Orphan Factory (review)

Smith. Plimpton neither refutes nor supports the claim but by its inclusion in the book automatically lends it some credence. A glaring omission is the text of Capote's unfinished manuscript, "Answered Prayers," an excerpt of which was originally published in Esquire magazine. "Answered Prayers ," which Capote had considered his masterpiece, was a thinly veiled portrait of socialites (the "Swans," as he nicknamed them) and their circle. After the excerpt appeared in Esquire, Capote was cast out of this elite group and consequently never finished the manuscript. But because Plimpton doesn't include any excerpts from the story itself, when the incident is discussed, readers feel as if they are at a party where the rest of the guests are in on something they aren't. Since "Answered Prayers" might be one way for Capote to answer his detractors, its omission is peculiar; Plimpton seems to be much more considerate of those who offer rumor and speculation about Capote than of Capote himself. A literary biography certainly shouldn't lionize its subject, and the general consensus is that Capote was petty, vengeful, lonely, and, toward the end of his life, incapacitated by drugs and alcohol. Perhaps Plimpton intends to show that the kind of society to which Capote tried so desperately to endear himself contributed to his pettiness and loneliness, but because there is so much more attention paid to Capote the social climber than to Capote the writer, it's difficult to take this biography very seriously. (KL) Orphan Factory by Charles Simic University of Michigan, 1998, 119 pp., $13.95 The most compelling sections of this collection of nonfiction musings and prose poetry provide the reader with details of Simic's experience as an immigrant from Yugoslavia, his trajectory as a poet, and his early days as a struggling painter and writer in New York. Other essays by the acclaimed poet deal with subjects as diverse as Yugoslavian politics, the seminal importance of photography in modern culture, and the alleged death of poetry. The title essay refers to Simic's native Yugoslavia, where ethnic hatred reigns and "orphan factories and scapegoat farms are the Balkans' chief economy." The piece is filled with images of childhood terror— executions in a neighbor's cornfield, bodies lining the ditches along local roads, rivers choked with corpses— and with memories of illegally fleeing his native land. Unlike many who discuss tensions in the former Yugoslavia, Simic adopts a critically detached stance wherein aU political zealotries are cast in the same terms stated by his elderly mother: "idiots killing idiots." His failure to side with any of the factions in his native land stems from his larger skepticism toward identifying with political movements of any kind, since they survive by eUminating individualism and have been responsible for the vast carnage of the twentieth century. This detachment is also evident in his approach to poetry, which holds that a poet should never be yoked to a didactic purpose or literary school, 216 · The Missouri Review both of which overshadow the function of paradox, the real source of poetry's transcendent beauty. For Simic, poetry boils down to two themes: "How strange I should be alive in this very moment. How strange the knowledge that I shall die one day." Such wonderment in the face of the sublime has long been a staple of his poetry yet, as he reveals in these essays, his mysticism is unalloyed by metaphysical speculation, which he deems to be an obstacle to the experience of mystery and awe. (KH) Life Among the Trolls by Maura Stanton Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998, 86 pp., $11.95 Maura Stanton's fourth book of poems is a beautiful and uneasy examination of what it means tobe a human and a writer. The poems persistently return to realizations of the grotesque underpinnings of art and life. The title poem chronicles the speaker's mutation into one of the trolls that "try to look like humans/ In their wigs and smiling masks/ Hiding their bristly humps,/Their bulbous eyes and horns." The speaker remembers, "Once sponge/ Slipped off a hand I was shaking/ And I felt the hooked claw/Quivering , exposed." The best poems...