BOOKS
III
suburbanite: the hero is short of cash, he wants to neck with the
babysitter, he is ready to vomit up a throatful of boredom. Reading the
first page or two leads to a surge of expectation-the sense of danger is
genuine enough, reality is breaking past the world of gadgets and ranch
houses, even past the surface of Cheever's greying prose. But, alas, this
reality proves to be a canary, not an eagle, and a canary soon caged.
The adorable fantasy of escape is squashed in a mild whimsy of resigna–
tion; the emotion that had been pinched into vitality becomes a mere
dribble of weariness. And though defeat may well be the greatest of
literary subjects, Cheever never allows his characters to face either the
desperateness or dignity of defeat: he murders their vital core before
they have a chance to.
Cheever really knows a great deal about suburban life; but he
cheats. He systematically refuses to face the meaning of the material he
has himself brought to awareness and then suppressed. A toothless
Thurber, he connives
in
the cowardice of contemporary life; the resig–
nation which constitutes his stock of wisdom is nothing but advice to
his readers that, dying slowly, they also die quietly.
Truman Capote, growing older, is also getting better.
Breakfast at
Tiffany's,
a slight thing but neither precious nor exhibitionist, rests upon
true observation of post-war New York life. And for the first time
in
Capote's work, there is a genuine interest in human character,
someone
else's
character, for its own sake.
Miss Holiday Golightly (but why do writers have to use such
names? why not a good simple name like, say, Emma Wodehouse?)–
Holly, as her friends call her, is an original. A few other novelists have
caught glimpses of her, notably Vance Bourjaily, but Capote handles
her with a special expertness: she is exactly right for his brilliantly
feline sensibility.
Holly is a new kind of brownstone girl. She glistens with the latest
Manhattan sophistication but is also very
gauche
and ignorant; she
sleeps with many but doesn't seem really interested in sex. A strangely
feverish post-war figure, she combines amorality and innocence in a
way that would startle a father confessor. She reaches a terrifying ulti–
mate in rootlessness: the human creature without bonds, notions, respon–
sibilities, delusions. Her doorbell reads
Miss Holiday Golightly, Travel–
inw-as if she had just been perusing Georg Simmel's essay on the
stranger. Her one great attraction is her candor, the candor of a nihilism
so naive as to seem indigenously American. "I'm always top banana,"
she says, "in the shock department."
Capote sets her up very well: habits, conversation, milieu. His
