RCS Posts books and literature: Portraits and Observations by Truman Capote
A recent reading of Portraits and Observations reminds me that Mr. Capote was a fine craftsman and a pleasure to read today. He seemed to love New Orleans and New York. His feelings for our West Coast and our Southwest was not love. Some might call him a regionalist. His observations of Europe are congenial. He does not make a secret of his likes and dislikes.
His observations of persons have a journalistic feel and he still revels himself in them.
He wrote so well that I suspect that one or two very good contemporary writers became envious.
Truman Capote is, I believe, a pen name. He was born in 1924 and died in 1984. His childhood, I believe, was unusual, uneasy, and interesting.
I missed his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms published in 1948. I remember talk of and the film of Breakfast at Tiffany's and his his nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.
Reading Portraits and Observations may be a good way for you to get to know his work and a bit about him. The Modern Library paperback edition in front of me mentions all, I believe, of his published works. It also devotes a page and half of biographical information about thi excellent author.
Capote met famous persons and tells of some of their doings and ways in a way beyond charming.
He seems not to have been very "political," but he was a journalist with a deep feeling for fairness. Among his essays is a piece on another great American writer. Ezra Pound, of Idaho. Capote leads me to believe that Pound had the misfortune of having his love of history lead him to an interest in economics. It seems that speaking of some individual's source of money or wealth makes them very nervous. Americans seem not to be excepted. The American "people" accused him of treason an convicted Pound of insanity. I am not really well informed on that history. If you know some of it, please use the "comments" section below to inform us a bit.
Just now that history sounds much like the worst that has come from Russia. Pound was incarcerated in Washington DC for over a decade and then declared incurably insane and released as not being a danger to himself or anyone else. I intend to take care of what I say about U.S. economics.
Capote has written of himself that he is not attracted to people who care more for their pets than for their friends. First friends and then cities seem to be among his top loves. In cities, he says, that one can be pleased to be among different people with different sets of friends with none of them overlapping. My experience has been similar.
Talking of friends Capote intimates that intelligence and attention is important and says, "I pay attention to my friends, am concerned about them and expect them to to do the same in return."
He says that he has always liked to read and enjoys and admires writers such as Flannery, O'Connor, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Katherine Ann Porter, and others, but that in his later life he has enjoyed reading the better of what he has already read: Proust, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, and Dickens.
He liked driving off and considered it therapy. He found betrayal of affections traumatic. As a politician he like Adlai Stevenson. (Stevenson was the first politician for whom I felt some admiration!) Mrs. Roosevelt liked him too. Capote knew and liked conversation and dialogue.
Seems a lot like a regular person, and a super writer.
RCS