Truman Capote published three
holiday stories based on his childhood experiences.
“A Christmas Memory” (see
previous post Dec. 2011) appeared in 1956 and is probably the best known. It is the most nostalgic of the three,
recalling his relationship at age seven with an elderly distant cousin, who is
“herself a child.” The two have formed a
bond as outsiders in their household.
Buddy, as the older cousin calls him, helps his “friend” gather pecans,
make fruitcakes, and prepare Christmas gifts.
Years later, when he receives word of his “friend’s” death, he recalls
the kites they made for each other and imagines, “rather like hearts, a lost
pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”
“A Thanksgiving Visitor” was published
in 1967 and “One Christmas” in 1982.
Buddy is seven or eight in the second story and six in the third. These later stories are more complex than the
first. Though there is still some
sentimentality surrounding Sook, the elder cousin’s name, as we learn in the
second story, they both convey a greater sense of moral complexity, as young
“Buddy” experiences more of the dark side of life.
From these two stories we
learn that Buddy and Sook had both been taken in by relatives, who are busy
running several businesses while Sook stays home, does the cooking and
housework, and serves as a surrogate mother to Buddy, whose birth mother,
having married young, had divorced the father, and left Buddy with family while
she went off to pursue college and career.
In “One Christmas” Buddy makes a brief reference to her suicide by drug
overdose in later life.
Having been abandoned by both
parents at an early age, Buddy has already seen the dark side, but he is happy
in his adopted family and especially in his relationship with Sook. Both of these two later stories can be viewed
as initiation narratives, as the young, innocent Buddy encounters the cruelty
and selfishness in the world, including in himself.
In “One Christmas” it is
questionable whether he recognizes the darkness in his own heart, but in “A Thanksgiving
Visitor” he learns a painful lesson in the cruelty that he is capable of.
Though it was published last
“One Christmas” takes place earliest in Buddy’s life. He is unexpectedly invited to travel alone
400 miles from his home in rural Alabama to spend Christmas with his father in
New Orleans. Buddy barely remembers his
father and is terrified of leaving his comfortable home with Sook to spend
Christmas in a strange city with a strange man.
He makes the journey, though,
and discovers first-hand his father’s somewhat profligate urban lifestyle of
big-spending, partying, and pursuing older rich women, who subsidize him. It is on this trip that Buddy also learns
that there really is no Santa Claus, but he plays innocent and manipulates his
father into buying him an expensive airplane with pedals. Thus is Buddy not only initiated into his
father’s profligacy but into his own ability to deceive and manipulate others
for his own selfish ends.
It’s unclear how aware the
child Buddy is of his own capacity for taking advantage of others, but the
adult Buddy, who is narrating the story, clearly presents the episode as a kind
of fall from childhood innocence.
The story also suggests a
kind of reversal of the prodigal son parable, as before leaving Buddy at the
train station, his prodigal father begs his six-year-old son to kiss him and
declare his love before returning home.
Later, Sook reassures Buddy: “Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s
just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us
all. That’s why everybody is Santa
Claus.”
If Santa Claus is no longer
quite the same, though, Buddy’s belief in God remains intact, and he imagines
“the voice of the Lord telling me something I must do.” He sends his father a postcard, in which he
writes, “…I am lurning to pedal my plan so fast I will soon be in the sky so
keep your eyes open and yes I love you Buddy.”
Is this our reassurance that,
while Buddy may have lost his innocence at one level, he is able to reclaim it
at another? Or is Buddy deceiving
himself about the state of his own heart?
One wonders too if, like that
other son, Icarus, Buddy might be in danger of flying too close to the sun.
In “A Thanksgiving Visitor” a
slightly older Buddy suffers the daily torments of an older bully in school, a
boy named Odd Henderson, “the meanest human creature in my experience.” Buddy confides in Sook the cruelties he is
subjected to, but Sook, a developmentally challenged adult, refuses to believe
anyone could be that evil. She knows the
large Henderson family and their struggles in rural Alabama during the
Depression with a father in prison. She
decides to invite Odd to join their family for Thanksgiving.
Buddy is mortified, treats
Odd rudely when he arrives, and takes an opportunity for revenge. While hiding upstairs he observes Odd steal
Sook’s cameo from the bathroom. As the
family gathers for dinner, Buddy loudly and publically accuses Odd of he
theft. Sook immediately goes upstairs to
check and returns to cover for Odd, stating that the cameo is safely in
place. Buddy is shocked, but even more
so when Odd stands up, confesses the crime, returns the cameo, and excuses
himself, thereby shaming Buddy, who had hoped to shame Odd.
Feeling that Sook has
forsaken him, Buddy retreats outside to the smokehouse, where he fantasizes
about hopping a train or committing suicide.
Later Sook consoles him, but imparts a hard lesson: “Two wrongs never
make a right. It was wrong of him to
take the cameo…(but) what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It
was deliberate…. there is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty.”
As a six-year-old in “One
Christmas,” Buddy may not have the self-awareness to recognize his own
culpability in manipulating his father, but in “A Thanksgiving Visitor,” at
seven or eight, he is forced to confront his own capacity for cruelty.
What Buddy is not aware of
but Sook had discovered when talking to Odd’s mother is that, however cruel Odd
may be at school, he is a great help and comfort to his mother at home.
Years later, just before Odd
joins the Merchant Marines and Buddy is sent off to a military academy, Odd
happens by the house and stops to help Sook and Buddy lift a heavy washtub of
blossoming chrysanthemums up the steps onto the porch. Odd ignores Buddy but is polite to Sook, who
hands him a bouquet of flowers to take to his mother. She calls to him as he walks away, “…be
careful! They’re lions, you know.” Odd
would not have understood, but Buddy would recall how Sook often compared
chrysanthemums to lions: “I always expect them to spring. To turn on me and roar.” Somewhat as Odd had sprung on
Buddy in school, and Buddy, in turn, had sprung on Odd at the Thanksgiving
dinner table.
This image of the
dual-natured chrysanthemums, both beautiful and menacing, embodies the duality
of human nature, capable as it is of both charity and cruelty.
Both stories function as
quasi-confessionals from the adult narrator, looking back on his innocent and
not-so-innocent childhood self. Both
portray the moral complexity of human nature.
Both testify to the wisdom and compassion of a developmentally
challenged adult, whose own moral character surpasses that of a precocious
child.
Both “A Christmas Memory” and
“One Christmas” use the image of flying, two kites “hurrying toward heaven” and
a toy plane in which Buddy imagines himself lifting into the sky. These images convey a sense of transcendence
over the darkness of death and human failure, just as, at the time of the Winter
Solstice, we look forward to the return of the light at the darkest time of
year.
