A Little Night Fiction

By R.Z. Sheppard

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS by Truman Capote; Random House; $10.95

Novelists during the past 20 years have been so busy making up the truth that they have not had much time for fiction. The names of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote spring immediately to mind, along with their catchy formulations, "nonfiction novel" and "the novel as history." Mailer, nurtured on emanations from Marx, Freud, Kierkegaard and Wilhelm Reich, can be an inspired explainer of the modern cloven spirit. Capote, the old Southern boy, steeped in regionalism and the oral tradition, is the storyteller, the Mother Goose of U.S. writing.

This is no mean designation; but, since critics are explainers, not storytellers, Mailer is usually perceived as a heavyweight and Capote as a lightweight. The champ himself contributed to this view in Advertisements for Myself (1959): "At his worst [Capote] has less to say than any good writer I know. I would suspect he hesitates between the attractions of Society which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and the novel he could write of the gossip column's real life, a major work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world."

Consciously or not, Capote eventually responded to this challenge with Answered Prayers, that bedeviled, and still unfinished, gossip novel concocted from letters, journals, conversations and the confidences spilled during hundreds of lunch dates. Four chapters of the book were published by Esquire in 1975-76. The reaction was predictable. Capote was denounced as a malicious liar and betrayer of his jet-set friends.

Capote the socialite may have suffered; Capote the artist has benefited. The new writings collected in Music for Chameleons get a maximum effect from a minimum number of words. Throughout these 14 pieces, the reader learns just how busy and varied Capote's life is. His range of acquaintances is not only vast but spooky. "I know Sirhan, and I knew Robert Kennedy, I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy," he says, explaining that he met Oswald in Moscow just after he defected in 1959.

In Martinique the author has an audience with one of the island's aging aristocrats, an enchantress whose piano playing attracts an exotic group of listeners: green, scarlet and lavender chameleons. Abandoned on a Connecticut country road, Capote meets a widow who shelters him in her cottage and shows him a freezer full of dead cats, old pets she could not bear to part with. Two policemen wait at a Los Angeles airport boarding gate to arrest Capote for ignoring a subpoena to testify in a murder case he had researched. The situation looks hopeless until he runs into Pearl Bailey and her gaudy entourage. She gets one groupie to switch clothing with Capote and then smuggles the frightened author aboard the plane.

Two kinds of women dominate the book: those, like Bailey, who are protective mother figures or good witches, and those who resemble childhood playmates. Mary Sanchez is a professional cleaning woman whom Capote accompanies as she makes her rounds of Manhattan apartments. Both writer and domestic get high on marijuana, music and laughter, but are brought down when one of Mary's clients unexpectedly returns home.

Marilyn Monroe is another professional who spends an unusual day with Capote. It begins at a funeral service and continues with champagne at a deserted Chinese restaurant. As Capote recreates the conversation, MM's talk is frank and salty. "Remember, I said if anybody ever asked you what I was like, what Marilyn Monroe was really like -- well, how would you answer them? ... I bet you'd tell them I was a slob. A banana split." Capote agrees but adds, "But I'd also say . . . you are a beautiful child." Despite this dose of saccharine, A Beautiful Child is the best sketch ever written about the late film star.

How much of this book can be called documentary truth? How much is a masterly synthesis of all the author has learned as a fiction writer, scenarist and journalist? It is impossible to be sure. Mojave, about an affluent woman's affair with a repulsive psychiatrist, is cast as a traditional short story. In Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime, Capote uses cinematic techniques to relate his part in an inconclusive murder investigation. Nocturnal Turnings, a self-interview, stretches the bounds of the humorous monologue.

It is unlikely that the level of Capote's technical abilities and the quality of his craft can be fully appreciated until the superficial aspects of his celebrity are forgotten. "I prefer to underwrite," he says in his preface. "Simple, clear as a country creek." As any country boy knows, it is not always easy to judge the depth of clear water.

Excerpt

"MARILYN: Oh, baby, I'm so sorry. But see, I got all made up, and then I decided maybe I shouldn't wear eyelashes or lipstick or anything, so then I had to wash all that off, and I couldn't imagine what to wear . . .

(What she had imagined to wear would have been appropriate for the abbess of a nunnery in private audience with the Pope. Her hair was entirely concealed by a black chiffon scarf; her black dress was loose and long and looked somehow borrowed; black silk stockings dulled the blond sheen of her slender legs. An abbess, one can be certain, would not have donned the vaguely erotic black high-heeled shoes she had chosen, or the owlish black sunglasses that dramatized the vanilla-pallor of her dairy-fresh skin.)"

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