Next book in my daily book excerpt:
We’ve moved out of the “science” area, and now we’re in the “oversized children’s and picture books” area. So next up is an excerpt from Truman Capote’s classic: A Christmas Memory: One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor (Modern Library)
Here’s the opening couple of paragraphs:
EXCERPT FROM A Christmas Memory: One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor (Modern Library)
Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable — not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”
The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together — well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives, and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.
“I knew it before I got out of bed,” she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. “The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; they’ve gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We’ve thirty cakes to bake.”
Sheila, did you ever see the 70’s Hallmark Hall of Fame (I think) production of “A Christmas Memory?” Geraldine Paige as Cousin Sook. Truman Capote narrating it himself. They give each other hand-made kites for Christmas and then go out and fly them. I’m sure you remember the end of Gerald Clark’s book, and Capote is talking to ghosts on his deathbed, and says, “It’s me! It’s Buddy!” to Cousin Sook. Anyway, tears are streaming down my sappy face right now, thinking of their relationship and what they meant to each other.
Stevie – I did see it. Beautiful.
The piece just makes my heart hurt. The simple love they shared – but so so profound. Making each other kites … and also: frankly – she was the only person who loved this fanciful little oddball. She loved him.
This story is such a beautiful tribute to her – to the gift she gave him. But yeah – it’s a killer.
I was just thinking about Capote last night, thinking about the time in his life when “Le Cote Basque 1965″(?) was published, later to be labeled as one of his only completed chapters of “Answered Prayers.” Capote’s characterization of a thinly disquised Slim Hayward (and oh, what a woman SHE was!) along with his skewering of a William Paley lookalike turned almost all of his rich, jet-set friends against him. He said to people in utter disbelief, “They know what kind of stories I love to tell, and the stories they told me; they know I’m looking at them deeply – why did they think they were exempt from appearing in my writing? I am a writer, after all.”
These glamourous, stunningly beautiful, smart, chic, stylish and wealthy women were his best friends (he called them his swans) and almost all of them turned away after “Le Cote Basque.” Babe Paley, considered the MOST beautiful and amazing of the group, was married to the brilliant William Paley of CBS and they all were friends, jumping from yacht to ship, from island to atoll. Lee Radziwell, Gloria Vanderbilt, Maria Callas, the Princess Agnezzi, and Jackie in the White House, well you know the list, Sheila – and WHAM the lid snaps and their golden literary poodle is cut off from the glamourous world that he brightened and heightened for them by telling the same sort of snappy, outrageous, slanderous stories about their mutual friends. He heard a lot of inCREDible stories along the way, you can imagine, many about the famous men the women had married.
Capote’s story is primarily a conversation between Slim Hayward and another woman lunching in the chic Manhattan restaurant, with Slim telling a bawdy, hemorragic nightmare of a story about one of William Paley’s sexcapades: how he’s sleeping around on an unknowning Babe and has bizarre bloody sex with a Jewish woman. It’s one of those stories where you put a hand up over your mouth like a Geisha and titter nervously, shocked and amused in equal doses. This is, after, the point of Capote’s story. Chic scenario, “lady talk” and a blood-soaked sex scene.
I loved “Le Cote Basque” and thought the storytelling and characterizations were scandalously delish. I can see how William Paley might not have been too thrilled with the story. Although Babe had reason enough to be horrified, I’m sure her husband’s ire was well-known to her and part of the reason Babe completely renounced Capote. Babe died of cancer about 10 years later and, although she regretted not having Capote’s company at a time she would have relished it, I believe she died and they were never reconciled.
As for little Buddy – a tow-headed little sissy angel-devil child who had his Cousin Sook and not much more, and who grew up to be respected and admired by these breathtaking people — when it all came crashing down, he went on a bender and a debauch that lasted almost until his death. He died in the home of one of the few swans who stayed his friend, Joanna Carson, Johnny’s ex-wife.