[REVIEW] Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories by Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is my favorite Audrey Hepburn film because I am basic and it’s the one that made me really admire her as an actress and woman. Briefly: I have three posters of Blake Edwards’ cinematic masterpiece hung up in my room; I have a commissioned replica of Holly Golightly’s cerulean blue-green sleep mask with the vintage gold eyelashes, which I also sleep with; and, lastly, I had also dedicated an entire day of my life bumbling around my city searching for the movie’s soundtrack on vinyl just so I can hear Audrey Hepburn’s crackly, whispering voice singing “Moon River” in my room as it rained outside. I rewatch this movie often. When I think of the word “comfort,” it certainly drifts into my periphery -- like a swan with bright white feathers -- before going off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see. Silly as it sounds, when I first saw BaT as a little girl, I knew it’d be special to me forever.
My mom had introduced me to old Hollywood movies and Audrey Hepburn before. She grew up in the post-WWII Philippines, where everything American was considered luxury and chic. I, like her, grew up watching Sabrina and My Fair Lady, -- along with Barbara Streisland, Grace Kelly, Greta Garbo, etc. -- but there was just something about BaT that hooked me in. When I got older and found out it was based on a book, I knew I had to get a cover just as gorgeous and melancholic as I envisioned the story to be. For a long while, I didn’t have my own copy -- because, frankly, a lot of editions looked cheap and gauche (not to mention excessively and distressedly bright cerulean). When I finally found my 1993 Vintage International copy, it was being sold on depop, and I remember being very determined to get it even though the seller did not deliver to Canada. I pulled many ridiculously convoluted strings, but I got it. I knew I’d love Truman Capote’s book as much as I loved the movie, so the edition had to be perfect -- so perfect that it would sit untouched on my shelf in wrapping paper for the past four years. (I knew I would pick it up when I was ready).
The same year I bought my copy of BaT, I also went to New York City for the first time, but the NYC I’d fallen in love with could only be found in the cloudy fumes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacies and artwork. So, when I say I like New York, I’m echoing the film scene where Holly says, with a fabulous flick of her wrist, how she loved living there and would hate to leave it. During that part, she and Paul/”Fred” were taking a tour of the town and looking up at those asphalt jungle skyscrapers that have long since been replaced by even taller monoliths made of neocapitalist engineering and multiple OSHA violations. Ironically, the thought of actually going to the city now makes my skin crawl, -- so many rats the size of babies and smelly garbage everywhere -- but I’m always happy to go back in time to the 1960s (or, in Capote’s novella, the 1940s) to visit Holly and her nameless cat.
BaT and this small collection can be read in one sitting, but I can’t imagine getting through more than one story at a time before being lulled into some kind of spell. It took me a while to get through this humble edition, but I turned the pages with the same carefree jaunt as someone taking an evening romp down Central Park. I had way more fun than I thought I would with this book. Obviously, I love the movie to pieces, and it is firmly my favorite between the two, but Capote’s novella was unabashedly mesmerizing, so I’m delighted to have been given the chance to re-immerse myself in one of my favorite stories from a different -- albeit grittier and more solemn -- perspective.
This was my first time experiencing Capote. I’d been putting off reading him for so long because I’m not such a big fan of American literature anymore. To my delight, I soon discovered that his writing style is limpid, sultry, and hypnotic, like the dewdrop sound of lazy piano keys floating into your inner ear the moment you also realize you’re alone at the jazz bar counter and about to fall asleep; finding a taxi and getting home is the least of your concerns, however, because right now the world and language and all existence feels melted and gooey like donut frosting. Capote’s prose reminds me a lot of Fitzgerald’s in The Great Gatsby or even J.D. Salinger, but then again most 20th-century American novelists leave me with this hungover, lethargic, and disillusioned feeling, as if I’m just about to turn to the next corner to find the party over, but the streetlights are dimming and the pavement goes on endlessly, and I can’t even remember where I’m supposed to go or who I’ve loved.
Along with BaT, the three short stories included in this edition are intimate and touching. As one reviewer says, “[E]ach of these stories touch on love, loss, and hope against hope that avoid sentimentalism in their cold rendering of events. It is more the external elements (the weather in New York, the changing seasons at the farm, the bee prophecy and the wind respectively) that color the psychology of the characters and their ambiguous fates.” After traipsing through Capote’s richly detailed yet dissociated, eclectic descriptions of human nature in these shorter forms, I know I will read more of him in the future, but for now I am quite satisfied with this short novella and three little stories, and I want to give a few comments on them before I get into reviewing the main novella.
I didn’t much like “House of Flowers” (it read like Paulo Coelho, but underwhelming and aimless). I liked “A Diamond Guitar” much better, although the story itself is pretty bleak and borderline Dostoyevskian. Like BaT, “A Diamond Guitar” is a tender story of unrequited longing and disappearance:
“He stood there whispering the names of the evening stars as they opened in flower above him. The stars were his pleasure, but tonight they did not comfort him; they did not make him remember that what happens to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of eternity. . . . Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady’s hair.”
There’s really not much I can say about this one. The narrator’s resigned exhaustion and painful abandonment were palpable on the page.
In the same vein, “A Christmas Memory” is a heartbreaking tale of innocent kinship between a young boy and an older woman and their foolish dreams of surpassing their humble existence:
”My, how foolish I am! . . . You know what I’ve always thought? . . . I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you didn’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are . . . just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”
There are no words to describe just how badly this last story fucked me up. It felt deeply personal and raw, as if Capote somehow knew what words needed to be wrung out of my heart and, knowing he’d never meet me, decided to write them down anyway in hopes that I’d find them someday, and I did. Fuck. I wanted to burst into tears!
And now we get to the main event. One reviewer loquaciously wrote, “[T]his novelette is a small 100 page thing, a drifting fragrance, a single chord, a glint, a hello then goodbye too soon, too soon – ah yes, itself therefore being the perfect embodiment of the Holly Golightly experience.” Generally speaking, there are two versions of Holly that people tend to fixate on: The classic Golden Age Hollywood it-girl who’s quirky, comical, and glamorously kooky; she’s fashionable, in-the-know, and in-the-now, but also terribly lonely, lost, and waiting to be swept off her feet. You can’t resist her charm even if you try, and you can’t help but fall in love with her because she’s played by the charming Audrey Hepburn in a little black dress, trendy sunglasses, and alligator shoes to match. Hollywood’s Holly is the epitome of kooky glamour and beauty, but her allure mostly comes from the stunning woman who plays her. Because of this characterization, BaT the movie becomes a classic, homemade rom-com -- complete with an emotional, angsty confession scene, a passionate kiss in the rain, and a dashing romantic male lead who reunites Holly with her no-name slob cat before promptly banishing her worries forever with the power of true love and a great soundtrack composed and conducted by Henry Mancini. But everyone knows it’s a pretended ideal.
By contrast, Capote’s original novella illustrates a much darker, tragic, and nuanced Holiday Golightly -- as portrayed through the hazy memories of a nameless, perpetually cucked narrator who met her when he was a young, inexperienced, and undoubtedly erect writer with nothing but dreams and pennies leftover after rent. Unlike Audrey’s adorable Holly, who catches stolen glances at the swoonworthy, blue-eyed George Peppard (who was, predictably, quite horrible in real life) and styles her lustrously highlighted brunette hair in fancy updos, Capote’s girl is a “wild thing” who cannot be caged like a bird, rescued like your common damsel in distress, or trained like a racial Other to do circus tricks. Capote characterizes her as like an elusive and exotic Madame Butterfly (“American geisha”), Cleopatra, or Pocahontas: Neurotic and erotic; a bad fever dream yet also a delicious nightmare.
Capote’s Holly is a snoopy alcoholic and a terrifying smoker; she’s crass, inelegant, opinionated, vulgar, uncensored, violent, unpredictable, etc.; there’s absolutely no doubt that she’s some kind of prostitute. She’s detached and does not stay in one place for long before she poofs like a fairy and disappears -- not exactly the kind of woman to ever settle down and be content with our starry-eyed narrator, whom we never really learn much about other than that he’s probably Capote’s self-insert and subtextually fruity in the Nick Carraway variety. The book is completely obsessed about Holly, but Hollywood didn’t seem to like that plotless plot and instead opted to give the narrator a name (Paul Varjak) and, rather than retain his implied homosexuality (Capote himself said BaT’s narrator is gay), the film changes him into a “kept” gigolo to an older cougar woman. Holly’s lesbianism is also erased significantly, but that’s the Hays Code for you. (The movie still subverts the Act in its own ways, but that’s a discussion for another time).
According to Capote, there is clearly no charged love story. In fact, Holly doesn’t even appear -- she’s long gone and missing in action from the first page. Wraith-like, she haunts the narrative and we only know about her through the narrator’s tragically melancholic yet definitely unreliable reminiscences. I’ve always thought Holly must’ve been a real woman Capote met once upon a time; she’s so vividly splendid and flawed, like Daisy Buchanan, Lady Chatterley, or Emma Bovary, that she must’ve been flesh at some point and not just another white male author’s Galatea. Indeed, Holly feels like the doll version of a real person, as if Capote had sometime met a bedazzling woman larger than life yet getting dimmer by the hour and decided to strip her down to her bare essentials for his book. She has brimming potential and depth, but she’s also the perfect manic pixie dreamgirl who got away. Eternally mysterious, like a sexy cold corpse.
The unlikely and doomed friendship between Holly and the brother-like (?) gay narrator is beautifully and painfully described, as are the lonely parties and beastly lovers that she entertains in the powder room. Capote presents her as the quintessential object of the male gaze: A bold woman who speaks her mind, but keeps enough of it so virginally hidden within herself that no man can resist prodding and picking at her. She comes with no strings attached and knows how to have a good time; so no worries about her baby-trapping you with the old ball and chain! She wishes she could have a “bull dyke for a roommate” because “they make such excellent housekeepers,” so she’d definitely be into some butt stuff. Altogether, she’s experimental, exciting, and a dirty tease, with a unique restlessness of spirit that’s riddled with contradictions and expensively cheap perfume. Yet, underneath all the flirting and high society debutante persona, she’s alone, frightened, and broken:
“No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is. You’ve had that feeling?”
A sad girl who dreads being a caged animal, but is also so tired of being alone. She wants to seem as though she’s making a holiday out of life, but, instead of going lightly, she struggles with the need for stability and the desire for freedom. Capote’s Holly is therefore much more enigmatic and pitiful than Audrey Hepburn’s interpretation -- so much darker and harder to romanticize, at least without it leaving a bad, sour taste in your mouth.
Book Holly isn’t a bad person; she’s just more layered and real, which is exactly why Capote leaves zero room for anything but her as his centrepiece. There’s certainly tension, heartache, and the age-old theme of love never being enough in this woeful tale, but, unlike in the movie, there’s no ragtag comedy or quirkiness to the otherwise darker and more discomforting story:
”You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”
Capote leaves much to be interpreted and felt. As one reviewer puts it, the book’s atmosphere is “a sort of bohemian yet preppy post-Beat decadence but with a tragic sexism that poisons Holly's relationships with everyone except the narrator. She is both an actor and a victim of her status as a sex object -- this is what transports this story from something banal to something more complex and enduring.” There’s an overwhelming sense of disillusionment, corrupt embellishment, and apathy that recalls the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and postwar America.
Thus, what makes the book so successful is that it’s a master class in mid 20th-century short fiction. Like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Capote is precise and deliriously sharp in his social commentary and subtle character development. By the novella’s conclusion, readers have a very colorful portrait of Holly Golightly, yet she remains a blurred photograph; a memory; a fragment of a life we only briefly get to encounter. Capote shrouds her in “an opaque cloak of mystery but also gives us magical glasses to see right through it,” as another reviewer puts it. It’s fun imagining what Holly is like and where she could be, but at some point we have to wake up and understand that everything’s over. Everything’s over.
BaT is a bittersweet, sad little tale of a man who met this hummingbird-like creature and couldn’t contain her, but he didn’t mind nor even wanted to do so because it may hurt to be something, but it’s worst to be nothing with her. We as the reader can’t help but be similarly enchanted; we also start longing for a girl we know we’ll never see again. Interestingly enough, Capote considered Holly Golightly his favorite character, so I’m sure that, no matter how marvellous Audrey Hepburn was, he’d still pick his originally messy platinum blonde heroine than the Holly most of us (including me) much prefer. Nevertheless, whichever version you find most striking, both women succeed in being beautiful, ephemeral visions, so I’m happy that I finally got to meet Capote’s best girl alongside Audrey’s most iconic and unforgettable role.
