Mendelsohn's Malice

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his malicious “The Truman Show” (The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004; included in Mendelsohn’s 2008 collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken) looks down his nose at Truman Capote and judges him to be a failure. He says it three times: (1) “In his inexorable disintegration, Capote represents a distinct type of American failure – the artist whose early success is so spectacular that both life and art are forever trapped by, and associated with, long-past triumphs”; (2) “Thus seduced by his own reputation, he failed to pursue an artistic avenue that could well have led him to greater success”; (3) “Together, they [a volume of Capote’s letters entitled Too Brief a Treat and The Complete Short Stories of Truman Capote] provide intriguing insights into the nature both of his gift and of his terrible failure.” Terrible failure? We are talking here about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood, and – my favorite Capote work – The Muses are Heard. Rather than focusing on Capote’s writing, Mendelsohn dwells on Capote’s personal life. In addition to calling Capote a failure, he also calls him an “inveterate liar.” I find this ad hominem form of book reviewing despicable. I’m interested in the writing, not the writer. Compare Mendelsohn’s piece with Thomas Mallon’s New Yorker review of the same two Capote books (“Golden Boy,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2004). Mallon says,

To best experience Capote the stylist, one must go back to his short fiction, his work in the form that he called his “great love”; it was a genre he neglected through the nineteen-sixties, and then, near the end of his life, began to woo again. In fewer than four hundred pages, Random House has just given us “The Complete Stories of Truman Capote” ($24.95). If some of the earliest, most precocious efforts seem derivative (“My Side of the Matter” now feels awfully like Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”), one experiences as strongly as ever his gift for concrete abstraction (“She had a hectic brightness”) and his spectacular observancy: the eyes of a woman taking off her glasses seem “stunned by freedom; the skimpily lashed lids fluttered like long-captive birds abruptly let loose.” Again and again, his lyricim, to poignant effect, stops just short of overripeness: a parked car, buried in new snow, “winked its headlights: help! help! silent, like the heart’s distress.”

By staying close to Capote’s writing, Mallon's piece is much fairer than Mendelsohn’s.

Here are two more examples of Capote’s “spectacular observancy.” The first one is from his great The Muses are Heard, which ran as a two-part article in The New Yorker (October 20 & 27, 1956), and the second one is from his much maligned “La Côte Basque,” which is a fragment of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, published in 1986:

Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, we rode for forty minutes through the blackened acres of bombed-out East Berlin. The two additional buses, with the rest of the company, had arrived at the station before us. We joined the others on the platform where The Blue Express waited. Mrs. Gershwin was there, supervising the loading of her luggage onto the train. She was wearing a nutria coat and, over her arm, carried a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag.

Even for this those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can’t refuse: Dom Pérignon, and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.

Those acutely seen details – “a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag,” champagne “bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze” – are the mark of a terrific describer. Capote’s writing brims with such details. I think, in the long run, Judge Time will be kind to it. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with moralizing critics like Daniel Mendelsohn who judge Capote’s life, not his work.

Credit: The above 1973 photograph of Truman Capote is by Henry Diltz, and is used to illustrate Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show,” The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004.