Capote's letters wickedly boring

Duane Davis, Special to the News

Published September 17, 2004 at midnight

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Twenty years after his death in 1984, Truman Capote may be better remembered for his life than for his writing.

Capote's success started when he was barely into his 20's, with a series of remarkable short stories published in the years just after the close of World War II in the big magazines of the day, such as Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, came out in 1948 to good reviews and was followed by more short stories, some superb nonfiction pieces for The New Yorker (see especially, "The Duke In His Domain," Capote's profile of Marlon Brando), plays, film scripts, and travel articles.

More novels followed, most particularly, The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's, the latter of which was made into a successful movie with Audrey Hepburn.

Then, in 1959, Capote came upon the story that would make him both famous and rich. Sent by The New Yorker to the small farming community of Holcomb, Kan., to examine the impact of the murder of the four members of the Clutter family by two drifters, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, Capote soon found himself entangled in a true-life tale - which would take him seven years to tell. First serialized in three parts in The New Yorker and then published as a book in 1966, In Cold Blood was a critical success, a sensational best seller, and, to this day, an extraordinary piece of writing. This was, perhaps, the last dignified moment in his life.

By the time of his death, Truman-Capote-the-celebrity had become more well known than Truman-Capote-the-writer.

He was a gay man - flamingly gay, one wants to add - with a penchant for rubbing elbows with that class of men and women whose wealth, charm and good looks made them aristocrats of society, the Gloria Vanderbilts and the Peggy Guggenheims.

By the '70s and '80s, overweight and visibly unhealthy from his Studio 54 nightlife of cocaine and catty bon mots, Capote had become a stereotype of depressing familiarity: the aging queen, still bitchy after all these years, a great guest to drag out on the Tonight Show for snippets of gossip collected over the years while sitting at the elbow of the glitterati.

He still wrote, but nothing of consequence, and his last years were textbook examples of how to go out badly: booze, pills, tantrums, and an ugly desire to publish 'tell-all' stories about his former friends.

What all this means, of course, is that a collection of letters, such as this, Too Brief A Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, edited by his biographer, Gerald Clarke, would seem to be a natural, and we turn to it expecting to read something wonderfully wicked, deliciously depraved, and maliciously bawdy. Also, of course, since we are all mature adults here, we hope for insightful and serious discussions of the manners and mores of our fellow creatures.

Well, we don't get much of either. Broadly speaking, I guess, you could say there are two types of letter writers: those who write to tell you what the weather is where they are and to ask what it's like where you are, and those who explain the weather with a sensibility and language that instructs us in the very nature of sunshine and rain.

As a letter writer, Capote falls into the former camp. His letters are short, informal, casual, and disjointed - they are written to friends and acquaintances in the shorthand of familiarity, assuming a shared body of experience. Reading them is a little like hearing one side of a conversation, sometimes interesting, occasionally baffling, and all too often little short of boring. It seems to me that this volume will be of little interest to the general reader and of no real value to the scholar.

The book's appeal, such as it is, comes down to just two aspects. First, Capote, especially in the early letters, comes across as a sweet, engaging man-child eager to get on his way in life. So, the first time you read something like this (from 1949) you are charmed: "Jack is fine and sweet as pie. He sends you his best, and Harold, too. I've already sent Harold a kiss, but here are several million more (for which I will have to pay extra postage). I love you, precious baby, darling child, and in my dreams frame your mad adorable face with a wreath of roses."

But as you might guess, a little of this goes a long way.

Of more interest are the hints the letters give of the underground life of homosexuals in America and Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Often, not surprisingly, this encompasses the secrets of both gay life and of celebrity, as in this, from a 1953 letter written while Capote was in Rome: "I got started on a great feud with M. (Montgomery) Clift - for six weeks we really loathed each other - but then (this is for your eyes alone!) we suddenly started a sort of mild flirtation, which snowballed along until it reached very tropic climates indeed."

But these are only hints, and not the whole story - for that the reader must turn to other books, Clarke's own biography of Capote, or, for a more jaundiced view, Gore Vidal's Palimpsest.

The failure of this book is not Truman Capote's. He did not write these letters for posterity; he wrote them for the person he sent them to - we are eavesdroppers, interlopers. Readers would do far better to return to Capote's short stories, novels and journalism - there we find the writer who can teach us about the sunshine and rain.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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