of The Grass Harp.) Capote knew, finally, that he wasn’t up to bringing his most serious and important work to an authentic conclusion. The coda as it stands was just the last in a series of endings that he fudged, or from which he retreated; and you can’t help wondering whether the inability to face unalterable facts (as represented by this particular false ending) was, in some way, the key to Capote’s disintegration. His own words suggest as much. “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” he later said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me.”
Indeed, the experience of writing his grim best seller may have traumatized the writer in profound ways unrelated to the usual creative anxieties. Norman Mailer observed a change in Capote during the Kansas years. “He was getting more masculine…. Getting to know all those people out in Kansas…had given him fiber. He was toughening up.” Capote himself acknowledged this transformation. “I’ve gotten rid of the boy with the bangs,” he told Newsweek in 1966. “He was exotic and strange and eccentric. I liked the idea of that person, but he had to go.” But once that boy left, it wasn’t clear what remained.
And so, after being forced to inhabit a world other than his inner child-life for a long time, he turned inward again. But somehow, the stark confrontation with his limitations, symbolized by his inability to complete his book honestly, permanently destabilized him. The simultaneous publication of the author’s stories and letters has the unintentional effect of reminding you that however enchanting Capote’s interior world may have been, and however lovely the writings it inspired, it was a very limited world—a space that the writer was unable to break out of. Between them, these two new volumes—the one preserving a body of work that should have been larger, but was in fact all “too brief”; the other a too-lengthy record of a life that clung too long to childhood, a record that, like his consciousness itself, could not move beyond youth—constitute an appropriate epitaph for the writer who might have been, rather than a tribute to the one who was. Not entirely a disappointment, but no genius, either.
—The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004
Winged Messages
Angel,” a word that today can have connotations at once sublime and a bit saccharine, ultimately derives from a rather mundane classical Greek masculine noun of the second declension, angelos, “messenger.” In Greek, it’s not a very exciting word at all—no more so than, say, “postman” or “radio announcer” is in English. If you happened to be an ancient Greek and had some bit of news or a message you needed to get across, an angelos was the man for the job; or, rather, angelos was the way you referred to anyone who ended up doing the job. In Greek tragedies, for instance, the character who delivers those famous fact-packed “messenger speeches”—the ones in which we learn how Oedipus handles the news that he’s adopted, or just what’s inside those nicely wrapped gift boxes that Medea sends to her ex’s new bride—is referred to as, simply, the angelos.
The related verb, angellein, “to announce,” is equally unsensational. When the great lyric poet Simonides of Keos wrote, in his old age, the famous epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae—“Go tell the Spartans that here we lie”—the word we translate as “tell” was angellein. However exciting his news might be, the classical Greek angelos was, generally, a featureless vehicle for transmitting crucial knowledge. It was only much later, after the word was appropriated for biblical purposes, that angeloi, “angels,” started to rival their messages in glamour and importance: sprouting wings, blowing mighty horns, and singing in celestial choirs, and altogether becoming religious and iconographic objects in their own right, the forerunners of the cloying figures that have become ubiquitous, in our post-millennial moment, on greeting cards, dashboards, New Age Web sites, and hit TV series such as Touched by an Angel, in which the eponymous, carefully multicultural leads, an attractive young Irishwoman and a soulful middle-aged African-American, go around teaching mortals Important Life Lessons.
And so the classical Greek angelos, grimly transmitting his urgent report of the horrors he has seen, horrors that always result when men find themselves trapped in irresolvable dilemmas, may be thought of as the Angel of Tragedy, and hence very different from the adorable, glittering sylphs who have, lately, alighted in stationery stores and aromatherapy counters and on our television screens, bringing the comfy tidings that everything will be OK: the Angels of Sentimentality.
Part of the excitement of being in the audience of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–and Tony Award–winning dramatic epic Angels in America when it first came to Broadway in 1993 was the fact that it seemed eager to give back to its (very real) angels something like their original job description. Kushner’s two-part drama turns, in fact, on the arrival of an urgent message from Heaven. The action of the first part, “Millennium Approaches,” culminates in the magnificent appearance of an angel, crashing through a ceiling in the bedroom of an AIDS-stricken gay man, and much of the second part, “Perestroika,” is devoted to an explication of what’s on the angel’s mind, which among other things allows Kushner to elaborate a complicated cosmology of his own idiosyncratic invention. But far more exciting than the culminating angelic message in the play (basically, that God abandoned His Creation early in the twentieth century and hasn’t been heard from since, something many may have suspected even before entering the theater) was the message of the play.
Although Angels premièred in the early 1990s, Kushner had been working on it since the late 1980s, and with the exception of a brief epilogue it’s set during a five-month period between October 1985 and February 1986—which is to say, the early years of the AIDS crisis, a period in which the terrible sense of emergency and paranoia in the gay community, which at that point seemed to be horribly singled out by the virus, stood in agonizing counterpoint to the sluggish and halfhearted response of official America, represented by a deeply conservative Republican administration, from whose “family values” the homosexual victims of the illness were excluded. It was only in 1987 that President Reagan finally addressed the illness in public; it had been six years since the first cases were reported, and three since the virus that causes it had been identified, and by that point, twenty-four thousand people had died of it.
Angels in America came as an enraged, seethingly articulate, intellectually ambitious, high-flown response to that stultifying and smug atmosphere of denial, silence, and willful ignorance. The admiration and, in a way, relief that immediately greeted its première (first on the West Coast, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, then in London and finally on Broadway) had to do with the general sense that finally someone was saying something grand, if occasionally grandiose, and important not just about AIDS, but about AIDS as a symptom of a profound rupture in American life. There had, by that point, been other plays inspired by the epidemic: William Hoffman’s As Is and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart both premièred, early in 1985, to considerable acclaim, as did the musical Falsettos, in 1990. But what made Angels feel different was its enormous scope. Here was a work about AIDS, and what it was revealing about the American body politic, on a scale sufficiently epic to suit the subject.
One of the most moving moments in Mike Nichols’s new made-for-television film of Angels—and one of the few moments that finds a cinematic equivalent for th
e ambitions of the original—comes, indeed, during the opening credits, during which the camera floats elegiacally in the air above San Francisco, then zooms through banks of woolly clouds across the continent itself, hovering briefly above Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and Chicago, to settle, finally, beside the Bethesda Fountain in New York’s Central Park, a monument that not coincidentally takes the form of an angel. The shot is moving because it suggests something essential about the mighty scope both of Kushner’s concerns—few contemporary playwrights are as intellectually ambitious as this one, steeped as he is in Marx, Brecht, and Melville—and of the drama he’s written, which ranges from the East Coast to Salt Lake City to Heaven itself (which, we’re told, looks just like San Francisco) and includes not only gays (and not only “good” gays, either) but Jews, Mormons, blacks, and Mayflower WASPS; pill addiction, loneliness, mental illness, homelessness, sexual repression; the westward migration of Eastern European Jews to America and of Mormons to Utah; the Bayeux tapestry, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the McCarthy hearings, and the decisions of Reagan’s judicial appointees; invented characters—there are rabbis, drag queens, housewives, nurses, doctors, and of course angels—as well as historical figures such as Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, whose ghost, in a gesture of imaginative boldness on the playwright’s part that is more or less typical, says Kaddish over the body of one of the men responsible for her execution.
Angels wanted, in other words, to be a play not about gays, or, for that matter, about AIDS and the rottenness of official America’s handling of the crisis, but about the texture of American experience itself. The message—that what the AIDS crisis was revealing wasn’t a moral flaw on the part of gay men, as the conservatives running the country would have it, but rather a moral failing in America itself—may not have come as a surprise to many in those first audiences, but it came as a profound relief to many that someone, finally, was delivering it with such fervor. “Greetings,” the angel intones as she crashes through the ceiling in the amazing finale of Part One, “the Messenger has arrived.” Many in the audience that first night felt that the words applied as much to the play as to the character.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 31