Margaret Soltan reminds us that yesterday was the anniversary of Truman Capote's death. Margaret has recently written a lively appreciation of Capote's style, parsing the opening of In Cold Blood to explain how complex and nuanced his deceptively journalistic prose was in that book; I've devoted some space to Capote (who invented a new mode of nonfiction writing with In Cold Blood), concentrating in particular on the "other" Capote--the one who wrote elegiac, semi-autobiographical stories about memory, childhood, longing, and loss.

One of my all-time favorite works of American fiction is Capote's Grass Harp, which is at once autobiographical, based on some of the stranger characters in Capote's childhood, and thoroughly embedded in American literary history--the story of a boy who runs away to a treehouse with two old ladies and finds himself floating above the cruel world on a utopian, leafy raft is a direct if largely unmarked descendant of Twain's original, and just as worthy of serious attention. A couple of representative sentences: "Dolly said that when she was a girl she'd liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us--it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields--I've heard Papa clear as day."

Capote lost his way entirely after In Cold Blood made him spectacularly famous; he drank and drugged and ate and gossiped his way to an early, ugly death in 1984, by which time he was the human equivalent of a bloated, bitter toad. But his early works bear no relation to the late man; they are, in fact, some of the most exquisitely rendered writing about vulnerability that we have.

R.I.P.

"Children on their Birthdays" is a Capote short story you ought to read if you have not. It is included in the anthology Stories of the Modern South (Forkner and Samway, eds.).