A previously unknown short story by Truman Capote, discovered written in pencil in a notebook then carefully deciphered and transcribed, will be published on Friday.
“Capote is, I would say, probably one of the top five short story writers of the 20th century,” said Andrew F Gulli, editor of the Strand Magazine, who discovered the story and has found other lost works by acknowledged masters.
Capote, who died aged 59 in 1984, is best remembered for the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood (1966), and for his close friendship with Harper Lee, author of the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
The newly discovered Capote story, Another Day in Paradise, concerns a moment in the unhappy life of Iris Greentree, an American living in a villa in Sicily. Despite the beauty of her surroundings, Greentree clashes with her Italian maid, devours Time magazine for glimpses of home and meets Mrs Daphne Beatty-Bayliss, an “immense” British woman leading two poodles by “rhinestoned leashes”.
Like the stones on those leads, flashes of Capote’s waspish style reflect the Mediterranean light. Greentree laments “those tintinnabulating bells that woke her at dawn, at midnight, at any hour the fool monsignore decreed”. The maid, Giovanna, resents “the signorina” as “a mad old maid. Mad and mean and stingy and rich.” Greentree does not share that judgment, noting: “What is the most invisible object in the world? An American without money.”
The story is not a happy one but it is rich in description, conjuring a lush scene in which a badly made caffè-latte can cause “goat’s milk [to] curdle the sky”.
Citing references including to cruise ship travel, Gulli dates the setting to the 1950s. When Capote wrote the story is much less apparent.
Asked why he thought the story was not published, Gulli said: “The works that ended up paying bills for authors were not short stories. They were novels. But some authors really excelled at short stories and loved writing them and Capote was one of those people. And if you find something completed by Capote, you can count on it being something that’s very, very satisfying.
“In several correspondences he said he loved stories because they forced him to be succinct. They forced him to write something very entertaining, in a very small package. When it came to short stories, with Truman Capote, you knew you were going to get something that was a very fine quality. I was surprised that this [story] was not published.”
Gulli is based in Detroit but found the story in papers at the Library of Congress in Washington. The same trip yielded a story by James M Cain, the noir genius behind The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, which Gulli published this year.
“God knows I love writers and magazines, [and] publishers, but sometimes you just need an editor to find that little pearl in the seashell,” Gulli said. “I have to say it was quite a nice harvest, finding those two stories at the same time.”
In the case of Capote he was “surprised because I had another go at looking at the papers, years ago, and somehow this was missed”. This time, he found an “old red- and gold-scrolled Florentine notebook”, and within it the story.
“That stationer is still open,” he said, “in St Mark’s, in Venice, and they’re one of the oldest stationers in all of Europe.”
Capote’s script, in pencil, proved “extremely difficult to decipher. Our transcriber … had a difficult time. The fiction editor had a very difficult time and finally Louise Schwartz at the Truman Capote estate, who is an accomplished writer in her own right, looked at the manuscript and gave us a lot of helpful input. So it took a village to bring this into the wonderful order it is in now.”
As printed by the Strand, Another Day in Paradise contains a footnote, concerning what appears to be a coinage all of Capote’s own.
The word is “foranesi”, defined as “a combination of the first part of the word “foràneo” (‘outside the city’) with the suffix ‘esi’, which indicates ‘those from a place’”.
“I think he was being clever,” Gulli said. “I think he was using his humor. I consulted four Italian translators and everybody had a different idea. Ultimately, I spoke to a wonderful translator who said, ‘OK, this is what I’m going to say.’ It’s an 85% chance that it is ‘foranesi’ but we can never say it 100% with Truman Capote, because you just don’t know. He was not a native Italian speaker.”
He was, however, a master of the English language.
Another Day in Paradise “kind of has the feeling of Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, Gulli said, “where there are people … trying to find their way. This story is about two characters. One is weighed down by the past and finds it difficult to process struggles in life with any form of personal growth. And she’s very bitter. And the other character has lost so much, has really, really suffered, but [is trying] to form a meaningful human connection.
“And that’s what I love about Capote. He wrote stories that were not necessarily about the supernatural or something falling in the night, but just about loss, bitterness, an expat in Italy, and he turned it into something that has a very profound message.”
The story ends on a mordant note typical of Capote, about the price of a drink at a cafe. But to Gulli, even the ending “has a message of hope to it, where rather than look at the character who is very embittered and deterred … you focus on the moral linchpin of the story. And that’s the person who, despite struggle, despite personal tragedy, tries to move on, tries to form a human connection and tries to be more optimistic about the future.”
