The Books: “Music for Chameleons” – ‘Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex’ (Truman Capote)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction (although Capote’s stuff walks the line with nonfiction):

Music for Chameleons – by Truman Capote. Today’s excerpt is from ‘Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex’. This is the final piece in Music for Chameleons and it is a “transcription” of a conversation Truman Capote had with himself, as he lay tossing and turning in bed one lonely night. One side of his personality interviews the other. It’s incredibly narcissistic, but because I find him an interesting character as well as a wonderful writer and storyteller, I love it. For example, the excerpt below. Now he was a huge name-dropper (as should be probably obvious by now) – but I don’t really have a problem with that, either – not like some folks do. I love to hear stories about famous people, and if someone’s got the dish on someone else – I’m on board. I read Perez Hilton. Of course I do. Anyway, here is Capote’s story about someone famous – an idol of his. He is ruminating to himseslf about “great conversationalists” he has known. He lists some names. Then tells this story.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons – by Truman Capote – ‘Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex’.

When I was eighteen I met the person whose conversation has impressed me the most, perhaps becaue the person in question is the one who has most impressed me. It happened as follows:

In New York, on East Seventy-ninth Street, there is a very pleasant shelter known as the New York Society Library, and during 1942 I spent many afternoons there researching a book I intended writing but never did. Occasionally, I saw a woman there whose appearance rather mesmerized me – her eyes especially: blue, the pale brilliant cloudless blue of prairie skies. But even without this singular feature, her face ws interesting – firm-jawed, handsome, a bit androgynous. Pepper-salt hair parted in the middle. Sixty-five, thereabouts. A lesbian? Well, yes.

One January day I emerged from the library into the twilight to find a heavy snowfall in progress. The lady with the blue eyes, wearing a nicely cut black coat with a sable collar, was waiting at the curb. A gloved, taxi-summoning hand was poised in the air, but there were no taxis. She looked at me and smiled and said: “Do you think a cup of hot chocolate would help? There’s a Longchamps around the corner.”

She ordered hot chocolate; I asked for a “very” dry martini. Half seriously, she said, “Are you old enough?”

“I’ve been drinking since I was fourteen. Smoking, too.”

“You don’t look more than fourteen now.”

“I’ll be nineteen next September.” Then I told her a few things: that I was from New Orleans, that I’d published several short stories, that I wanted to be a writer and was working on a novel. And she wanted to know what American writers I liked. “Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson …” “No living.” Ah, well, hmm, let’s see: how difficult, the rivalry factor being what it is, for one contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, “Not Hemingway – a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe – all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn’t living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?”

With no particular expression, she said, “Actually, I wrote it.”

I had seen photographs of Willa Cather – long-ago ones, made perhaps in the early twenties. Softer, homelier, less elegant than my companion. Yet I knew instantly that she was Willa Cather, and it was one of the frissons of my life. I began to babble about her books like a schoolboy – my favorites: A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, My Antonia. It wasn’t that I had anything in common with her as a writer. I would never have chosen for myself her sort of subject matter, or tried to emulate her style. It was just that I considered her to be a great artist. As good as Flaubert.

We became friends; she read my work and was always a fair and helpful judge. She was full of surprises. For one thing, she and her lifelong friend, Miss Lewis, lived in a spacious, charmingly furnished Park Avenue apartment – somehow, the notion of Miss Cather living in an apartment on Park Avenue seemed incongrous with her Nebraska upbringing, with the simple, rather elegiac nature of her novels. Secondly, her principal interest was not literature, but music. She went to concerts constantly, and almost all her closest friends were musical personalities, Yehudi Menuhin and his sister Hepzibah.

Like all authentic conversationalists, she was an excellent listener, and when it was her turn to talk, she was never garrulous, but crisply pointed. Once she told me I was overly sensitive to criticism. The truth was that she was more sensitive to critical slights than I; any disparaging reference to her work caused a decline in spirits. When I pointed this out to her, she said: “Yes, but aren’t we always seeking out our own vices in others and reprimanding them for such possessions? I’m alive. I have clay feet. Very definitely.”