I need to learn not to click links like this at work. Now my coworkers keep checking to see if I’m alright.
Two of my other favorite Capote works, other than In Cold Blood, are “House of Flowers” (which was made into a musical that in no way resembles the original short story) and The Muses Are Heard, neither of which seem to be available online. I strongly recommend reading both; the book A Capote Reader (1987) has both, along with lots more.
“House of Flowers” is the story of Ottilie, a prostitute in Port-Au-Prince, who marries a country boy named Royal and then outwits his evil witch of a grandmother. In her brothel she counts herself lucky because “I have five silk dresses and a pair of green satin shoes, I have three gold teeth worth thirty thousand francs” until she meets Royal and elopes with him to his house where “wisteria sheltered the roof, a curtain of vines shaded the windows, lillies bloomed at the door”.
The Muses are Heard is completely different, a nonfiction account of Capote visiting Soviet Russia in 1956 along with the American production of Porgy and Bess. It’s both hilarious and tragic. Two of the performers, Earl Jackson and Helen Thigpen, want to get married in Moscow so they’ll be the first black couple to be married there. The director’s secretary, Nancy Ryan, hopes to find forbidden romance with some handsome Soviet (even though the only Russian phrase she’s learned to say means “I’ve been wounded in the privates”). Capote himself goes to a store, and finding himself beseiged by a curious Russian mob, grabs a random hat, buys it, and then realizes it doesn’t fit. The performers are horrified on opening night when their enthusiastic performance receives an unnerving and completely silent response from the audience all through the first act. Oh, how will they go on for the second? It’s fantastic.
There was a movie adaptation of The Grass Harpa few years ago (filmed very close to where I grew up, incidentally- the church I went to as a boy is used in it). It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t great either. The book- same story. One of his earlier pieces. There’s also a musical stage version of Grass Harp.
He wrote another holiday story, One Christmas, about a Christmas spent with his father and his father’s wealthy girlfriend in New Orleans. It was filmed as a TV movie. It’s most noteworthy for being Capote’s last story and Katharine Hepburn’s last role (she played a very old Katharine Hepburn). Both the story and the movie are fair to middlin’ at best, far from the brilliance of Christmas Memory. (I blame substance abuse and depression and fame whoring.)
I was reading an interview with Capote’s one-time friend turned archenemy Gore Vidal recently, who’s now in his 80s and living in California as a very wealthy and very bitter literary Norma Desmond. His hatred for Capote is still obsessive.
I think it’s classic Salieri Complex*: Vidal’s a great essayist and at his best a good novelist and has written many times the output of Capote but is mostly forgotten now and will be completely forgotten by all but a few American literature and political scholars within a generation after his near death, while the best of Capote will be read and enjoyed a century from now (if anything is). I credit it to the fact that Vidal is capable of turning elegant phrases and making great bitchicisms, but incapable of giving life, which at his best Capote could do. Sook lives.
*Garlic and cross held at nitpickers: Yes, I know Salieri didn’t really have a Salieri Complex.
Are there any more of his short stories online? I just read the Christmas one and I’d love to read more.
Considering Capote only died in 1984 and I doubt the copyright has expired on any of his works, probably not. But your local library might have at least a couple of his books – In Cold Blood and Breakfast At Tiffany’s at least, I’d imagine. There’s a fantastic anthology called A Capote Reader (1987) that contains lots of stories, a few novellas and non-fiction pieces, as well as some of his interviews (including one with Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson Family). Highly recommended.
Thanks! I have a hold put on In Cold Blood, but I am stuck at my desk all day today and was hoping to read some more NOW, darn it. I’ll have to keep an eye out for A Capote Reader, it sounds like something I’d really enjoy.
Capote
Hoffman
One of the better performances on film I’ve seen in a long while
I just read *A Christmas Memory *and it did nothing for me.
Maybe I really am all dead inside? Anyone else get that reaction?
Did you see Toby Jones in Infamous? In my opinion it was way better than Hoffman’s. Obligatory YouTube trailer and clip.
Sampiro, I have a vague recollection that Sook was aghast at the way Capote portrayed her as a doddering old woman at the end of one of those stories, in much the same way that Gloria Vanderbilt was aghast at her portrayal in La Côte Basque as not recognizing her own husband twenty years after their divorce.
This is not to throw cold water on Capote himself, who is my favorite writer too, but to illustrate the point that he was quite skillful at embellishing real-life people and events in order to make them more poignant or interesting to read about, even though the subjects of those embellishments sometimes failed to understand them as literary license, which most authors engage in.
IOW, it’s a shame they took them personally.
Yep… I did. Although I wouldn’t say it was WAY better, it too was a fine performance. The ‘angle’ in both was different.
It wouldn’t have been Sook herself. She died in 1944, just as he was gaining some fame from his stories, and it’s doubtful she ever read any of them as she had a lingering final illness. Other relatives attest that she was “strange”, attributing it partly to her morphine addiction. (She became addicted to it as a painkiller due to arthritis.)
I’m prejudiced of course, but I don’t think embellishment or rearranging/restructuring of some details necessarily diminishes the truthiness of a tale and can even, to some extent, increase it. In addition to increasing the interest factor (because there are precious few people who have a life so fascinating a straightforward narrative would be interesting reading- even a memoir by Abraham Lincoln would bore you to tears if it was just a recounting of facts), it doesn’t really re-create the time and place and feel or essence of the event. (If Lincoln had written a memoir he could tell you all you ever wanted to know about white snakeroot poisoning and the symptoms of tremetol poisoning and how often his mother vomited or had high fevers and perhaps even how the cabin smelled, but it doesn’t really tell you what this was like for a 9 year old child to go through as much as if he fictionalizes it a tad to capture the emotions and significance of the moment.)
Now how much you can do this before it leaves dramatic license and becomes fiction is a matter of much debate. Capote certainly found that line and raced past it many times, particularly when he was telling a “true” story, though at the same time his “fiction” (such as in *La Côte Basque *) was often so unembellished as to be instantly recognizable to anyone who knew the people it was based upon.
The truthiness of literature would be a good thread actually.
Thanks. I must be thinking of something else.
Indeed. I would think Anais Nin and Henry Miller would be good subjects for such a thread. They were certainly skillful and prolific practitioners of ‘truthiness’. 
You’re a very naughty boy.
With no pinkies.
I recall that one of Capote’s aunts criticized some of his writings, but she also wrote a (crummy) short story called “I Remember Grandpa” and passed it off as one of his. I doubt she was anything more than a grasping relative trying to get her moment in the sun.
Another really fantastic Capote story is “The Diamond Guitar”, about an escape attempt at a prison. It’s so beautiful and sad that I can’t give away anything more than that – you need to read it.
Capote also worked on a television show called Death Row, USA for ABC. After writing In Cold Blood, he’d become something of an amateur authority on the prison system and interviewed many killers for the show, which ABC shelved because the footage was “too grim”. Capote being Capote, he quipped, “What did you expect, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?” I don’t believe the show ever saw the light of day, although I’d dearly love to see it. Capote was against the death penalty, which I suppose is no surprise considering he saw Hickock and Smith hanged. He advocated either imprisonment for life or rehabilitation (in one interview, he even cautiously stated that he felt Perry could’ve been rehabilitated and released, but reviled Caryl Chessman). Interestingly, he was also a critic of the Miranda Rights.
In Cold Blood was a terrific book. The disregard for life that they showed was frightening. If memory serves they were driving down the street and would veer over just to hit a stray dog walking down the street. And then laugh. They give me the creeps.
See, to me this is the problem with literary license (or perhaps with too much information available after the fact ;)). Once you know that an author interjects things to make the story more interesting, you can’t take for granted that anything described really happened. Maybe they ran over dogs like he said, or maybe Capote just said they did to make them even more evil, and thus more interesting to read about.
This is particulary the case with Anais Nin and Henry Miller who I mentioned upthread. Who knows if she really had an adult affair with her father, who knows if Miller really starved in Paris, etc., etc.?
The reason these things are so fascinating is the idea that a real human being has actually experienced them, and once you learn the author has made them up out of whole cloth they aren’t nearly as fascinating.
This might be a good place to ask something that I’ve always wondered about. In Cold Blood is obviously based on true fact. How about Handcarved Coffins? (part of the Music for Chameleons anthology) It was written in the same style as In Cold Blood, but it is wholly fictional. Right?
(Handcarved Coffins is the story of several murders of seemingly unconnected people, linked by the appearance of a small handcarved coffin received by the victim before their death.)