Love as a Moral Challenge
On Truman Capote's wistful novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's".
I am always drawn back to the novels I read in my very early twenties. This was the time when I first began to take books seriously as LITERATURE, when I first turned to them for more than the story, more than a single reading, as models for the life (more accurately, the lives, because we’re not singular) that I wanted to live. It was also the time I decided writing was something I was going to do, that I would give up comfort in return for a few golden hours of crafting sentences out of the rough timber of words.
I lived in a cramped, cold apartment with a series of roommates; I ate tuna from the can (all I could afford); I worked as a cleaner before the sun had risen so my day would be free for writing. It wasn’t a comfortable way to live, and I looked forward to a future I knew was almost within reach — I just had to stretch far enough, want it hard enough. Back then, I waited for tomorrow to come and life to start. Now, I find myself looking back fondly at that time of simplicity and idealism. That’s probably why I return to the books I read back then.
One of those books was Truman Capote’s wistful novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I recently found myself eager to return to it, for the nostalgic reasons mentioned above and because the book I was reading at the time kept reminding me of what Capote captures so lucidly. That other book was Emma Pattee’s recent novel, Tilt. In one scene, the heavily pregnant protagonist gives her unborn child some rather cynical life advice. Here’s what she calls “the short version” of the dubious guidance:
“The short version is that nobody told us (us being me and your father and everyone who grew up watching Britney Spears and LeBron James explode from nothingness into white-hot stars) that it is worse to try and fail than to not try at all. Because when you don’t try, you can always imagine the life you could have lived.”
What hurts the most is the proximity to success, the outstretched fingertips nearly touching the hem of Midas’ robe and turning you to the gold you believe you should be. Nostalgia is the sharp sting of homecoming, of briefly regaining something distant; we need a good word for this pain of almost-but-not-quite attaining the desired thing. This experience demands of our language at least a scrap of letters to capture and express it. Absent that, Pattee offers us a useful (and searingly beautiful) set of phrases that do the job — she describes this loss of something just out of reach as “capsized opportunity, the stench of potential, fermented”.
The distinct whiff of this fermented potential hangs over Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “I am always drawn back,” its unnamed narrator tells us in the opening line, “to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.” The framing device that occupies these first pages sees the narrator wandering mentally and then physically back through the streets of brownstones “where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment”. Despite the “tobacco-spit” colour of the walls and its cramped confines, the apartment represented what he was reaching out for at that early stage in his career:
“[With] all its gloom, it was still 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.”
The nearness and therefore the not-yet-attained status of life is so clear in all of these details. The fact that this was his first place of his own (and the cliché is correct: you don’t forget your first) carries the implication of homes yet to be lived in; the books are there to be one day read; the pencils in their jar are not yet sharpened but, like the books, waiting; and our narrator is himself in the act of becoming. Life is on the way but not here yet.
A Stranger Who’s a Friend
From these memories, the narrator travels physically back to Joe Bell’s bar, with the idea to finally write about the woman he used to go to the bar with, “six, seven times a day”: Holly Golightly. In a few pages that on their own would make a wonderful short story, Joe Bell’s own sense of longing, painfully and eternally unresolved, sets the stage for the novella to come. He tells our narrator a strange story about Mr Yunioshi, a photographer they both knew years before, who’d recently been to Africa:
“On Christmas Day Mr Yunioshi had passed with his camera through Tococul, a village in the tangles of nowhere and of no interest.” He was about to leave the village when he spotted a man carving monkeys on a walking stick. On asking to see more of the artisan’s work, Mr Yunioshi was shown a carving of a woman’s head. A round of bargaining ensued, and at the cost of “his salt and his watch”, Mr Yunioshi learned that some months ago, “a party of three white persons had appeared out of the brush riding horseback. A young woman and two men.” The woman spent some nights with the woodcarver, then rode away on her horse, alone. This is the unattainable, ever-nomadic, self-determining Holly Golightly.
The story of the woman in Africa is the whole of the novella writ-small — Holly takes what she likes, trades sex for what she needs, and leaves when it suits her to travel who knows where next — and it’s the beginning of how the book and its characters treat Holly as something talismanic. She is a semi-magical and quasi-mythical being that will answer (so those around her seem to believe) some longing deep within if only they can possess her.
Mr Yunioshi “asked about [Holly] up and down the country”, seeking her out after seeing the woodcarver’s own attempt to capture something of her in his carving. Joe goes on to admit that he’s spent the years since Holly left New York searching for her on these streets. When this is taken to be evidence of his being in love with Holly, Joe says:
“Sure I loved her. But it wasn’t that I wanted to touch her. [...] You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”
Self-Sacrificial Love
This question about what constitutes love — romantic, erotic, or purely platonic — is a through line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The narrator is attracted to her in the most literal sense of the word, like a satellite orbiting a planet, drawn towards Holly’s gravity in spite, or because, of his inability to fully understand her. He doesn’t seem to be erotically attracted to her and he probably shares his author’s sexual tastes. Yet he feels for her something he would call love. On a fine day out together, as they ride horses in Central Park, he thinks:
“Suddenly, watching the tangled colours of Holly’s hair flash in the red-yellow leaf light, I loved her enough to forget myself, my self-pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.”
He loved her enough to forget himself. Here is the novella’s central insight into the deepest of loves: that it always requires some self-sacrifice. We must give up some part of ourselves to those whom we love. Even Holly in her own ingenuous way realises this, telling our narrator that for something to belong to you, you must belong to it. That’s why her love for New York (“I love New York, even though it isn’t mine”) doesn’t make her stay there, can’t keep her there, because what love she feels for it lacks that depth.
This is contrary to most common conceptions of love, which sees love itself as the fulfilling thing, the force that will bring us happiness and affirmation. That’s an entirely self-centred and self-gratifying way to think of love, as something that will validate us exactly as we are. Here, however, love is not the object to be obtained as proof that we deserve it. Instead, it’s the motivation to become someone others deserve. We give ourselves up in the faith that others will give themselves up to us in return. As the philosopher Roger Scruton put it:
“Love is a moral challenge that we do not always meet, and in the effort to meet it we study to improve ourselves and to live as we should.”
In other words, the deepest love does not reassure us we’re fine as we are; it challenges us to be better. In one of his notebooks, the poet William Butler Yeats put it this way:
“In wise love, each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.”
A Sad Ghost
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is descriptive in the best sense, an attempt to capture in writing a person, and people, and parts of life that cannot be captured any other way. Yet it also acts as a kind of caution. Holly is not a romantic figure, or a heroine in any traditional sense; she is a ghost, a sad figure who is forever on the run from her deep dissatisfaction, who drifts across the surface of living because she’s too scared of losing herself in life’s depths.
For my money, there’s no sadder moment in this melancholic book than when Holly abandons the cat that’s been living with her in New York. She hasn’t even named the creature because the cat didn’t “belong” to her or to anyone. When Holly finally leaves New York in a taxi with the narrator beside her and the cat on her lap, she asks the driver to stop. She gets out of the car and ditches the cat in an alley. Back in the taxi as it drives on, she defends her coldness, insisting she and the cat were always independent of each other, and then —
“[Holly’s] voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face. The car had paused for a traffic light. The she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her.”
But, of course, when she returns to the alley, the cat is long gone. Here, finally, Holly understands: “Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine.”
Another near miss, another something longed for and yet just out of reach.