Private Light

A TREE OF NIGHT AND OTHER STORIES (209 pp.)--Truman Capofe--Random House ($2.75).

Many writers need to live with their experiences for ten or 15 years before they can make first-class fiction out of them. If this is true of 24-year-old Truman Capote, it could explain why the two best stories in this collection are about remarkable ten-and twelve-year-olds. These two stories, Children on Their Birthdays and Jug of Silver, are written with full sympathy for their juveniles and an effortless command of the scene. They could become small classics of their kind.

Capote's style is pure and free from writer's cramp in dealing with such subjects as the devotions and heroisms of children and the world of intense phenomena in which children live. His description of Miss Bobbit, in Children on Their Birthdays, may not be for everybody, but it is a fair example of good Capote: "By now it was almost nightfall, a firefly hour, blue as milkglass; and birds like arrows swooped together and swept into the folds of trees. Before storms, leaves and flowers appear to burn with a private light, color, and Miss Bobbit, got up in a little white skirt like a powderpuff and with strips of gold-glittering tinsel ribboning her hair, seemed, set against the darkening all around, to contain this illuminated quality . . . She stood that way for a good long while, and Aunt El said it was right smart of her."

Capote has a harder time with adult motives and emotions; he almost never represents them with success. The life of maturity, as rendered in these stories, is a kind of macabre carnival in which the characters float, entranced, from one sensational rousing to another, and all the sideshows are put on by the powers of darkness. Figures that symbolize evil, dissolution and death are either beautiful or hypnotic; ordinary grownups are scornfully and crudely caricatured. All this involves a good deal of hectic overwriting. Truman Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (TIME, Jan. 26, 1948), won loud praise from a few critics, softer praise from some better ones. He is certainly one of the most talented writers lately out of school, but his future would look wider if he could break away from the overripe magnolia and do more work on bread & meat material. His publishers, who have been selecting rather tender jacket photographs with which to publicize him, could help, too, by respecting his youth instead of exploiting it.

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