For ages I’ve been swayed to check out the writings of Truman Capote, but for ages I have been preoccupied to do so. Tonight I finally sat down with Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote and am already won over.
I particularly liked this passage from “New York 1946″
Lunch today with M. Whatever is one to do about her? She says the money is gone finally, and unless she goes home, her family refuses absolutely to help . Cruel, I suppose, but I told her I did not see the alternative. On one level, to be sure, I do not think going home is possible for her. She belongs to the sect most swiftly, irrevocably trapped by New York, the talented untalented; too acute to accept a more provincial climate, yet not quite acute enough to breathe more freely in the one so desired, they go along neurotically feeding upon the fringes of the New York scene.
Only success, and that at a perilous peak, can give relief, but for artists without art, it is always tension without release, irritation with no resulting pearl. Possibly there would be if the pressure to succeed were not so tremendous. They feel compelled to prove something, because middle-class America, from which they mostly spring, has withering words for its men of feeling, for its young of experimental intelligence, who do not show immediately that these endeavors pay off on a cash basis. But if a civilization falls, is it cash they find among the ruins? Or is it a statue, a poem, a play?
Which is not to say the world owes M., or anyone, a living; alas, the way things are with her, she most likely could not make a poem, a good one that is; still she is important, her values are balanced by more than the usual measure of truth, she deserves a finer destiny than to pass from belated adolescence to premature middle age, with no intervening period, and nothing to show.
-Truman Capote.
He sure knows how to tell it.
