Too Brief a Treat
The Letters of Truman Capote
edited by Gerald Clarke
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95

CHARM was Truman Capote's specialty, the propellant that lifted him early off the launching pad of obscurity and sent him, for a brief while, into the stratosphere of celebrity of a luminosity given to only a few writers in the history of this country: After Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, no one else comes to mind. Capote could be charming on the page or in person. His prose, always rhythmically on beat, featured lilting phrases. In no other writer would Haitian ladies on the porch of a bordello "flourish paper fans that beat the air like delirious moths"; or a middle-aged woman take off her rimless spectacles to reveal eyes that, "nude and moist and helpless, seemed stunned by freedom; the skimpily lashed lids fluttered like long captive birds abruptly let loose." Who but Capote could write to a friend that "there is going to be a beauty contest on Saturday to pick a Miss Taormina: if I win will send you a telegram"?

Truman Capote was of course gayer than a leap year Mardi Gras. Small, delicately featured, with a famously high and piping voice, he would have had a tough time passing, to use the old-fashioned phrase. Not that it often occurred to him to do so. He appears to have been perfectly at ease with his homosexuality. He played it, too, for charm.

Charm is the desire to delight, light-handedly executed. In most definitions of charm the word "magic" turns up, and there is, in fact, somethingmagical about the gift of charm, for it reminds us that the world, for all its dreariness and depression, suffering and sadness, is still a highly amusing place. When he was up to it, which he was most of the time, Truman Capote could almost unfailingly provide such reminders.

The standard--and rather boring--line on Capote's charm is that it was a dodge through which he hoped to attain the love he had missed as a child. In a letter to Perry Smith, one of the two killers who are at the center of his immensely successful work of reportage In Cold Blood, Capote provided a quick sketch of his childhood:

I was an only child, and very small for my age--and always the smallest boy in school. When I was three, my mother and father were divorced. . . . My father (who has been married five times) was a traveling salesman, and I spent much of my childhood wandering around the South with him. He was not unkind to me, but I disliked him and still do. My mother was only sixteen when I was born and was very beautiful. She married a fairly rich man, a Cuban, and after I was 10 I lived with them (mostly in New York). Unfortunately, my mother, who had several miscarriages and as a result developed mental problems, became an alcoholic and made my life miserable. Subsequently she killed herself (sleeping pills).

Not enough love in the home, the verdict is, and so poor little Truman sought it everywhere else. ("Too much love in the home," I long to write on papers by many undeservedly confident students.)