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One can hardly blame publishers for wanting to publish “the long lost manuscript.”
HarperCollins caved in when it published Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman.” The jury is still out on whether it was a good idea or even whether Ms. Lee fully understood what was going on. Readers eagerly anticipated it. Critics gave thoughtful opinions pro and con.
“The Early Stories of Truman Capote” (Random House, $25, 177 pp.) is a parallel discovery. Ironically, Ms. Lee’s and Mr. Capote’s lives were interwoven. They were childhood friends. Ms. Lee did research for Mr. Capote when he was writing “In Cold Blood.” Mr. Capote appears as Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
A Swiss publisher was looking through Mr. Capote’s papers in the New York Public Library, perhaps searching for an unfinished novel or further chapters of “Answered Prayers,” his scandalous attempt to limn a segment of New York society in the manner of Proust. What the publisher found was this trove of short stories that Mr. Capote had written between the ages of 14 and 20. Several of them had been published in his high school newspaper in Greenwich, Connecticut.
One wonders what Mr. Capote would think of the book. Would he curl up in embarrassment? Probably. A writer’s unpublished manuscripts are so for a reason. If these were not written by Mr. Capote, they would likely never have seen the light of day. They are the work of an apprentice, a child even—though a very precocious child. There is not much that would embarrass Mr. Capote, but he would be mortified by a careless usage or a cliché.
Nevertheless, these stories are not without interest. In the preface to his 1980 collection, “Music for Chameleons,” he described how people would be amazed that someone so young could write so well. “Amazing? I’d only been writing day in and day out for 14 years.” That would have made him 8 years old when he started. So these are stories he began to produce six years later. They are the works of a fledgling spreading his wings, but not quite taking off.
The book gives no indication of the chronology, yet some stories show a surer hand. A particularly amusing one is “Kindred Spirits,” in which a woman who has killed her husband advises another on how she might kill hers.
“‘But I understand drowning is pleasant,’ said Mrs. Green.
“‘Oh, yes indeed, an extremely pleasant method of—of departure. Yes, I think if the poor man could have chosen his own way out, I’m certain he would have preferred—water. But harsh as it may sound, I can’t pretend I wasn’t considerably cheered to be rid of him.”’
In what appears to be an earlier story, “Parting of the Way,” Mr. Capote writes of two drifters, possibly ex-convicts, eerily foreshadowing the two murderers Perry and Dick of “In Cold Blood.”
The stories give off a whiff of Southern Gothic. The story, “Mill Store,” describes a woman who is drawn to a young girl’s eyes. They were “his” eyes. The broad hint is that she was in a romantic attachment that went sour. In the course of the story the young girl is bitten by a snake and the woman sucks the venom from the wound and applies fresh chicken blood, perhaps not a regularly accepted medical practice. While rinsing her mouth “she felt sick all over when she thought of what she had done.”
In “Swamp Terror” a young boy watches his friend and his friend’s dog die at the hand of an escaped convict they were tracking.
The book is filled with lonely spinsters, nasty children, the unloved and the lost, all in some way marginal or outsiders.
The stories are clearly those of a schoolboy, albeit a bright and very promising schoolboy. There are few adults who could write as well, much less 14-year-olds. But the book doesn’t give us what we go to fiction for, an enlargement of our experience and a lift of the spirit. Sometimes, just escape.
There is a lesson here for all writers. Shred your juvenilia.
But there is something to admire in the book, too. The evidence of a writer’s discipline, even at a very young age, and the dogged determination to master the craft of fiction.
on Mar 17, 2016