Sextet: T.S. Eliot & Truman Capote & Others, Signed by John Malcolm Brinnin
[Signed Presentation by John Malcolm Brinnin] Brinnin, John Malcolm. Sextet: T.S. Eliot & Truman Capote & Others. First Edition. 1981. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is warmly inscribed, “Inscribed, with pleasure, for Fred Vanacore, John Malcolm, Key West, 1 × 14 × 87.”
For someone who considered his society friends fair game when it came to his writing, Truman Capote was surprisingly displeased when his literary friends turned the tables and wrote about him. On such person who drew Truman’s wrath was John Malcolm Brinnin, with whom he bonded in the mid-forties when both were in residence at Yaddo, the Upstate New York writers' colony. After publication of this book, Truman dismissed Brinnin as someone he barely knew and had not seen in many years. That was untrue. They had been close friends, and the real reason Capote was deflecting was because Brinnin hit too close to home. From the beginning, Brinnin understood not only the magnitude of Capote’s talent but the ferocity of his demons. About one third of the book concerns, Capote, Brinnin's most important literary friendship. The remainder chapters include reminisces of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elizabeth Bowen, the Sitwells, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and T.S. Eliot.
“More hungry for attention than anyone else, [Truman’s] learned to bestow what he craves. For recipients, enchantment; for himself, a deeper longing, a bigger audience.”
--John Malcolm Brinnin