Book review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote
“Would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”
When someone asks “have you ever read a book that made you cry?”, well yes, this is the one. It leaves you streaming like meadows, darling. If someone wonders if there is any iconic film and novel are so equally superb that you can’t say which is better, it’s right here. What a trip. I’ve read this twice.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is Truman Capote’s scintillating masterpiece, the perfect antidote to the green meanies and the greatest American novel yet. It’s also my candidate for the most classy piece of literary art ever set in a city. You haven’t read it? “It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I’ll give you two.”
The lead character is Holly Golightly, a waif perhaps but a master manipulator who deploys supreme charm against selected wealthy targets, but also as a defence against insecurity, loneliness and her omnipresent fear of poverty. She’s empowered because she can make men jump to attend her but she’s also dependent on their generosity, which will only last as long as her coquettish allure and market value. She’s unstable emotionally, but so are we all and that’s how I for one connect with this damaged bird of a character.
“My yardstick is how somebody treats me”, she spills. If they’re going to treat her as a lady and symbol of elegance, she’ll be dreamy and unforgettable for them, but she’s secretly scared that she has no defence if someone calls out her business model as teasing rich men for cash. “If I do feel guilty, I guess it’s because I let him go on dreaming when I wasn’t dreaming a bit” — applicable for every man swept up in her elfin spell? She charms, taps her admirers for cash and then doesn’t consummate, leaving these men hanging. Is Paul Varjack an exception? Perhaps he is the best positioned to understand her and accept without any judgement hanging over those moral compromises. He is a kept man, the paid-for pet stud of a rich businesswoman. As with the French film Priceless, they’re both compromised and equivalent, just trying to peddle their way into shallower waters.
The question is about whether she is too far gone to still be able to form a real, loyal and lasting human attachment. Has she withdrawn so far behind her defences that she has become… her cat?
The couple are both naturally inset in the fabric of New York (of 1961) and they ‘work the city’, but both also see themselves as apart from the metropolis and the people who infest it, just like Holly’s cat: “I haven’t any right to give him one [a name]. He’ll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other: he’s an independent, and so am I.”
In the words of the book, she’s a phony, but she’s such a delightful and sympathetic fake that it’s impossible to think any less of her for it. She believes the dream she has created is quite real, so it becomes real as other people want to believe it (the same principle as believing that paper money has value; if you believe it, it does). The real thing, if there ever was such a woman, would be lesser in comparison with this character because Holly Golightly is The Ideal, which real people can only ever be a shadow of [see Plato’s allegory of the cave, aka the Theory of Forms]. “You’re wonderful. Unique. I love you.” They do. That uniqueness is so true because the character sixty or seventy years ago set a bar as the role model of millions of women to aspire to — and yet none has ever matched up. How unique, how magnificent and durable that impression which a male author created must evidently be. Perhaps it could have only been written by a man because women can’t conjure plinth-like respect for the feminine when it skips reality.
It’s time I wound this up. “But it’s Sunday, Mr Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.” I’m ashamed it’s a review jam full of quotes as that’s just too cheap, hardly Tiffany’s, but I wanted to give a reflection of the eloquent sense of eternal truth and sadness behind the human condition on which this remarkable tour de force is painted. I can’t believe Holly’s character comes from observation, or imagination, or insight, so it seems likely a divine muse is to blame.
“You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well, baby you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the West by Tulip, Texas, or on the East by Somaliland, it’s wherever you go, because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
Culturally then, what do we take from this book?
My, that’s easy. Simply everything.
