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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Twenty years after the death of Truman Capote, it comes as a surprise to open his letters and meet with more discipline than dissipation. Biographies of the writer cannot ignore his last, wasted years, but a new epistolary handbasket, "Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote" (Random House; $27.95), stops almost short of hell, devoting about ninety per cent of its contents to an ambitious artist between the ages of nineteen and forty-two, not the bloated, frantically fallow T.C. of the years after "In Cold Blood." There's very little here of the U.N. Plaza apartment and Princess Lee and even the Paleys, let alone the woozy Liza nights at Studio 54. According to Gerald Clarke, who edited the collection of letters and wrote a 1988 biography of Capote, in the decade and a half that the writer was rich and unproductive and miserable his correspondence "dwindled to postcards and telegrams--when he wanted to say something, he picked up the telephone." Such laziness has purchased Capote an odd new posthumous privacy.
Near the end of the Second World War, the slender, blond Capote worked as an assistant at The New Yorker, where the writer Brendan Gill recalled him as a "gorgeous apparition, fluttering, flitting up and down the corridors of the magazine." His real work, though, was going into his stories. What a pleasure it is to hear him, in 1946, being bumptious instead of bitchy, not quite twenty-two and crowing about his accomplishments and plans: "The O. Henry introduction said that A Tree Of Night was a better story than Miriam, which of course it is, and raved on and on about it. Wait until they read The Headless Hawk: they ain't seen nothin yet." This letter, to Mary Louise Aswell, an editor at Harper's Bazaar, reminds a reader of the time when nearly every American slick magazine gave space to serious short fiction. The women's-mag editors, including George Davis, at Mademoiselle, were especially hospitable to Southern talents like Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, and Capote quickly figured out how to transfer gothic dollops of his native Alabama to stories traversing the sidewalks of New York. (The Second Avenue popcorn seller in "The Headless Hawk" is a bearded midget.)
Capote's first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948), a Dixie farrago of addled relatives, crumbling plantation architecture, and cross-dressing homosexuality, repelled Time but made the Times' Orville Prescott describe the young author as "dangerously gifted." By 1950, Capote was getting far, fast, even without the help of what he calls, in a letter, "the great chest-pounding he-men" reviewers who abounded in the postwar Sunday book pages. The sensation he made with "Other Voices, Other Rooms" had something to do with its nambla-worthy jacket photograph, and though he claimed to dislike the "dopefiend pictures" of himself that showed up in magazines, he knew that such hothouse displays were good for business at a time when he was all business. For a while, he managed his celebrity with less self-exploitation than Tennessee Williams, whose 1950 article about fashionable literary locales and personalities struck Capote as "the absolute zenith of vulgarity."
He quickly expanded his own oeuvre and range...
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