Wit and wistfulness

Too Brief a Treat

The Letters of Truman Capote

Edited by Gerald Clarke

Random House: 492 pp., $27.95

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The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

Truman Capote

Random House: 300 pp., $24.95

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Other Voices, Other Rooms

A Novel

Truman Capote

Modern Library: 198 pp., $19.95

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In that distant era when competitive types like Norman Mailer could still cast an adventitious eye to appraise the talent in the room and imagine that the fate of civilization might be intertwined with the prevailing quality of literature, Truman Capote was celebrated as a peerlessly distinct stylist with a droll, sure eye for detail and -- until “In Cold Blood” revealed the full scope of his ambition -- a miniaturist of genius. His stories, novellas and books of delectable reportage were succinct distillations of the Southern Gothic manner more amply (though often less enjoyably) realized by Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams.

Happily or not, Capote’s literary reputation rests primarily on “In Cold Blood,” about which it is possible, even decades later, to entertain a measure of cynicism. William Burroughs’ remark that it “could have been written by any staff writer at the New Yorker” may have overstated things. But “In Cold Blood” isn’t quite the masterwork it’s been touted as, though the unfinished “Answered Prayers,” so often disparaged, probably could have been. Even in its abbreviated form, it delivers much that “In Cold Blood” doesn’t. It’s unfair to treat the rest of Capote’s writing as prelude or postscript to his best-known book, though many letters in “Too Brief a Treat,” one of three books issued on the 20th anniversary of his death, underscore the huge stakes Capote had riding on “In Cold Blood” -- a gamble he certainly won in his lifetime.

“In Cold Blood” caught something ugly and lethal in society a few minutes ahead of everyone else; it posits a Norman Rockwell ordinariness as perfection and plays to the same kinds of stereotypes, cliches and anxieties that Friday the 13th and Halloween do. In short, it is more enjoyable as a species of camp than as a work of literature.

Long before “In Cold Blood,” Capote had the idea for a truly shocking book that would disgorge, exquisitely, everything he had learned about money and the people who have it, his society women “swans” and their gargoyle husbands, their secrets and lies and betrayals. Had he refrained from publishing pieces of “Answered Prayers” in advance of the main course, he might have been able to cook up the entree. But the two excerpts that appeared in Esquire in 1975 and 1976 mobilized most of the old-money elite society against him. The rich may fawn on court jesters and lapdogs, but he must have known that they dump any pet that bites in the time it takes to place a phone call to the vet.

Capote’s fall from grace with the likes of socialite Babe Paley induced an epic case of depression and writer’s block, sporadically overcome with short pieces, a novella and some gorgeously compressed stories, including the title story of “Music for Chameleons.” From his letters to friends and acquaintances, we learn little of this. They do indicate, with a painful gallows humor, a losing struggle against what’s currently called substance abuse. It has been said that the consummate craftsman’s inability to finish “Answered Prayers” was what really killed him, regardless of the pills and liquor. Certainly when he wasn’t writing, he was thinking about writing, which most writers will tell you is far more torturous than doing it.

Capote’s letters are indeed “too brief a treat,” but they reveal what gnawed at their author’s mind in any given period. It should be sobering to any aspiring writer to realize how much Capote, even after he became famous, suffered financial insecurity of the most thwarting variety -- and how stoical and determined he had to be to get what he wanted done. Judging from these letters, he was unstintingly kind to his friends and ferociously supportive of their careers. His loyalty reflects an admirable, obdurate courage, especially considering how miserably repaid it often was, and how often the recipients of his financial or emotional largess took it for granted. From the time of his first success, with “Other Voices, Other Rooms” -- one of the most plangent, mysterious and perfect evocations of childhood ever written and now reissued -- Capote managed to live well, even when that required desperately nimble improvisation. But a great deal of the big money he made (from screenplays, “In Cold Blood” and advances)went to support his mother, stepfather and a plethora of ghastly ex-lovers.

Most of Capote’s letters would be unremarkable -- they are indeed too brief and too telegraphic (this collection would be indecipherable without abundant footnotes) -- if they were someone else’s letters. They do provide a chart of Capote’s progress and offer glimpses of his inner life, but they are generally utilitarian, with a garnish of sentiment, or gossipy in a breezy, I’m-packing-for-Capri manner. Still, they’re as addictive as potato chips, often very funny and reflect a gift for empathy with an assortment of longtime familiars.

Like many witty people, Capote acquired a largely undeserved reputation for malice; he could, of course, mow people in half with his tongue. (One exchange on “The Tonight Show”: Groucho Marx -- “Well, I’d marry you, Truman, if you wrote another hit book, but I’m afraid I couldn’t give you what you deserve.” Capote -- “What’s that, the best years of your life?”) But he ordinarily gave people the benefit of the doubt.

The new collection, “The Complete Stories of Truman Capote,” spans 1943 to 1983 and reflects the glories and hazards of a kind of fiction that is rescued from sentimentality by a calculated element of cruelty, a surprise plot twist or the specter of mortality. Some of Capote’s stories read much like those the New Yorker and other magazines were publishing at the time. The least wonderful pieces here seem a little too neatly crafted and rely too heavily on claustrophobic atmospheres and wistfully haunted, or wistfully eccentric, characters. A few -- in particular, the ones constructed around seasonal holidays -- could send a contemporary reader into insulin shock, though even these contain arrestingly fine passages. Even in his more threadbare writings, Capote does some things perfectly that many writers can’t do at all: landscapes, rooms, faces the reader sees in vivid detail simply through the suggestive power of one or two miraculously well-turned sentences.

In the better stories here (he wrote many others that would have fortified this volume), Capote revives and improves upon the Saturday Evening Post short story, which in its time was arguably superior to the standard fare in the New Yorker, if similarly conventional in a formal sense. This isn’t a put-down; conventional forms can be perfect containers for unconventional content. Had he lived longer, however, the plans for “Answered Prayers” he hinted at in interviews suggested an ambitious experiment in sidereal time, more audacious in construction than anything he had previously done.

“My Side of the Matter,” “A Tree of Night,” “House of Flowers” and “Mojave,” easily the most engaging inclusions, belong in a class by themselves. Capote summons the sensory world in its bewildering, inexhaustible richness; the reader feels what Burroughs called “the crackle of the universe.”

Reading these stories in sequence, one notes that Capote developed his craft slowly, with a poised indifference to passing time, introducing more complex effects only when he had fully mastered them. In his later writing, despite the private distress he tactfully dissembles in his final letters, there is no falling-off, no faltering in tone or style; he becomes, if anything, more ruthlessly exacting with his talent even as his life falls apart. Especially in “Mojave,” which was intended to be part of “Answered Prayers,” Capote evokes both the sweetness of life and its inevitable spoilage, in a parable about the deal we have to settle for when we realize we can never have what we truly want -- that is, wanting what we have. *