Truman Capote | Saying nothing in particular

Next on my list of favorite Christmas stories that have nothing to do with Santa, is this short story by Truman Capote.

It’s the story of a young boy and his elderly “friend” who set out with $12.99 to make thirty fruitcakes for people who have been kind to them or people they admire (like Eleanor Roosevelt). They are the wards of “persons” who “have power over us and often make us cry” but who for the most part ignore them and so over the years they have figured out how to entertain themselves and, at the same time, save a few pennies here and there for their Fruitcake Fund.

 "... a morning arrives in November, and my friend as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and the fuels the blazes of her heart announces: 'It's Fruitcake weather!'"

We know little else about them. The young boy remembers no other home and his friend has never traveled more than five miles from the house nor has she seen a movie or eaten in a restaurant … but she “has killed with a hoe the largest rattlesnake ever seen in the county (sixteen rattles) … tamed hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger … knows the recipe for every sort of old-time Indian cure, including a magical wart remover.”

She also knows how to make kites and fly them in any weather. The important things to a young boy.

Nor do we know much about where they live except that it is a “spreading old house in a country town.” There’s an orchard nearby where they gather “windfall pecans” from amongst the fallen leaves, a grocery where they buy “cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned pineapple from Hawaii, rinds and raisins and … oh so much flour, butter and so many eggs” which they load into his baby carriage (the thing he arrived in with little else) and drag home. However, for the most expensive ingredient they must summon their courage to visit a notorious bootlegger by the name of Haha Jones. Any guesses as to what that most expensive ingredient was?

Truman Capote aka Buddy and his friend Nanny aka Sook

Okay – it’s whiskey! Any of my baking blogger buddies use hard liquor in their fruitcake? I’m thinking of giving it a try. It’s been just that kind of year!

Me … after gobbling down too much spiked fruitcake.

By pure coincidence, in the last couple of months I’ve seen two movies based on Truman Capote’s life at the time he wrote the book IN COLD BLOOD: Truman starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Infamous starring Toby Jones. Both excellent movies. Hoffman had the more difficult role because he had five or six inches on Capote and didn’t really look that much like him. However, he did an amazing job of capturing the angst of a writer trapped by his ambition.

The late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote agonizing over what he knows he must do to get the story.

Writing about an actual crime must always bring angst. Will you get the details accurately? How will the victims be affected by what you write? No doubt there are cold-blooded writers and journalists out there who put their own ambitions above the feelings of those affected by what they publish, but, both these movies suggest Truman Capote was not one of them. However, he was keenly aware that in order to finish his book (which he called a“nonfiction novel”) the killer he’d come to know would have to die. He also knew that his book would have more authenticity if he could pry the details of the Cutter family’s seemingly random slaughter out of a death row convict. Not an easy job. It would take Capote four years to cajole and dance his way into the man’s heart and soul until finally gaining his trust. His passion to create a masterpiece overrode any moral objections to duping someone into believing that you care about them when all you really care about is improving your story. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how Capote actually felt but as the appeals process dragged out the execution day, he was forced to face the ghoulishness of the situation and his own “cold-bloodedness.”

I know writers who believe that this sort of ambition, this willingness to sacrifice all – including one’s self-respect – is necessary to write great fiction. I must admit when I create a character based on a real person, I shudder and stammer and fall all over myself with dread. I don’t have it in me to befriend someone just so I could expose their story to the world, even for that coveted Best Seller status. What do you think? Are there limits beyond which you will refuse to go? Or, in the pursuit of art are there no limits?