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 Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African-American Geoffrey Chaucer Miguel de Cervantes
Poets: Volume I George Orwell Milan Kundera
African-American G.K. Chesterton Nathaniel Hawthorne
Poets: Volume II Gwendolyn Brooks Norman Mailer
Aldous Huxley Hans Christian Octavio Paz
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Andersen Paul Auster
Alice Walker Henry David Thoreau Philip Roth
American Women Herman Melville Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poets: 1650–1950 Hermann Hesse
Ray Bradbury
Amy Tan H.G. Wells
Richard Wright
Arthur Miller Hispanic-American
Robert Browning
Asian-American Writers
Writers Homer Robert Frost
August Wilson Honoré de Balzac Robert Hayden
The Bible Jamaica Kincaid Robert Louis
The Brontës James Joyce Stevenson
Carson McCullers Jane Austen Salman Rushdie
Charles Dickens Jay Wright Stephen Crane
Christopher Marlowe J.D. Salinger Stephen King
Cormac McCarthy Jean-Paul Sartre Sylvia Plath
C.S. Lewis John Irving Tennessee Williams
Dante Alighieri John Keats Thomas Hardy
David Mamet John Milton Thomas Pynchon
Derek Walcott John Steinbeck Tom Wolfe
Don DeLillo José Saramago Toni Morrison
Doris Lessing J.R.R. Tolkien Tony Kushner
Edgar Allan Poe Julio Cortázar
Truman Capote
Émile Zola Kate Chopin
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson Kurt Vonnegut
W.E.B. Du Bois
Ernest Hemingway Langston Hughes
Eudora Welty Leo Tolstoy William Blake
Eugene O’Neill Marcel Proust William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald Margaret Atwood William Gaddis
Flannery O’Connor Mark Twain William Shakespeare
Franz Kafka Mary Wollstonecraft William Wordsworth
Gabriel García Shelley Zora Neale Hurston
Márquez Maya Angelou
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Truman Capote
New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Truman Capote, New Edition

Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom

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Truman Capote / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-398-1 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Capote, Truman,
1924–1984—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
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 Contents

Editor’s Note vii

Introduction 1
Harold Bloom

The Dark Stories 3

William L. Nance

The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 23

Alfred Kazin

Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror

in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron 43
J. Douglas Perry, Jr.

Living the American Dream:

“Children on Their Birthdays” 57
Lee Zacharias

The Legend on the License 67

John Hersey

“Fire, Fire, Fire Flowing Like a River,

River, River”: History and Postmodernism
in Truman Capote’s Handcarved Coffins 87
Jack Hicks
vi Contents

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood 99

Ann M. Algeo

“The Last to See Them Alive”:

Panopticism, the Supervisory Gaze,
and Catharsis in Capote’s In Cold Blood 121
Trenton Hickman

He Would Have Been a Good Man:

Compassion and Meanness in
Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor 135
Marshall Bruce Gentry

“Some Unheard-of Thing”: Freaks,

Families, and Coming of Age in
Carson McCullers and Truman Capote 151
Thomas Fahy

Cold-Blooded Journalism: Truman Capote

and the Non-Fiction Novel 173
Nick Nuttall

Chronology 189

Contributors 191

Bibliography 193

Acknowledgments 196

Index 198
 Editor’s Note

My uneasy introduction briefly meditates on the survival possibilities of

Capote’s work. The high lacquer of his style in early books perhaps redeems
them, while In Cold Blood, still fiercely relevant, probably depends on the
fate of the miscalled “nonfiction” or journalistic novel.
William L. Nance examines Capote’s early short stories (1943–48) and
finds them to be studies for the protagonist of Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948), while the late journalist Alfred Kazin explores In Cold Blood (1965)
as a prelude to Norman Mailer’s adventures in the factual non-novel.
Faulkner is compared with his disciples, Capote and the late writer of
popular fiction William Styron, by J. Douglas Perry, Jr., who sees “gothic”
as the binding agent between a strong master and (I would say) two weaker
followers, as contrasted to, say, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flan-
nery O’Connor.
Capote’s story “Children on Their Birthdays” is judged as effective
“black humor” by Lee Zacharias, after which the journalistic John Hersey
deplores the blendings of fiction and journalism by Capote, Mailer, and Tom
Wolfe.
Handcarved Coffins, a late return to factual fiction by a worn-out Capote,
is sympathetically examined by Jack Hicks, while both Ann M. Algeo and
Trenton Hickman revisit the grim power of In Cold Blood.
Marshall Bruce Gentry courageously takes Capote into the company of
Flannery O’Connor, who dwarfs poor Capote, after which Thomas Fahy risks
the same consequences by juxtaposing Capote with Carson McCullers.
In this volume’s final essay, Nick Nuttall bids an elegiac farewell to In
Cold Blood.

vii
 H arold B loom

Introduction

So many eminent authors have resented all intimations they ever were influ-
enced by a forerunner that Truman Capote’s obsessive denials in this matter
are remarkable only for their intensity.
In a later preface for a reprinting of Other Voices, Other Rooms (first
published in 1948), Capote denied the palpable influence upon the book of
William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. They counted for
little to him, Capote asserted, as compared to Henry James, Mark Twain,
Poe, Willa Cather, and Hawthorne. Behind this odd grouping, one discerns
Capote’s quest to be self-generated: Poe and Cather made a difference to his
art, but James, Twain, and Hawthorne all were very remote.
I read Other Voices, Other Rooms soon after it appeared, borrowing
the novel from the current shelf at the Cornell University Library. I have
just reread it for the first time since then, after more than a half-century. I
remembered it surprisingly well, since it had seemed to me derivative, but
the distinction of the prose was evident enough then and remains lacquered
enough now to preserve it in the mind. The closing paragraph can represent
the high gloss of the style:

His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its
subject to enter focus. The wall yellowed in the meticulous setting
of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold,
seasonal color. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of
him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph’s


 Harold Bloom

window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass,

darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping
snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled.
She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go:
unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge where,
as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at
the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.

The Capote-like protagonist, still just a boy, enters the sexual realm
with the transvestite Randolph and looks back at the self left behind. This
is not a study of the nostalgias or a lament for lost innocence. It is style for
style’s sake.
So rococo are Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s that
they remain something more than period pieces, though their preciosity
makes it virtually impossible for me to venture prophecies as to their survival
value. Try reading Capote side by side with Ronald Firbank, author of such
sublime hilarities as Valmouth, The Flower Beneath the Foot, and The Eccen-
tricities of Cardinal Pirelli. Compared to Firbank’s blazing outrageousness,
early Capote fades away into pastel shades.
But there is another Truman Capote, who wrote In Cold Blood, still
the most effective of “nonfiction novels.” I reread In Cold Blood rarely and
reluctantly, because it is both depressing and rhetorically very effective. The
depression, as rereading makes clear, is caused by Capote’s covert imagina-
tive identification with the murderers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock.
Perry Smith is Capote’s daemon or other self, and it is no surprise to learn
that Capote cultivated the murderers, wept for them at the scaffold, and paid
for their burials. Whether the cold, artful book deserves canonical status, I
am uncertain, but it is likely enough to survive. It reflects its America, which
is still our own.
 WILLIAM L. NANCE

The Dark Stories

T he early fiction of Truman Capote is dominated by fear. It descends

into a subconscious ruled by the darker archetypes, a childhood haunted
by bogeymen, a world of blurred realities whose inhabitants are trapped in
unendurable isolation. The stories set in this dark world include “A Tree
of Night” (1943), “Miriam” (1944), “The Headless Hawk” (1946), “Shut
a Final Door” (1947), and “Master Misery” (1948) (S).1 Deep below the
surface they are really one story, and they have one protagonist. This story
will be continued, and its hero will achieve a peculiar liberation in Capote’s
first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). The fear and sense of captivity
that overshadow these stories result from the individual’s inability to accept
and respond properly to reality. On the social level this means inability to
love other persons. More essentially, it means refusal to accept mysterious
and frightening elements within the self, for the persons encountered by the
protagonist are most properly viewed as projections of inner personae. One
indication of the climate of the protagonist’s inner world is the fact that
nearly all of these persons are grotesques.
The stories are fundamentally psychic in orientation. In at least two
cases—“Miriam” and “Shut a Final Door”—the line between realism and
fantasy is definitely crossed: things happen that are literally impossible.
Usually, however, the settings seem realistic; we are kept in a world that

From The Worlds of Truman Capote, pp. 16–39, 240. © 1970 by William L. Nance.


 William L. Nance

is conceivably real, though strange, and the effects are wrought through
manipulations of the protagonist’s consciousness. The characteristic style
of the early work is intensely poetic, and the meaning of the stories rests
heavily on intricate patterns of symbolism. The most prominent stylistic and
symbolic motif in the fiction up to and including Other Voices, Other Rooms
is that of descent into a state of intensified and distorted consciousness. This
happens in each story, the differences being mostly in what might be termed
focal length. Sometimes the setting remains normal and the character simply
becomes sleepy or drunk, or has a dream. At other times the entire setting
takes on dreamlike characteristics, often through weather imagery such as
darkness or snow. In the most extreme cases the reader is pulled completely
into the illusion by means of apparitions or mysterious voices presented as
real. This scale of reader involvement is one of several ways of looking at the
stories and not, incidentally, a simple measure of their total effectiveness:
Capote handles his various effects always with considerable skill.
Perhaps the most obvious thing to be noted about Capote’s early work
is its highly personal quality. The stories take place in an inner world almost
entirely devoid of social or political concern. Because of this subjective orien-
tation, even the treatment of human relations has about it an air of isolation,
of constriction. With this qualification in mind, one may go on to observe
that love and the failure of love are of central concern in Capote’s fiction. The
meaning of love, as it emerges in the early work, would seem to be uncritical
acceptance. In each story the protagonist is given an opportunity to accept
someone and something strange and disturbing, to push back the frontier of
darkness both in the surrounding world and in the soul. Not until Joel works
his way through Other Voices, Other Rooms does one of them manage to do so.
Their characteristic kind of failure appears in simplest form in the tendency
to dismiss any challenging new presence as “crazy.” Capote’s impulse, from
“A Tree of Night” to In Cold Blood, is to accept and understand the “abnor-
mal” person; it has been, indeed, one of the main purposes of his writing to
safeguard the unique individual’s freedom from such slighting classifications
as “abnormal.”

“A Tree of Night,” the earliest story included in Capote’s Selected Writings,

sets the pattern of the self-protective hero who lives in fear because of a
refusal to accept. Compared to some of the stories which follow, this one is
relatively simple. The style is unobtrusive, the symbolic structure modest.
Events stay within the bounds of credibility, and yet the reader is chillingly
exposed to the grotesque both in the external world and in the semicon-
scious mind of the young heroine.
Nineteen-year-old Kay, returning to college from her uncle’s funeral,
is forced to sit in a train compartment opposite two other passengers: a
 The Dark Stories 

gin-reeking dwarfish woman with a huge head, and a corpselike man. The
woman persuades her to drink some gin and goes to get paper cups. Kay
is left alone with the man, unable to take her eyes off him, repelled but
fascinated, especially by his eyes “like a pair of clouded milky-blue marbles,
thickly lashed and oddly beautiful” (S 6).
The movement of this story is Kay’s descent into a half-world of subcon-
scious childhood fears. Already begun when she entered the compartment,
it accelerates as she waits drowsily for the woman’s return. When the man
unexpectedly strokes her cheek, she leans forward in confusion and gazes
into his eyes. “Suddenly, from some spring of compassion, she felt for him a
keen sense of pity; but also, and this she could not suppress, an overpowering
disgust, an absolute loathing: something about him, an elusive quality she
could not quite put a finger on, reminded her of—of what?” (S 7). When Kay
tries to escape, the woman seizes her wrist and shows her a worn handbill
describing her companion as “Lazarus, the Man Who Is Buried Alive.” She
explains that they do a traveling show featuring a mock burial.
The man begins playing obscenely with a peach-seed love charm, insist-
ing that she buy it, and Kay finally runs from the compartment. When she
steps out onto the black, freezing observation platform the immediate dan-
ger of sleep is removed but her mind begins to slip back toward a ghost-rid-
den childhood. The area, though new to her, is “strangely familiar.” Unable
to light a cigarette, she angrily tosses it away and begins “to whimper softly,
like an irritable child” (S 14). She longs to go inside and sleep but knows that
she is afraid to do so. Suddenly, compulsively, she kneels down and touches
the red lantern that hangs in a corner, the one source of warmth and light. A
“subtle zero sensation” warns her that the man is behind her, and she finally
gathers courage to look up. Seeing his harmless face in the red light, she
knows that what she fears is not him but

a memory, a childish memory of terrors that once, long ago, had

hovered over her like haunted limbs on a tree of night. Aunts,
cooks, strangers—each eager to spin a tale or teach a rhyme of
spooks and death, omens, spirits, demons. And always there had
been the unfailing threat of the wizard man: stay close to the
house, child, else a wizard man’ll snatch and eat you alive! He lived
everywhere, the wizard man, and everywhere was danger. At night,
in bed, hear him tapping at the window? Listen! (S 14–15)

Danger is still everywhere for Kay. Holding onto the railing and “inching
upward,” she returns from childhood and the deepest part of her mind only to
accompany the man back into a coach “numb with sleep.” She wants to cry out
and waken the other passengers, but the fear of death is too strong: “What if
 William L. Nance

they were not really asleep?” (S 15) Tears of frustration in her eyes, she agrees to
buy the love charm, “if that’s all—just all you want” (S 15). There is no answer,
and Kay surrenders to sleep, watching the man’s pale face “change form and
recede before her like a moon-shaped rock sliding downward under a surface
of water” (S 15–16). She is dimly aware when the woman steals her purse and
pulls her raincoat “like a shroud above her head” (S 16).
Kay’s immersion in the subconscious has not been cathartic. The
wizard man she buried alive there as a child has finally come forth like
Lazarus, but only to haunt her in an even more insistent shape. She has
not eluded him any more than she will elude death. In fact, death seems
already on her, short-circuiting her life, as the raincoat-shroud is pulled
above her head. But Kay’s failure is not simply her mortality. She is like a
child living fearfully in the dark because, shutting her eyes against ghosts,
she has shut out love and life.
Capote’s next story, “Miriam,” though its materials are different, fol-
lows a pattern essentially the same as that of “A Tree of Night.” Like Kay,
Mrs. H. T. Miller hides repressed fears beneath a fastidious exterior, the
penetration of which provides the main action of the story. A sixty-one-year-
old widow, she lives alone and unobtrusively in a modest but immaculate
New York apartment. Her life is neither broad nor deep. Her interests are
few, and she has almost no friends. Her activities are “seldom spontaneous”
(S 17). Snow is falling lightly as she goes out for a movie one night, leaving
a light burning because “she found nothing more disturbing than a sensa-
tion of darkness” (S 17). She moves along “oblivious as a mole burrowing a
blind path,” but outside the theater she is agitated by the sight of a little girl
with long, silver-white hair. Miriam’s intrusion into Mrs. Miller’s life begins
gently, with a request that she buy her ticket, since children are not admitted
alone. On closer examination Mrs. Miller is struck by the girl’s large eyes,
“hazel, steady, lacking any childlike quality whatsoever” (S 19). As they talk,
it emerges that Mrs. Miller’s name, until now hidden beneath her late hus-
band’s initials, is also Miriam. Disturbed by the girl’s coolly self-contained
manner, she leaves her and goes in alone.
A week of snow follows, progressively shutting Mrs. Miller off from
her familiar world. She loses count of the days. One evening, comfortably
settled in bed with hot-water bottle and newspaper, her face masked with
cold cream, she is roused by the persistent buzz of the doorbell. She notes
that the clock says eleven, though she “was always asleep by ten.” Indifferent
to the lateness of the hour, Miriam gently forces her way into the apartment.
Indifferent also to the season, she wears a white silk dress. The older woman,
by now thoroughly frightened, tries to disarm this apparition by recourse to
familiar categories: “Your mother must be insane to let a child like you wan-
der around at all hours of the night—and in such ridiculous clothes. She must
 The Dark Stories 

be out of her mind” (S 21). Miriam continues to study Mrs. Miller, “forcing
their eyes to meet” (S 22). In the jewel box she finds a cameo brooch that
was a gift from Mr. Miller and insists on having it. Suddenly Mrs. Miller is
stunned by the realization that she is, in this “hushed snow-city,” alone and
helpless. The cameo, now on the girl’s breast, emphasizes the identity of the
two Miriams, “the blond profile like a trick reflection of its wearer” (S 23).
Miriam leaves and Mrs. Miller spends the next day in bed. When the
next morning dawns with unseasonable brilliance, the bad dream seems to
be over. Mrs. Miller straightens the apartment and then goes out shopping,
this time spontaneously, having “no idea what she wanted or needed” (S 25.)
Then, “as if by prearranged plan,” she finds herself buying glazed cherries,
almond cakes—everything for which Miriam has expressed a desire. Mean-
while the weather suddenly turns colder, clouds cover the sun “like blurred
lenses” (S 26), and snow begins to fall. When, later that day, Miriam returns
with the intention of staying, Mrs. Miller at first yields with “a curious pas-
sivity” (S 27), then begs her to go away, dissolves in tears, and finally runs
out the door.
For the next few minutes the story seems to return to the everyday
world. Mrs. Miller pounds frantically on the door of the apartment below,
is courteously received by a young couple, and incoherently tells them about
a little girl who won’t go away, and who is about to do “something terrible”
(S 28). The man investigates but finds no one, and his wife, “as if delivering
a verdict,” concludes, “Well, for cryinoutloud . . .” (S 29). Mrs. Miller climbs
slowly back to her apartment and finds it as it was before Miriam entered, but
also as empty and lifeless “as a funeral parlor” (S 29).
Having lost her bearings now completely, Mrs. Miller is sinking again,
this time deeper than ever. “The room was losing shape; it was dark and get-
ting darker and there was nothing to be done about it; she could not lift her
hand to light a lamp” (S 29–30). Then, sitting passively, she begins once more
to feel that it has all been only a bad dream. “Suddenly, closing her eyes,
she felt an upward surge, like a diver emerging from some deeper, greener
depth” (S 30). Feeling her mind waiting as though for a “revelation,” she
begins to reason that Miriam was just an illusion, and that nothing really
matters anyway. For all she has lost to Miriam is “her identity,” but now she
is confident she has again found herself, Mrs. H. T. Miller (S 30). Comfort-
ing herself with these thoughts, she becomes aware of the harsh sound of a
bureau drawer opening and closing, then the murmur of a silk dress “moving
nearer and swelling in intensity till the walls trembled with the vibration and
the room was caving under a wave of whispers” (S 30). She opens her eyes to
the dull, direct stare of Miriam.
In a 1957 interview for the Paris Review, Capote, asked what he
thought of his early stories, expressed qualified admiration for Other Voices,
 William L. Nance

Other Rooms and added, “I like The Grass Harp, too, and several of my short
stories, though not ‘Miriam,’ which is a good stunt but nothing more. No, I
prefer ‘Children on Their Birthdays’ and ‘Shut a Final Door,’ and oh, some
others, especially a story not too many people seemed to care for, ‘Master
Misery.’ ”2
Capote’s judgment on “Miriam,” though it tends to ignore the story’s
close thematic kinship with his others, seems reasonably just. Comparison
with “A Tree of Night” can highlight some of the story’s limitations. Both
have the same underlying theme: subjection to fear because of a failure of
acceptance. But while in the earlier story a few simple and believable events
are made to evoke bottomless psychological depths, in “Miriam” the machin-
ery becomes an end in itself. The story’s haunting effect, which is undeniable,
comes from skillful ghost-story manipulation of a too-solid embodiment of
the subconscious as alter ego. Miriam reminds one of Poe’s William Wilson
and Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde. Today’s reader wants more subtlety than that.
In the two stories so far examined, the emphasis has fallen more heavily
on failure to accept oneself than on failure to love other persons. Kay would
not be expected to enter into a much closer relationship with her two travel-
ing companions, and Mrs. Miller’s visitor is less a person to be loved than a
haunt and a symbol. Capote’s next two stories, “The Headless Hawk” and
“Shut a Final Door,” deal more emphatically with love, and in this way rep-
resent at least a partial broadening of scope. Nevertheless there is an essential
similarity among all these stories, perhaps most evident in the way they end.
Like Kay and Mrs. Miller, Vincent and Walter wind up more conscious than
ever that they are trapped.
“The Headless Hawk” begins with an epigraph that could as fittingly be
applied to any of the early stories. It is from The Book of Job (24:13, 16–17):

They are of those that rebel against the light; they know not the
ways thereof, nor abide in the paths thereof. In the dark they dig
through houses, which they had marked for themselves in the
daytime: they know not the light. For the morning is to them as
the shadow of death: if one know them, they are in the terrors of
the shadow of death. (S 31)

The story records Vincent’s affair with the enigmatic girl, “D.J.” Like
Mrs. Miller’s encounter with Miriam, it is a descent into a dreamlike world
of uncertainty, a nonliberating confrontation with subconscious fears. For
Vincent this is not the first such experience but the culmination of a long
series of failures at love. Corresponding to the extent of his experience is
a degree of self-awareness far beyond that of Kay or Mrs. Miller. Vincent
knows, as he proceeds through the affair, what its outcome will be. So, in
 The Dark Stories 

a sense, does the reader, for the story employs a frame chronology in which
the central action appears as a flashback. The opening section finds Vincent
already nervously resigned to being constantly shadowed by an unnamed,
elfin girl; then comes the story of their meeting and eventual breakup, and
the brief closing section simply reaffirms the finality of the first part.
As the story opens, Vincent Waters is already down at the “deeper,
greener depth” (S 30) from which Mrs. Miller mistakenly thought she was
emerging just before Miriam’s final appearance. As he closes the art gallery
of which he is manager and starts home on a humid afternoon, he feels as
though he moves “below the sea. Buses, cruising crosstown through Fifty-
seventh Street, seemed like green-bellied fish, and faces loomed and rocked
like wave-riding masks” (S 31). He sees the girl, ghostlike in a green trans-
parent raincoat, and she follows him through the streets. Her eyes have a
shocked look, “as though, having at one time witnessed a terrible incident,
they’d locked wide open” (S 33). Vincent has been oppressed lately by a
sense of unreality; voices these days seem to come to him “through layers
of wool” (S 32). Entering his basement apartment, he looks back to see the
girl standing listlessly on the sidewalk. The rain, threatening all day, still
holds back.
Part Two begins abruptly with their first meeting. On an idle win-
ter morning at the gallery she quietly appears before him dressed “like a
freak” in masculine odds and ends. She wants to sell a painting, and her few
remarks hint that she painted it in an asylum. The institution was appar-
ently presided over by a Mr. Destronelli, whom she mentions as if expecting
Vincent to recognize the name. He shakes his head and, making a capsule
survey of his life, wonders why eccentricity has such appeal for him. “It was
the feeling he’d had as a child toward carnival freaks. And it was true that
about those whom he’d loved there was always a little something wrong,
broken. Strange, though, that this quality, having stimulated an attraction,
should, in his case, regularly end it by destroying it” (S 36). Vincent over-
comes “an intense longing to touch her head, finger the boyish hair” (S 36),
as she unwraps the picture and places it before him.

A headless figure in a monklike robe reclined complacently

on top a tacky vaudeville trunk; in one hand she held a fuming
blue candle, in the other a miniature gold cage, and her severed
head lay bleeding at her feet: it was the girl’s, this head, but here
her hair was long, very long, and a snowball kitten with crystal
spitfire eyes playfully pawed, as it would a spool of yarn, the
sprawling ends. The wings of a hawk, headless, scarlet-breasted,
copper-clawed, curtained the background like a nightfall sky.
(S 36–37)
10 William L. Nance

The picture is crudely done, but to Vincent it seems to reveal “a secret

concerning himself ” (S 37). He decides to buy it, but before he can write
a check the phone rings and the girl vanishes, leaving only the address
“D.J.—Y.W.C.A.”
Vincent hangs the painting above his mantel and on sleepless nights
talks to the hawk, telling it about his life, which he feels has been “without
direction, and quite headless” (S 38), a long series of good beginnings and
bad endings both in art and in love. He is, he feels, “a victim, born to be
murdered, either by himself or another” (S 38). February and March pass
but he is unable to find the girl. He becomes more and more disturbed,
and friends notice the change in him. On an April evening, wandering the
streets slightly drunk, he finds her. At his approach she is terrified, but soon
her head relaxes on his chest “like a child’s” (S 41) and she agrees to go home
with him.
Vincent has lighted his room with candles, and it appears to waver in
their “delirious light” (S 41). He himself feels a “drugged drunk sensation” (S
42). On this occasion the girl seems to him more attractive, less abnormal.
Unusually relaxed, she talks about her childhood, then about Mr. Destro-
nelli—“Everybody knows him” (S 42). As Vincent embraces her he glances
at a mirror where “uncertain light rippled their reflections” (S 43). He asks
what “Mr. Whoozits” looks like, then notices that for the first time she is
staring at the painting, studying a particular object, but “whether hawk or
head he could not say” (S 43). Pressing closer to him, she replies, “Well, he
looks like you, like me, like most anybody” (S 43). This rather intricate scene
brings together several strands in the story. The initiation of their affair, it
takes place in a setting of multiple distortion (Vincent’s mind, the candlelit
room, the mirror’s wavering reflection). The girl sinks into her childhood
and emerges with Mr. Destronelli, whom she identifies with both herself
and Vincent, staring up at the painting as she speaks so that her words could
as easily apply to the figures there, both hawk and human being. Vincent is
entering not only into physical union with the girl but into a blurred identi-
fication with her, the hawk, and Destronelli. At the same time the latter two
remain apart, hovering threateningly over the scene.
Next morning Vincent discovers that the girl has no sense of time and is
preoccupied with a mysterious “he” who she thinks brought her here. Vincent
declares his love, then remembers numerous others he has loved, female and
male, all eccentric and all betrayed by him. But he tells her that there was
only one, now dead, and “to his own ears this had a truthful ring” (S 45).
The affair continues for a month and ends on D.J.’s eighteenth birth-
day. Vincent has kept her a private experience, not mentioning her to any
of his friends. He has given her money for clothes, but the things she has
spent it on are, like the name D.J., more masculine than feminine. She
 The Dark Stories 11

prepares for the birthday party “with the messy skill of a six-year-old play-
ing grownup” (S 46). Their celebration consists of dinner at the automat
followed by a movie. Both are aware that they are nearing the end, and the
impulse to separate comes from the girl as well as from Vincent. As they
go to bed, she thanks him for the violets he has given her and adds, “It’s a
shame they have to die” (S 48).
Meanwhile Vincent has slipped into a dream that seems to compress his
life, past and future, into a stagnant present. In an endless hall lit by chan-
deliers he sees a degenerate old man in a rocking chair. “Vincent recognizes
Vincent. Go away, screams Vincent, the young and handsome, but Vincent,
the old and horrid, creeps forward on all fours, and climbs spiderlike onto
his back” (S 48). Thus laden, he is ashamed to find himself in a throng of
elegantly dressed couples, all silent and motionless. Then he recognizes
that many of them are similarly burdened, “saddled with malevolent sem-
blances of themselves, outward embodiments of inner decay” (S 48). The host
appears, bearing a massive headless hawk on his arm, and orders the guests
to dance. Vincent’s old lovers one after another glide into his arms, and he
hears “a cracked, cruel imitation” (S 49) of his voice speak hypocritically to
each. Then D.J. appears, bearing on her back a beautiful child.

“I am heavier than I look,” says the child, and a terrible voice

retorts, “But I am heaviest of all.” The instant their hands meet
he begins to feel the weight upon him diminish; the old Vincent
is fading. His feet lift off the floor, he floats upward from her
embrace. . . .
The host releases his hawk, sends it soaring. Vincent thinks,
no matter, it is a blind thing, and the wicked are safe among the
blind. But the hawk wheels above him, swoops down, claws fore-
most; at last he knows there is to be no freedom. (S 49)

Beneath the Gothic stage props, the meaning of this dream is reason-
ably clear. In it, as in the story as a whole, Vincent is burdened with guilt
and the expectation of death. With at least a potential sympathy the scope
broadens to include others, many of them similarly burdened. The host, no
doubt Vincent’s image of Mr. Destronelli, carries the headless hawk, the two
functioning as a unit like falcon and falconer. The waltz symbolizes the lack
of direction in Vincent’s life, always circling and changing partners, never
progressing. But his affair with D.J. has given him a clearer understanding of
himself. Previously he thought it “strange” that the defects in his lovers, after
attracting him, destroyed the attraction. Now he blames his own want of
love and is overwhelmed by his “wickedness.” Presumably it is her complete
innocence that drove the lesson home, for she bears on her back a child, the
12 William L. Nance

opposite of Vincent’s degenerate old man. He has hoped that contact with
her would free him, but soon learns that his fate is darker and more inescap-
able than he thought. For such as Vincent and the girl (and no other kind of
person has yet appeared in Capote’s fiction) there is no love and no freedom.
The hawk that pursues her will get him, too.
The defeat Vincent has dreamed must still be painfully acted out. When
he wakes at dawn and reaches out for the “mother-comfort” of the girl’s pres-
ence, the bed is empty. He finds her in the yard, and as he approaches she
whispers, “I saw him. He’s here” (S 50). Desperate to free himself of his
dreamed guilt, Vincent finds a pretext ready. He knocks her hand away and
almost slaps her. “ ‘Him! Him! Him! What’s the matter with you?—’ he tried
too late to prevent the word—‘crazy?’ There, the acknowledgment of some-
thing he’d known, but had not allowed his conscious mind to crystallize.
And he thought: Why should this make a difference? A man cannot be held
to account for those he loves” (S 50). It sounds like Mrs. Miller’s self-deluded
hope that she is rising from the depths and that “like everything else,” her
meeting with Miriam was “of no importance” (S 30). Vincent, however, has
been here before and knows better.
Later in the day Vincent returns from the gallery, violently ill, to learn
from the superintendent’s wife that D.J. has attacked the gas man with her
scissors, calling him “an Eyetalian name” (S 52). Hiding until D.J. goes out,
he begins to pack her things. His fever increasing, he falls to the bed and
into a surrealistic nightmare in which a butterfly appears and, to his horror,
perches like a ribbon bow above the severed head in the painting. He finds
the scissors and stabs them at the insect. It escapes and the blades dig into
the canvas “like a ravening steel mouth, scraps of picture flaking the floor
like cuttings of stiff hair” (S 54). Sitting in terror he recalls things D.J. has
told him. In her fantasies Mr. Destronelli has taken many forms, among
them those of “a hawk, a child, a butterfly” (S 54). He was in the asylum,
and after she ran away she encountered him in other men who mistreated
her. One of them was a tattooed Italian; another painted his toenails. She
is certain that eventually “he” will murder her. This fantasy of the girl’s cor-
responds to Vincent’s dream and knits the story’s symbolism into an even
more complicated pattern. Its principal function is to emphasize her role as
Vincent’s alter ego. Like him, she is a traveler in circles and “a victim, born
to be murdered,” though her victimization has been on a much more concrete
and rudimentary level than his. At the same time, Vincent sees even more
clearly that as their life-patterns mesh, he is being cast in the role of her
destroyer, Destronelli.
The final brief section of the story begins at the moment when D.J.
follows Vincent home and stands on the walk outside his apartment. It is
July, about two months after their separation. Since then Vincent has been
 The Dark Stories 13

wasted by pneumonia, and his constant haunting by the girl has resulted in a
“paralysis of time and identity” (S 56). On this evening he goes out for supper
just as the long-threatening rain is about to begin. There is a clap of thunder
and, as she joins him in the “complex light” of a street lamp, the sky is like “a
thunder-cracked mirror,” and the rain falls between them “like a curtain of
splintered glass” (S 57).
It can be only a partial justification of the complexity of this story to say
that it enmeshes the reader as it does the characters. Capote once said, “All I
want to do is to tell the story and sometimes it is best to choose a symbol.”3
For “The Headless Hawk,” he chose too many symbols. It is the most com-
plex and involuted of all his short stories, several of which tend toward excess
in this respect. Only his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, surpasses it in
symbolic density, and it is interesting to note that as his career progressed,
Capote has moved first to a simpler fictional technique and finally to the
“nonfiction novel.”
The symbolism in “The Headless Hawk,” too heavy to be carried natu-
rally by the action, is concentrated principally in three focal points which
are themselves intricately and arbitrarily contrived: the painting, Vincent’s
dream, and the girl’s rambling fantasies. All of it is intended to point up
meanings already more or less explicit in the dramatic action. These mean-
ings finally come down to one: Vincent himself is the headless hawk. He is
both victim and victimizer, and he is directionless and alone. Through a bal-
ance brilliantly achieved, whatever else one must say about the story, the girl
becomes both a living person and a projection, a delusion of the submerged
consciousness (what Miriam is for Mrs. Miller and the wizard man for Kay).
At the same time she is a profitless encounter, a test which Vincent fails by
rejecting instead of loving. It is this aspect of his theme that Capote empha-
sizes in his next story.

Walter Ranny of “Shut a Final Door” is in many respects identical with

Vincent; certainly the title of his story would fit Vincent’s as well. The two
stories differ mainly in perspective. Walter is viewed far more objectively
than is Vincent, for the story’s focus is less on the undulating consciousness
than on the external world of persons, places, and events. In this respect it
points toward Capote’s later work—not the deeply submerged Other Voices,
Other Rooms, but the later, more social short novels, The Grass Harp and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Essentially, though, “Shut a Final Door” is part of the
dark fiction of fear, failure, and captivity.
The story opens on a sufficiently “social” note: “Walter, listen to me:
if everyone dislikes you, works against you, don’t believe they do so arbi-
trarily; you create these situations for yourself ” (S 58). Anna’s remark, for
all its glib triteness, is the story of Walter’s life. Too insecure for love or
14 William L. Nance

even friendship, he is a treacherous coward for whom the reader feels an

immediate distaste, only partially removed as the story probes more deeply
into his fears.
The conversational tone of the opening is appropriate, for the dominant
motif in the story involves malicious and inescapable voices. That, and cir-
cles: “He said you said they said we said round and round. Round and round,
like the paddle-bladed ceiling-fan wheeling above” (S 59).
The fan is in a drab side-street hotel in New Orleans, where Walter has
come with “a feeling of having traveled to the end, the falling off ” (S 59). He
lies under the fan thinking that his life has been a circle. Trying to find the
center, the explanation of it, he rejects as “crazy” Anna’s opinion that it was
his own doing; he prefers to blame his parents. Still looking for the center, he
decides to begin with Irving, the first person he’d known in New York. Like
“The Headless Hawk,” this story begins at the end, jumps back to the begin-
ning, then progresses to the end again, completing a circle that symbolizes
the protagonist’s life.
Irving, delicate and boyish, is friendly to Walter during his first lone-
some days in New York. He has many friends and introduces Walter to all
of them. Among them is Margaret, “more or less Irving’s girl friend” (S 60),
whom Walter steals, hurting Irving irreparably and establishing the pattern
of betrayal that will characterize his own brief social climb. Soon he realizes
that he has no friends and tries to analyze his trouble:

He was never certain whether he liked X or not. He needed X’s

love, but was incapable of loving. He could never be sincere with
X, never tell him more than fifty percent of the truth. On the
other hand, it was impossible for him to permit X these same
imperfections: somewhere along the line Walter was sure he’d be
betrayed. He was afraid of X, terrified. (S 64)

Walter meets Rosa Cooper, a wealthy heiress, and begins spending

most of his weekends at her Long Island home, making valuable contacts.
Among these is Anna Stimson, a horsey fashion editor with a highly irregu-
lar past. Walter makes her his mother confessor because “there was nothing
he could tell her of which she might legitimately disapprove” (S 66). He asks
Anna if she loves him.

“Oh,” said Anna, “when was anything ever what it seemed to be? Now
it’s a tadpole now it’s a frog. . . . Flying around inside us is something
called the Soul, and when you die you’re never dead; yes, and when
we’re alive we’re never alive. And so you want to know if I love you?
Don’t be dumb, Walter, we’re not even friends. . . .” (S 66–67)
 The Dark Stories 15

The theme of deceptiveness is already a familiar one, and will be exploited

most fully in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Often quite effective when woven
into the plot and atmosphere of the stories, it here sounds like shallow
cynicism, neither well dramatized nor adequately “distanced” from the
author. It is an indication of the way Capote loses power when he tries to
philosophize.
When on the same day Walter is fired from his job and dropped by
Rosa, he is suddenly flooded with vivid memories of boyhood trips with
his father to Saratoga. He has just decided to go there when the telephone
rings. It is a long-distance call from a town he doesn’t know, and after some
rattlings a strange, dry voice says, “Hello, Walter.” He hears breathing as
clearly as if the person were standing beside him, but when he asks who it
is the only answer is, “Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long
time” (S 70).
On the train Walter has a dream in which he sees coming toward him a
funeral-like procession of cars bearing many of his past and present acquain-
tances. Feeling naked, he hails the first limousine and sees his father open
the door. “Daddy, he yelled, running forward, and the door slammed shut,
mashing off his fingers, and his father, with a great belly-laugh, leaned out
the window to toss an enormous wreath of roses” (S 71). Walter’s problem
is basically the same as Vincent’s and this dream is reminiscent of his. Both
dramatize a fear which is ultimately of death, though Walter’s is couched in
simpler, more clinical terms: he is a child rejected by his father.
D.J.’s counterpart in this story is the woman Walter finds looking at
him when he wakes from this dream. She is a cripple with her left foot
encased in a giant shoe. He helps her with her luggage, but it is only that
evening, in a hotel bar, that they become acquainted. She explains that she
is there because her doctor is going to lecture to a medical convention about
her case. Like Walter, she is afraid. She tells him she is a domestic and takes
care of a boy named Ronnie: “I’m better to him than his mother, and he loves
me more” (S 73). Walter finds her depressing but is too afraid of loneliness to
leave her. When the bar closes, the woman asks him, blushing, if he wants
to go to her room. He goes, but, seeing her coming out of the bathroom,
reeking with dime-store perfume and wearing only “a sleazy flesh-colored
kimono and the monstrous black shoe” (S 73), he realizes that he can “never
go through with it. And he’d never felt so sorry for himself: not even Anna
Stimson would ever have forgiven him this” (S 73–74). When she is ready he
comes to the edge of the bed, kisses her cheek, and says, “I think you’re so
very sweet, but . . .” (S 74). Then the telephone rings.
Walter’s search for a mother, as well as his father, is made explicit and
becomes one of the principal themes of the closing section. When the phone
rings, the woman answers, mistakes “Ranny” for “Ronnie,” and is frightened
16 William L. Nance

that something has happened to the boy. Then she gets the name correct and
begins to hang up, but Walter seizes the phone. The message is the same as
before, and after hearing it Walter falls across the woman, crying and beg-
ging, “Hold me, please” (S 74). She calls him “Poor little boy,” and he goes
to sleep in her arms (S 74). The next day he takes the train for New Orleans,
“a town of strangers, and a long way off ” (S 75). As he lies sweltering in the
hotel room, now back at the moment at which the story began, the telephone
rings. “So he pushed his face into the pillow, covered his ears with his hands,
and thought: think of nothing things, think of wind” (S 75).
Walter’s fixation is powerfully, if somewhat crudely, conveyed by the
telephone calls, which could have no “natural” explanation. Like Miriam,
the bodiless voice is a projection of subconscious fears, and it has the same
kind of artificiality that she does. Essentially, of course, they are both related
to the more subtle wizard and headless hawk.
The next and final “dark” story, “Master Misery,” recalls most strongly
the first, “A Tree of Night.” The heroines of both are young women, and their
fear contains a strong sexual element. More than any of the other stories,
“Master Misery” is heavy with suggestions of sleep, dreams, childhood, and
the unconscious; and while it differs from “Miriam” and “Shut a Final Door”
in containing nothing that is not literally possible, it is perhaps the most
bizarre story of all. It is the one that Capote said he liked especially, though
hardly anyone else seemed to.
Sylvia is one of a class familiar in American fiction: the young girl from
the Midwest come to work in New York. She is also a wandering spirit, con-
firmed in restlessness and unconventionality because she “wants more than
is coming to her” (S 109). She is close kin to D.J. of “The Headless Hawk”
and also to later heroines, among them Holly Golightly. As the story opens,
Sylvia is returning to the apartment she shares with Henry and Estelle, an
“excruciatingly married” couple from her Ohio hometown. The day has been
unusual, for in a restaurant she overheard a man talking about someone who
buys dreams. His companion found this “too crazy” (S 101) for him and left
the address lying on the table, where Sylvia later picked it up. Estelle says
it is too crazy for her, too, and asks incredulously if Sylvia really went to see
“this nut” (S 101).
Though she denies it, Sylvia did; unable to get the idea out of her mind,
she had gone to the man, whose name was A. F. Revercomb, and sold a
dream for five dollars. He had been pleased with it and asked her to return.
Unsettled by the experience, Sylvia speculated that he was mad, but finally
left the question open. On the way home she walked through the park and
was badly frightened by two boys who began following her. Going to bed
at the end of this fateful day, Sylvia feels “a sense of loss, as though she’s
been the victim of some real or even moral theft, as though, in fact, the boys
 The Dark Stories 17

encountered in the park had snatched (abruptly she switched on the light)
her purse” (S 101). She dreams of “cold man-arms” encircling her, and Mr.
Revercomb’s lips brushing her ear. The day’s experiences, especially the sell-
ing of her dream, have blended in one overwhelming fear of violation.
A week later she again finds herself near Mr. Revercomb’s house. It
is the Christmas season, an especially lonely time, and she is drawn to a
window display in which a mechanical Santa Claus slaps his stomach and
laughs. The figure seems evil to her, and with a shudder she turns away.
Later, as she dozes in Revercomb’s waiting room, the quiet is broken by
a loud commotion and a “tub-shaped, brick-colored little man” (S 104) pushes
his way into the parlor, roaring drunkenly, “Oreilly is a gentleman, Oreilly
waits his turn” (S 104). He is quickly thrown out; when Sylvia emerges a
short while later, she sees him, looking “like a lonely city child” (S 104) and
bouncing a rubber ball. She smiles, for he seems a harmless clown. Oreilly
admits that he has made a fool of himself but also accuses Revercomb: “I
didn’t have an awful lot to begin with, but then he took it every bit, and now
I’ve got niente, kid, niente” (S 105). As to his present occupation he explains,
“I watch the sky. There I am with my suitcase traveling through the blue.
It’s where you travel when you’ve got no place else to go” (S 105). He asks
Sylvia for a dollar for whiskey, but she has only seventy cents, for, confront-
ing “the graying invisibility of Mr. Revercomb (impeccable, exact as a scale,
surrounded in a cologne of clinical odors; flat gray eyes planted like seed in
the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses)” (S 106), she
had not been able to remember a dream.
She tells Oreilly that she will probably not go back, but he says, “You
will. Look at me, even I go back, and he has long since finished with me,
Master Misery” (S 106). Starting off in the rain, they approach the Santa
Claus display and Oreilly, standing with his back to the figure, says,

“I call him Master Misery on account of that’s who he is. . . . Only

maybe you call him something else; anyway, he is the same fellow,
and you must’ve known him. All mothers tell their kids about him:
he lives in hollows of trees, he comes down chimneys late at night,
he lurks in graveyards and you can hear his step in the attic. The
sonofabitch, he is a thief and a threat; he will take everything you
have and end by leaving you nothing, not even a dream. Boo!” he
shouted, and laughed louder than Santa Claus. “Now do you know
who he is?”
Sylvia nodded. “I know who he is.” (S 106–107)

In an artificial juxtaposition similar to those in “The Headless Hawk,”

Oreilly speaks of Revercomb while standing in front of the Santa Claus,
18 William L. Nance

emphasizing the growing identification of these two figures and giving the
first clear hint that he himself will assume a destructive role toward Sylvia,
much as Vincent did toward D.J. In this scene the rain provides the custom-
ary atmosphere of distortion and blurred identities.
Sylvia, now living both specifically and generally in a world of dreams,
has begun to lose her grip on the world of everyday reality. She has moved to
a cheap furnished room and let it become filthy. Fired from her job, she has
lived for a month on the income from her dreams. Estelle visits her, scolds
her, and insists on knowing whether the decline is because of a man. Sylvia,
amused, admits that it is.

“You should have come to me before,” Estelle sighed. “I know

about men. That is nothing for you to be ashamed of. A man
can have a way with a woman that kind of makes her forget
everything else. If Henry wasn’t the fine upstanding potential
lawyer that he is, why, I would still love him, and do things for
him that before I knew what it was like to be with a man would
have seemed shocking and horrible. But honey, this fellow you’re
mixed up with, he’s taking advantage of you.” (S 108–109)

Estelle is the first of Capote’s characters to be ridiculed in this way, but

she will not be the last. Though satirized here as an embodiment of society’s
fatuous gentility, she also speaks with its prosaic rightness. Sylvia is, indeed,
getting mixed up with a man who will take advantage of her—not only Mr.
Revercomb, but that grey eminence’s more immediate representative, Oreilly.
Sylvia answers, also more truly than she knows, that the affair she is
involved in hasn’t “anything to do with love” (S 109). She rejects the sugges-
tion of marriage and reminds Estelle that they’re “not children any more; at
least, I’m not” (S 110), but her actions when finally left alone seem intended
to belie the assertion. First she sucks a piece of sugar, her grandmother’s
remedy for bad temper, then she pulls from under the bed a musical cigar
box made for her by her brother when she was fourteen. The tune it plays is
“Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” Inside this box of childhood
memories she keeps the little book in which she has begun recording her
dreams, since they are “endless” now and hard to remember.
Later, hurrying to Mr. Revercomb’s she finds the mechanical Santa
Claus has been replaced by the equally disturbing display of a plaster girl
riding madly on a bicycle that gets nowhere. But Mr. Revercomb likes her
dream about the “three blind children” (S 110), and she leaves with an enve-
lope containing ten dollars.
In one of Sylvia’s conversations with Oreilly, Master Misery, already
linked with the maniacal Santa Claus, is explicitly probed down to his final
 The Dark Stories 19

meaning, death. Oreilly tells her that their vicious circle of dream-selling is
“just like life” (S 112), but she disagrees: “It hasn’t anything to do with life. It
has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken
from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone” (S 112).
When Oreilly is arrested for stealing a bottle of liquor, Sylvia collapses.
For days she lies in her room, hardly eating, drugged with sleep. On the
radio she hears a weather report reminiscent of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “A snow-
storm moving across Colorado, across the West, falling upon all the small
towns, yellowing every light, filling every footfall, falling now and here” (S
114). Discovering that snow has smothered the city, she opens the window to
feed the birds and forgets to close it; snow blows into the room. “Snow-quiet,
sleep-silent, . . . Mr. Revercomb, why do you wait upon the threshold? Ah,
do come inside, it is so cold out there” (S 115).
The figure she dimly sees at the door just before losing consciousness is
not Revercomb’s but Oreilly’s, and when she wakes he is holding her in his
arms and singing, “cherryberry, moneyberry, happyberry pie, but the best old pie
is a loveberry pie . . .” (S 115). When she asks why he isn’t in jail he says he
was never there, then quickly changes the subject. With “a sudden feeling of
floating” (S 115) she asks how long he has been with her, and he replies that
she let him in yesterday—then quickly begins the “wicked” story of how he
escaped from the police.
Oreilly stays with her over the weekend, and it is like a beautiful party.
They laugh and dance and she feels loved and declares that she will never be
afraid again. She decides that she would like to get her dreams back and go
home. “And that is a terrible decision, for it would mean giving up most of my
other dreams” (S 117). He insists that she go directly to Revercomb with the
request; she does, and soon is back in his arms crying, choking, then laugh-
ing hysterically. “He said—I couldn’t have them back because—because he’d
used them all up” (S 118).
As if on a signal, they separate, Sylvia giving Oreilly her last five dollars
to buy whiskey for his travels in the blue. Then she starts toward home.

I do not know what I want, and perhaps I shall never know, but my
only wish from every star will always be another star; and truly I
am not afraid, she thought. Two boys came out of a bar and stared
at her; in some park some long time ago she’d seen two boys and
they might be the same. Truly I am not afraid, she thought, hearing
their snowy footsteps following after her: and anyway, there was
nothing left to steal. (S 119)

This closing line is delicately ambiguous. Possibly a continuation of

Sylvia’s thoughts, it is also the last of several hints that her virginity has been
20 William L. Nance

lost to Oreilly. This suggested sexual theft is, of course, only a metaphor for
the author’s real concern: the theft of Sylvia’s dreams by Mr. Revercomb. She
dreams of Mr. Revercomb as a father-lover, and in her delirium his role is
transferred to Oreilly. Sylvia is victimized in much the same way as D.J. was,
and both their stories have as a major theme the sad fact that victims who try
to be lovers are doomed not only to see themselves reflected in one another
but also to advance each other’s destruction.
While Capote may be granted his fondness for this story, it is neverthe-
less weak in several respects. Like “The Headless Hawk,” though to a lesser
degree, it is a network of meanings too often artificially represented by sym-
bols and only half realized in concrete dramatization. Oreilly in particular is
difficult to see as a human being, and the identification of him with Sylvia,
Revercomb, Santa Claus, and the cycling girl is too obviously contrived, as
is much of the action.
The principal weakness of the story, however, is at its center, the busi-
ness of selling dreams. “Dreams” can mean and half-mean many things, and
the story contains a vagueness which is less suggestive than confusing. It
might, for example, be read with some validity as an attack on psychoanaly-
sis or on the scientific mentality in general—or perhaps an expression of a
young writer’s fear of exploitation.
While the implications of the story are vague, its overall pattern is
clear, and even clearer when it is compared to the stories that preceded
it. Like them, it traces the decline into captivity of an individual made
vulnerable by refusal or inability to accept reality. But though the pattern
is a familiar one, there is a significant change of emphasis: for the first
time the victim-heroine is viewed with definite approval. While Capote’s
early stories are characterized, from a moral standpoint, by a fluctuating
and sometimes almost nonexistent narrative point of view, all the earlier
protagonists have to some extent been held responsible. Even in Kay there
was a trace of the victimizer as well as the victim. But Sylvia completely
escapes responsibility. She does so by being a childlike, innocent dreamer.
The dreamer (almost always feminine), who made her first appearance in
D.J. and here becomes the central character of the story, will be the typical
protagonist of the stories that follow Other Voices, Other Rooms. Because the
dreamer is unconventional, whatever moral disapproval enters these stories
is reserved for the society from which she deviates.

“Master Misery” completes the first phase of Truman Capote’s career as a

writer of fiction, the dominant characteristics of which should by now be
evident. The protagonist, while varying and developing in ways already dis-
cussed, is always and essentially a victim. The central action of each story is
not so much his movement into the state of captivity as an immersion in his
 The Dark Stories 21

own deeper being that culminates in a shattering and final revelation of his
plight. In each case the dark force that haunts the protagonist is projected
outward—through characters of varying degrees of credibility, through
images or dream or delirium, through concrete symbols—until it may be
said to constitute the very framework and texture of the story.
But in each case it is also focused in one particular manifestation or set
of related ones: a wizard man in a tree of night; Miriam; Mr. Destronelli
and a headless hawk; a disembodied telephone voice; Mr. Revercomb-Mas-
ter Misery. That these figures dominate the stories is pointed up by the fact
that in every case but one they appear in the title. And Capote’s custom of
so naming his stories is to continue. It has been noted that the next phase of
his career is marked by a new emphasis on the dreamer. The titles of several
of the stories express or are related to the dreamer’s dream or ideal: “Chil-
dren on Their Birthdays” and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for example. One can see,
then, in the very titles of the stories, a progression from fear to fantasy, from
captivity to some kind of wistful freedom. Movement from captivity to free-
dom is also the theme of Capote’s next, and longest, piece of fiction—Other
Voices, Other Rooms.

No t e s
1. The Selected Writings of Truman Capote (New York: Random House, 1963).
Quotations from this volume are identified in the text by S and the page number.
2. Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New
York: The Viking Press, 1960), p. 290.
3. Current Biography, 1951, p. 93.
 ALFRED KAZIN

The Imagination of Fact:

Capote to Mailer

W hen Truman Capote explained, on the publication in 1965 of In Cold

Blood: The True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, that the
book was really a “nonfiction novel,” it was natural to take his praise of
his meticulously factual and extraordinarily industrious record of research
as the alibi of a novelist whose last novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, had been
slight, and who was evidently between novels. Capote clearly hungered to
remain in the big league of novelists, so many of whom are unprofitable to
everyone, even if he was now the author of a bestselling true thriller whose
success was being arranged through every possible “medium” of American
publicity. Capote is a novelist, novelists tend to be discouraged by the many
current discourtesies to fiction. Clearly Capote wanted to keep his novelist’s
prestige but to rise above the novelist’s struggle for survival. In Cold Blood,
before one read it, promised by the nature of the American literary market
to be another wow, a trick, a slick transposition from one realm to another,
like the inevitable musical to be made out of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
What struck me most in Capote’s labeling his book a “nonfiction novel”
was his honoring the profession of novelist. Novels seem more expendable
these days than ever, but novelist is still any writer’s notion of original tal-
ent. What interested me most about In Cold Blood after two readings—first
in The New Yorker and then as a book—was that though it was journalism

From Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer,
pp. 209–241. © 1971, 1973 by Alfred Kazin.

23
24 Alfred Kazin

and soon gave away all its secrets, it had the ingenuity of fiction and it was
fiction except for its ambition to be documentary. In Cold Blood brought to
focus for me the problem of “fact writing” and its “treatment.” There is a lot
of “treatment” behind the vast amount of social fact that we get in a time of
perpetual crisis. These books dramatize and add to the crisis, and we turn to
them because they give a theme to the pervasive social anxiety, the concrete
human instance that makes “literature.”
In Cold Blood is an extremely stylized book that has a palpable design
on our emotions. It works on us as a merely factual account never had to. It
is so shapely and its revelations are so well timed that it becomes a “novel”
in the form of fact. But how many great novels of crime and punishment
are expressly based on fact without lapsing into “history”! The Possessed is
based on the Nechayev case, An American Tragedy on the Chester Gillette
case. What makes In Cold Blood formally a work of record rather than of
invention? Because formally, at least, it is a documentary; based on six years
of research and six thousand pages of notes, it retains this research in the
text. Victims, murderers, witnesses and law officials appear under their own
names and as their attested identities, in an actual or, as we say now, “real”
Kansas town.
Why, then, did Capote honor himself by calling the book in any sense
a “novel”? Why bring up the word at all? Because Capote depended on the
record, was proud of his prodigious research, but was not content to make a
work of record. After all, most readers of In Cold Blood know nothing about
the case except what Capote tells us. Capote wanted his “truthful account”
to become “a work of art,” and he knew he could accomplish this, quite apart
from the literary expertness behind the book, through a certain intimacy
between himself and “his” characters. Capote wanted, ultimately, to turn the
perpetually defeated, negative Eros that is behind Other Voices, Other Rooms
into an emblematic situation for our time. As Norman Mailer said when run-
ning for Mayor, “Until you see what your ideas lead to, you know nothing.”
Through his feeling for the Clutter family and its murderers, Capote was able
to relate them—a thought that would have occurred to no one else.
Fiction as the most intensely selective creation of mood, tone,
atmosphere, has always been Capote’s natural aim as a writer. In In Cold Blood
he practices this as a union of Art and Sympathy. His book, like so many
“nonfiction” novels of our day, is saturated in sexual emotion. But unlike
Mailer’s reportage, Capote’s “truthful account” is sympathetic to everyone,
transparent in its affections to a degree—abstractly loving to Nancy Clutter,
that all-American girl; respectfully amazed by Mr. Clutter, the prototype
of what Middle America would like to be; helplessly sorry for Mrs. Clutter,
a victim of the “square” morality directed at her without her knowing it.
None of these people Capote knew—but he thought he did. Capote became
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 25

extremely involved with the murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock,
whom he interviewed in prison endlessly for his book and came to know
as we know people who fascinate us. He unconsciously made himself seem
responsible for them. Kenneth Tynan drew blood when, with the glibness
which knows that “society” is always to blame, Tynan entered into the spirit
of the book completely enough to denounce Capote for not doing everything
possible to save his friends Perry and Dick.
This fascinated sympathy with characters whom Capote visited sixty
times in jail, whom he interviewed within an inch of their lives, up to the
scaffold, is one of many powerful emotions on Capote’s part that keeps the
book “true” even when it most becomes a “novel.” Capote shows himself
deeply related to Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who
more than any other agent on the case brought the murderers in. And as a
result of In Cold Blood Capote, who had so successfully advertised his appear-
ance on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, had by 1969 become
an authority on crime and punishment and an adviser to law-and-order men
like Governor Reagan. Capote was a natural celebrity from the moment he
published his first book. In Cold Blood gave him the chance to instruct his
countrymen on the depths of American disorder.
Yet with all these effects of In Cold Blood on Capote, the book itself goes
back to the strains behind all Capote’s work: a home and family destroyed
within a context of hidden corruption, alienation and loneliness. Reading
In Cold Blood one remembers the gypsy children left hungry and homeless
in The Grass Harp, the orphans in A Tree of Night, The Thanksgiving Visitor
and A Christmas Memory, the wild gropings of Holly Golightly in Breakfast
at Tiffany’s toward the “pastures of the sky.” One remembers Capote him-
self in his personal pieces and stories in Local Color searching for a home in
New Orleans, Brooklyn, Hollywood, Haiti, Paris, Tangier and Spain—then
returning to Brooklyn again in “A House on the Heights”

twenty yards ahead, then ten, five, then none, the yellow house on
Willow Street. Home! And happy to be.

The victims in In Cold Blood were originally the Clutters, but by the
time the crime is traced to the killers and they are imprisoned, all seem
equally victims. As in any novel, innocent and guilty require the same
mental consideration from the author. In any event, innocence in our
America is always tragic and in some sense to blame, as Mr. Clutter is, for
incarnating a stability that now seems an “act.” Capote is always sympathetic
to Nancy Clutter, who laid out her best dress for the morrow just before
she got murdered, and Nancy is the fragile incarnation of some distant
feminine goodness, of all that might have been, who gets our automatic
26 Alfred Kazin

sympathy. But despite Capote’s novelistic interest in building up Mr. Clutter

as the archetypal square and Mrs. Clutter as a victim of the rigid life-style
surrounding her, Capote’s more urgent relationship is of course with “Perry
and Dick.” Almost to the end one feels that they might have been saved and
their souls repaired.
This felt interest in “Perry and Dick” as persons whom Capote knew
makes the book too personal for fiction but establishes it as a casebook for
our time. The background of the tale is entirely one of damaged persons who
wreak worse damage on others, but the surface couldn’t be more banal. Perry
is the “natural killer” selected by Dick for the job, and Dick’s father can say
to Agent Nye of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation:

“Was nothing wrong with my boy, Mr. Nye, . . . an outstand-

ing athlete, always on the first team at school. Basketball! Bas-
ketball! Dick was always the star player. A pretty good student,
too . . .”

Terror can break out anywhere. The world is beyond reason but the
imagination of fact, the particular detail, alone establishes credibility. It all
happened, and it happened only this way. The emotion pervading the book
is our helpless fascinated horror; there is a factuality with nothing beyond it
in Perry’s dwarfish legs, the similar imbalance in Dick’s outwardly normal
masculinity and his actual destructiveness. On what morsels of unexpected
fact, summoned out of seeming nowhere by the author’s digging alone, is our
terror founded! On the way to rob the Clutters, Dick says:

“Let’s count on eight, or even twelve. The only sure thing is

every one of them has got to go. Ain’t that what I promised you,
honey—plenty of hair on them-those walls?”

The Clutters are stabbed, shot, strangled, between mawkish first-name Ameri-
can “friendliness” and bouncy identification with one another’s weaknesses.
Nancy couldn’t be sweeter to her killers, Perry worries that Dick may rape her,
Kenyon asks Perry not to harm his new chest by putting the knife on it. All
this “understanding” between “insecure” people makes the crime all the more
terrifying. It is the psychic weakness that removes so many people, taking their
“weakness” for themselves, from any sense of justice. So much fluency of self-
centered emotion makes crime central to our fear of each other today.
We may all have passing dreams of killing. But here are two who killed
perversely, wantonly, pointlessly, yet with a horrid self-reference in the pitiful
comforts they offered their victims that establishes their cringing viciousness.
And the crime, like the greatest crimes of our time, is on record but remains
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 27

enigmatic, “purposeless,” self-defeating. The will to destroy is founded on

what we insist are personal weaknesses, but which we cannot relate to what
has been done. Even before the Hitler war was over, there were Nazis who
said, “At least we have made others suffer.” The fascination of Capote’s book,
the seeming truthfulness of it all, is that it brings us close, very close, to the
victims, to the murderers, to the crime itself, as psychic evidence. Killing
becomes the primal scene of our “feelings” that with all the timing of a clever
novelist and all the emphatic detail brought in from thousands of interview
hours by a prodigious listener, Capote presents to us as a case study of “truth”
we can hold, study, understand.
As a novelist, dramatist, travel writer, memoirist, Capote had always
been rather a specialist in internal mood, tone, “feeling”; now an action,
the most terrible, was the center around which everything in his “truthful
account” moved. He was ahead of his usual literary self, and the artfulness of
the book is that it gets everyone to realize, possess and dominate this murder
as a case of the seemingly psychological malignity behind so many crimes
in our day. The book aims to give us this mental control over the frightening
example of what is most uncontrolled in human nature.
Technically, this is accomplished by the four-part structure that takes
us from the apparently pointless murder of four people to the hanging of the
killers in the corner of a warehouse. The book is designed as a suspense story—
why did Perry and Dick ever seek out the Clutters at all?—to which the author
alone holds the answer. This comes only in Part III, when the book is more
than half over. Each of the four sections is divided into cinematically visual
scenes. There are eighty-six in the book as a whole; some are “shots” only a few
lines long. Each of these scenes is a focusing, movie fashion, designed to put us
visually as close as possible now to the Clutters, now to Perry and Dick, until
the unexplained juncture between them is explained in Part III. Until then, we
are shifted to many different times and places in which we see Perry and Dick
suspended, as it were, in a world without meaning, for we are not yet up to the
explanation that Capote has reserved in order to keep up novelistic interest.
Yet this explanation—in jail a pal had put the future killers on to the Clutters
and the supposed wealth in the house—is actually, when it comes, meant to
anchor the book all the more firmly in the world of “fact”—of the public world
expressed as documented conflict between symbolic individuals. It was the
unbelievable squareness of the Clutters as a family that aroused and fascinated
the murderers. The book opens on Kansas as home and family, ends on Alvin
Dewey at the family graveside,

Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under

them leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices
in the wind-bent wheat.
28 Alfred Kazin

The circle of illusory stability (which we have seen destroyed) has closed in
on itself again.
Capote’s book raises many questions about its presumption as a whole,
for many of the “fact” scenes in it are as vivid as single shots in a movie can
be—and that make us wonder about the meaning of so much easy expert
coverage by the writer-as-camera. (“A movie pours into us,” John Updike
has said. “It fills us like milk being poured into a glass.”) One of the best bits
is when the jurors, looking at photographs of the torn bodies and tortured
faces of the Clutters, for the first time come into possession of the horror,
find themselves focusing on it in the very courtroom where the boyishness
and diffidence of the defendants and the boringly circular protocol of a trial
have kept up the jurors’ distance from the crime.
There is a continuing unreality about the murder of the four Clutters
that Capote all through his book labored to eliminate by touch after touch
of precious fact. He is our only guide through this sweetly smiling massacre.
He is proud of every harrowing or grotesque detail he can dredge up—Perry
unbelievably tries to buy for a face mask black stockings from a nun, remem-
bers that after the attack on Mr. Clutter he handed a knife to Dick and said,
“Finish him. You’ll feel better.” The labor after so many facts emphasizes the
world of conflict, social bitterness, freakishness, the “criminal” world, the
underworld for which Capote asks compassion in the epigraph from Villon’s
“Ballade des pendus”:

Frères humains, qui après nous vivez,

N’ayez les cueurs contre nous endurcis,
Car, si pitié de nous povres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.

—But now, “real” or “unreal,” this murder is public. Closeness is the key.
The hope of the book is to get us close, closer, to what occurred in the heart
of Middle America and occurs every day now. There is in us, as well as in
the Clutters’ neighbors, “a shallow horror sensation that cold springs of per-
sonal fear swiftly deepened.”
The horror is now in the nature of the “fact” material. What can be
reconstructed as fact from actual events may take the form of a cinematic
“treatment” and easily use many shifts of time and place. But it makes our
participation in the story more narrow and helpless than a real novel does.
The attempt at closeness is all through Capote’s work; he attempts to induce
it here by identifying us with “real” people we may think we know better
than we do—victims and murderers both.
The reason for the “nonfiction novel” (and documentary plays, movies,
art works) is that it reproduces events that cannot be discharged through
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 29

one artist’s imagination. Tragedy exists in order to be assimilated by us as

individual fate, for we can identify with another’s death. Death in round
numbers is by definition the death of strangers, and that is one of the out-
rages to the human imagination in the killing after killing which we “know
all about,” and to which we cannot respond. Capote worked so long on this
case—“his” case—because to the “fact writer” reporting is a way of showing
that he knows. The killing of the Clutter family was not “personal,” as even
Gatsby could have admitted about his murderer’s mistake in killing him.
History is more and more an example of “accident.” The Clutters were there
just for their killers to kill them.
“The event” is fascinatingly inscrutable though it is in the public light—
just one of many killings in our time by people who did not know their
victims. As with so many mass murders, many witnesses and documents
are needed to reconstruct the true history of the crime. But irony more than
truth is the motif of such fact books, for the point made is that there is no
“sense” to the crime. This is what relieves the liberal imagination of respon-
sibility and keeps it as spectator. In a “real” novel—one that changes our
minds—a single Raskolnikov or Clyde Griffiths commits a singular crime
(and is usually pursued by a single law-enforcer who has no other crime to
uncover). The resolution of the crime—murder is the primal fault—gave the
moral scheme back to us. But as Joan Didion said when she decided not to
do a “fact” book around the taped memories by Linda Kasabian of living in
the Charles Manson “family,” there was nothing she could learn by writing
such a book.
In the many gratuitous murders that have soundlessly bounced off the
imagination of our time, murderers and victims remain in every retrospect
forever strange to each other. Apart from “war crimes” like Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, Dresden, Mylai, the dropping of Viet Cong prisoners on vil-
lages from American helicopters, the torture, confessions and executions of
whole masses of people as “enemies of the state,” there are the murders by
Detroit policemen (described by John Hersey in The Algiers Motel Incident)
of three Negroes just because they have been found in a motel with white
women, the killing of parents and children on a Kansas farm by two not
abnormally rootless American boys of whom we know enough to know (even
if they do talk of killing as “scoring”) that we don’t know them, the murder
of eight-months-pregnant Sharon Tate and six other people by members of
the Charles Manson “family.”
These are now public events, matters of record, horrors taking place in
the well-publicized arena that is now the domain of “reality.” The news of
these things is so instantly and widely disseminated that the sense of being
left behind can frustrate the writer brought up on the necessary consistency
of art, the significance of even a murderer’s motive, and Chekhov’s belief that
30 Alfred Kazin

if a gun is mentioned in Act One it must go off in Act Three. What we are
dealing with here is not the pressure of “reality” on fiction, but the shape that
so many public crimes and happenings are taking in a middle-class culture
that for the first time is dividing on a wide scale, and where the profoundest
disaffection is often felt exactly among these dutiful thinkers who are most
conscious of literature itself as a tradition. One sees on every hand how many
cherished personal images of literature are being destroyed by the fury of
public events and technological change.
But if white middle-class writers who have always thought of litera-
ture as theirs are struggling to find a form and language for this “crisis of
literature,” so-called minority writers brought up on collective experiences
of oppression—who have all too sufficiently been named as Negro, coolie,
Black, African, peasant—have always thought of themselves as creatures of
history, and have often created works of literature without thinking of them-
selves as more than powerful speakers, as Malcolm X did in the extraordi-
nary recital of his life to the editor friend who then wrote it.
James Baldwin cares desperately for literary distinction. He has achieved
it not through his novels, which after Go Tell It on the Mountain seem heavy
expositions of a complicated sexual travail, but through his ability to turn
every recital of his own life into the most urgent symbol of American crisis.
In Notes of a Native Son he describes himself on August 3, 1943, a fanatical
Harlem preacher’s emotionally alienated son,1 following his father’s coffin
to the cemetery through Harlem streets that were “a wilderness of smashed
plate glass” after a wartime race riot. The day of his father’s funeral was Bald-
win’s nineteenth birthday; the day of his father’s death had seen the birth of
a posthumous child.
Only Baldwin, with his genius for finding the widest possible applica-
tion for his personal fury, could put his disturbed emotions into this trinity
of death, the heaped-up glass in the Harlem streets, the birth of a posthu-
mous son. In this aria, Baldwin shows himself an extraordinary spellbinder.
Rage, grief, loneliness are his literary capital, and he works on his own poi-
gnancy and American guilt with the same fervor. Now that militant Black
nationalism has dismissed him (along with so many other talented writers) as
superfluous, one can agree that Baldwin joined the cause rather late and has
never been a natural militant.2
As a writer Baldwin is as obsessed by sex and family as Strindberg was,
but instead of using situations for their dramatic value, Baldwin likes to pile
up all possible emotional conflicts as assertions. But for the same reason
that in Giovanni’s Room Baldwin made everybody white just to show that he
could, and in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone transferred the son–
father quarrel to a quarrel with a brother, so one feels about Another Country
that Baldwin writes fiction in order to use up his private difficulties; even his
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 31

fiction piles up the atmosphere of raw emotion that is his literary standby.
Why does so powerful a writer as Baldwin make himself look simpleminded
by merely asserting an inconsequential succession of emotions?

They encountered the big world when they went out into the
Sunday streets. It stared unsympathetically out at them from
the eyes of the passing people; and Rufus realized that he had
not thought at all about this world and its power to hate and
destroy.
“They out there, scuffling, making that change, they think it’s
going to last forever. Sometimes I lie here and listen, listen for
a bomb, man, to fall on this city and make all that noise stop. I
listen to hear them moan, I want them to bleed and choke, I want
to hear them crying.”
The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with
chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention,
but succeeded only in attracting each other.

But in Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next
Time, Baldwin dropped the complicated code for love difficulties he uses
in his novels and simplified himself into an “angry Black” very powerfully
indeed—and this just before Black nationalists were to turn on writers
like him. The character who calls himself “James Baldwin” in his nonfic-
tion novel is more professionally enraged, more doubtfully an evangelist for
his people, than the actual James Baldwin, a very literary mind indeed. But
there is in Notes of a Native Son a genius for bringing many symbols together,
an instinctive association with the 1943 Harlem riot, the streets of smashed
plate glass, that stems from the all too understandable fascination of the
Negro with the public sources of his fate. The emphasis is on heat, fire, anger,
the sense of being hemmed in and suffocated; the words are tensed into
images that lacerate and burn. Reading Baldwin’s essays, we are suddenly
past the discordancy that has plagued his fiction—a literal problem of con-
flict, for Baldwin’s fiction shows him trying to transpose facts into fiction
without sacrificing the emotional capital that has been his life.
This discordancy has been a problem in Black writing, as in most
minority writing that deals with experiences that may in fact be too deep,
too painful, and so inexpressible. Nor does the claim to literature work for
those, like Eldridge Cleaver, who mythologize rape into a form of social
protest—Soul on Ice is propaganda. To turn the facts into literature, and lit-
erature into whatever will “change our minds,” is a special problem for radi-
cals. The heroic Soviet writer Andrey Sinyavasky said in his great polemic
against “socialist realism” that a work of literature can spring from anything
32 Alfred Kazin

but must not be eclectic. A peculiar directness, an unconscious return to

scriptural models, a lack of all literary pretense, saved Malcolm X as a writer.
He cared desperately about salvation, not literature, and made his Autobiog-
raphy the searing personal document it is by never saying “my book.”
It is safe to say that Malcolm never thought of his life as a novel. In
East Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm Little grew up, Negroes weren’t
allowed into town after dark. When Malcolm was four, the family’s home
was set afire by two white men; white policemen and firemen stood watch-
ing as the house burned down to the ground. Malcolm’s father, a free-lance
Baptist preacher and a follower of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa move-
ment, was murdered by white men; his mother broke down and spent the
next twenty-six years in the state asylum. Malcolm and the other younger
children became wards of the state.
He eventually went to a suburb of Boston to live with a tough older
sister; as a crude country kid he excitedly entered into the big-city world of
jazz, drugs and hustling that he observed as a shoeshine boy at Roseland State
Ballroom in Boston. He helped to rob a jeweler, was sent to prison, learned to
read and write, was converted by his brother to the Black Muslim movement.
There he found for the first time expression of his strong natural devoutness
in what he thought of as a liberating universal religion of all the dark and
oppressed peoples. But he was forced out of the movement by the leader’s
jealousy and was murdered while speaking to his followers from the stage of
the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
In Malcolm’s literal recital of his life to Alex Haley—he was a naturally
gifted speaker as well as a religious agitator too busy to write—the freedom
he displays comes from his austere sense of fact and his ability to read other
people’s souls. The book is an example of straight autobiography in a time of
novelized autobiographies3—of autobiography as a religious pilgrimage, of a
man seeking his way up from his personal darkness to some personal light.
Everything is rooted in the Negro’s tie to history through his oppression. All
love relationships are sparse, treated as gifts, but are not elaborated. There
is not much room in Malcolm’s book for love. He found himself only as a
leader, and he expected to become a sacrifice.
No doubt someone will make a novel of Malcolm’s life, as William
Styron has made a novel of Nat Turner’s insurrection. Turner lived as a
slave, was hanged as the murdering leader of a slave revolt, and left twenty
pages of “confession,” taken down by the court-appointed counsel who hated
him. Styron is an elegantly accomplished novelist who in a book entitled
The Confessions of Nat Turner still wanted to be a novelist, a Virginian who
felt himself intensely involved with the Negro struggle and wanted to write
a historical novel that would reflect the present crisis and above all bring
white and black together. Surely this much relevance would not violate the
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 33

integrity of fiction! Indeed Styron’s strong feelings as a liberal Southerner did

not override his novel, which far from being declamatory in the evangelical
style of Harriet Beecher Stowe (who also wrote a novel about Nat Turner)
turns Nat Turner into an extraordinarily sensitive and dreamy autodidact
who once petted with another slave boy but died a virgin, who organized an
insurrection but could kill no one but the white woman he loved, whom he
could possess only by standing guard over her corpse with a sword.
Styron’s book is full of sensitive landscapes that could apply to any
Southern boy’s growing up. They do not make the connection between slav-
ery and insurrection that must have existed in Nat Turner’s mind for him to
organize the “only effective, sustained,” the only significant slave revolt in
American history. Styron wanted to dispel the strangeness of the “Negro”—
especially in bondage, where even the most concerned Southern defender
cannot now imagine his individual feelings—by showing him to be as com-
plicated as oneself. But though many Southern white writers were deeply
moved by Nat Turner, the book was violently attacked by Black national-
ists. Styron’s Turner was too sensitive for them. Harriet Beecher Stowe had
answered the angry Southern critics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by providing docu-
mentation for every horror she described in her novel. But Mrs. Stowe was
worried not about “fiction” but about the violation of Christianity in a slave
society. Styron was relevant to too many things at once: to the art of the
novel, to the original twenty-page confession, and above all, to his contem-
porary belief that our psychology can illuminate the mind and heart of a
Negro slave in 1831. Entering into Nat Turner’s “dreams” as confidently as
we do, we recognize that what our contemporary, William Styron, wanted
most to do in this book was to become a Negro mind, to get past the ever-
lasting barrier, to make “human” and “clear” what makes us afraid in the
shadows we still occupy.
That ambition is natural to our Freudianism and our liberalism. Othello
will always be strange to the Venetians, but what a Southern writer of Sty-
ron’s liberal urgency wanted above all, in 1967, was to dispel the strangeness
by dramatizing Turner’s “feelings,” which would show that Negro and white
are kin. Styron has always been a novelist of feelings—elegiac in Lie Down
in Darkness, histrionically “wild” in Set This House on Fire. Nat Turner wait-
ing for death talks so much to us about his dreams that he becomes our alter
ego—another Southerner Styron wants and needs to understand for the sake
of justice and civic peace. But the narrative is so dreamlike that we cannot
really believe this man has been a slave and the organizer of so many killings.
The violence that is the background to the imaginative literature of fact, the
violence that in literature still has the power to surprise and to transform
us, to reveal us to ourselves when we are caught in the act—this is missing
in Styron’s book. Though it finally describes the insurrection, Nat Turner’s
34 Alfred Kazin

1967 introspectiveness does not prepare us for it. The link between a tortured
self and a violent self, such as novelists describing a killing must show in a
killer, is not present in The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron himself called his
book “a meditation on history,” and it is more that than it is a dramatic novel.
But of course Nat Turner was a “real person.” So there is no end to the many
meditations on history we can weave around him.

Our relationship to things of public record is never as sharp and finished

as it can be to a wholly invented character or deed. What is invented in
one mind can remain a fable for the reader. What has actually happened
and been recorded—this has already been participated in and glossed by so
many people that we are confronted with rival myths, partisan fragments of
fact in many minds at once. Nat Turner existed, so we shall never agree on
what he was “really” like. Norman Mailer’s version of the 1967 march on
the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night, is scornfully rejected by people who
marched with him. Eichmann the organizer of the gas chambers, on trial in
Jerusalem, provoked so many different versions of his character and respon-
sibility that even many who suffered together at his hands came into conflict
over the truth of events that they had lived through side by side.
But this is natural. What is artificial is the interposition of so much
“art” into journalism as a way of making “literature.” Why should any pre-
tense to literature be brought to the agonizing facts of our time except as
a way of glorifying the individual journalist suddenly interested in being
“creative”? Great history has usually been narrative history, but the narratives
have been shaped by a point of view, a philosophy of history and of human
motives. History is what the unifying passion of the historian brings to the
scattered facts. It is not an ironic and derisory style daubed on the facts like
theater makeup.4 Art and outrage have no necessary connection with each
other. This is another horror for us who for thirty years have tried to make
Hitlerism accountable to our humane culture. The horror is that so many
frivolous, hysterical, ignorant, trivial people could have captured the hearts
of so many Germans and have killed human beings for reasons no more
“significant” and “historical” than their own murderous vanity and rage. One
is now supposed to honor Napoleon for the millions of deaths he caused
because he was the vehicle of historical progress. In the case of Hitler and his
gang, no delusion is possible. Like the boy who stabbed an enemy in a gang
war and as he took the knife out, said to the corpse, “Thanks very much!,”
Hitler operated on the weakness of his victims and the fear he inspired in the
outlookers. He had no serious historical ideas, no tenable hopes. All those
millions died to the frenzy of murdering gangsters. They died meaninglessly.
And how do you make art out of what is inherently meaningless, was never
a contest? Nowhere has totalitarianism as a climate, or totalitarianism as a
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 35

subject, been able to produce a work of art. What it does provoke, from the
many ground down in our time by the Moloch of “History” or “Race,” is
occasional personal testimony. The victims alone can testify to the power of
these murderous abstractions. Their own existence is the moral authentic-
ity they have saved from what André Malraux properly defined as the only
purpose of the concentration camps. “The supreme objective was that the
prisoners, in their own eyes, should lose their identity as human beings.”
In any event, experience does not necessarily take the form of “litera-
ture” to those who in the modern Hell, the degradation of whole classes
and races of people, have known the lowest abyss of suffering. Even Tolstoy,
whose shame in the face of other people’s destitution was only “moral” suf-
fering, could say nothing more than: “One cannot live so! One cannot live
so!” The “structuring,” to use a more mod word than “fictionalizing,” may
come later in the victim’s life. Usually it does not come from the victim at
all, but from concerned intellectuals. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote
a whole series of books—The Children of Sánchez and La Vida are the best
known—in which, having taped the detailed monologues of those usually
illiterate people who live below the level of anything we know as poverty, he
transcribed this testimony, translated it, obviously selected from it, inevitably
heightened it.
Lewis had a conscious rivalry with belles-lettres. He often stated his
belief that the real “culture of poverty” was his specialty and that such pov-
erty was beyond the ken of even the grimmest naturalistic novels. (Although
James Agee similarly wished to confront his middle-class readers with the
lives of powerless tenant farmers, the moving force behind Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men was a poet’s discovery of documentary as a form.) Lewis thought
of himself as a transformer of his bourgeois readers. He could have echoed
Whitman: Through me, many long dumb voices, / Voices of the interminable gen-
erations of prisoners and slaves, / Voices of the diseas’d and despairing . . . Should
an anthropologist so openly put the emphasis on “me”? Lewis insisted that
his material was not to be duplicated elsewhere, that he was working out a
wholly new literary domain. The transmutation of research into “a new kind
of book” inevitably inflates the writer’s idea of himself.
This sense of oneself as a “pioneer” is very important to the writing of
the “nonfiction novel.” Norman Mailer would not have attempted his liter-
ary march on the Pentagon, would not have re-examined the astronauts, if
he had thought any other writer capable of this. Mailer will always be the
dominating voice in every book of reportage he writes—he has to feel that
he is writing history as a form of action. Then, energetically moving against
history’s own actions, he feels himself in complete control of materials that
have been opened up by his literary curiosity. The raw material in all such
cases is a fact of human experience so extreme that the writer is excited by his
36 Alfred Kazin

literary intimacy with it. This suggests an influence on the audience proper
to the shocking novelty of the material. Oscar Lewis was driven not so much
by the anthropology that he had learned as a practiced field worker in Haiti,
Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, as by literary abilities set in motion by his need
to use material that would liberate, agitate, revolutionize. So Mailer has been
saying for years that the really repressed material is in our social thinking,
not in the private psyche—that the struggle in America (and America is the
persona behind all his nonfiction tracts) is whether this fat overgrown self-
indulgent society, unable to master “progress,” will be able to confront its
secret fears and festering injustices. Capote in his murder book is saying, less
directly, that murderers are loose all over the place. Notice the attention he
gives to the bodies and most intimate physical habits of all “his” characters.
There is the connection between Mr. Clutter, who disdained evil and com-
plexity, and the outsider, vagabond, pervert, who said to his pal, “Finish him
off. You’ll feel better.”
Oscar Lewis’s “characters” in La Vida describe sexual sensations that
have never been reported by women in our middle-class fiction for the rea-
son that these women have much more to live for. The lack of money among
Lewis’s people is nothing compared with their lack of general satisfaction.
At the same time the absolute domination by the family seems to fill up
the vacuum created by emotional scarcity. We have here something like the
bondage we have seen in Malcolm X and James Baldwin. But in Lewis’s
transparently literary creations these wretched of the earth are supposed to
be real people talking into a tape recorder. This verisimilitude was Lewis’s
pride as a social liberator whose polemic took the form of getting people to
tell their life stories. We are involved with whole families whom we never see
in Mexico. And if our middle-class souls protest that we never seem to get
out of these low dark rooms and alleyways, Lewis would respond that ours is
an era marked by the return of the repressed, the painful, the unacceptable,
the frightful.
Revolution or therapy? For purposes of the imagination of fact, the
horrible is like Artaud’s prescription for “the theater of cruelty”: we put into
the play what we are most afraid of. But do we as readers of the nonfiction
novel, as mere spectators of the television horror show, act anything out? Do
we ever do anything more than have “feelings”? Before the great screen of
fact created by the information and communications revolution of our time,
we remain viewers, and it is truly amazing how much crisis and shock we
can take in without giving up anything or having the smallest of our habits
changed in the least. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem was, as Harold Rosen-
berg said, a necessary purging of emotion—for the survivors and intended
victims! But perhaps the S.S. man in Russia quoted in Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem was just a thunderstruck tourist when he reported that
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 37

“there was, gushing from the earth, a spring of blood like a fountain. Such a
thing I had never seen before.”
In the often apocalyptic personal remembrance of Hitler’s hell, the
survivor’s natural feeling of guilt is also a pervasive horror of human nature
that has filled the air since the war. Often enough in this new literature of
exposure the truly horrible fact comes in as a judgment on oneself. In Elie
Wiesel’s Night, his memoir of Auschwitz, a child being hanged proves too
light for the rope and strangles so slowly that Wiesel, a former Chassid,
cries out with the other prisoners that God himself is hanging on the gal-
lows. In Counting My Steps, Jakov Lind’s memory of his adventures under
the Nazi occupation, he describes the police driving Jews out of their houses
in Amsterdam while he scurries for safety to the apartment of a married
woman, also a refugee.

A few minutes after the last shouting had died away, afraid of
special punishment, all of them went, one by one. . . . We had
been eating silently for nearly fifteen minutes when from outside
came the sounds of pots and pans being dragged over the cobble-
stones, the crying of a child, the barking of a dog, the shouting
of a loudspeaker, march music, and the tenor of a high-flying
bomber. . . . We sat and ate our lunch. . . . I went to her bed, she
opened her gown, my fly. [He makes love for the first time in his
life.] A key turned in the door. . . . Gunther kissed his wife, said,
“They will soon be here. Let’s go.” I had passed the test and sur-
vived. All that was left now was to beat the police to it as well.

We say about a book like Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, the stupe-
fying itinerary of cruelties inflicted by Polish peasants during the war on
a homeless boy, “What a writer!” And to ourselves we add, “With experi-
ences like that, how can you miss?” It is the writer himself who seems to get
turned on in these shattering memoirs, to rise above our helpless nonpartici-
pation. Such books seem to be made out of a hardness that has burned away
everything but the ability to write with this concentrated purity of feeling.
Literary power is still our ideal, and we are jealous of the power that dis-
covers itself in extreme experiences. We locate imaginative authority in the
minority man, the battered refugee, the kook, the deviant, the mad poet, the
suicide, the criminal. Genius, says Sartre in his book on Genet, is not a gift
but a way out one invents in desperate cases. (This is obviously Sartre’s hope
for the downtrodden masses.)

Subject—the “situation,” the accident, the raid, the murder—is so primary in

these novelized special cases that the only force apparently able to do justice
38 Alfred Kazin

to extreme experiences is the writer’s myth of himself as an agent for change.

The world and the battered author, the revolutionary demonstration and the
ego, the crime and the reporter, the moon and me!
These are the now chilling polarities in Norman Mailer’s brilliantly
literary but evanescent descriptions of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, the
1960 and 1968 national conventions, the first landing of American know-how
on the moon. They move us out of the inherent consistency and exhaustive
human relationships of the novel onto the great TV screen of contemporary
history, and Mailer’s illusion is that he is somehow helping to change his-
tory. Mailer is the greatest historical actor in his own books, but they do not
convey any action of his own. They are efforts to rise above the Americanness
that he loves to profane, but which fascinates him into brilliance. The nonfic-
tion novel exists in order not to change the American situation that makes
possible so much literary aggression against it.
Mailer’s tracts are histrionic blows against the system. They are fascinat-
ing in their torrential orchestration of so many personal impulses. Everything
goes into it on the same level. So they end up as Mailer’s special urgency, that
quest for salvation through demonstration of the writer’s intelligence, real-
ism, courage, that is to be effected by making oneself a gladiator in the center
of the ring, a moviemaker breathing his dreams into the camera.
Yet the theme of Mailer’s reportage is the unprecedented world now,
rushing off to its mad rendezvous with the outermost spaces of blind prog-
ress. Mailer’s reportage responds excitedly to great public demonstrations,
conventions, crowds, coordinations of technological skill. He has carried
over from his fiction many sensory equivalents for the sound and weight of
crowds, for physical tension, anxiety, conflict, for the many different kinds of
happenings that his mind can register as he watches Jack Kennedy arriving
in Los Angeles in 1960, senses the Florida cracker’s feeling that he has made
it as the Saturn booster goes up from its Florida pad in 1969. Mailer has both
lived and written his life with the greatest possible appetite for the power and
satisfaction open to successful Americans since 1945; but his reportage has
become steadily more baleful and apocalyptic—not least because his subjects
soon lose their interest for everybody but himself.
One aim of his highly colored style has been to find new images for
energy, for savoring the last possible tingle of orgasm, for life among the
managers, for the sexual power and thrust (sex as thought, thought as sex)
inseparable from the experience of self-representative American males. But
a new reason for so much style is to keep the zing in his subjects. Mailer has
been the hungriest child at the American feast, directly in the line of those
realistic novelists for whom John O’Hara spoke when he said that the devel-
opment of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century
was the greatest possible subject for a novelist.
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 39

But clearly Mailer’s reportage represents his dilemma as an artist forced

back on too many “ideas”—a superbly gifted writer too good for this genre.
Of a Fire on the Moon is a book of such brilliance, and of such sadness in
trying to keep different things together, that like a rocket indeed it has been
set off by forces that at every moment threaten to explode it. Proust says
somewhere that notes are fantasies. But in Mailer it is precisely with his
fantasies, the greatest of which is that he can bring to some portentous world-
historical consummation the battle in himself between so many loves and so
many Spenglerian despairs, that he has written his moon book. It is not
exactly a book about the journey of the Apollo 11, not exactly a book about
the “WASP” types who fascinate him by their bureaucratized steadiness,
all those dumb other reporters, the computer age. . . . It is a book about a
novelist trying to write instant history.
Of course we all have a sense these days of being ridden down by his-
tory, and want to do something about it. Never has there been such a con-
certed consciousness, in the name of history, of how little history is leaving
our minds and our souls. Never have there been so many techniques for
circulating facts and dramatizing them. Real history, partisan history, and
commercial history are so thick a part of contemporary writing that it is as
if History had come back to revenge itself on its upstart rival, Fiction. But
not without Fiction’s own techniques, as one can see nowhere better than in
Mailer’s allegory of himself as history. The effort sprouts more coils around
Mailer himself than the serpents did around Laocoön and his sons. With
one breath he must say yes! serpents are of the essence and I can take any-
thing! with the next make a mighty heave to get the damned things off him,
two Americans to the moon, and the book to the publisher.
Such ambition, such imagination, such wrath, such sadness, such clev-
erness, so many ideas! The flames licking Saturn-Apollo on its way up had
nothing on this. It is as if Mailer were sketching the possibilities of one
brilliant novel after another. The dreaming, longing, simulating—of master-
pieces—give the reader the sense that Mailer was really dreaming of other
books all the time he was writing this one. The giveaway at crucial passages of
philosophizing—and that was another reason for taking on the assignment;
it was like asking Hamlet to give a lecture on Monarchs I Have Known—is
that with the whole universe to travel up and down on his typewriter, Mailer
cannot help fudging the world-historical bit; he is not always clear to him-
self, and damn well knows it. Rather than dramatize the American contra-
dictions that are eating him up, he tries to keep them all in eloquent bursts
that stagger you with ideas, but that leave you uneasy. The performance is not
of the moon but of the effort to talk about it.
Journalism will no more diminish than will the “communications
industry,” but the new art-journalism, journalism as a private form, has
40 Alfred Kazin

already had its day. It went through a whole cycle in the Sixties, and no
longer astonishes. Issues die on it as fast as last week’s issue of Time, and
while the professional reporter can still depend on a bored downgrading of
human nature, Mailer depended for his best “pieces,” like The Prisoner of Sex,
on challenges to his manhood that not even the Kate Milletts will always
provide. Mailer identified creative vitality in his best tract, The Armies of
the Night: History as a Novel: The Novel as History with his revolutionary
élan. But America has worn out the revolutionary in Mailer; the historical
blues are more a problem to the novelist-as-reporter than to the novelist or
reporter as such. Mailer in Of a Fire on the Moon describes the lifting of the
Saturn-Apollo in language born in the envy of Moby-Dick and manifest
destiny—language that somehow suggests there may yet be political hope
in so much mechanical energy. Some transformation of minds may yet take
place in outer space!
But the possibility of doom is just as strong in Mailer’s own moon trip
as in his enthusiasm for a technical wizardry of which, in the end, he knows
less than he does about doom. With so many agonies of contradiction in
himself, not the brilliant novelist’s lesser rhetoric will do—that just passes
out symbols like party hats to surprise—but the patience and depth of fic-
tion itself, dramatic imagination, the world reconstructed in that personal
sense of time about which space centers, sex movements and all other plurals
know nothing, but which is a writer’s secret treasure. Despite all our rapture
about them now, the great nineteenth-century novels were not and certainly
are not the “world.” The world is a world, dumb as nature, not a novel. The
world as our common experience is one that only the journalist feels entirely
able to set down. It is a confidence that those who stick to fiction do not feel,
for if the “world” is not an experience in common, still less is it a concept on
which all can agree. It is not even as close as we think. As Patrick White,
the Australian novelist, says in one of his books—“Why is the world which
seems so near so hard to get hold of?”

No t e s
1. In an interview in E. W. E. Bigby’s The Black American Writer (Penguin),
Baldwin says: “I’ve hated a few people, but actually I’ve hated only one person, and
that was my father. He didn’t like me. But he’d had a terrible time too. And of
course, I was not his son. I was a bastard.”
2. Baldwin up to the 1960s was a markedly esthetic and even precious writer
whose essay attacking Uncle Tom’s Cabin (and not just Mrs. Stowe), “Everybody’s
Protest Novel,” was more expressive of his literary sophistication than his later
attempts at militancy. In conversation, during his expatriate days in Paris, Baldwin
once said memorably that a perfect article for a Jewish magazine would be “A Negro
Looks at Henry James.”
 The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer 41

3. Hortense Calisher describes these as “veiled autobiography posing as

novel—currently a novelist’s straight path to being lovable.”
4. “The new journalism” is a technological product, like the drawn-out dra-
matization of the day’s news on television by reporters who, being on camera, have
naturally come to think of themselves as actors. There is so much “news” today, and
so much submission to it by a vast audience that submits to every fresh shock as
cavemen submitted to thunderstorms, that the reporter-as-actor can get away with
anything, especially getting the facts wrong, so long as he hypnotizes the audience.
Henry Luce encouraged his staff to think of an article rewritten from the
New York Times as a “story.” Then, especially on failing newspapers like the New York
Herald Tribune, writers were given their head in the hope of titillating an audience
surfeited with mere “news.” Tom Wolfe, who was trained as a scholar in American
studies but understandably went further as a dramatizer of celebrities in a pixie
hah-hah style designed to make you think of him as an original, has written many
amusing profiles of American leaders like Hugh Hefner, Leonard Bernstein, but has
become altogether too conscious of mere personality, especially his own. So much
of contemporary magazine and even book review journalism now deals in personal
gossip about the American great that the only justification for a “fact piece” is usu-
ally forgotten in Wolfe’s ad hominem writing.
In any event, such writing depends on a most credulous audience. When
Michael J. Arlen described the frivolity of the “New Journalism” one reader replied
in the June 1972 issue of The Atlantic, “The most insulting accusation Arlen made
was that the New Journalism is non-factual. . . . Wolfe never suggests any lack of
truth or any sacrifice of reality. Instead, he insists, and rightly so, that the New
Journalism adds to the depth of reality and truth, that literary devices such as sym-
bolism, dialogue, experimentation in narration, imagination in development, etc.
complement the facts by adding new dimensions of reality, providing the reader with
an entry into the situation being recounted.”
Inevitably, Wolfe has come to think that “the new journalism” makes nov-
els unnecessary. Journalists take themselves too seriously. First they describe facts,
then they see “trends,” and finally, they see themselves as a trend.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Some trembled and shook as with palsy from fears.
Like children they clung to each other and waited
In terror and silence, as if they were fated,
Or looked at each other wild-eyed and in wonder,
And hurdling together were thrown asunder
By the surging and swirling of onrushing water,
And were pent up and helpless as lambs for the slaughter.

Then the dark moment passed and a hope came again;

It came like the smile of the sun through the rain,
For the current had turned and toward the south veering,
They could see, with a joy, that the hills they were nearing;
And the house was now slowing as onward it bore,
While people came running to meet them on shore,
As nearer and nearer the house-boat had veered,
Where were all of the town folks who heard and had feared
They were lost, and among them the care-worn mothers,
The anxious old fathers and sisters and brothers.

Then out from the shore came the same dinky “John”
That the trusting old fiddler had rode away on,
And strange though it seemed, there was Dan in the boat
That had weathered the storms and was still there afloat.
Then the cheers of the dancers rang out to the shore,
And ev’ry eye swam with the tears that it bore.
The “Oracle” suddenly came to life, too,
As often ’tis found where there’s hope people do;
He shouted and waved with the wildest delight,
When the recognized forms of his friends came in sight.

He cried, “Oh, we’ve all had a lark of a time!

We’ve been up to Twilley’s to dance to my rhyme,
And water-bound there since we left the old town,
We have danced day and night, and the most the way down;
We grew tired of the place, and we thought we’d come home.
All the dancers are with us—they wanted to come.
As the stream was rough swimming and too deep to wade,
We concluded to come on the trip the house made.
How’s the folks at Dinwiddie? There’s no use to worry,
The flood will subside when it gets o’er its flurry.”

Though the moments had seemed to the dancers so frightened,

Like so many hours, yet their hearts were so lightened
With hope, that they took the bed-slats and rowed on
With a strange, nervous strength that seemed hardly their own,
After all of the trials through which they had gone,
And the dauntless bass-fiddler rowed swiftly the “John,”
To help them to land near the dancers’ own town,
Where some cried, and some danced with the crowds that came
down,
And many gave thanks with a quivering lip—
They were safe! They were safe! from the perilous trip.

There the house that the dancers had come in was moored,
Where the tale of its marvelous venture still lured
The thousands long after the flood had declined,
Till piece-meal from vandals and weather combined,
It fell to decay, or was carried away.
’Twas a favorite pastime on any fine day
For the thoughtless to waltz through the house with a song
And leaving to carry a relic along,
Until nothing was left of the house that withstood
The perils that came with the eighty-four flood.

The tall trees are standing, still standing alone,

Where they whisper each other the nights they have known,
And if they seem lonely without the old house,
Yet the birds in the evenings go there to carouse.
There they chatter and sing in their merriest lay,
And, like dancers, choose partners in much the same way;
And the boatmen will tell how they sometimes have heard
There the singing of songs—not the notes of a bird—
As though festive, gay spirits still hovered around,
Late, late in the night on the acre of ground.
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
standardized.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DANCE OF
DINWIDDIE ***

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