My observations on 'A Christmas Memory' written by Truman Capote - Francisco Vaz Brasil

My observations on 'A Christmas Memory' 
written by Truman Capote

                                                Text by Francisco Vaz Brasil

     In a certain day of 2008, the American Literature teacher, Maria Clara Matos, showed me a text by Truman Capote - A Christmas Memory. I read it carefully. Reread it for more four times. And each time that I read it, I felt more interest by the works written by Truman Capote. Capote is an icon of the letters of the United States. Capote knew actually mount the board of words, with the simplicity of a master. The text of Capote is fine, clear, dry and is lyric, like a poem. After A Chistmas Memory was in search of the other works by Capote. Fantastic. I got him some books and I have received the influence of Professor Maria Clara. A Christmas Memory is to be read by all who have the opportunity to read in English and to feel the purest emotion and assess the  sensitivity.

          A Christmas Memory had initially appeared in Mademoiselle magazine in December, 1956, and was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963, it was the 1966 edition that established the story's enduring popularity. Also this short story appear in Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the edition of 1994. The story of a seven-year-old boy and his aging cousin's holiday traditions was made into an Emmy Award-winning television movie starring Geraldine Page in 1968 and continues to be produced by high-school and regional theaters throughout the United States. Truman Capote drew his own experience in rural Alabama to write A Christmas Memory.

          Truman Capote drew on his own youthful experience in rural Alabama to write A Christmas Memory. This story, which he called his personal favorite, is an idealized recollection of one of the few relatively secure periods of his unstable early childhood.

          A Christmas Memory is a holiday classic. It's the autobiographical account of a simpler Christmas celebration.

          Buddy is a young boy living with elderly relatives. He and his friend, a distant cousin in her 60s, hoard pennies to buy the ingredients for fruitcakes to give as gifts. They make kites for each other. Despite her frail condition, they went out to cut down a Christmas tree, accompanied by their dog (Queenie).

          The story can be called as the fiction of nostalgia, in accordance to Nance* (1970: p. 78) in “which Capote looks back fondly upon his Southern childhood. These nostalgic stones evoke a gentle, simple, and secure childhood uncorrupted by the complications of adulthood.”   Autobiographical elements in A Christmas Memory are apparent: Capote lived with relatives in the South as a child, and during this time his older female cousin, the childlike Sook Faulk, was his closest companion. And in accordance to Nance*,

          “The nostalgic mood has prompted some critics to dismiss the story as "saccharine." However, the story also contains darker elements such as loneliness, poverty, social isolation, and death, which demonstrate that the innocence of childhood may protect young people from the elements of the human condition, but not remove them from it. The story is also an example of a common theme in Capote's writings: the friendship forged among social outcasts, many of which are eccentric women. And about A Christmas Memory, Saturday Review called it "one of the most moving stories in the language." 

     By the sheer of his prose and a brilliant economy of ongoing narrative rhythm, Capote cleanses of any possible sentimentality a small array of characters, actions and emotions that might have gone foully sweet in less watchful and skillful hands. “Only Chekhov comes to mind as sufficiently gifted in the treatment of similar matter” (Price)**.

          Never is later to mention the words by Norman Mailer, at the last cover of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and three stories,  referring itself to Capote: “Truman Capote is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.”

          Truman Capote left us the finest and best literature in short stories and novellas which are: Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), his first novel and a classic Southern Gothic, is the story of a young boy's painful search for identity. His other works include a gentle autobiographical novel, The Grass Harp (1951); a collection of short stories, A Tree of Night (1949); the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958); a report of his trip to Russia with the cast of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, The Muses Are Heard (1956); the musical House of Flowers (1954); and two collections of nonfiction pieces, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). In 1966, Capote published his "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood, a chilling account of the senseless, brutal murder of a Kansas family that is widely considered his finest work. Fragments of his last major book, the unfinished Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, were collected in 1990. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote was published in 2004. 

 * NANCE, William L , in The Worlds of Truman Capote, Stein and Day, 1970, pp. 78-83
** PRICE, Reynolds. Introduction to  THE COMPLETE STORIES OF TRUMAN CAPOTE. Random House. 2005. 297 pp.