Of Love and Other Demons

The first chapter of Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote follows our hero's adventures from 1936 through 1948, a particularly heady period of his life. Capote leaves Alabama for New York City, joins the staff of The New Yorker, sells his first stories (for which he wins several national awards), becomes a popular fixture in the New York literary scene and in the salons of Paris, meets the love of his life and signs a major book deal with Random House for his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. By the time the chapter ends, Capote is a bestselling and critically lauded novelist, and even a national celebrity. He has just turned 24, though with his slight, 5'3" frame, skirling falsetto voice and golden bangs, he looked not a day older than 12. "For God's sake!" shouted New Yorker editor Harold Ross, upon seeing Capote for the first time in his office. "What's that?"

On the first page of this opening chapter, which editor Gerald Clarke understatedly titles "The Exuberant Years," there is a photograph that captures perfectly Capote's spirit at the time. Taken in Tangiers by Cecil Beaton, the photograph shows a singing Capote mid-leap, spread-eagled and arms outstretched like a bounding Lindy Hopper. The ground is not even in the frame--for all we know he is thirty feet in the air. Although Capote would go on to even greater literary success and celebrity with the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), he was never more full of hope and excitement than in these early years. Each piece of correspondence reads like a love letter, breathless and exclamatory. He was always very affectionate toward his friends, often effusively so, but in these letters, written before he had made his first enemies or alienated those closest to him, he seems in love with everything and everyone--with New York, his editors, his friends, his lovers and, most of all, his work. Here is the beginning of a letter written to Mary Louise Aswell, his editor at Harper's Bazaar:

Marylou, divinely beloved,
   This must be love! For you are the only one I ever write: yes, it is love...

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