A Christmas Memory

If what you think about when you think about Truman Capote is Philip Seymour Hoffman's virtuoso turn as Capote hot on the trail of a story about murder in cold blood on the Kansas plains, or old black and white Life magazine shots of New York's famous Studio 54 where he's seen hanging out with Andy Warhol or Bianca Jagger, or maybe even the scandalous "come hither" photo of 23 year old Truman reclining on a second empire couch which appeared on the back cover of his first novel Other voices, other rooms, you might be surprised to know that he is the author of a beautifully warm and tender Christmas story.

A Christmas memory originally appeared in the collection to which Breakfast at Tiffany's gave the title, way back in 1958, but Modern Library reprinted it as the title piece of a trilogy of Capote stories about childhood, which is the copy I found in the Central City Library basement when I decided on Christmas Eve that I'd like to re-read it. I was well into it by the time I hit the stairs, but luckily not yet at the end, because I surely would have tripped from the sudden blurring of my vision. The story is not sad, or at least not just sad, but the last page and a half is one of the saddest pieces of writing you'll find anywhere, and it always makes me cry.

It's a semi-autobiographical story which draws on a time in Capote's childhood when he was packed off to stay with relatives in Alabama. It's about a boy and a much-older distant cousin: he by circumstance motherless and fatherless; she a "childlike" spinster, crippled from a childhood illness, with a face -- lest you think we are getting soppy here -- like Abraham Lincoln's. It's about their Christmas ritual of making fruitcakes together. It's about love and friendship and, in that way that really good writing has, where you find something new every time you read it because of how it invites you to bring things of your own to it, this time I realised that it's also about how a tradition, to be important, doesn't need to exist over such a long time as you might think. It only takes one time around, and two hearts, when that's all you've got.

I have to say that in this sense, Modern Library should be reprimanded for their dismal cover flap blurb, which sums up the story like this: "In A Christmas Memory, Miss Sook, Buddy (the narrator) and their dog, Queenie, celebrate the yuletide in a hilariously tipsy state." Is this the Walt Disney version or what? In A Christmas Memory the scene where Sook and Buddy get tipsy finishing off the whiskey left over from their fruitcakes is 1 1/2 pages out of 27. The other 25 1/2 pages are filled with things like Sook and Buddy going out with an old baby carriage to gather windfall pecans and the long evening they spend shelling them, "scraps of miniature thunder" crackling through the air, or the counting of the pennies they have been saving all year to buy the other ingredients, earned by killing flies for the "others" of the house (25 flies = one penny), or, my favourite, when they go over the list of people they send fruitcakes to every year, a list which includes Pres. Roosevelt and a couple from California with whom they once passed an enjoyable hour on the porch when the couple's car broke down near the house.

And the last of the things that happen in the other 25 1/2 pages is that the boy gets sent off to military school, and the cousin, already elderly when the story begins, ages and grows weaker, until finally one winter when the fruitcake weather arrives she cannot rouse herself to greet it. And when that happens, says the boy, "A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken sting. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."


Harper Lee's friendship with Truman Capote goes back to the time of A Christmas Memory. Monroeville, Alabama, the town Capote's relatives lived in, was her home town and the model for Maycomb, the fictional setting for To Kill a Mockingbird. She put him in To Kill a Mockingbird as Dill, or so he proudly claimed. You can read about their friendship on the website Southern Literary Trail.

Have a look at the Truman Capote page on pinterest by Diane Wiggins, where you can see a photo of the real-life Sook, with Capote as a boy, and another of little Truman in a white suit, hands in pockets, looking exactly as you would expect Dill to look.

You can read the first pages of the story on the Auckland Libraries online catalogue record for the book. Don't worry, it's easier than you think to get used to the lack of paragraph formatting!

And to finish off, here's a very short, very beautiful (appropriately) videoclip made at the Kite Festival in Cervia, Italy:

Christmas nonsense

Not "Christmas, nonsense!" in the Scroogian sense of "Bah, humbug!" ie "If I could work my will, nephew, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart", but pure, simple, funny Christmas nonsense. Along with the family Christmas, the consumer Christmas, the religious Christmas, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the funny Christmas. If you'd like to join in, the first thing to do is to sing these lines to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas":

Good King Sauerkraut look out
On your feets uneven...

This is just one of a series of splendidly mangled Christmas carols which appeared in the classic (we're talking back in the Kennedy era, the Cold War era, the Race to the Moon era) American comic strip Pogo, written by a genius named Walt Kelly. Pogo is a chipper little possum who lives in the Okefenokee Swamp in America's Deep South, along with his best friend Albert the Alligator (big and a bit stupid, in that classic best friends tradition where one has the brains and one has the brawn) and a slew of other swamp creatures incarnating various human personality types, such as the morose and prickly Porky Pine and Mam'zelle Hepzibah, a sexy French skunk.

In the house where I grew up there were three paperback Pogo collections on a low shelf in the dining room and we kids found them and read them, over and over, without knowing or caring that the animals were actually satires on various political figures of the era, but just because they were so funny. I remember my mother explaining about a bobcat with thick eyebrows who represented Joe McCarthy, the man who led the witchhunt against communists in Hollywood, the Army etc (you know, all those likely places), and how we just didn't really care.

I still don't really care about the political jibes, but I have enjoyed over the years catching on to various clever literary allusions with which Pogo was also sprinkled, my favourite being the mud turtle named Churchill La Femme, nicknamed "Churchy".

It turns out Roger Ebert, the American film critic famous for the entertaining "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" reviews he used to do on TV with Gene Siskel, vestiges of which can still be spotted on DVD cases as "Two thumbs up! -- Siskel and Ebert", and for his clear and intelligent writing style which made him the only film reviewer to have won a Pulitzer Prize, and then more recently for his clear and intelligent writing about life after thyroid cancer, which left him unable to speak or eat, and now for a memoir called Life itself, is a Pogo fan as well, and he has posted Walt Kelly's Moon Race version of everyone's favourite Christmas poem, "Twas the night before Christmas" as I call it, but which is actually titled "A visit from St. Nicholas", on his blog. If you are a comics reader or writer who would like to sample a fine, aged comic, I recommend taking a look.

There is also an official Walt Kelly site and the vintage newspaper comics site ilovecomixarchive.com has got some good Pogo strips on it. Walt Kelly, I found out, also worked for Walt Disney for a time, and is responsible for animating Geppetto inside the whale in Pinocchio -- is this my favourite Walt Disney animated film, or is it Dumbo? -- hey, look at that, Walt Kelly worked on Dumbo too!

Supposedly a complete Collected Pogo is in the works. I will definitely be requesting a purchase for the library.
Addendum, a year later: it's here! From our friends at Fantagraphics: Pogo, the complete syndicated comic strips. Volume 1, through the wild blue yonder.

"...Due to run 12 volumes, this collection completes the holy trifecta, along with Charles Schulz' Peanuts and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, of comic strips whose influence cannot be overstated." -- Booklist

Merry Christmas to all from Books in the City. And to wrap up, may I offer a Pogo chorus of:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Joseph Brodsky's Christmas Poem

I first encountered the poet Joseph Brodsky in the pages of The New York Review of Books, it would have been something to do with St. Petersburg, the city where he was born and raised and which in many ways defined him -- the city where, as he used to say, everything can change (including its name, twice) except its weather and its light.

Even after serving 18 months at hard labour for the crime of "social parasitism" (ie being a poet), and when that didn't deter him from writing poetry, seeing himself diagnosed as schizophrenic by a medical expert of the regime, clearly a menacing development, and despite repeated invitations to emigrate to Israel, Brodsky didn't want to leave St. Petersburg. They had to break into his apartment and get him and put him on a plane; he didn't even know where it was going.

It went to Vienna, and after that he went on to America, became an American citizen and, like his city, changed his name. Fifteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I happened to visit New York that year, and that was where I encountered him again, in the Strand Bookstore, under the guise of his book of essays, Less than one, which I bought and still treasure. And then, just a few years ago, I found his grave in the beautiful cemetery of San Martino in Venice, near those of Ezra Pound and Diaghilev.

Brodksy ended Less than one with a piece which is a tender eulogy to St Petersburg and a brave one to the memory of his parents. He called it In a room and a half, that being the size of the apartment his family was allotted by the communist officials. And now, the director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy has made a film with this name, based on Brodsky's life and poetry.

I haven't been able to see the movie yet but I found the theatrical trailer on youtube and it looks wonderful. It opens magnificently with the old slave spiritual Go down Moses as the soundtrack, an impeccable choice given how Brodsky described his parents' greatest failure: they weren't able to raise their son to be a slave.

Joseph Brodsky, who would have turned 70 this year, used to write a poem every Christmas. Here is one of them I particularly like, written during his time at hard labour in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. It surprised me to realise, as I was writing this, that he was only 24 when he composed it. My first thought was that the tone is that of a much older man, which would have been more than understandable, but then I re-read it and thought, well, no, actually. For my money, that's defiance there in the last line.

January 1, 1965

The kings will lose your old address.
No star will flare up to impress.
The ear may yield, under duress,
to blizzards' nagging roar.
The shadows falling off your back,
you'd snuff the candle, hit the sack,
for calendars more nights can pack
than there are candles for.

What is this? Sadness? Yes, perhaps.
A little tune that never stops.
One knows by heart its downs and ups.
May it be played on par
with things to come, with one's eclipse,
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for what occasionally keeps
them trained on something far.

And staring up where no cloud drifts
because your sock's devoid of gifts
you'll understand this thrift: it fits
your age; it's not a slight.
It is too late for some breakthrough,
for miracles, for Santa's crew.
And suddenly you'll realize that you
yourself are a gift outright.

-- translated by the author

Christmas Stories

presenting a few of my favourites

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol will always be for me the story which most makes me feel like Christmas. In  our house, my father read it out loud to us every year, a chapter a night, on the days leading up to Christmas. Even now when I read it, it is his version I hear. Scion of a theatrical family and a bit of a ham, he was a splendid, uninhibited reader who always enjoyed  his performance as much as we did.

"Marley was dead, to begin with." He gave the opening line a neutral, conversational tone, which contrasted marvellously with the tingle of excitement running through us as finally, after dinner, coffee and cigarette (for him) we settled on the couch to let the yearly ritual begin. But by the time we got to "What a turkey! There never was such a turkey", the words were rolling forth in inspired waves, pulling you under into their oceans of gusto and jollity. Finally I could forget the terrifying chapter where the ghostly hand draws back Scrooge's bedcurtains, which would keep me awake for hours afterward with the sheet drawn up to my eyes, casting my eyes about in the dark to make sure no ghost could creep up on me unannounced.

The reading was dosed so that the final triumphant chapter would fall on Christmas Eve. When we got to the lines "And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge"  my father read them out with such heart that I had to agree with my sister, thirty or more years later, when she suggested it would be the single best phrase to remember him by.

You can read both the abridged version of A Christmas Carol, which Dickens used to read aloud on his incredibly popular author tours, and the longer version, at dickenschristmascarol.com.  

And while you're at it, visit David Perdue's wonderful site, the Charles Dickens Page, where The Christmas Carol page offers links to illustrations, maps of Dickens's London, even things like Dickens's original accounts page for A Christmas Carol (6000 copies sold the first day). At the very bottom, there is this jewel from A Christmas Carol:

"It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself."

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."

Even if you didn't grow up where it snowed, A Child's Christmas in Wales will be one of the stories most evocative of Christmas you'll ever read, which shows you what a great poet can do. It's all there: the panoply of human types -- the imbibing aunts, the snoozing uncles, the human arts of music and conversation, the human love of sweets, and the mysteries of human time which is both unstoppable and yet capable of preserving some things for you forever.

One of the very best ways to experience A Child's Christmas in Wales is to hear Dylan Thomas reading it aloud. It takes 20 minutes on the wonderful Caedmon collection of Dylan Thomas recordings, 11 CDs where he reads his work and the work of others, including Shakespeare, which you can get from the library.  But you will probably enjoy it so much that you'll want to hear more.

The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry

I am always telling people to read this beautiful little turn-of-the-century story by O.Henry about, as they say, the meaning of Christmas. O.Henry is famous for short stories with a twist ending, often given you to read in school as ambassadors for the form, also because mostly they are very funny - The Ransom of Red Chief about the kidnapping of a little boy so annoying that in the end the kidnappers are willing to pay the family to take him back is one of my favourites. But The Gift of the Magi is sad and sentimental. Approach it with an open mind and you won't be disappointed. You can read it on the Literature Collection website.

O.Henry, a romantic figure (although he always demurred on this) who had headed west from the Carolinas as a young man to work on a cattle ranch, spent time in prison for embezzling bank money, which he may or may not have done -- he first ran off to Central America, to somewhere for which he later invented the term "banana republic", but returned to the United States to be with his wife who was dying of tuberculosis, entering prison the next year and spending three years there -- said "There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands."

Who knows what stories you might get from this bench - in Christmas colours, note - photographed in front of an Irish library?

Book bench by Irish typepad