All the memories of the art associated with the portraits of Louis XIII’s time were from then on associated with the thought of her love, bestowing on it a new existence and causing it to enter into the system of her artistic tastes. She ordered from Amsterdam the photograph of a young man’s portrait that resembled him.
She met him a few days later. His mother was seriously ill, his voyage postponed. She told him that she now had on her table a portrait that reminded her of him. He seemed touched, but cold. This made her suffer profoundly, but she consoled herself by thinking that he had at least understood, if he had not enjoyed, her attentions. To love a boor who would not have been aware of it would have been even more cruel. Then, reproaching him in her mind for his indifference, she tried seeing again the men who had been infatuated with her and towards whom she had been indifferent and coquettish, in order to practice towards them the adroit and tender pity that she would at least have tried to obtain from him. But when she met them, they all had the horrible defect of not being him, and the sight of them only irritated her. She wrote him; he did not respond for four days, then a letter came which anyone else would have found amicable, but which threw her into despair.
He wrote: “My mother is getting better, I shall leave in three weeks. Until then, my life is quite full, but I shall try to come by once to pay my respects.”
Was it jealousy for everything that “filled his life” and that prevented her from penetrating it, disappointment at his departure and that he would only come to see her one more time before then, or was it rather disappointment that he did not feel the need to come see her ten times a day before he left?
She could not stay at home, hastily put on a hat and left on foot, quickly traversing the streets that led to his house, with the absurd hope that, by some miracle she was counting on, he was going, at the turning of a square, to appear to her shining with tenderness and that, in a glance, he would explain everything to her. Suddenly she saw him walking along, gaily chatting with some friends. But then she was ashamed, thought that he would guess that she was looking for him, and abruptly turned and entered a shop. On the following days she no longer went looking for him and avoided the places where she might meet him, keeping up this last bit of coquettishness toward him, this last dignity toward herself.
One morning she was sitting alone in the Tuileries, on the terrace of the Bord de l’Eau. She let her disappointment drift, expand, refresh itself more freely in the broadened horizon, gather flowers, soar with the hollyhocks, the fountains and the columns, gallop in chase of the dragoons who were leaving their Orsay quarters, go drifting about on the Seine and glide with the swallows in the pale sky. It was the fifth day since the friendly letter which had desolated her. Suddenly she glimpsed Lepré’s big white poodle, which he let out alone every morning. She had joked with him about it, had told him that one day someone would steal it. The animal recognized her and came up to her. The mad desire to see Lepré that she had repressed for five days completely overcame her. Seizing the animal in her arms, shaking with sobs, she hugged it for a long time with all her strength, then undid the posy of violets she was wearing on her bodice and, attaching it to the dog’s collar, let it leave.
But, calmed by this crisis, assuaged as well, feeling better, she felt her rancor fade little by little and some joy and hope returning with the physical well-being, and felt herself valuing life and happiness. Lepré was going to leave in seventeen days, she wrote him to come dine the next day, excusing herself for not having answered him, and spent a fairly pleasant afternoon. In the evening, she dined in town; many men were to be at this dinner, artists and sportsmen who knew Lepré. She wanted to know if he had a mistress, any kind of bond, which would prevent him from approaching her, which would explain his extraordinary conduct. She would suffer greatly if she learned anything, but at least she would know, and perhaps she could hope that given a little time her beauty would transport him. She left her house having made up her mind to ask this immediately, then seized with fear, she didn’t dare. At the last moment, what impelled her upon her arrival was less the desire to know the truth than the need to speak of him to others, this sad charm of evoking him in vain wherever she was without him. After dinner, she said to two men who were standing near her, and whose conversation was quite free: “Tell me, do you happen to know Lepré?”
“We’ve been seeing him every day forever, but we’re not very close to him.”
“Is he a charming person?”
“He is a charming person.”
“Well! Perhaps you could tell me … please don’t consider yourselves obliged to be too kind, for it concerns something that is truly quite important to me.—There is a young girl whom I love with all my heart and who has shown some inclination for him. Is he someone one could marry without fear?”
Her two interlocutors remained embarrassed for a moment.
“No, that cannot be.”
Madeleine, quite courageously, continued, in order to get finished as quickly as possible: “He has a long-standing affair?”
“No, but it’s really not possible.”
“Tell me why, I assure you, I beg of you.”
“No.”
But then, after all, it was better to tell her, she might imagine the ugliest or the most ridiculous things.
“Well! All right, and I believe that we are not doing any wrong to Lepré in telling you; first, you must not repeat it, of course all Paris knows it anyway, and as for marriage he is far too honest and delicate to dream of it. Lepré is a charming fellow, but he has one vice. He loves base women that one picks up in the mud, and he loves them madly; sometimes he passes his nights in the suburbs or on remote boulevards, at the risk of getting himself killed someday, and not only does he love them madly, but he loves only them. The most ravishing woman in society, the most ideal girl, leave him absolutely indifferent. He cannot even pay them attentions. His pleasures, his preoccupations, his life, are elsewhere. Those who do not know him well used to say that with his exquisite nature, a great love would draw him out of it. But for that it would take a person capable of feeling such a love, and he is not capable of it. His father was already that way, and if his sons won’t be, it’s because he won’t have any.”
The next day at eight o’clock Madeleine was informed that M. Lepré was in the salon. She went in; the windows were open, the lamps had not yet been lit and he was waiting for her on the balcony. Not far from them some houses surrounded by gardens were resting in the softened light of evening, distant, Oriental and religious as if it had been Jerusalem. The sparse and caressing light bestowed on each object a completely new and almost moving meaning. A luminous wheelbarrow in the middle of the dusky street was touching, as was, a little further on, the dark and already nocturnal trunk of a chestnut tree, beneath whose foliage the last rays were still soaking. At the end of the avenue the setting sun was gloriously bending like a triumphal arch paved with celestial golds and verdure. At the neighboring window heads were reading with a simple solemnity. In approaching Lepré, Madeleine felt the pacified sweetness of all these things soften, make languid, pry open her heart, and she had to restrain herself so as not to weep.
He, however, handsomer this evening and more charming, treated her with delicate cordialities that he had not shown up to then. Then they chatted seriously, and she glimpsed for the first time the full extent of his intelligence. If in society he did not please, it was precisely because the truths he was searching for were situated below the visual horizon of witty people, and because the truths of great spirits are ridiculous errors on earth. And then his goodness sometimes lent these truths a charming poetry, as the sun gracefully colors high peaks. And he was so nice to her, he showed himself so grateful for her kindness that, feeling she had never loved so much, and having renounced the hope of seeing her love returned, she suddenly glimpsed with joy the hope of the intimacy of a pure friendship, thanks to which she would see him every day; and she adroitly and happily let him k
now of her plan. But he, saying that he was very taken up, could scarcely be free for more than one day every two weeks. She had told him enough to let him understand that she loved him, if he had wanted to understand. And he, as diffident as he was, if he had had the shadow of an inclination for her he would have said so in words of friendship, even the most trifling. Her disordered glance was fixed on him so intently that she would have immediately made them out, and would have been greedily sated by them. She wanted to stop Lepré, who was continuing to talk of his time so taken up, of his life that was so filled up, but suddenly her glance plunged into the heart of her adversary, so far that it could have plunged into the infinite horizon of the sky stretching out before her, and she felt the uselessness of her words. She was silent, then she said: “Yes, I understand, you are very busy.”
And at the end of the evening, when he was leaving, as he was saying to her: “May I not come to say farewell?” she answered with sweetness: “No, my friend, I have things to do, I think it would be better to leave things as they are.”
She was waiting for a word; he didn’t say it, and she said to him: “Adieu!”
Then she waited for a letter, in vain. So she wrote him that it was better to be frank, that she could have let him believe that she liked him, that that was not the case, that she would prefer not to see him as often as she had requested with an imprudent cordiality.
He answered that he had in fact never believed in anything more than a cordiality that was celebrated, and which he had never had the intention of abusing to the point of annoying her by coming so often.
Then she wrote him that she loved him, that she had never loved anyone but him. He answered that she was jesting.
She stopped writing to him, but not, at first, thinking of him. Then that happened too. Two years later, tired of her widowhood, she married the Due de Mortagne, a man of great handsomeness and wit who, until Madeleine’s death, that is to say for more than forty years, decorated her life with a glory and an affection to which she did not show herself insensible.
Christmas Vacation
Truman Capote
—Edited by Bradford Morrow
EDITOR’S NOTE
“CHRISTMAS VACATION” IS ONE of the earliest surviving manuscripts written by Truman Capote, and is by far the most significant and substantial of his childhood literary efforts. This is its first appearance in print.
The young author had originally titled his tale “Old Mrs. Busybody” and had conceived it not as a Christmas story, but the harsh, satiric portrait of a domineering small-minded spinster. A close inspection of the first page of the original manuscript reveals that Capote, an eleven-year-old sixth grader at Trinity School in New York, erased both his original title and chapter heading, having written some pages of his narrative before deciding to recast it as a Christmas tale. In his first draft, it is apparent that the opening sentence read simply, “Old Mrs. Busybody stood gazing out the window looking at several young boys and girls smoking cigarettes.” If a bit inert, it was grammatically correct: a complete sentence. Only later, revising the story with a precocious attention to dramatic detail, did he add—with a darker pencil and in a more slanted hand—the phrase, “Christmas was only a few days and as,” which somewhat mangled his earlier tidy sentence, but contributed to what he saw as a more promising overture. It provided, too, a purposeful reason for Lulu Belle and her family’s visit, not to mention the comical exchange of gifts in the final chapter.
Written in 1935-1936, “Christmas Vacation” is clearly juvenile work. However, it proves abundantly the seriousness of Capote’s decision, made when he was nine or ten years old, to become a writer. Above all, it displays rare perseVerance in one so young, and has a rounded feel with plots and subplots all developed, and resolved. Its narrative seldom pauses; its dialogue barrels forward with many of the characters’ voices nicely differentiated by specific catchphrases, mannerisms or accents; its manic slapstick comedy—sometimes acerbic, sometimes violent—is generally timed with the deftness of a born storyteller. “Christmas Vacation” is also important in that, however highflown its burlesque and caricatures, it plausibly documents autobiographical elements of Capote’s childhood. Indeed, Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke, who was kind enough to read the manuscript and consult with me about the work, recalls Capote having claimed to have published in a Mobile, Alabama, newspaper the first part of a similar story with a protagonist named Mrs. Busybody, and that friends and relatives were so scandalized by its thinly disguised, unfavorable characterizations of them that the rest of the work was never published.
The detested Mrs. Busybody—who is present primarily at the beginning and end of the novelette, cast as the grudging host of her balmy relatives—was evidently based on a neighborhood lady whom Capote and his friends disliked. Mrs. Busybody and Lulu Belle would seem to be amalgams, pastiches, of others around him in Alabama at the time as well. Certainly, Capote’s neglectful mother, Lillie Mae, who darted in and out of Capote’s childhood as whimsy, finances and selfishness dictated, shares Lulu Belle’s impatience with children if not her willingness to beget them. The reader can easily imagine that when—in full-blown riotous Katzenjammer Kids style—Lulu Belle and her wacky family arrive at Mrs. Busybody’s for the holiday, Capote was inspired by the eccentric, brawling household on Alabama Avenue in Monroeville, where young Truman was raised by an unorthodox clan of relatives after his mother temporarily abandoned him there in 1930. As Gerald Clarke writes in Capote, the boy was taken in by “three quarrelsome sisters in late middle age … [in] an atmosphere heavy with small secrets and ancient resentments.” Capote’s novelette vividly suggests in the character of Lulu Belle the tempestuous Jennie Faulk, Lillie Mae’s cousin who ruled the roost in Monroeville, where she was locally famous for her nasty disposition. In pure Lulu Belle fashion, Jennie “once whipped a lazy yardman with a dog chain” and, as Clarke reports, “another time, spotting someone who she thought had cheated her … jumped out of her car and attacked him on his own front porch …”
Altercations, anarchy, alcohol (Jennie and her sister, Sook, were particularly fond of their bottle, much like the character Uncle William in Capote’s story) were daily a part of life on Alabama Avenue. And the sisters’ brother, the meek, soft-spoken, cloistered Bud Faulk, would seem to provide a partial model for Capote’s alienated character Uncle William, as well. “Surrounded by contentious, difficult women and half-invalided by asthma,” Clarke writes, “Bud … kept to himself.” Capote’s biological father, the jinxed Arch Persons, an ingratiating con artist and dreamer given to failures great and small, prefigures Uncle William, too, when, writing to his brother John about the fact that Lillie Mae was divorcing him so that she could marry Joseph Garcia Capote, he exclaims, “She was just as cruel and heartless about it as possible. Girls are sure a pain.” Uncle William, feeling utterly beaten by his wife in the final chapter of “Christmas Vacation,” similarly concludes, “I guess a married man just hasn’t got a chance.”
In agreement with Truman Capote’s literary executor, Alan Schwartz, I have edited the original manuscript as lightly as possible, only correcting obvious misspellings and adding punctuation where Capote left it incomplete or in the haste of composition left it out altogether. In the very few places it seemed necessary to add a word for coherence, the insert is bracketed. Although Capote freely alters spellings of the name “Lulu Belle” and “Lulubelle,” I have in this transcript maintained “Lulu Belle” throughout, in part because it seems to me consistent with period Southern spelling of the name, and partly because if one sees any of Capote’s contemporary feelings toward his mother, Lillie Mae, present in the characterization of Lulu Belle, this spelling seems most fitting. The minor character “Lizzie” is spelled inconsistently (Lizzie, Lissie, Lizzy) and I have used the first spelling since there is no clear reason to prefer one over another, except in the case of “Lissie,” which is used in a bit of dialogue and again displays, I believe, Capote’s ear for col
loquial elocution. I have also kept Capote’s spellings, or possibly deliberate misspellings, of generally exclamatory words used in dialogue, such as “scallywags,” “raggimuffin,” “laggert” and, for instance, “Mothaw” as he attempts to mimic the British accent of the hapless Selby Pifflesniffle. Since we are reproducing the original holograph, which was written in pencil on ruled yellow notebook paper, the edited transcript is meant, as much as anything, to be a guide to reading it in facsimile.
That this fragile manuscript has survived is largely because of two Capote admirers: his English teacher at Trinity, John E. Langford, who kept it for some forty-five years, and Frederick Vanacore, who obtained the document at Charles Hamilton Gallery on April 15, 1982, and has now generously made it available to us for publication. I want to thank Caroline Donner for making the initial transcription of the manuscript, Andreas Brown and Gerald Clarke for kind advice, and Alan Schwartz of the Truman Capote Literary Trust for permissions and magnanimity.
Christmas Vacation
By Truman Capote
CHAPTER I.
CHRISTMAS GUEST
Christmas was only a few days [away] and old Mrs. Busybody stood gazing out the window looking at several young boys and girls smoking cigarettes.
“Tusk! Tusk! I don’t know what this younger generation is getting to be,” she mumbled then she hobbled out of the kitchen toward them.
“You young ruffians, stop smoking those cigarettes this minute!” cried Mrs. Busybody as she waved her cane at them.
“Well! Well! if it isn’t old Mrs. Busybody herself,” hollered one of the boys. “And in person too,” cried another. A little girl who was near Mrs. Busybody took a deep draw on her cigarette and blew the smoke right in Mrs. Busybody’s face. Still another offered her a cigarette.
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