(New York) In addition to classics such as In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote left behind many unfinished and unpublished works.
Capote, who died in 1984 shortly before his 60th birthday, spent much of his later years struggling to write his so-called Proustian masterpiece Answered Prayers, of which only excerpts have been published. As a young man, he wrote a novel about a love story between a young socialite and a parking attendant that was published posthumously under the title Summer Crossing.
Briefer works were also sometimes abandoned, including a story first published this week.
Capote was in his 20s and a rising star when he moved from New York to Taormina, Sicily, in 1950 and settled in a picturesque villa named Fontana Vecchia, once occupied by D. H. Lawrence. Acclaimed for his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and for his disturbing short story Miriam, Capote describes his move to Europe as a necessary escape from the American literary scene, which he compared to living in a bubble, and an ideal setting for work: He wrote the novel The Grass Harp in Sicily and worked on numerous short stories.
“I’m so happy to write stories again, it’s my great love,” he wrote to a friend.
A story set in Sicily, Another Day In Paradise, is an unfinished work that appears in the new issue of The Strand Magazine. Written at a time of relative contentment for Capote, Another Day is a tale of disillusionment: Middle-aged American heiress Iris Greentree used up her inheritance—all modest because her mother did not trust her with questions money – to buy a villa in Sicily. She will eventually be betrayed by the local man who persuaded her to invest his money, Signor Carlo Petruzzi, and too broke to sell the house and return to the United States.
Much of Capote’s fiction is set in New York or the American South, but Another Day in Paradise has the natural rhythm, decorative language, and cutting – sometimes cruel – humor of his best-known works , as well as themes of loneliness, fear and regret. Thomas Fahy, author of Understanding Truman Capote, says that the writer probably recognized himself in Iris Greentree’s feeling of estrangement and alienation.
“He was constantly changing locations as a child, from New Orleans to Alabama, from New York to Connecticut,” Mr. Fahy said. You could see how very lonely and isolated his life had become. »
The Strand has published rare works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and many others. Editor Andrew Gulli unearthed Capote’s account at the Library of Congress, in an “old Florentine notebook with red and gold scrolls,” he wrote on the Strand’s editorial page. The manuscript, worked in pencil, was at times so difficult to read that Mr. Gulli needed a transcriber to help him prepare for publication.
Mr. Fahy says that Capote’s time in Sicily, where he stayed for a little more than a year, left him with the kind of feelings that many authors experience when they are far from their home countries – a strong sense of distance from his anchor home that likely helped inspire “Another Day in Paradise,” and a heightened clarity, which he drew on for The Grass Harp and his memories of his years in Monroeville, in Alabama.
Capote biographer Gerard Clarke says the writer moved to Sicily partly because his partner, Jack Dunphy, wanted to live abroad and because the strong U.S. dollar made Italy more affordable than New York . Neither Mr. Clarke nor Mr. Fahy could cite a specific real-life model for Iris Greentree, but Capote refers to a possible inspiration — the aunt of a boy who delivers ice cream — in his essay Fontana Vecchia, written in early 1950s.
“Blonde and witty, the ice boy is an eleven-year-old child with an erudite appearance. He has a beautiful young aunt, one of the most attractive girls I have ever known, and I often talk to him about her,” Capote writes. “Why,” I wanted to know, “doesn’t A., the aunt, have a boyfriend? Why is she all alone, never at balls or on Sunday walks? The ice boy says that it’s because his aunt has no interest in the local men, that she is very unhappy and that she only wants to go to America. »
