Portraits and Observations

From the Publisher

“A must-have treasure for Capote fans . . . These are delicious, dramatic, and tender nonfiction portraits and tales.”
–NPR’s Morning Edition

“A wonderful volume . . . Nearly every page can be read with real pleasure. . . . No matter what his subject, [Capote’s] canny, careful art gives it warm and breathing life”  
–The Washington Post Book World

“Every piece is a treasure. . . . Pages and pages of remarkably evocative, careful and well-observed prose [delineate,] in a measured and elegant manner, one of the most remarkable American literary lives of the twentieth century.”
–Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Michael Dirda

It's a wonderful volume on several counts. First, Portraits and Observations contains all of Capote's nonfiction (except In Cold Blood). Second, it's of a handy size, substantial and inviting without seeming magisterial and sepulchral. Third, nearly every page can be read with real pleasure, whether Capote is describing New Orleans or Brooklyn, whether he is profiling the fatuous Marlon Brando or his own high-spirited cleaning lady. Fourth, those who appreciate the music and cadence of a sentence, or relish a well-turned simile, will find much to enjoy and learn from in these crafty, intricately structured essays. Fifth, despite his real zest for high society, Capote is clearly a democratic bard, drawn as much to the glamour of a derelict washerwoman as to that of a Hollywood superstar. He is, in this regard, an heir to his fellow New Yorker writer, that chronicler of metropolitan life, Joseph Mitchell…No matter what his subject, Truman Capote's canny, careful art gives it warm and breathing life.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

This volume of collected essays, many out of print since their original publication, is both a long overdue and welcome addition to the Capote revival. It's arranged chronologically-from a short 1946 piece on New Orleans, written when Capote was 22, to a brief appreciation of Willa Cather he wrote the day before he died in 1984. The 42 pieces range from one-page portraits of public figures such as Ezra Pound and Coco Chanel to the 104-page 1956 "The Muses Are Heard," a masterful journalistic account, first printed in the New Yorker, of an American opera company's tour of Porgy and Bessin the U.S.S.R. The collection contains some great writing-his 1970s "Handcarved Coffins," an account of a Midwestern murder that recalls In Cold Bloodand can be savored for its beautifully nuanced balance of empathy and emotional horror. Many of the pieces, however, such as a 1974 sketch of Elizabeth Taylor written for Ladies' Home Journal, feel "occasional" and off-the-cuff. While integral to Capote and his evolution as a writer, these pieces do not constitute his best work. Still, the volume's completeness will recommend it to fans as well as anyone seriously interested in mid-20th-century American literature. (Nov. 20)

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Library Journal

Long overdue, this work collects all of Capote's (1924-84) published short nonfiction. The featured works cover the artist's interests in travel, celebrities, the arts-both visual and literary-crimes of passion, and himself (one of the wittiest articles is a self-portrait in the form of a Q&A). Place-always a favorite topic of Capote's-is represented by vignettes about his childhood in Alabama and New Orleans, his travels abroad, his work in Hollywood, and why he considered New York "home." The earliest sketches were written around the time of the author's 22nd birthday; the last, the day before his death. Following the 50th-anniversary edition of Capote's A Christmas Memory, this collection offers the highest quality of writing from a genuine American stylist. Recommended for all academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ7/07.]
—Pam Kingsbury

Kirkus Reviews

"I'd never known anyone who wrote," Capote once remarked of his small-town Southern childhood, the start of many a story. "Indeed, I knew few people who read."He has been dead for nearly a quarter of a century, and Capote would be chagrined to find that, yes, few people read, and fewer read him now than in his heyday, despite two recent films devoted to his life circa In Cold Blood. This well-made selection of essays, excerpts and interviews memorializes the Capote who was at once more and less than the careerist literary journalist of that era-the bon vivant who fed himself baked potatoes stuffed with caviar; the haunted romantic who declared that the most beautiful word and the most dangerous word in English were one and the same: love. He was also the gossip, social butterfly and hanger-on who did not like actors (of John Gielgud: "all his brains are in his voice"; of Marlon Brando: "No actor . . . has transported intellectual falsity to higher levels of hilarious pretension") or politicians except, strangely, Ronald Reagan and Adlai Stevenson, but who always managed to be around actors and politicians. Capote is largely remembered today as a personality, a celebrity and Tonight Show fixture, but he was a brilliant writer first and always. This anthology gathers many pieces that stand up well against anyone's work, as with his description of a New York heat wave or of the tony-crowd, pre-jetset life on a Mediterranean island ("Ischia was no place for the rush of hours, islands never are"). The best parts find Capote at his most relaxed, inclined to make fun of his many peculiarities, especially when they butt up against others' eccentricities. Capote's account of a chicken dinner witha famed artist gone awry is one of the funniest pieces in the culinary literature and a pleasure in any context. Capote's about due for a revival. This is the sampler to spark it.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In addition to his other notorious addictions, for much of his life Truman Capote was a raging and exacting workaholic, which explains the tremendous output in varying forms included in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. One of the few American writers to tackle short and long fiction, nonfiction, plays, film scripts, and reportage, Capote in this volume shows himself to be a hungry and yet tastefully selective observer of human triumphs and foibles. Included here are early impressions of places like New York and Hollywood and a fond but unsentimental reminiscence of his hometown of New Orleans ("no more charming than any other Southern city.... The main portion...is made up of spiritual bottomland"); portraits of some of the most famous actors of his time, such as Brando, Bogart, and Elizabeth Taylor, even though "the trouble with most actors...is that they are dumb"; and intermittent self-observations, as in the mock interview with himself in which he remarks that if he hadn't been a writer he "wouldn't have minded being kept, but no one has ever wanted to keep me -- not more than a week or so." For such a flamboyant figure, Capote's touch as a writer was light and often subtle, and despite his sad chemical decline, he proves himself here to have had moments of great clarity nearly to the end. --Janet Steen