Lusher, Harold E.

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

TRUMAN CAPOTE Music for Chameleons Toronto: Random House, 1981. Pp. 265. The first story in this collection of recent writing by Truman Capote clarifies what must seem a gratuitously mystifying title. As the aristocratic old lady of Martinique entertains her guest at the piano in "her cool Caribbean salon," dozens of chameleons gather at her feet, and give every evidence of listening attentively, while she plays a Mozart sonata. At the close of this unusual concert, the old lady stamps her foot, and the chameleons dis-appear "like sparks from an exploding star." It is an arresting scene that Capote conjures up for us, and he uses it not only as the title of his introductory story, but also as the title of the first of three sections into which the work is divided, and finally as the title of the book itself. And by the time the reader has finished this volume, he finds that he too, not unlike the chameleons in this brief recollection of an almost forgot-ten murder, has been hypnotized and enchanted by one of the most artful and accomplished writers of our time. The first section of the book comprises six selections, most of which are based on direct personal reminiscence or experience. The author uses the first-person singular to establish a point of view, but is otherwise careful to let the "story" or the material he is dealing with dominate and shape the narrative. One of the most subjective of writers, he is at the same time, paradoxi-cally, one of the least personally intrusive. Or, as he himself notes in a brief, but informative, preface which traces his own literary development: "Actually, in all my reportage, I had tried to keep myself as invisible as possible." From the vantage point of the discreet or innocent observer, he is tfius able to resurrect or illuminate strange fates ("Mr. Jones"), kindly horrors ("A Lamp at the Window"), obsessive passions ("Dazzle"). The whole of Part II consists of the long story "Handcarved Coffins," a brilliant study of calculated murder inspired by the desire for revenge. A wealthy western rancher sends each of his victims a small, hand-carved coffin to forewarn them of his intentions. The victims are members of a local committee who had diverted a part of the water supply from "his" river to other ranches in the area. In spite of the dedica-tion of a very patient and resourceful FBI agent, the killer escapes arrest, because he has been careful enough to cover his traces: nothing can be proved against him. Subti-tled "A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime," the story instantly recalls the "nar-rative journalism" technique of Capote's immensely successful novel In Cold Blood (1966). Like the novel, "Handcarved Cof-fins" also aims at "something that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry" ("Preface," p. 7). Part III comprises seven "Conversational Portraits," and traces encounters that Ca-pote has had with the great and the anonymous. His account of how Pearl Bailey ("Derring-Do") helped him escape the California police at the L.A. Interna-tional Airport is hilariously funny, and will probably surprise readers by the boister-ousness of its humor. The encounter with Marilyn Monroe ("A Beautiful Child") successfully recalls the curious blend of earthiness and wistfulness that animated that ill-starred celebrity, and like other ac-counts of Marilyn Monroe that have ap-peared recently, persuades the reader again that, in spite of her beauty and renown, her life was hardly the splendid adventure that so many of her fans likely imagined. How-ever, the conservations" that Capote re-cords for us are not simply exercises in name-dropping. The encounters with the anonymous are just as entertaining and revealing as the meetings with the famous and the notorious. He makes die rounds with a charwoman ("A Day's Work"), and gives us brief, but telling glimpses into the lives of each of her customers. The conver-sation in "Hidden Gardens"—with the powerful female owner of a waterfront bar—not only retrieves moments of a shared past, but is also a fond evocation of the qualities and street scenes of New Orleans in the spring. In California's San Quentin prison, a grim encounter with a young inmate, who was peripherally in-volved with the Charles Manson gang and the Sharon Tate murders, supplies the basis of "Then It All Came Down." The reader soon discovers that Capote's fondness for the bizarre, the inexplicable and the gothic are alive and well in this new collection of stories and conversations. He is reminded too that the writer's thought and experience also embrace sunnier days Brief Mentions 165 and happier hours, even if only retrospec-tively, and that the shining horrors of life are frequently redeemed by unexpected rewards, by situations of high comedy and shared laughter, and by moments of memorable beauty. The private hours may be dark and filled with unanswered ques-tions ("Nocturnal Turnings"), but the pub-lic experiences often distill into hints and clues that may yet lead to answers. The author's preface will be of special interest to serious students of Capote's work, and is in itself worth the price of admission to his surprising world. Harold E. Lusher RÉSHARD GOOL Price Charlottetown, P.E.I.: Square Deal Publications, 1976. Pp. 186. "Promise-keeping and truth-telling are, perhaps, the most final social values. With-out them, no society can function." So speaks Henry Naidoo, the protagonist of Price (p. 186). Naidoo is the lawyer son of poor Natal Hindu parents. His story, nar-rated by his friend, Adrian Van der Merwe, "golden-haired representative of Af-rikaaner Herrenvolk" (p. 2), is the tragic story of the destruction of the liberal option in contemporary South Africa. With a strong sense of the dramatic unities, Gool sets his action in Cape Town between Dingaan's Day, December 16, 1947, and the New Year of 1948, the year in which the Afrikaaner Nationalists are to assume power. Political forces mobilize with Sophoclean inevitability to shape the last few weeks of Henry Naidoo's life. In Katherine Holmes, younger daughter of an old Cape Colored family, Naidoo finds love, destiny, and "the liberal spirit of the Cape" (p. 118). The love-death paradigm is strongly etched. Love and the political ideal also come together in a single design: ". . . there is for me only one kind of true love," Henry asserts, "and that is responsible compassion" (p. 186). Indeed, responsible compassion is a marked feature of Gool's treatment of his major characters and themes. Both Henry and Katherine are required to bear a substantial burden as representative fig-ures. Both, nonetheless, are rendered with warmth and individuality. We are allowed to know Henry through his introspective diary and letters (pp. 3-25). Here are reflected his earnestness, romanticism, and "ironical rationality." The controlling voice, however, is that of Adrian, Oxford-educated lecturer in sociology, an "Anar-chist of the pacifist type," and author of a dissertation on historical determinism. Adrian's link with determinism warns us that the sense of fate that pervades the novel springs not only from the bias of events and from the requirements of Aris-totelian catharsis, but from the particular point of view of the narration. It is under this triple doom that the three major personae of Price, Adrian, Henry, and Katherine, capitulate, th rough exile, through death, through intimate loss, to the inexorable tragedy of the land. Each pays a price to participate in that tragedy—Adrian the price of Ishmael, that he may tell the story; Katherine the price of lovelessness, that, though ravished and barren, she may at least survive; Henry die price of a brutal death, that, no longer an "outsider," he may act out the principles of promise-keeping, truth-telling, and re-sponsible compassion. The rewards of reading Price are many. In no small measure they are due to the sensitivity With which Gool creates the ambience and to the exuberance with which he endows die supporting roles. Cape Town on a midsummer holiday (p. 27), for example, and the estuarine Eden of Henry's childhood (pp. 8-9), are described with rich nostalgia. Gool's versatility in re-creating the idiosyncrasies of colloquial speech give keen memorability to such characters as the promiscuous Doc (p. 32), and the Cambridge-educated Marxist, Yus-souf Rycliffe (pp. 101-02). The masterpiece among the fixed characters, however, is the "gorgeous, and repulsive, figure" of Shaikh-Moosa the entrepreneur, archbe-trayer of the Categorical Imperative, which Gool quotes as his novel's epigraph: ". . . treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never solely as a means." The spider at the center of the web in which all Price's characters are entangled, Shaikh-Moosa is "reality" itself, rudiless capital ism—protean, inventive, flam-166 The International Fiction Review, 8, N o . 2 (1981) 

Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/download/13528/14611

Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals