The story was written in pencil in a red and gold notebook that Truman Capote bought in Venice at Italy’s oldest paper shop, the Legatoria Piazzesi, an ancient little place with a faded blue and white sign.
A researcher who found the notebook in Capote’s papers and began to read it was transported to a mountain villa in Sicily where a Miss Iris Greentree sits with her morning cup of coffee and contemplates with great bitterness the gorgeousness of the landscape all around her. “Help! Help!” she says to herself. “Another day in paradise.”
Entitled “Another Day in Paradise,” the short story is being published for the first time by The Strand Magazine.
“I think it’s very, very good,” Laurence Leamer, a biographer of Capote, said after looking at it. “Usually when they find stuff like this, there’s a reason it wasn’t published. But this deserves to be [considered] an important part of his work.”
Andrew Gulli, managing editor of The Strand, said it came to light a few months ago when he was looking for new works by the novelist James M Cain in the Library of Congress. He asked the researcher he had hired to search through Capote’s papers too.
“I had very little expectations of finding anything,” he said. Capote was not “like some of the pulp writers … who have 100 stories, 200 stories,” he said. So when the researcher found the story he was “very surprised”.
“Usually when they find stuff like this, there’s a reason it wasn’t published.”
It was written in pencil and parts of it were hard to decipher. Louisa Jordan, the magazine’s fiction editor, spent hours “poring over Capote’s handwriting, deciphering his Italian and hunting down obscure Sicilian words”, Gulli wrote, in an editorial.
The story’s heroine, Miss Greentree, had forsaken marriage to serve as her mother’s secretary, traveling companion and nurse. Upon her mother’s death she is left “a grim, gabled, twenty-room house in a suburb of Philadelphia”. She sells it and ups sticks to a cheap corner of Sicily, to the village of Taros, where she is beguiled by Signor Carlo, who persuades her to spend all her savings on a patch of mountainside he owns and to pay him, at an extortionate rate, to build upon it La Bella Vista.
Then he drops her to devote his charms to other new arrivals. The locals say she has been jilted but “she had never been in love with the man: worse — she’d trusted him”, Capote writes. She had thought herself in paradise, but “as Signor Carlo’s betrayal grew apparent, it was as though a magician had shown her the secret of his art: Taros became an explained trick, a snare of sun and air …” And she is trapped there.
Sitting with her coffee, she cries for help, “blinking her eyes against the stark, once-blissful sun that burned in a sky of idiotic blue”, bitterly contemplating almond trees “snowily flowering in the immaculate sunshine”, and not even wanting to glance to her left at Mount Etna, “its eternal smoke spiraling skyward”.
Leamer, who wrote Capote’s Women: a true story of love, betrayal, and a swan song for an era, said that Capote, who may be best known for the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, “basically was a miniaturist” and a natural short story writer. In this one, “the sense of detail is extraordinary, the right detail, whatever it is”, he said. “He just understood it so well, and he knew Sicily.”
Capote, like his heroine, had sailed for Sicily on a Norwegian ship in 1950 with his partner, Jack Dunphy, to Taormina and a villa called Fontana Vecchia, a pink house on a hillside, like the villa in his short story.
“I don’t think he’s ever written about that part of his life before,” Leamer said. “Certainly not in this way. It made me realize once again what a great writer he was. You see what we lost with his early death.”
Will Pavia is the New York correspondent for The Times of London
