EUROPE IN THE WRITINGS OF TRUMAN CAPOTE OR THE STEPS TO THE CREATION OF THE NONFICTION NOVEL Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez Universidad Camilo José Cela Last 25th August 2004, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the death of the American writer Truman Capote and simultaneously, in the following months, two milestones in his literary career: the fortieth anniversary of Truman Capote’s publication of the first lines of his masterpiece: In Cold Blood1 and the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Local Color, where the author gives a very personal and distinctive portrait of Europe; a kind of reportage of a post-war continent that now, years after, has just lived the expansion of the European Community last 1st of May. Due to the celebration of these events in the following months, it is the aim of this research to study the connexion between Truman Capote and Europe: his vision, his opinion, his writings, travels and, furthermore, the importance and the transcendent role of Europe as the root for the non-fiction novel in the making of In Cold Blood. Europe has always been a recurrent topic in the history of American Literature. As a starting point for our issue, we think first of Henry James, who sent his characters to Europe searching, looking for the land of experience, looking for the “tree of knowledge”, a place to learn and a place to be refilled with that experience and that knowledge2. We think of Washington Square and how Dr. Sloper believed 1 Although the book itself was published at the turn of the year 1965, the appearance of chapters or parts of the story in The New Yorker started after the summer of 1965.First chapter on the 25th September 1965. The second, on the 2nd October; third and fourth on the 9th and 16th of the same month. All of them would be published under the general title of In Cold Blood in the last days of the year. 2 According to Brian Lee, James got a more complete sense of what America was from what he observed from the Europeans when he was living in Paris and when his “innate understanding of ES 25 (2004-2005):43-70 44 EMILIO CAÑADAS RODRÍGUEZ that it would be in Europe where his daughter Catherine would mature and get the sense to be freed from the spell Mr. Townsend seemed to have on her. But this travel for experience occurs not only in fiction but also in real life. Edgar Allan Poe and, after him, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound came to Europe and instantly became European. Then, in the twenties and on, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein or Dos Passos, in other words, The Lost Generation, made their way to Europe as well and created new characters living the European experience like, for example, those of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Among other events, the First and the Second World War and, in addition, the Spanish Civil War came and Europe suffered one of its most serious events of destruction. World War II, in particular, made American people look at our continent with a different perspective. Some American writers felt the need to account for and participate in the coverage of that destructive time and those destructive events. Some, like Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway or John Dos Passos faced war as close as they could. The stories of war and devastation mixed with the idea of a new flourishing and a new renaissance in the post- war Europe provoked an immediate and sudden interest for writers to come and see with their own eyes what the old continent had to offer. Among others, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Paul and Jane Bowles, Henry Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, Newton Arwin, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Jack Dunphy, Gore Vidal, Eugene O’Neill and... Truman Capote made the journey to discover “the European reality.” But when and why did Truman Capote come to Europe? Where did he go? How did his European experience mix with his writings? Why are his writings significant in this important moment in the history of Europe? These are some of the questions we are going to deal with in the next pages. In order to establish the place and the time of the writer, we would like to start by providing some biographical information on the author. Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924. He was linked to the south of the United States in his early years and subsequently moved to New York, where he spent most of his life. At the age of eight, he had just written his first narrative “Mr. Old Busybody” an account of the small community he lived in. But it was in 1943 that he received some recognition with short stories, some of which will appear as a collection in A Tree of Night in 1949. Capote’s vision of Europe is distilled in his literature from 1946 to the end of his career; it started with three sketches of the limited edition of Local Color (“To Europe”, “Ischia” and “A Ride Through Spain”). They contained information about his first and second trip to Europe at the end of the forties. In addition, his vision of America was brought into a much clearer focus in the Parisian salons of Madame Viardot and Madame Blocqueville, where he met Flaubert, Daudet, Maupassant…” and especially when he was accepted as one of them (Lee: 85). EUROPE IN THE WRITINGS OF TRUMAN CAPOTE OR THE STEPS TO THE CREATION … 45 Europe is included in the 1956 book The Muses Are Heard, a journey to the former USSR to cover a musical performance in Leningrad and the first reportage book of the writer. Before that, two exceptional novels, Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948 and The Grass Harp in 1951, contributed to his success as a young writer. In 1966 he was acclaimed by readers and critics with the publication of In Cold Blood, a true account of a crime that started a new genre, the “nonficition novel.” In 1973, the writer published The Dogs Bark, defined by him as “a prose map, a written geography of my life”3. The book contains stories, essays and sketches (“Fontana Vecchia”, “Lola”, “Greek Paragraphs” and “Self- Portrait”) that complete the writer’s vision of Europe through his experiences around the Mediterranean at the beginning of the fifties and in the sixties. Finally, in the unfinished novel Answered Prayers, published in 1984, in the chapter titled “Unspoiled Monsters” the writer returns to the times of his first trips to Paris, Venice and Tangier. He died, as we said at the beginning of this research, on the 25th of August, 1984, in Los Angeles. We mentioned that it is in these works that the reader would find Capote’s vision of Europe. And it is there where the reader can see that the writer’s life and works are completely entwined; the works in which Capote photographs Europe cannot be separated from his very personal experience, as we analysed in Ficción y Realidad en la obra de Truman Capote (2003). It will be, then, necessary to use some biographical data to complete the meaning of this research.4 1. LOCAL COLOR (1950) Local Color, a nine sketch collection published in 19505, is the first serious attempt of the author to look for a new system of writing, mixing fiction and reality, reportage and imagination. These Travel Sketches “are, in fact, varied exercises in local color writing, as the general title accurately denotes, and Capote’s objective in each of the nine pieces was to capture the flavour of the specific location and achieve a sense of “place”6 and the collection is “a truthful book of travel impressions”7 and a “collection of perceptive and civilized travel pieces that marked Capote’s first literary departure from the shadowy bordered between dream and reality.”8 In those lines, the reader will find two constant features that exist 3 Preface to The Dogs Bark, p .xvi. 4 Biographical data given comes mainly from two sources. First, from our investigation and traveling following the steps of Truman Capote in those places, from London to Paris and from there to Venice, and also to Rome, Berlin or New York, and second from the use of his biography written by Gerald Clarke in Cardinal, London, 1989 and by the analysis of the Truman Capote’s papers in the Private archives of the New York Public Library . 46 EMILIO CAÑADAS RODRÍGUEZ together: first, a remarkable exercise on local color writing, as Reed says, remarking any single aspect that makes a person or a place different, inimitable or exclusive, using real people and dates and fictionalising in details. His characters are, as usual, chosen for their eccentricity and peculiarity; what he tries to find, among other things, is authenticity. Second, these writings are sketches and preparations for the non-fiction novel. The first lines of this 1948 sketch are quite indicative of these features. “To Europe”, written in 1948, represents a change, a trip from the American to the European. In that text we can locate the characteristics we mentioned above and, in addition, the basic idea necessary to understand his works: Europe was for him “a bridge to childhood” It was right that I had gone to Europe, if only because I could look again with wonder. Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge to childhood and walk across it.