December 29: Good Read, Truman Capote, Fruitcake Weather, New Cartoon

”Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”

One of my favorite Christmas novellas is by Truman Capote.  A Christmas Memory is about a young Capote (“Buddy”)  and Miss Sook, a child-like old maid cousin Capote lived with as a youngster in Alabama.  The plot centers on Miss Sook and Buddy’s annual tradition of making fruitcakes for family, friends, missionaries, and even Eleanor Roosevelt.  They collect pecans.  They buy whiskey.  They go hunting for the perfect Christmas tree.  They make tinfoil angels.  They give Christmas kites to each other.  Reading the book is like staring at a daguerreotype, tinged in sepia and clouded around the edges with memory.

A Christmas Memory was the first book I ever read by Truman Capote.  I knew Capote’s name, had seen pictures of him.  I didn’t know anything about his alcoholism and drug addiction.  I didn’t know he was gay.  I didn’t know he had written the first nonfiction novel (In Cold Blood), a book that changed the literary landscape.  I didn’t know he started working for The New Yorker as a copyboy when he was a teenager.  I didn’t know he was eventually fired from that job for offending Robert Frost.  Basically, I didn’t know anything about Capote when I first encountered his tale of Buddy and Miss Sook.

In a way, I’m glad I didn’t know any of those details about him.  It would have colored my enjoyment of A Christmas Memory.  There’s something incredibly innocent and beautiful in Capote’s prose.  It touches a place that, I think, exists in most readers’ Christmas remembrances.  It’s a place that’s warm and happy.  A place where darkness and anger and death are held at bay.  A place where Buddy and Miss Sook can forever make their fruitcakes and decorate their tree.

Capote starts the book in much the same way Dickens begins A Christmas Carol, with the hint of fairy tale:

Imagine a morning in late November.  A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.  Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town.  A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it.  Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

Dickens begins his Christmas story in earnest with the words “Once upon a time”; Capote does much the same with his instruction to “Imagine a morning…”  Both writers invoke a primal childhood response, telling us to get ready for a good story.  The scene Capote describes could be Grandma’s kitchen in “Little Red Riding Hood.”  It’s warm and inviting.  It reminds me of my mother making sugar cookies on a December afternoon, of the smell of ham baking in the oven on Christmas Eve.

Of course, Capote cannot hold off the real world forever.  Throughout the novella, it keeps intruding on Sook and Buddy’s adventures.  Angry relatives chide Sook for letting Buddy get tipsy on leftover fruitcake whiskey (“A child of seven!  whiskey on his breath!  are you out of your mind?  feeding a child of seven!  must be loony!  road to ruination!  remember Cousin Kate?  Uncle Charlie?  Uncle Charlie’s brother-in-law?  shame!  scandal!  humiliation!  kneel, pray, beg the Lord!”).  A rich mill owner’s wife tries to buy Sook and Buddy’s perfect Christmas tree (“Giveya twobits cash for that ol tree.”).  For most of the story, however, Capote maintains the silver tones of memory.  Until the end, when reality reasserts itself.

Capote writes,

…a morning arrives in November, a leafless, birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim:  “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!”

And when that happens, I know it.  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 loose like a kite on a broken string.  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.

New Year’s Eve is in a couple of days.  We will gather at my parents’ house on December 31 to play games and eat a lot of food.  An old friend who lives in New Zealand will be at the party this year.  He was the best man at my wedding.  At midnight, we will hold up cups of juice and toast memories of the past and look to the future.  We will reflect on all that is good and happy in our lives.  For one night, we will be Buddy and Miss Sook, eternally young, eternally together.

Saint Marty will hold onto that Christmas memory. 

The Confessions of Saint Marty

December 8: Winding River, Good Read, "American Primitive," New Cartoon

They walked along the road; Scrooge recognizing every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.  Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers.  All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

This little scene from Stave Two of A Christmas Carol is straight out of a Currier and Ives print.  In fact, Currier and Ives owes a lot to Charles Dickens, who pretty much created the whole stereotypical snowy, idyllic Christmas landscape described in this passage.  Weather and nature play an important role in the book, indicating happiness or sorrow, mirth or dearth.

Mary Oliver, the author of American Primitive, writes about nature.  In fact, most of the poems in this  collection bear titles indicating the importance of the natural world to Oliver's work:  "Mushrooms," "Egrets," "A Poem for the Blue Heron," "Rain in Ohio," "Skunk Cabbage," "Blackberries," "The Sea," "In Blackwater Woods."  Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this collection, and it epitomizes everything that is great about her poems.

Oliver works through nature to touch upon greater questions of survival and spirituality and silence and love.  She uses an eye that, at once, sees the minutiae of foxes and herons and dark spiders, as well as the cosmic of landscape and weather and space.  In the poem "Flying," Oliver writes,

...
you stare like an animal into
the blinding clouds
with the snapped chain of your life,
the life you know:
the deeply affectionate earth,
the familiar landscapes
slowly turning
thousands of feet below.

Oliver revels in the rich, fecund life of swamp and sea and forest.  And through that rich life, she's able to excavate the even more fertile spaces of the heart and soul.  She's an American primitive and and American treasure.

Reading Mary Oliver makes Saint Marty want to give up poetry, because he will never approach the perfection of poems like this one:

First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into the night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things;
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect.
and nightly turn from.  Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain--not a single
answer has been found--
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

Confessions of Saint Marty