Truman Capote’s literary fame rests on two things: a short story called Breakfast at Tiffany’s and a pioneering “nonfiction novel” of true crime, In Cold Blood. Music for Chameleons, Capote’s last book to be published in his lifetime, collects pieces from both genres he made his name in, along with some magazine-style “Conversational Portraits”, featuring, most notably, the icon on the cover, Marilyn Monroe.
As skilful a prose stylist as Capote was, I was never that taken with his fiction, and the short stories in this book didn’t change my opinion. Where Capote shines though is in his nonfiction and the true crime piece, Handcarved Coffins, is the best part of the book, and some of the interviews were enjoyable as well. I didn’t love Music for Chameleons but it’s got plenty to recommend it.
Of the six short stories, the shortest, Mr Jones, was the most impressive. At just three pages long, Capote is able to conjure up a compelling look at a seemingly unprepossessing man - with a secret. The title story has a striking image of a grand old lady playing a piano to an audience of chameleons, and A Lamp in the Window, about a man stranded in the woods at night who comes across a lone house, has a bizarre twist to the end. Mojave is the best story though, about a successful businessman recounting a tale from his youth where he met a blind old man abandoned in the desert.
While not being stories that are all that memorable or riveting to read, what I liked the most about them was how Capote is able to add in layers of interesting detail into them. Mojave is ostensibly about the blind old man but there’s more stuff around the businessman telling the story and his wife as well, none of which really needed to be there, but added richness to the narrative. Or the opening preamble to A Lamp in the Window that could’ve been a whole other story in its own right.
Handcarved Coffins is the piece de resistance of the book, so much so that I feel like it should be the title of the book. In Cold Blood is fantastic - a genuine masterwork that is rightly Capote’s most famous book, and I loved it - so I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to checking this one out.
Set in a Western state in the mid-’70s, Capote relates the tale of a series of grisly killings in a small town whose victims all received a hand carved wooden coffin in the mail containing a candid photo of them prior to their murder. That’s the only connection though as the methods they were all killed were very different - one involved rattlesnakes, another involved arson, one was beheaded, one was poisoned, and so on.
It’s an unpredictable, engrossing narrative and one I couldn’t believe hadn’t been made into a documentary before - and there lies the rub. I didn’t want to know anything about the crimes beforehand so I only looked it up after I’d finished and… it turns out it’s not real. Or at least, Capote vaguely based it on something he’d heard about and then embellished it with a lot of his own inventiveness to make for a better story.
Which is disappointing. The subtitle - “A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime” - turns out to be misdirection and that’s why the killer and his purported crimes haven’t been made into multiple true crime documentaries. Still, it’s a good story for the most part though the conclusion is underwhelming, as is the reveal that it’s not actually a true story. Maybe it’d be less bathetic to those readers who do some background reading on the book before starting and already know it’s not entirely nonfiction, but that’s what I get for just jumping straight in without knowing what I’m getting myself into!
The Conversational Portraits that make up the third and nonfictional final part of the book is similarly an anticlimactic way to close things out, as they are largely undramatic and fluffy. A Day’s Work is about Capote following around a weed-smoking cleaning lady during a regular work day in New York while Hidden Gardens is about a Character in New Orleans - both are mildly amusing at times but very forgettable. Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex, where Capote interviews himself, reads, perhaps appropriately, as masturbatory and pointless.
A Beautiful Child, the Marilyn piece, is only compelling because it’s Marilyn - take away the legendary name and it’s not as interesting. It’s set in 1955 New York and Capote and Marilyn are attending the funeral of acting coach Constance Collier. They get drunk and that’s about it. Marilyn does seem very likeable though - swearing like a sailor (she thought Queen Elizabeth was “a cunt”) and generally coming across as approachable, vulnerable and charming.
Some of the pieces though edge towards more exciting territory. Derring-Do is about Capote’s escape from the Feds after failing to show in court to testify at the retrial of a killer, while Then It All Came Down is about Capote interviewing Robert Beausoleil in San Quentin for his part in the Manson Family Murders.
My favourite of the Portraits though is about someone who wasn’t famous. Hello, Stranger is about a severely stressed businessman who relates an odd story that begins with him discovering a message in a bottle and ends with his wife repeatedly painting the same boat on a canvas in her locked room.
Capote cleverly nudges the reader towards his interpretation of what this chap did and why he’s in such a state without ever coming right out and saying it. It’s a fascinating look at the lies we tell ourselves and what it does to us over time.
Pleasingly, the two most famous features of the book - Handcarved Coffins and the Marilyn piece - are two of the best here, but there are also other enjoyable nuggets to discover amid this collection with Mr Jones, Mojave and Hello, Stranger being standouts in their own right. Music for Chameleons is an uneven collection with its share of stories that don’t quite hit the spot but it’s worth checking out if you enjoyed Capote’s more well-known books and are wondering which one of his to pick up next.
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