A BRIDGE OF CHILDHOOD Truman Capote’s Southern Years <i> by Marianne M. Moates (Henry Holt: $19.95; 240 pp.)</i>

Remember that peculiar dreamy child, Dill, in “To Kill a Mockingbird”? According to Marianne Moates, that was our first glimpse of Truman Capote, one of the fictionalized trio that included the narrator, Scout, and her older brother, Jem. Capote grew up Monroeville, Ala., the same town as “Nelle” Harper Lee. He and Lee along with Capote’s cousin, Jennings Faulk Carter--on whose remembrances this book is based--comprised that threesome in a childhood link that lived far beyond time and place.

Much of Moates’ book is stamped with the same love of place, the same piquant interest in the folk who move into and out of daily living, the same children’s exploits that so incisively underscore the behavior of adults in Lee’s book. Readers see that there was little malice but more of a child’s need “to see what will happen” in Capote’s childhood stunts: exhibiting a “two-headed chicken” and a borrowed animal fetus; throwing a Halloween party that stirred up the local Ku Klux Klan, and digging out of the hard, packed, red soil of Monroeville a small swimming pool.

Sook, the childlike aunt who inspired “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” cherished the boy and gave him the one thing she considered truly hers: a secret recipe for a rheumatism cure. But like most others, she turned her back on him as an adult. Moates brings the seeds of Capote’s earliest betrayals and his later flamboyance into a context of heartbreak and love denied. Being with family was all he ever wanted, and never got. His dandyism further alienated the folks back home who wouldn’t let him buy property there for fear he’d bring in celebrities and other “flashy” types.

Moates adroitly relates Carter’s stories with little authorial presence, and one can’t help but believe that a great deal of her work is hidden--that she pulled from Carter the most minute details of a Southern childhood and invisibly worked them into his family lore. This is literary biography of the very entertaining kind, informed with a love for the child that was (illustrations include never-before-published baby pictures) and a desire to capture both the brilliance that would emerge and the innocence that was to crumble.