a love letter to Capote

I love these pieces. Love. He has this eternal air of journalism about him – it comes across in both nonfiction and fiction, and makes me think that he sort of collects people. His fictional characters and his true characters feel no different in description and no different in style – he brings both alive with beauty and with empathy and with these sort of minute, dazzling details which turn them from character to person. His writing sort of – well, I guess it has this vibrancy to it, this sort of elegantly luscious quality which makes his people and his places shine in the most unexpected ways. Like: “even the cat had ceased to prowl, and lay dreaming in the corridor” (from “A Ride Through Spain”). The cat doesn’t doze, it doesn’t sleep or laze or get in the way – it dreams. Or: “Once, at a parting in the trees, there was something I’d wanted to see, a castle on the hill, and it sat there like a crown.” Perfect. This castle, presumably made of aged grey stone, doesn’t only shout history and whisper of being old – it sits with grace atop the mountain, with years of practiced royalty.

And that is what I love about Capote. He doesn’t simply write the happenings and personalities of people – he spins them into these webs of the uncommon and of the beautiful, taking perfectly normal traits and turning them vivid, these pieces of person that shouldn’t matter but do. I picture him as an incessant people watcher – he just loves people and their oddities. But he doesn’t ridicule these quirks – he embraces all traits, all wrongs and all rights. Like this part in Summer Crossing (which urrabody needs to read):

“In the last year, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was dark. But it was never dark there: the lights that had been running all day grew yellow at dusk, white at night, and the faces, those dream-trapped faces, revealed their most to her then. Anonymity was part of the pleasure, but while she was no longer Grady McNeil, she did not know who it was who replaced her*, and the tallest fires of her excitement burned with a fuel she could not name. She never mentioned it to anyone, those pearl-eyed perfumed Negroes, those men, silk- or sailor-shirted, toughs or pale-toothed and lavender-suited, those men that watched, smiled, followed: which way are you going? Some faces, like the lady who changed money at Nick’s Amusements, are faces that belong nowhere, are green shadows under green eyeshades, evening effigies embalmed and floating in the caramel-sweet air. Hurry. Doorway megaphones, frenziedly hurtling into the glare sad roars of rhythm, accelerate the senses to collapse: run – out of the white into the real, the sexless, the jazzless, the joyful dark: these infatuating terrors she had told to no one.”

Now, now only is that achingly beautiful, it notices everything about everything. It’s perfect. His writing is perfect. The End.

*Capote? Mebbe?