I began reading the final story in this collection early in the morning, minutes before leaving the house. I was about to go to a different town for the weekend, and clearly the bus would not wait, and so regrettably I had to cut it off. The story in question, "Where the World Begins", tells of a girl, Sally Lamb, daydreaming in class and not paying any attention to what Miss Carter, the teacher, has to say. I had to stop right in the midst of things, when Miss Carter (or 'Robot', as Sally calls her) breaks off the girl's reverie and reprimands her for being distracted.
Now. Before I had a chance to resume reading, I could not stop thinking about where the story would go. Or, rather, where young Truman Capote would be taking it. I had a couple of intriguing ideas in mind when finally I settled in my seat and got back to the short story. It was a revelation. Capote's ending was simple and unassuming, strikingly so, and yet I felt that none of my complexity mattered. His was not just good. His was the only way the story could go.
And so it is, with this collection. The Early Stories by Truman Capote are, of course, a seminal event in the literary world. They were first published by Penguin Classics in 2015 (my edition is from 2017, the reverse featuring a stunning picture of young Capote by his typewriter), and they give you that rare chance, not always warranted or justified, to get intimate with an artist's formative years.
Which are, in the case of The Early Stories, most certainly formative. And yet how giant a leap would he really make, from here to A Tree of Night? Because one could argue that, In Cold Blood aside, teenage Capote is not a whole lot different from mature Capote, and I mean that in the best way possible. There is the sophisticated simplicity, the love for the different and the defenseless. And then there is all that sentimentality; after all, who did not cry at The Grass Harp, and who could force them back at the end of "This is for Jamie"?
It is fascinating to witness young Capote being so minimalist with his plot (think Chekhov, think Joyce's "Araby") or the typical Southern ease with which he tackles race ("Lucy" is especially noteworthy, and not just for its brilliant first sentence). The few experiments, like "Traffic West", are rather curious, but it is when he does not try too hard that he weaves true beauty into the seemingly plain American characters and landscapes of the 1940s. It is then that his language, so glacial and so beautiful, shines with such confident ease. Even if he could always knock you out with something as striking as that last sentence of "Where the World Begins":
'She was very happy here, with the wind blowing in her hair and Death around the corner'.
Occasionally, while reading this amazing collection (and I took my time, never exceeding one story per day), I had a distinct feeling that he was not really taking them anywhere, these stories. That it was these stories that were taking him places, and it is our luck and our joy that these places lay exactly where his heart was. For this, above all, could be the mark of a great artist.
