Books Borrowed from My Ex-Husband #8
CHILDREN ON THEIR BIRTHDAYS
Penguin Modern Classics
by Truman Capote
£3, 74 pages
Truman Capote and I have been involved since back in the day, and I loved him as an impressionable teenager. I read everything I found of his work when I was sixteen. I knew I liked Capote, but didn’t know why. These were the days I was falling in love with writing, absorbing all I could. But weirdly, I can’t consider Capote without thinking of Jack Kerouac. I remember distinctly why this is.
I talked to my fantastic English teacher (thank God for great teachers, like Ms. Early in Junior year) about Capote, and also about my budding love for all things Beat. I had been fanatical about Ginsberg (my youngest son is named from “A Supermarket in California,” so the love lingered) and was getting into Jack Kerouac.
Kerouac, she sighed. I know, typical at sixteen. She shared a quote that I endeavored to understand for a long, long time. A quote I’d think of when I sat down to work. She said Capote famously said of Kerouac, “That isn’t writing, it’s typing.” This terrified me, because always I faced this fear: who decides what is good enough?
Jesus, that’s a nightmarish thought. What it comes down to, is the popular myth of Kerouac high and frantically typing his work (not his actual process at all, but whatever) versus Capote’s meticulous prose. That Kerouac’s work, often flouting any nothing of conventional structure or even grammar, could be as emotionally effective as Capote’s careful precisionism must have be quite the affront. I drank the careful Koolaid. I labor over sentences, and edit within an inch of my life. But consequently, for years, I was fearful of writing precisely because of that Capote quote. What if you do it, but don’t do it well enough, and then everyone thinks you’re a hack? Would it break your heart? Did it break Jack Kerouac’s, this notion of not good enough? Can you only love one, Jack or Truman? Is that it?
It made me afraid to even start. It shouldn’t have. Here’s a game:
A: “Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame.”
B: “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
C: “We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south.”
D: “I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
These two writers are held as as polar opposites, but can you tell which is the Capote and which is the Kerouac? Are you sure?
With that in mind, I reviewed the Capote Mini Modern. I felt I paid a visit to an old friend. A fussy and snobby friend, but a friend. When reading work I haven’t read since childhood, I am nervous. My starry eyes have been replaced with wiser ones, and I am harder to impress. Because Capote’s snobbery made such an impression on me–the importance of every single word, I didn’t want to re-read work that lost its sparkle for me. I hate the moment the Wizard is revealed behind the curtain.
But it hadn’t lost a rhinestone’s worth of sparkle. I remembered the stories, old friends of mine, stories that made me want to write. “Children on Their Birthdays” is incredible. Capote reveals his ending at the beginning, and somehow makes the ending more shocking by doing so. He does this two ways, with characters and narrative perfectly lean and paced; and with lush language inserted in the right spots. There is no formula for this, it is pure talent.
“A Christmas Memory” is a story that I’d like nothing more than to dislike. It is all heart, sweetly sentimental, reminisces of boyhood–a general turn off for me. But again, the characterization, the pacing, and the language combine in a way that is powerful, firework popping powerful. A story that the cynic in me doesn’t even want to like, that makes me cry when I read the last paragraph:
And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected so see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kite hurrying toward heaven.
There is an honesty to the loss and grief of “A Christmas Memory” that is so perfectly stripped, a quite innocent work, tender–that the emotional response upon its conclusion is earned.
At his best, Capote holds you, but as a reader, you don’t want to let go. I felt it instinctively as a kid, I can understand it more so now, having slung enough sentences to know, he really knew what he was doing.
Bringing me back to the famous quote about Kerouac, and why Capote said what he did. Kerouac’s work, though impressionistic and sprawling, is strikingly similar to Capote’s in that it hits that same sweet spot of empathetic characterization and honesty. The above quotes, while stylistically different, are thematically similar. The natural world becomes metaphor, and the words are loss-laden.
The likeness doesn’t stop there. Both Capote and Kerouac’s output was negatively affected by alcoholism. Capote’s style ran more to engraved invitations and drunken balls (ahem, the dancing kind.) Kerouac did not need an invitation for drunken debauchery, particularly not an engraved one. The why of this, the drink that took a toll on the work, is testament to their inherent similarities: these are two men that had the fine sensitivity to observe the world and articulate the human heartbreak of living. In their own ways, divergent syntax aside, they got it. The things one sees, trying to transfer to the page the sum of life, can hurt. Booze can be palliative.
Capote’s Mini Modern is wonderful, beautifully done. It is not just “typing” in any sense. And neither is Kerouac’s work, of course. They both provide lessons in how it can be done, and as a writer, how very thrilling to think that what it takes is less a magic formula for success in prose, but more the swagger of the writer that says I can do this how I please and dammit, follow along here. And then, as a reader, you do.
As I try to let go of my old prejudices (I would die if somebody accused me of typing) I laugh at myself. How would my sixteen-year-old self react to the fact that I now serve on the Board of Directors of the Jack Kerouac Project, a 501(c)(3) that champions emerging writers? I’ve slept in Kerouac’s bedroom. Typing indeed.
Writing. Typing. What time seems to teach me, the example of both these writers, is to enjoy the living off the page as well as the process of filling it up. I am happy to know that I can love them both.
Quiz answers:
A and C are Capote, from “A Christmas Memory.”
B and D are Kerouac; B from On the Road and D from Dharma Bums.