Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short No...
It's hard to read the title novella without visualizing Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, and Buddy Ebbsen (the character Patricia Neal played, whom I thought was changed from being a man is not on the page) or to read "A Christmas Memory" without hearing Geraldine Page in my brain (even though a substantial part of the film of "A Christmas Memory" is Capote's voice-over remembering his boyhood). When Holly sings on the fire-escape, plucking her guitar, I know she's gotta be singing "Moon River," even though I also know that the character is based on Marilyn Monroe and could just as easily be singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend."
It is also difficult to purge the drunken whines and snarls of the older Truman Capote (1924-84) on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" to reach back to the carefully crafted of prose his early fictions from the 1950s about his own childhood and adolescence (Other Voices, Other Rooms as well as "A Christmas Memory" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's) and his parables herein of convicts or of an uncorrupted, reformed prostitute. Younger readers who were spared the sight of the burned-out Capote and have not seen the compelling films of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "A Christmas Memory" can read the words on the page without such associations as flood my mind. I once could: I know (not least from the edition I plucked from the shelf to supplement what I'd packed to read on a recent trip) that I read the book for the first time before I'd seen Audrey Hepburn and Geraldine Page take over the characters.
Capote's structuring of "Breakfast" is not the romance between the struggling young writer and the attractive young refugee from the boondocks living off men, but not quite a prostitute, Holly Golightly. Instead, the narrator (called "Fred" by Holly because he reminds her of her brother Fred) is poring over a picture of an African carving that may be a portrait of her in the company of a bartender who doted on her when she lived in the Manhattan neighborhood some years earlier.
Holly's general insouciance about men and money is in the book, as are her relationships with others, including the Mafioso Sally the Tomato, who is sending coded messages out through her. Fred and Holly steal Halloween masks, but don't go together to Tiffany's. (Fred does get a modest present, a St. Christopher's medal, from there for her.) A backwoods husband shows up and is unable to convince her to return with him. And she lets the cat loose on her way to the airport, and then regrets it (but instead of going back for it, charges Fred to make sure it is alright).
There is some casual racist language (the n-word, not anything about Mr. Yuioshi, who was so offensively played by Mickey Rooney in the movie), but the novella balances wistfulness about a Holly more sinned against than sinning and clear-eyed recognition of the less engaging aspects of her exploitativeness to those who have to pick up the pieces. "Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information, anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put her on her guard," for she had a lot in her past and in her ongoing modus operandi she did not want to think about or have noticed.
Fred is more a camera recording the outlandish mix of knowingness and innocence that is Holly than a fleshed-out character in Capote's "Breakfast." Similarly, the autobiographical observer, Buddy, in "A Christmas Memory" has hardly any attributes other than having been captured by the projects of his somewhat dim-witted by loving older cousin in "A Christmas Memory." All year they saved what money they could obtain to buy materials (including a bottle of bootleg whiskey) to make fruitcakes for people, including President Roosevelt, whose appreciation of them was obviously less than the boy and his aged playmate believed. The focus of the tale is their final set of fruitcakes, when she was sixty-something. He was eight and did not know that it was the last year he would be helping make them. He did not know that he was about to be shipped off to a military boarding school and would become one of the recipients of the annual fruitcackes . The story is a touching tribute to an apparently real relative — and not at all like a fruitcake. It is more like a soufflé in which the ingredients are perfectly blended.
The other two stories, both impersonally narrated in the third person, seem more willed. They are demonstrations of the writer's range rather than invocation of interesting women the writer knew before he became a famous writer (which in Capote's case, was early).
"House of Flowers" is a faux primitivist parable of Ottile, a Haitian hill girl who becomes the toast of a Port-au-Prince bordello, but finds happiness with a man who carries her back to the hills and ties her to a tree to punish her (after she vanquishes his sorceress grandmother).
"A Diamond Guitar" seems very cinematic a tale of unrequited love of a heretofore-settled-into-his-life-sentence for a flashy youngster who escapes the Alabama prison camp (but leaves the rhinestone-studded guitar as a memento). It does not seem to have been filmed, however.
Three of the four tales are about loss (and Ottile is lost to her Port-au-Prince friends, as Holly is to her Manhattan ones). They range in geography (Haiti, Africa, rural Alabama, and Manhattan). The quiet elegy at the end of "Christmas Memory" (placed last in the volume, though reaching the furthest back into Capote's own past) I find very moving. Before he became a grotesque parody of the viper-tongued, alcoholic writer, in these stories, in his Southern Gothic early novels, and in his influential "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, Capote had great skill in evoking unsophisticated characters.
In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the liter...More at HotBookSale
This is a story that was first published in 1958. This wacky hillbilly-turned-playgirl who lives in a Manhattan brownstone shares not only his philoso...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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