Thank You, Mr. Truman Capote

Not for writing In Cold Blood, not for your memorable & endearing Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and not for being the “real” boy (Dill) in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. 

I thank you for “A Christmas Memory,” which I used each December in the 1970s when I taught high school English classes in California’s Napa Valley.  I no longer have Capote’s story, but earlier today a friend loaned me her copy.  On the internet, it is possible to hear the late Truman Capote read this non-fiction story from his youth about his friend (an older female relative) and her dog Queenie.

I opened the small book just now and heard in memory the first line from reading it so often decades ago.  “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.”  Morning resonates with its dual meaning, as a time of day and a period of grief. “Both are implied in the opening and are understood by story’s end.

Why read “A Christmas Memory?”  For one’s heart. Which is why I read this story aloud to students each year before the Christmas break. The toughest kids from Rancho, home of Kaiser Steel, would ‘hear’ this story and not mock the boy Buddy and his best friend, a wonderful, wacky woman who makes fruitcakes each November and sends them out into the world.  “Buddy,” she says, “do you think Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt will serve our cake at (Christmas) dinner?”

I’m deeply grateful I recalled this story.  Post election, I have been feeling Scrooge-ish about Christmas this year. Yet reading the last words of Buddy’s friend gave me pause. “As for me,” she says, “I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”  I thank Truman Capote for this forgotten line, which I needed to remember.  I wish you a fine holiday and New Year. 

Ilona and I will return to our blog the second weekend in January.  Until then, my best thoughts to all.  Gail

What Was Inside Animal Farm?

My wacky filing system again…and tucked inside Orwell’s tiny book was “Farm to Fable,” a

short review from September 7, 1946. Given I was three then, how to explain the date and

having this review by Edmund Wilson. Ah, yes, I’d saved it from The New Yorker’s September

4 th, 2023 issue. Who was Edmund Wilson? The premier literary critic in America for forty

Years and The New Yorker’s principal book reviewer. He wrote widely on the Soviet Union, so

no surprise he was asked to review Orwell’s fable in 1946. I quote Wilson’s second sentence 

in his review. Who, I ask, is allowed this length today?

“If you are told that the story deals with a group of cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry which decide to expel their master and run his farm for themselves but eventually turn into something almost indistinguishable from human beings, with the pigs as a superior caste exploiting the other animals very much as the farmer did, and if you hear that Stalin figures as a pig named Napoleon and Trotsky as a pig named Snowball, you may not think it sounds particularly promising. But the truth is that it is absolutely first-rate.” The review is only two paragraphs, in which Wilson describes Orwell’s prose as plain and spare (unlike his own) and “admirably roportioned to his purpose.” Wilson then compares Orwell’s fable to Voltaire and Swift’s satire.

Enjoyable and enlightening to reread Animal Farm this week, along with Colm Tóibín’s The

Magician, a novel about the German writer, Thomas Mann. The book is 498 pages and effortless reading. Permissible voyeurism, I call it! A reader begins in 1891 in Lübeck, Germany, and continues with Thomas all the way to 1950 in Los Angeles, California.

I turned down the corner of page 196 in chapter 7, Munich, 1922. Why? Because of its relevance now. Mann agrees to deliver a lecture, “An Appeal to Reason,” at the Beethovensaal

in Berlin. He assumes his audience deplores the turning away from principles of a civilized

society, that they will despise “the gigantic wave of barbarism, the primitive populist fairground barking, and will reject a politics of the grotesque, replete with reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetitions of monotonous slogans until everyone foams at the mouth.” Mann describes Nazism as “a colossus with clay feet.” That’s when a man in the audience stands and demands to be heard. He calls Mann a liar and an enemy of the people; and soon dissenters all over the hall shout abuse and catcalls. “It was clear they were organized.” That evening Thomas Mann understands he will never be able to speak in Germany again. There’s something happening, Mr. Mann, and now… you know what it is. Remember Bob Dylan’s song about Mr. Jones, who doesn’t know what “it” is. Can you hear the tune and sing the words?

Both Thomas Mann and Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature. What do you have

to say about that, Mr. and Ms. Jones? To be continued…

A Big and Relevant Word: Apotheosis

This word rings in my mind as a spiritual disease. Apotheosis is the elevation of a person to the rank of a god. We’re living with this disease now, as multitudes chant their God’s name, wear his hat, and twitch with fervor in glorifying the past, again and again and again.

“It was as if all their individual five senses had become one organ of looking…like an apotheosis, the words that flew among them, wind- or air-engendered.” These words are from page 216 in William Faulkner’s Light in August.

In this novel Faulkner explores apotheosis, a diseased state of mind, as depicted through the character, Gail Hightower. This deposed Presbyterian minister, an outcast in Jefferson, Mississippi, is a sad man of “soft and sedentary obesity,” and childless, his wife a suicide, his own father an unwanted phantom. What is it that sustains Hightower?  His daily twilight ritual when he invokes the memory of his grandfather, as he rides his horse into Jefferson during the Civil War.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. This Faulknerian claim at the beginning of chapter six can be related to other characters, but especially to Hightower. This sad and lonely man refuses to remember that his grandfather died in a chicken coop, shot to death in the act of stealing. Yet belief in Memory allows Hightower to see his grandfather atop a magnificent horse galloping into Jefferson with a Confederate calvary.

Is Faulkner not relevant now?

No matter that Mr. Apotheosis suggested quack remedies during the pandemic; that he talked with Putin and made sure there was no record of their conversation; that his buddy was the Korean dictator; that the rich got a huge tax break; that he compromised the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley; that he instigated an insurrection, and that he is a convicted felon. To multitudes in our nation none of the above matters… because he is divine and God (the Christian one) saved him in Butler, PA.

Okay, comic relief for me if not you.  Faulkner created compound words that amaze me. So, to get Mr. Apotheosis out of my mind, I will write a paragraph of description, borrowing from William.  Think of the 1930s, a country store in Oxford (Jefferson), Mississippi.

On a shadowdappled Saturday afternoon, outside a country store with its greasecrusted & frictionsmooth counter, three forwardleanin, fanaticfaced, hookwormridden mill workers in stiffbrim hats…sit on a heelgnawed porch. Their fecundmellow voices hum in Augusttremulous light, their bigbuckled hands hold thwartcurled cigarettes. In mansmelling, manstale, sweatfaded shirts, they believe themselves to be white “eagles: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong.  Somewhere a dog barks, mellow, sad, faraway.”  One sobereyed man, says, “Hey, what ya all think ‘bout that new guy… Joe Christmas?”

I’ll answer this question next week, por fin (at last). Joe IS the novel’s central character.