Music for Chameleons

A woman, a piano and eighty lizards

The title piece is four or five pages long and does almost nothing, which is why Capote put it first. An elderly aristocratic woman in Martinique gives Capote mint tea, mentions in passing that she is drinking absinthe, and plays Mozart on the terrace. Lizards come out of the garden and settle on the stones to listen.

Nothing in the piece is explained and nothing is concluded, and the lizards are reported as a fact rather than offered as an image. Opening a comeback book with a sketch this slight is a decision about what the whole volume is for. Capote is announcing that he is no longer building large structures, and that he intends to write short and get out. After six years on the Kansas murders and fifteen more on a novel he could not finish, brevity was the point.

Handcarved Coffins, and the crime that stays open

The long middle section is In Cold Blood done again at a tenth of the length and with the answer withheld. Somebody in a western American town is killing people, and each victim has received a miniature coffin, carved from balsa wood, with a photograph of themselves inside it. One killing uses rattlesnakes released into a car. Capote gives almost the whole thing as dialogue between himself and the investigator on the case.

Two choices distinguish it from the Kansas book. The town and the people are not named, which means a reader cannot check anything, and the case is never closed. Capote subtitles it a nonfiction account of an American crime, and readers have been arguing since about how much of it happened, in exactly the way they argue about In Cold Blood. Here he had no court record, no confession and no execution to anchor the story, which is either the reason the piece is frightening or the reason it cannot be trusted.

Standing next to Marilyn Monroe

"A Beautiful Child" describes an afternoon in 1955 with Marilyn Monroe, after a funeral, drifting round Manhattan and ending up drinking champagne on a pier. Capote's method in the conversational portraits is to give himself almost no lines and let the other person talk. His own contribution is the questions and the stage directions.

The technique flatters the subject and conceals the writer, and the concealment is the trick. A reader comes away believing they have met Marilyn Monroe rather than read Capote, which is exactly the effect In Cold Blood had aimed at over four hundred pages. Set against "Then It All Came Down", an interview with one of the men convicted of the Manson killings, the range of the section becomes clear. The same flat attentive manner is applied to a film star and to a murderer, and it does not condescend to either.

The self-interview

The volume ends with Capote putting questions to himself, and it is the least guarded writing of his career. He was fifty-five, had been treated for alcoholism and drug addiction, had lost most of his friends over the Answered Prayers chapters four years earlier, and had not finished a book since 1966. The self-interview is where he accounts for all of that, in a form that lets him ask the questions an interviewer would not dare to.

Yes. More and more. But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint.

The passage works because of the order of the list. Three admissions that cost him something are followed by a boast, and the boast is delivered in the same flat tone as the confessions. Then the sentence turns and takes all four back as compatible with sainthood. Capote is doing in four sentences what the conversational portraits do at length: giving a reader the whole of a person by reporting their speech and declining to comment on it. He died four years after the book appeared.