Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America’s postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (A Tree of Night, among others), novels and novellas (The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany’s), some of the best travel writing of our time (Local Color), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in The New Yorker (The Duke in His Domain and The Muses Are Heard), a true crime masterpiece (In Cold Blood), several short memoirs about his childhood in the South (A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor, and One Christmas), two plays (The Grass Harp and House of Flowers) and two films (Beat the Devil and The Innocents).
Mr. Capote twice won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in August 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.
SECOND VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2012
Copyright 1950, 1951, © 1956, 1958 by Truman Capote
Copyright renewed 1978, 1979, 1984 by Truman Capote
Copyright renewed 1986 by Alan U. Schwartz
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1958.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this work were originally published in Botteghe Oscure, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mademoiselle.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Capote, Truman.
[Breakfast at Tiffany’s]
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a short novel and three stories / by Truman Capote—1st Vintage International edition]
p. cm.
Contents: Breakfast at Tiffany’s—House of flowers—A diamond guitar—A Christmas memory.
I. Title.
PS3505.A59A6 1993
813’.54—dc2o 93-10163
eISBN: 978-0-345-80305-4
www.vintagebooks.com
Cover design by Megan Wilson
Cover photograph © Horst P. Horst/Condé Nast Archive/CORBIS
v3.1_r1
For Jack Dunphy
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
House of Flowers
A Diamond Guitar
A Christmas Memory
Other Books by This Author
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I AM ALWAYS DRAWN BACK to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again.
Holly Golightly had been a tenant in the old brownstone; she’d occupied the apartment below mine. As for Joe Bell, he ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue; he still does. Both Holly and I used to go there six, seven times a day, not for a drink, not always, but to make telephone calls: during the war a private telephone was hard to come by. Moreover, Joe Bell was good about taking messages, which in Holly’s case was no small favor, for she had a tremendous many.
Of course this was a long time ago, and until last week I hadn’t seen Joe Bell in several years. Off and on we’d kept in touch, and occasionally I’d stopped by his bar when passing through the neighborhood; but actually we’d never been strong friends except in as much as we were both friends of Holly Golightly. Joe Bell hasn’t an easy nature, he admits it himself, he says it’s because he’s a bachelor and has a sour stomach. Anyone who knows him will tell you he’s a hard man to talk to. Impossible if you don’t share his fixations, of which Holly is one. Some others are: ice hockey, Weimaraner dogs, Our Gal Sunday (a soap serial he has listened to for fifteen years), and Gilbert and Sullivan—he claims to be related to one or the other, I can’t remember which.
And so when, late last Tuesday afternoon, the telephone rang and I heard “Joe Bell here,” I knew it must be about Holly. He didn’t say so, just: “Can you rattle right over here? It’s important,” and there was a croak of excitement in his froggy voice.
I took a taxi in a downpour of October rain, and on my way I even thought she might be there, that I would see Holly again.
But there was no one on the premises except the proprietor. Joe Bell’s is a quiet place compared to most Lexington Avenue bars. It boasts neither neon nor television. Two old mirrors reflect the weather from the streets; and behind the bar, in a niche surrounded by photographs of ice-hockey stars, there is always a large bowl of fresh flowers that Joe Bell himself arranges with matronly care. That is what he was doing when I came in.
“Naturally,” he said, rooting a gladiola deep into the bowl, “naturally I wouldn’t have got you over here if it wasn’t I wanted your opinion. It’s peculiar. A very peculiar thing has happened.”
“You heard from Holly?”
He fingered a leaf, as though uncertain of how to answer. A small man with a fine head of coarse white hair, he has a bony, sloping face better suited to someone far taller; his complexion seems permanently sunburned: now it grew even redder. “I can’t say exactly heard from her. I mean, I don’t know. That’s why I want your opinion. Let me build you a drink. Something new. They call it a White Angel,” he said, mixing one-half vodka, one-half gin, no vermouth. While I drank the result, Joe Bell stood sucking on a Tums and turning over in his mind what he had to tell me. Then: “You recall a certain Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi? A gentleman from Japan.”
“From California,” I said, recalling Mr. Yunioshi perfectly. He’s a photographer on one of the picture magazines, and when I knew him he lived in the studio apartment on the top floor of the brownstone.
“Don’t go mixing me up. All I’m asking, you know who I mean? Okay. So last night who comes waltzing in here but this selfsame Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi. I haven’t seen him, I guess it’s over two years. And where do you think he’s been those two years?”
“Africa.”
Joe Bell stopped crunching on his Tums, his eyes narrowed. “So how did you know?”
“Read it in Winchell.” Which I had, as a matter of fact.
He rang open his cash register, and produced a manila envelope. “Well, see did you read this in Winchell.”
In the envelope were three photographs, more or less the same, though taken from different angles: a tall delicate Negro man wearing a calic
“Now what do you make of that?” said Joe Bell, satisfied with my puzzlement.
“It looks like her.”
“Listen, boy,” and he slapped his hand on the bar, “it is her. Sure as I’m a man fit to wear britches. The little Jap knew it was her the minute he saw her.”
“He saw her? In Africa?”
“Well. Just the statue there. But it comes to the same thing. Read the facts for yourself,” he said, turning over one of the photographs. On the reverse was written: Wood Carving, S Tribe, Tococul, East Anglia, Christmas Day, 1956.
He said, “Here’s what the Jap says,” and the story was this: On Christmas day Mr. Yunioshi had passed with his camera through Tococul, a village in the tangles of nowhere and of no interest, merely a congregation of mud huts with monkeys in the yards and buzzards on the roofs. He’d decided to move on when he saw suddenly a Negro squatting in a doorway carving monkeys on a walking stick. Mr. Yunioshi was impressed and asked to see more of his work. Whereupon he was shown the carving of the girl’s head: and felt, so he told Joe Bell, as if he were falling in a dream. But when he offered to buy it the Negro cupped his private parts in his hand (apparently a tender gesture, comparable to tapping one’s heart) and said no. A pound of salt and ten dollars, a wristwatch and two pounds of salt and twenty dollars, nothing swayed him. Mr. Yunioshi was in all events determined to learn how the carving came to be made. It cost him his salt and his watch, and the incident was conveyed in African and pig-English and finger-talk. But it would seem that in the spring of that year a party of three white persons had appeared out of the brush riding horseback. A young woman and two men. The men, both red-eyed with fever, were forced for several weeks to stay shut and shivering in an isolated hut, while the young woman, having presently taken a fancy to the woodcarver, shared the woodcarver’s mat.
“I don’t credit that part,” Joe Bell said squeamishly. “I know she had her ways, but I don’t think she’d be up to anything as much as that.”
“And then? ”
“Then nothing,” he shrugged. “By and by she went like she come, rode away on a horse.”
“Alone, or with the two men?”
Joe Bell blinked. “With the two men, I guess. Now the Jap, he asked about her up and down the country. But nobody else had ever seen her.” Then it was as if he could feel my own sense of letdown transmitting itself to him, and he wanted no part of it. “One thing you got to admit, it’s the only definite news in I don’t know how many”—he counted on his fingers: there weren’t enough—“years. All I hope, I hope she’s rich. She must be rich. You got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.”
“She’s probably never set foot in Africa,” I said, believing it; yet I could see her there, it was somewhere she would have gone. And the carved head: I looked at the photographs again.
“You know so much, where is she?”
“Dead. Or in a crazy house. Or married. I think she’s married and quieted down and maybe right in this very city.”
He considered a moment. “No,” he said, and shook his head. “I’ll tell you why. If she was in this city I’d have seen her. You take a man that likes to walk, a man like me, a man’s been walking in the streets going on ten or twelve years, and all those years he’s got his eye out for one person, and nobody’s ever her, don’t it stand to reason she’s not there? I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any skinny girl that walks fast and straight—” He paused, as though too aware of how intently I was looking at him. “You think I’m round the bend?”
“It’s just that I didn’t know you’d been in love with her. Not like that.”
I was sorry I’d said it; it disconcerted him. He scooped up the photographs and put them back in their envelope. I looked at my watch. I hadn’t any place to go, but I thought it was better to leave.
“Hold on,” he said, gripping my wrist. “Sure I loved her. But it wasn’t that I wanted to touch her.” And he added, without smiling: “Not that I don’t think about that side of things. Even at my age, and I’ll be sixty-seven January ten. It’s a peculiar fact—but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind more and more. I don’t remember thinking about it so much even when I was a youngster and it’s every other minute. Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden. Whenever I read in the paper about an old man disgracing himself, I know it’s because of this burden. But”—he poured himself a jigger of whiskey and swallowed it neat—“I’ll never disgrace myself. And I swear, it never crossed my mind about Holly. You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”
Two men came into the bar, and it seemed the moment to leave. Joe Bell followed me to the door. He caught my wrist again. “Do you believe it?”
“That you didn’t want to touch her?”
“I mean about Africa.”
At that moment I couldn’t seem to remember the story, only the image of her riding away on a horse. “Anyway, she’s gone.”
“Yeah,” he said, opening the door. “Just gone.”
Outside, the rain had stopped, there was only a mist of it in the air, so I turned the corner and walked along the street where the brownstone stands. It is a street with trees that in the summer make cool patterns on the pavement; but now the leaves were yellowed and mostly down, and the rain had made them slippery, they skidded underfoot. The brownstone is midway in the block, next to a church where a blue tower-clock tolls the hours. It has been sleeked up since my day; a smart black door has replaced the old frosted glass, and gray elegant shutters frame the windows. No one I remember still lives there except Madame Sapphia Spanella, a husky coloratura who every afternoon went roller-skating in Central Park. I know she’s still there because I went up the steps and looked at the mailboxes. It was one of these mailboxes that had first made me aware of Holly Golightly.
I’D BEEN LIVING IN THE house about a week when I noticed that the mailbox belonging to Apt. 2 had a name-slot fitted with a curious card. Printed, rather Cartier-formal, it read: Miss Holiday Golightly; and, underneath, in the corner, Traveling. It nagged me like a tune: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling.
One night, it was long past twelve, I woke up at the sound of Mr. Yunioshi calling down the stairs. Since he lived on the top floor, his voice fell through the whole house, exasperated and stern. “Miss Golightly! I must protest!”
The voice that came back, welling up from the bottom of the stairs, was silly-young and self-amused. “Oh, darling, I am sorry. I lost the goddamn key.”
“You cannot go on ringing my bell. You must please, please have yourself a key made.”
“But I lose them all.”
“I work, I have to sleep,” Mr. Yunioshi shouted. “But always you are ringing my bell …”
“Oh, don’t be angry, you dear little man: I won’t do it again. And if you promise not to be angry”—her voice was coming nearer, she was climbing the stairs—“I might let you take those pictures we mentioned.”
By now I’d left my bed and opened the door an inch. I could hear Mr. Yunioshi’s silence: hear, because it was accompanied by an audible change of breath.
“When?” he said.
The girl laughed. “Sometime,” she answered, slurring the word.
“Any time,” he said, and closed his door.
I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached th
She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically. He was short and vast, sun-lamped and pomaded, a man in a buttressed pin-stripe suit with a red carnation withering in the lapel. When they reached her door she rummaged her purse in search of a key, and took no notice of the fact that his thick lips were nuzzling the nape of her neck. At last, though, finding the key and opening her door, she turned to him cordially: “Bless you, darling—you were sweet to see me home.”
“Hey, baby!” he said, for the door was closing in his face.
“Yes, Harry?”
“Harry was the other guy. I’m Sid. Sid Arbuck. You like me.”
“I worship you, Mr. Arbuck. But good night, Mr. Arbuck.”
Mr. Arbuck stared with disbelief as the door shut firmly. “Hey, baby, let me in, baby. You like me, baby. I’m a liked guy. Didn’t I pick up the check, five people, your friends, I never seen them before? Don’t that give me the right you should like me? You like me, baby.”
He tapped on the door gently, then louder; finally he took several steps back, his body hunched and lowering, as though he meant to charge it, crash it down. Instead, he plunged down the stairs, slamming a fist against the wall. Just as he reached the bottom, the door of the girl’s apartment opened and she poked out her head.