Understanding Truman Capote

Chapter 6 Breakfast at Tiffany’s

chapter 6 Breakfast at Tiffany’s Jerry: [Breakfast at Tiffany’s] is kinda old, isn’t it? George: [The book club] wanted to read a Truman Capote book. Jerry: Oh, sure . . . Truman Capote. George: He’s a great writer. Jerry: Oh, yeah. George: Did you ever read anything by him? Jerry: No. You? George: Nah. Seinfeld, “The Couch” (1994) When George Costanza (Jason Alexander) joins a book club to impress a woman, he assumes that reading Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s—at only “ninety pages”—will be a breeze. He soon realizes that he has trouble concentrating on anything unrelated to sports and decides to track down a copy of the film instead. At the end of this Seinfeld episode, the book club meets, and George disagrees with his would-be-girlfriend’s interpretation of female independence in the novel: “After all, [Holly] did get together with George Peppard. I mean, Fred.” To which she replies, “George . . . Fred’s gay.” This humorous exchange certainly pokes fun at the ways popular culture often appropriates literature. It replaces complexity (in this case regarding sexuality) with the conventional, and it encourages passive consumption (watching a film) over intellectual engagement. In short, it cultivates aliteracy —a willingness to accept Capote’s “greatness” as a writer without actually reading his works. George not only goes to great lengths to avoid reading, but he also wants to be entertained during the screening of the film, asking for dimmed lights, popcorn, grape juice, and a seat on the couch closest to 96 Understanding trUman capote the television. These trimmings provide a physical comfort that parallels the reassurances offered by a happy Hollywood ending. The substitution of the film for the book also speaks to the tremendous popularity of the 1961 adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn. In many respects George’s preference for Hepburn’s Holly reflects a choice that continues in the American cultural imagination. Our investment in the film’s message about the redemptive power of heterosexual love and monogamy persists, and we do not seem to want anything—not even the book—to challenge them. This Seinfeld episode offers a clever counterpoint to the ways that Breakfast at Tiffany’s has become a cultural shorthand for true love and glamorous New York nightlife.1 Most popular allusions to the work either celebrate the film’s message of idealized romance or lament its failed promise. The 1994 song “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something, for example, does both in response to a disintegrating romantic relationship. The couple in the song has only a vague recollection of the movie, but the singer clings to the hope that this shared experience might somehow resuscitate their love. Likewise in the pilot episode of Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) bemoans the romantic difficulties facing single women in New York City: “Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7 a.m., and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.” Although she claims that true love has “fled the co-op,” this sentiment does not prevent her and her friends from pursuing the happy ending of Hepburn’s Holly for the next six years. Whether it serves as an image for finding personal contentment through love or as an excuse to make Tiffany’s a destination spot for every tour bus in Manhattan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s continues to have a cultural capital far removed from the novel. Like Roland Barthes’s notion of the face of Garbo, the image of Hepburn looking in the window of Tiffany’s represents something beyond itself. It has become an idea that continues to inspire romantic fantasy.2 Yet our investment in Hepburn’s Holly, as well as the comforting messages of the film, has skewed our understanding of Capote’s work and the era in which it was written—the 1950s. It has, in effect, robbed the book of its historical and social significance. Much like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) tells the retrospective story of a captivating, enigmatic, and morally problematic figure through the eyes of a nostalgic narrator. Both novels depict postwar escapism and a narcissistic youth culture that rejects middle-class values through late-night parties, drinking, and sexual freedom. The nameless narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s first learns of Holly Golightly in 1943 when he rents...