Book review: The Early Stories of Truman Capote
Drawn to the outsider in society, an inclination that informed much of his work, the sketches are of women, children, and the disadvantaged struggling at the margins of society and trying to gain a foothold on life’s slippery slopes.
As different in style as they are in their chosen milieux, the tales include a boy confronting the violence of adulthood in pursuit of an escaped convict, the ‘mean girls’ jealousies that lead to a life-altering event at Miss Burke’s Academy for Young Ladies, and a distraught woman fighting to save the life of a child who has her lover’s eyes.
Unearthed by Swiss publisher Peter Haag as he delved through the library’s Capote archive while searching for possible extra material from the infamous unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, the stories were previously published in the author’s high school newspaper, The Green Witch.
While all the stories were written between the ages of 11 and 19, they are undated, and so places the reader as detective in guessing which were produced as he grew more mature and adept at the profession that would guide his short life.
All are vignettes of the lonely, broken and troubled that Capote would fashion and shape into masterpieces later on in his career.
As he often admitted, fiction was an escape from being Truman Streckfus Persons — the son of a confidence trickster and a Southern belle alcoholic, who was often forced to endure endless childhood evenings locked in hotel rooms while his parents drank and spent to oblivion.
When he was later forced to live with a diverse collection of eccentric cousins in Monroeville, it provided a rich harvest of material his Other Voices and The Grass Harp books.
Eventually his mother remarried, this time to Joe Capote — an event that took the budding writer to New York for an adolescence in the ultimate urban jungle that guided much of his output until his death in 1984.
Yet, regardless of the fame and notoriety that would follow, it was the South that shaped Capote — as demonstrated in this collection of mainly Southern stories.
An escaped lunatic is hunted through a swamp; a young girl sits waiting for her love on a porch at night, and an impoverished woman who lived like Sleeping Beauty behind a hedge of japonicas is found dead in her yard.
“I was so young that I had never thought that I could grow old, that I could die,” the protagonist muses in Miss Belle Rankin.
The story ends with a vivid description of the forgotten old woman lying dead with snowflakes in her hair and flowers pressed to her cheek.
While best remembered for his part in the ‘new journalism’ movement of the 1960s and 70s, it was Capote’s short stories that first gained him a reputation in Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker magazines during his late teens.
In an interview with the Paris Review in 1957, he acknowledged his devotion to the short story process: “When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant.”
With a lengthy foreword by the celebrated New Yorker critic Hilton Als, these stories show the gathering talent and distinctive voice of that boy from Alabama who would later to become a legend of American literature.
Mind you, it is heartening to us aspiring scribblers to see that occasionally, even a genius like Capote was prone to suffer the same traps of penmanship that mark the rest of us.
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