Books like Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote

Portraits and Observations, what a fitting title for this collection of poetic oddities and fluid cognizance. Capote's work is what you label belletrist, because be it fiction or nonfiction, the magnetism of his artful prose is the transfixing element. I was enthralled by “Master Misery,” and since then, I’ve bought Portraits and the nonfiction piece that helped transform journalism: In Cold Blood (which he discusses in this collection). “I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm,” Capote once said. \ “Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon, Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.”\ Try, he did—I would venture to say he did more than try: \ On winter nights, when the wind brings the farewell callings of boats outward bound and carries across rooftops the chimney smoke of evening fires, there is a sense, evanescent but authentic as the firelight’s flicker, of time come circle, of ago’s sweeter glimmerings recaptured.\ During the sixties, Capote spent some time around fame: Elizabeth Taylor, Harper Lee (in fact the character Dill, in To Kill a Mocking Bird, is supposedly him), Willa Cather, Louis Armstrong, and Tennessee Williams. He also spent some time quietly observing America (New York especially), and creating portraits of Europe through the written word. He was a writer’s writer and I wonder why he was never considered a travel writer, because I certainly would call him one. The essays in this collection are a vast bunch—this is what I loved most about them; although I could have done without some of the longer (and perhaps more popular) ones. One minute you’re in Brooklyn, but soon, you find yourself in Venice, and then Haiti. One minute you’re reading about movie stars and murders, and the next minute, you’re gleaning behind-the-scenes knowledge of the writing craft, and everything that went into, In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Muses are Heard: “I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.” It's disheartening to think about the downturn his life (and writing life) took, the addiction and controversy, or the book he talked about for years but didn't get to finish. Still, we have his classics. And most of all, we have the poetic simplicity he so firmly believed in:\ Soothing, and also disquieting. The blackness, the longer one gazes into it, ceases to be black, but becomes a queer silver-blue, the threshold to secret visions; like Alice, I fell on the edge of a voyage through a looking-glass, one I’m hesitant to take.\