Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote

By Truman Capote

Book Overview

Truman Capote was hailed as one the most meticulous writers in American letters-a part of the Capote mystique is that his precise writing seemed to exist apart from his chaotic life. While the measure of Capote as a writer is best taken through his work, Capote the person is best understood in his personal correspondence with friends, colleagues, lovers, and rivals. In Too Brief a Treat , the acclaimed biographer Gerald Clarke brings together for the first time the private letters of Truman Capote. Encompassing more than four decades, these letters reveal the inner life of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing personalities. As Clarke notes in his Introduction, Capote was an inveterate letter writer who both loved and craved love without inhibition. He wrote letters as he spoke- emphatically, spontaneously, and without reservation. He also wrote them at a breakneck pace, unconcerned with posterity. Thus, in this volume we have perhaps the closest thing possible to an elusive treasure- a Capote autobiography. Through his letters to the likes of William Styron, Gloria Vanderbilt, his publishers and editors, his longtime companion and lover Jack Dunphy, and others, we see Capote in all his life's phases-the uncannily self-possessed na.f who jumped headlong into the dynamic post-World War Two New York literary scene and the more mature, established Capote of the 1950s. Then there is the Capote of the early 1960s, immersed in the research and writing of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood . Capote's correspondence with Kansas detective Alvin Dewey, and with Perry Smith, one of the killers profiled in that work, demonstrates Capote's intense devotion to his craft, while his letters to friends like Cecil Beaton show Capote giddy with his emergence as a flamboyant mass media celebrity after that book's publication. Finally, we see Capote later in his life, as things seemed to be unraveling- when he is disillusioned, isolated by his substance abuse and by personal rivalries. (Ever effusive with praise and affection, Capote could nevertheless carry a grudge like few others). Too Brief a Treat is that uncommon book that gives us a literary titan's unvarnished thoughts. It is both Gerald Clarke's labor of love and a surpassing work of literary history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375501339
• ISBN13: 9780375501333
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Better than a diary!

When you read personal correspondence written to friends, lovers, and business associates . . . well, it doesn't get any better! Candid, un-censored, witty, funny, revealing, cutting . . . it's all there! A great look at the true Truman Capote. Very interesting.

Too Much Of A Good Thing

I always loved Truman Capote's writing and looked forward to this book oh, so much, especiallywhen I saw it was edited by the estimable Gerald Clarke, who has written so brilliantly on Capote in his biography (and who also wrote GET HAPPY, a terrific life of Judy Garland). (Hmmm, he must specialize in the tiny.) But alas Capote's letters just aren't as good as his fiction. They seem hurried, scattered, as though he were writing too fast to revise, everything exactly the opposite of what one likes about the stories and filmscripts. I will say you do get a different side of him, and the outlines of his social world become clearer, so view this compilation as an addendum to the biography, and you won't go far wrong. I was surprised to see him make so much of (i.e. flatter) Cecil Beaton, it sounded phony. It seems that he treated Newton Arvin pretty well all things put together. Some have said that he "used" Arvin to get ahead and then dumped him once he had found a measure of his own success. But Arvin can't have been an easy guy to live with IMHO. Another interesting correspondent is William Goyen. I think the best letter in all of TOO BRIEF A TREAT is Capote's letter congratulating Goyen on the achievement of THE HOUSE OF BREATH. That letter, in the perfection of its phrases and the conviction of its rapture, is alone worth the price of the book. It's a shame that Goyen later turned on Capote and treated him so shabbily. Good for Gerald Clarke for pointing this out. Meanwhile the good news for Capote fans is that his novel SUMMER CROSSING, about which many of the letters to Bob Linscott are devoted, has been recovered and now, fifty-plus years later, it might be seeing the light of day. In the interim we will re-read these letters, hoping to scan in more data on the terrific catastrophe that was Truman Capote's life.

A book for fans of the genre and of the man

"Your letter was too brief a treat, but a treat all the same; there is only one excitement to my day, and that is when the postman comes." So wrote the author who sometimes waited an hour for the best word to come to mind when engaged in concocting a novel, yet spun off letters to friends and colleagues like cotton candy. Truman Capote, to whom fame came early and lasted long, called all of his correspondents by such adorations as "precious baby, darling child." To almost anyone he was likely to say, "much love, little blue eyes" or "I miss you 24 hours of the day" or "a thousand kisses, precious." It seemed that nearly everyone he wrote to was his darling, his love, and wanted showering with kisses. Not that he couldn't be cutting and catty, though always with gentility, at least on paper: "I'm afraid he's set fire to too many bridges"; "he's furious because anyone other than himself is here" (of W.H. Auden); and, of Jimmy (James) Baldwin, "his essays are at least intelligent, though they almost invariably end on a fakely hopeful, hymn-singing note." Of his early work on IN COLD BLOOD he wrote, "This is my last attempt at reportage." Like almost every writer, he wanted to know what the critics were really thinking and get copies of all his reviews. He managed to sound both humble and very puffy when referring to his successes, and terribly anxious about the fate of pieces in progress. A collection of so very many letters (for that is all the book is) can start to feel water-logged after a while. It's a good thing to recall that posterity will not necessarily be fascinated by one's complaints about the cold, the prices of goods in foreign cities, or the antics of one's pets (and Truman had many). We would all make our letters more artistic and succinct if we imagined that they'd be read generations hence. So we can speculate on two forking probabilities. One: that Capote well knew that his words would be taken for gemstones ages from now and wrote with the cagey casualness of the omniscient observer. Two: that Capote never imagined for an instant that anyone would collect his letters to friends and place them on the altar of memory for the entire world to see. I prefer the second alternative, because I like thinking of Capote as a natural, sweet-hearted man, who showed his artistic brilliance to the public but saved his syrup and a touch of spice for his epistolary relationships. TOO BRIEF A TREAT is a book for fans of the genre and of the man. --- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott, author of WITH IT: A Year on the Carnival Trail