Two blog posts in a row, what??
This morning I finished reading an anthology volume called Great Modern Short Novels or something to that effect. The novellas were:
- Lost Horizon (James Hilton)
- The Red Pony (John Steinbeck)
- The Third Man (Graham Greene)
- A Single Pebble (John Hersey)
- The Light In The Piazza (Elizabeth Spencer)
- Seize the Day (Saul Bellow)
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote)
I had never read any of them and I enjoyed them all. I had seen the film adaptations of Lost Horizon, The Third Man, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but even those held some surprises in the reading. Breakfast at Tiffany’s specifically is much more modern than the film version would have you believe.
Among multiple pieces of dialog that I found surprising for 1958 was when Holly Golightly was talking about marriage and said “If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn’t pick Jose. Nehru, he’s nearer the mark. Wendell Willkie. I’d settle for [Greta] Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or—listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man O’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Not that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.”
Same sex marriage being casually discussed by a character in a novel in 1958? And it’s far from the only instance in the book. On another occasion she suggests that Rusty Trawler should “settle down and play house with a nice fatherly truck driver”.
That’s not the only dialog that seems more apropos to 2020 than 1958. You know that part in the movie where she’s trying to get her cat to leave and she tells the cat to “Beat it!” and “Scram!”? In the book she also tells the cat to “Fuck off!” Hard for me to picture Audrey Hepburn voicing that dialog in the movie.
Like I said, modern. The story has problematic elements, but I am just noting that I was a bit surprised by Holly Golightly, despite seeing the film version. In the book she is barely 19 years old but she’s had eleven lovers (“not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count”) she talks about dykes and gay marriage and bi-sexuality, drops an F-bomb, happily takes money from sugar daddies, and rather than staying with Paul at the end, she leaves the country and he ends up with the cat. This is hardly a new revelation (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/21/was-holly-golightly-bisexual/) but it was definitely not the BaT I am familiar with.