Fiction
Grown up fibs
Francis King
Music for Chameleons Truman Capote (Hamish Hamilton pp. 262, £7.95) The longest and best piece in Truman Capote's collection Music for Chameleons IS liandearved Coffins', an apparently factual account of a series of bizarre and gruesome murders, in which the victims were variously drowned, burned to death, Poisoned with liquid nicotine, and bitten by rattle-snakes high on amphetamines, Mr Capote subtitles this 'A Non-fiction Account of an American Crime'; and if it is indeed what he claims, then one can only be amazed that the libel laws permitted its Publication . Like the detective obsessed With the case, Mr Capote seems to have no doubt of the identity of the culprit, whom he names; but at no point does he indicate that this man was subsequently convicted or even put on trial.
With all the other pieces, the same problem obtrudes: how much is fact and how much is fiction? 'Handearved Coifing' IS sandwiched between what the blurb calls SIX short-stories and what it calls seven conversational portraits. In all but one of the short-stories,Mr Capote is both narrator and protagonist; and among much that has swirled up out of the simmering witch's cauldron of the author's fantasy-life, real events are also recorded. Thus, in the title-story, 'Music for Chameleons', one is disinclined to believe that, when a 'rum coloured' Martinique aristocrat played Mozart for Mr Capote, music-loving chameleons gathered round to listen to her.
But embedded in this whimsy is the real-life story, widely reported at the time, of how the composer Marc Blitzstein was murdered in Martinique by two Portuguese sailors whom he had injudiciously taken back to his hotel.
In the conversational portraits the same problem of disentangling fact and fiction also faces the reader. For example, the first piece in this section is a highly entertaining account of how the diminutive author accompanied his massive cleaning woman on her rounds of her other employers. Eventually, high on pot, they ended up in the apartment of a Jewish couple, who were supposed to be out for the day. At once, they began to gorge and swill. The couple then returned and, outraged, expelled them. The denouement, though hardly unexpected, makes a neat conclusion; but its very neatness makes one question its accuracy. Again, did Mr Capote really meet Lee Harvey Oswald in the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, during the period of his defection, or does he merely claim to have done so, in the manner of those elderly women who claim to have refused a drink from Haig in the Onslow Court Hotel?
Mr Capote's boast that he has invented a literary genre, the 'non-fiction novel', is. of course, a bogus one. Fearful of being sued, novelists have long been transmuting fact into fiction; and fearful of being boring, autobiographers and biographets have long ' been transmuting fiction into fact. Mr Capote is essentially a raconteur, and every raconteur, while repeating his 'true' story, keeps altering and embroidering it. Every spouse, choking back a protesting 'But, darling, last time you told that quite differently', knows this.
That Mr Capote has tacitly acknowledged that his role is that of raconteur is demonstrated by the artfulness, akin to Maugham's, with which he gives the impression, not of writing for the reader but of speaking to him. Whole stretches of the conversational pieces are even laid out as a play, with 'T.C.' cast in the leading role.
More subtly, the same illusion is maintained by a deliberate carelessness of writing. The author thus confesses I was in a helluva lot of trouble"; writes of a friend that 'he had lately accumulated considerable poundage and had gotten a bit jowly too'; and refers to the 'Emerald Isle' of Ireland and to the 'eternal snows' of Switzerland. Again, in his preface, Mr Capote vaguely names a story by Henry James — I think The Middle Years': he then quotes from it, concluding 'Or words to that effect.' At first the exasperated reader wants to yell at him: 'For Christ's sake, can't you or your editor check the title and the passage?' But the answer is. that, of course, someone can check these things; but by the sloppy negligence of the reference, Mr Capote has tricked the reader into feeling that they are seated opposite each other, far from any library, while Mr Capote alternately pours out his story and the booze.
When Mr Capote published his remarkable first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, it carried on its back a photograph of its young author looking like a depraved choir-boy. The present volume carries a photograph in which, emaciated and wrinkled, he looks like Karen Blixen in her last years. But despite appearances, Mr Capote's strength is, paradoxically, the weakness of many another writer who has received a premature acclaim: he has never wholly grown up. What makes this collection so triumphantly readable is that its author has never lost the child's ability to fantasise about his experiences; the child's glee in fibbing; the child's sense of wonder; the child's voracity for experience.
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