Page 16 HIGH GEAR FEBRUARY 1981

Truman Capote's colorful lizards

By George Brown

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS. By Truman Capote. Random House. 262 pages. $10.95.

Capote burst onto the fiterary scene in 1948 with the publication of the hauntingly beautiful "Other Voices, Other Rooms." This was not a gay novel in the usual sense, yet the cognoscenti were aware that the main character, the young boy, would grow up to be gay -and hat in essence this boy was the young Southern boy Capote had been. Giving the novel a pseudo notoriety was a photograph of the author, then in his midtwenties, on the dust jacket. Per-

haps the best word to describe this person was enigmatic, but if this word had to be expanded, then such descriptions as childman, precocious, fey and esoteric came to mind.

The cognoscenti also knew that the young Southern boy in "The Grass Harp," pubilshed in 1951, would also grow up to be gay. The image of Capote through the Fifties and well into the Sixties remained that of the enigmatic boy-man, although "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in 1958 gave him a more definable image, with the sketch of him on the dust jacket of the novella (which included short stories, among them the now classic “A Christmas Memory") presenting

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On the Square

ine suggestion of a sophisticated and cultured man-about-town. The persona of the narrator of "Tiffany's" strongly reinforced this image.

In 1966 a new Capote emerged with the publication of "In Cold Blood," the account of an actual multiple murder in Kansas, with the emphasis on the characters of the two murderers. Critics lauded this book which Capote labeled a nonfiction novel, a serious new literary form which he hoped to pioneer. There was no Capote on the dust jacket, but photographs of him at this time showed a man just about old enough to be the father of the boy-man on the dust jacket of "Other Voices, Other Rooms," a

mature man who was not necessarily enigmatic or esoteric. There is a thread of homosexuality in this book, for one of the murderers has a homosexual orientation, but the writer didn't probe deeply into this.

"Music for Chameleons" in 1980 is Capote's thirteenth published book, and the man on this dust jacket is well into his fifties and lined by those years. The enigmatic, the esoteric, quality is again apparent, and the pose even suggests something of a warlock. Capote is something of a warlock in his writing. He labels the fourteen pieces in the book nonfiction (the fifteenth piece is an illuminating preface). The fourteen pieces, however, are written as if they were fiction. Capote takes what he sees as truth from his own life and from the lives of others and in writing elevates it to spellbinding art -journalism, as he defines it, elevated to the form of art. This writing can be compared to music, for from the pages come the sounds of harps, violins, oboes, bassoons, and saxophones moving to powerful, if muted, finales.

Capote realizes, as he states in the preface, that all people do not see the same truth in the same thing. Writing can lie, without meaning to, just as a camera can lie merely by recording what it snaps in the light and the conditions available. And just as the image of a person is influenced by the technique of the photographer, so is his image influenced by the technique of the writer.

Chameleons, of course, are lizards capable of changing color, and in the title piece we discover that they like music. Who are the chameleons of the books's title -the subjects of all these pieces? For the subjects>> change according to the way Capote sees them and then presents them. Others could view the same things and write in a different shade or a different color. Perhaps all of our lives fit into the framework of a "Rashomo." At any rate, along with music Capote's writing contains color, and from this writing bold shades flash and flare, and pastels glow and shimmer. The pastels, I think, predominate.

At least six of the pieces allude to gay people of homosexuality, perhaps the slightest of these being the joke about a Jesse James train robbery in "Hidden

Gardens" (and here it must be noted that Capote, a native of a New Orleans, can magically evoke the piquant ambience of that unique city).

"Mojave" titled for the desert, reveals a stark truth about and love and abandonment that is so artfully developed even the most sophisticated reader must surely gasp at the denouement. For this revelation Capote uses both heterosexuals and homosexuals, but the main characters are heterosexual.

It is "Dazzle" that truly dazzles the sensitive reader into a kind of beautiful terror (and it might even turn the insensitive into the sensitive). The story is beautiful because truth is there, and it calls forth terror because of the gargantuan pain and confusion that it exposes. The frightened and vulnerable young boy who wants to be a girl, and who goes to ȧ local sorceress for help, is the boy of "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and "The Grass Harp"; and in "Dazzle" he is more poignant, in far less space, then he was in those novels -and he was very poignant in them.

with Errol Flynn, is he bragging and then becoming blase when he dismisses Flyn's phallic charm as ordinary? (Yes, we are told, in this book and in the recent book by Charles Higham, that Errol Flynn, gay blade of Hollywood's golden age, was apparently a gay blade in both senses of the word "gay."

The writer seems to be brutally honest with himself in "Nocturnal Turnings or How Siamese Twins Have Sex," and it is this Capote I would choose to know personally. I doubt if few do. I don't know if he still appears on the talk shows, but in the midSeventies I sometimes saw him on the Tonight Show. Television is not the medium for his talent, and whenever I saw him talking to Johnny Carson, I had to keep reiterating to myself that Truman Capote is a truly fine writer. According to various sources he is, in a natural setting, a charming conversationalist.

A truly fine writer Truman Capote was and is. It is to be hoped that he will soon write a novel, either fiction or nonfiction, in which he places emphasis on gay people and their problems. It When Capote writes of himself is well time that he and Tennesas the sophisticated New Yorker see Williams, to whom he dedithat he surely is, he not only cated "Music for Chameleons," becomes less charming but he turned their talents to a more becomes brittle and snobbish. complete examination of homoHe gives an insightful picture of philes. When Capote and WilliMarilyn Monroe in "A Beautiful ams began their careers in the Child", but do we see them, MonForties, a homosexual who roe and Capote, as two spoiled wanted to be considered a children out on the town? And serious writer couldn't very well when he tells Monroe, and the do this Gore Vidal partially reader, about his one-night affair excepted. That time is now gone.

Patron saint

If anti-gay activists with religious pretensions think that they need a patron saint, the most likely candidate who has appeared so far is John Gacey.

It should never be forgotten that many, if not most, of his victims were gay and that Gacey's personality is largely the result of a very strict religious upbringing.

The several teenagers he disposed of were those of his sexual partners he thought might expose him publicly. Gacey's chief motive in the killings was to keep anyone from disturbing his pose as respectable and religious-minded pillar of the community.

Instead of being a symbol of what anti-gay types oppose, Gacey is in fact one of the most appropriate symbols imaginable of what they R.W stand for.

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