Reynolds Price's introduction to the Modern Classic version of Truman Capote's Complete stories thrusts the diminutive Southern gentleman alongside the globetrotting bar-room aficionado and occasional war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. When I think of what I know about Hemingway and how busy he seemed, all the damn time, Capote is not a comparative figure in my mind's eye. He's just a very intelligent guy who had a fine eye for detail and character and spun woozily evocative yarns around his upbringing and New York living. And yet I hugely prefer his careful, refined style, not effete as such but deeply interested in a feminine way for me. Capote's style seems perverse in streaks; never asexual but capable of occupying both genders in back to back tales.
The cover is a charmer; a precious young Truman stares intensely into a camera, wispy fringe combed across freckled brow and his clear blue eyes fix you in your place as a cigarette stub dangles from fingers that it feels insulting to describe as lithe, because it's a lazy term and this man would never appreciate slothliness in word or wit.
Twenty vignettes set all over America make up this collection, ranging as far south as Texas and as far north as New York. He's a writer I've always seen in New York thanks to his toothy personality, a fetish for etiquette and an alleged amphetamine habit that would stop Hemingway's bull in Pamplona. And indeed most of my favourite tales, including the exquisitely sinister Miriam and the famous Headless Hawk, are set in that snowflaked city.
As a Southerner, his taste and touch for gothic is refined and seems to possess an ancient wisdom. Elmore Leonard once advised aspiring writers never to describe the weather 'just because it's there': sound advice, and Capote's landscapes creep around their subjects almost tenderly. He has a particular talent for the night. 'Tall trees, misty, painted pale by malicious moonshine towered steep on either side without a break or clearing', make for an oppressive backdrop in A Tree Of Night, a sinister story of a lonely young woman travelling alongside a freak show compere and her savant partner, (relationship never clarified).
Like the sticky Southern heat Capote grew up in, the writing is regularly uncomfortably close to the skin. A surgical knife seems to hovers over each character, trimming and distilling a cast of dozens with a few short, sharp strokes. His brutal treatment of Walter Ranney in Shut A Final Door would be shocking if it weren't so unconcerned with itself, instead annotating his pain with merciless aestheticism via a silent hand. And it seems no background, age or indeed culture is beyond his tender grip. The writing feels amazingly tactile, like it had shook hands with its creations and perhaps sat down for coffee before committing their existence to paper.
Preacher's Legend depicts a decrepit Negro in semi-glorious senility, having finally made his peace with his unseen God in the woods near his shack home. Capote's forensic style lifts the tale off the page here - -it's commonplace to point out the inherent hazards involved with a creation of this broadness and contemporary whims would doubtless cause a younger writer to ironically stretch further than Capote probably did in his depiction. Instead what's captured is almost bitterly honest and gently funny in its exposure of loneliness and the beliefs that gather, like dust, in the spaces between living.
What really stands out is his almost tender appraisal of the most subtle of emotional changes in his characters throughout - I imagined him combing his delicate fingers through that fine hair as he stripped and planed for the depth and dimension that's so insistent in his style. The omniscient position he assumed at the hub of East Coast society in the Fifties and Sixties no doubt played into the development of his style and there's equally no doubt of the relationship each held throughout the author's professional life.
But the most fascinating aspect of all of this was considering where the man drew his abilities from; paradoxically his social nature, his known propensity for gossip and discussion of those around him enabled him to draw on deep wells of understanding of human character that a more reserved individual would never have access to. That alone is not a talent, but these stories feel as fresh today as they did fifty years ago. The man himself would surely tell you that that is a price worth paying.
Pictures courtesy of Penguin.com
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