Produced by The Public Theatre
December, 1996

A Study Guide
Prepared by
Martin Andrucki
Professor of Theater, Bates College

The Public Theatre and Professor Martin Andrucki
own all rights to this Study Guide.

I. THE AUTHOR

Holiday Memories is a stage adaptation by Russell Vandenbroucke of two short stories by Truman Capote, an author better known for his prose fiction than for his dramatic writing.

Truman Capote was born Truman Persons in New Orleans in 1924, the son of Archulus "Arch" Persons and Lillie Mae Faulk.  Arch was a fast-talking salesman and dreamer whose official employment was selling Mississippi river boat excursions to clubs and churches, but whose real desire was to strike it rich.  His many crackpot schemes--legal and illegal--in pursuit of this fantasy inevitably ended in failure.  Eventually his desperate projects carried him ever further outside the law.  In 1931, and again in 1932, he was jailed for passing bad checks.  Then, in 1934, he was convicted of forging a postal money order--a crime that carried with it a three-year term in the federal penitentiary.  Luckily for Arch, however, his sentence was suspended.

Spirited, attractive, and ambitious, Lillie Mae quickly realized the colossal mistake she had made in marrying Arch.  Looking elsewhere for consolation, she engaged in dozens of affairs, often with Arch's knowledge and tacit consent.  In his turn, Arch sometimes tried to profit from his wife's infidelity, as in his staging of a boxing-match refereed by one of her lovers, the former heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey.

"Between Arch's schemes and Lillie Mae's affairs," writes Capote biographer Gerald Clarke, "there was little time for [Truman].  When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do."  Throughout Truman's childhood, then, his parents' marriage was in a perpetual state of chaos.  In addition to being locked in hotel rooms, the boy was frequently exposed to his mother's sexual escapades.  "She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis," Capote writes.  "We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch.  Suddenly they had a big fight.  He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it.  He only stopped when I became hysterical."

Beginning in 1928, Truman found himself deposited more and more frequently with relatives while Arch pursued his schemes and Lillie Mae explored her opportunities for career and romance in distant cities.  Finally, in 1930, just before his sixth birthday, his parents decided to install him on what looked like a permanent basis in the home of Lillie Mae's distant cousins in Monroeville, Alabama.  The following year, his mother moved to New York City, thus increasing the boy's sense of abandonment.  Except for brief visits with his mother and father, he remained with his Monroeville relatives until his parents' divorce, when he was ten years old.  At that time, Lillie Mae won custody of Truman, who then took the last name of his mother's second husband, a Cuban immigrant.  After four years in Monroeville, the boy moved to New York and became Truman Capote.

Those years in Alabama were crucial to his development.  On the one hand, they were a time of extraordinary loneliness and pain for a child who felt his parents had deserted him.  Throughout his adult life, Capote was plagued by intense periods of anxiety which he attributed to this experience of parental neglect.

On the other hand, some of the human connections he made in Monroeville, inside and outside the family, were spiritually nourishing.  Among his playmates was Harper Lee, who would later achieve fame as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.  She remembered Capote during these years as "a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies."  The two remained friends into adulthood.

Also important to the abandoned boy was his cousin Sook, one of four adults--three sisters and a brother--who presided over the house in Monroeville.  The oldest but the least grown-up of the sisters, Sook was close to sixty years old when Truman moved in.  Gerald Clarke describes her as "so childlike that she was thought to be retarded by many people; in fact she was merely so shy and unworldly as sometimes to appear simpleminded. . . She had never read anything but the Bible and Grimm's fairy tales . . . and she had never been to a movie."  Her furthest excursions away from home led her into the surrounding woods to find ingredients for medical cures or to search for the perfect Christmas tree.  It was to this odd and unworldly woman that the young Truman looked for the affection his parents failed to provide.  She took him under her wing, engaging him in the household chores and local adventures that filled her life.  When he finally moved to New York to join the mother about whom he had been fantasizing for four years, he found her emotionally distant, and he pined for his beloved Sook.

On first moving to New York, Capote attended a private academy in Manhattan, but when he neglected his studies his mother sent him away to a military school outside the city.  This experience was a complete disaster.  His mother, who had renamed herself "Nina," withdrew him from this school and sent him back to the private academy.  All the while, Truman had been nurturing an ambition to become a writer, a calling for which he felt formal schooling was unnecessary.  When the family moved to Connecticut, he attended Greenwich High School, but failed to graduate with his class, still dismissing his studies as irrelevant.  Upon moving back to New York, his parents sent him to another private school, this one for young men with academic problems.  Here again, he disregarded his academic work, and instead pursued a life of night-clubbing and urban adventure, gathering materials and experiences for the stories he was beginning to write.
At the age of eighteen he landed a job as a copy boy at the New Yorker magazine; by the time he was twenty-one he was publishing fiction in Madamoiselle and Harper's Bazaar, and working on his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which was published in 1948.

Other well-known works by Capote include the novels The Grass Harp (1951), and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), and a work that he described as a "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood (1965).  The latter is a detailed account of the murder of a Kansas farm family, including an exhaustive psychological portrait of their killers.  It is Capote's best known work.

He also wrote two pieces for the stage: a 1952 adaptation of The Grass Harp, and an adaptation in 1954 of another of his stories, The House of Flowers.  In 1954 he wrote the screenplay for Beat the Devil, a film directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart.

The stories on which Holiday Memories is based were written more than a decade apart.  "A Christmas Memory" dates from the year 1956, ten years after Sook's death, while "The Thanksgiving Visitor" was published in 1967.

At the time of his death in 1984, Capote was at work on another novel, Answered Prayers, which remains unfinished.

II. THE SETTING

Adapted from material that is frankly autobiographical, Holiday Memories is set in and around the Monroeville house where Capote spent his childhood years from age six to ten.  However, it is important to remember that what we encounter in Capote's stories, and hence what we see in their stage adaptation, is this house as remembered by the narrator.  Thus, imagination--rather than literal depiction--plays a major role in shaping the setting.  As adapter Russell Vandenbroucke says, "Memory is fluid and quicksilver.  It allows these stories to jump effortlessly from room to room within the house, to the Alabama countryside, and back again."  Accordingly, the stage setting must strive to capture this same flexibility.  Vandenbroucke stipulates "a theatrical environment that avoid[s] literal representations.  As these memories exist in Truman's imagination, so we [ask] the audience to use its imagination."  Rooms, characters, and objects are therefore more often suggested or evoked than explicitly shown in this production.  This non-literal style of presentation is particularly appropriate for a play in which an old woman teaches a boy the power of imagination.

III. THE PLOT

Holiday Memories is comprised of two one act plays closely related by their themes and characters.  In both, a narrator named Truman looks back at events from his childhood, providing the theatrical equivalent of a voice-over commentary on the past.  He introduces characters--including himself as a seven-year-old nicknamed "Buddy"--describes places and situations, and sketches out family backgrounds.  Although he is named "Truman," this narrator is not identical with Truman Capote; instead he embodies the persona, or the special voice and character of the author who tells these stories on the page.  As Vandenbroucke points out in his "Note" on the play, "There is inherent dramatic tension in the distinction between the narrator and his younger self. . . .  They are aware of each other's existence, hear one another, and can talk to one another.  Given the vagaries of memory, Buddy sometimes corrects Truman. . . . Buddy and Truman sometimes experience and perceive the same event differently."  This is particularly important when we see the contrast between the seven-year-old's bafflement at some moral puzzle that the adult understands with a kind of sad wisdom.

The first of the two short plays, "The Thanksgiving Visitor," is about the crisis that arises for Buddy when his cousin Sook decides to invite twelve-year-old Odd Henderson to dinner on the holiday.  Odd, as Buddy tells us, was "the meanest human creature in my experience," a boy from a family of "shiftless, surly" people "every one of them ready to do you a bad turn."  The boy's family is so awful, according to Truman, that "You might have felt pity for him"--a sentiment reversed by Buddy's interjection: "If he hadn't been so hateful."  The play explores the complicated moral territory bounded on the one side by the boy's hatred, and on the other by the pity of the adult.

Buddy hates Odd because the older boy bullies him so relentlessly that, as Truman says, "It would take a page in small print to list the imaginative punishments Odd inflicted."  Buddy even dreams about Odd, seeing in his sleep the bully's "narrow lion eyes" and hearing the hissing of his "high, harsh voice."  And when Buddy manages to ask Odd in the midst of one of his assaults why he is always tormenting him, Odd responds, "You're a sissy.  I'm just straightening you out."

Buddy is therefore dumbstruck when Sook announces her intention of inviting this nightmare figure to Thanksgiving dinner.  She imagines that if Odd gets to know Buddy better, the torments might stop, and she reasons that "Odd only picks on you out of jealousy.  He's not smart and pretty as you are.  The thing to keep in mind, Buddy, is this boy can't help acting ugly; he doesn't know any different."   Moreover, as Sook explains, she wants to see Buddy happy, "Strong, able to go out in the world.  And you're never going to until you come to terms with people like Odd Henderson and turn them into friends."

Over Buddy's bitter protests, Sook follows through on her plan, and Odd accepts the invitation.  On Thanksgiving day, he arrives and charms his hosts with his spirited singing of "Red, Red Robin."  Buddy's hatred is now augmented by envy at his enemy's social success, and he feels that the "jealousy charging through me had enough power to electrocute a murderer. . . .  I could have killed him as easily as swat a mosquito."  Enraged, he withdraws to his favorite hiding place in the house, an abandoned closet he calls The Island.  From there he can observe people as they use the bathroom.  As he hides, Odd enters, and with Buddy secretly watching, the visitor finds and pockets a treasured old brooch belonging to Sook.  Buddy now knows that vengeance is finally within reach.  As the family sit around the Thanksgiving table, Buddy raises his voice to denounce his enemy: "Someone here is a thief. . . .  Odd Henderson is a thief.  He stole Miss Sook's cameo."

With this announcement, Truman recalls, "Hostility sprouted and surged around the table like a thorn-encrusted vine . . . and the victim trapped in its tendrils was not the accused, but his accuser."  When Sook denies that the jewelry has been stolen, Odd stands up, admits his guilt, returns the brooch, and leaves the house.  Instead of savoring victory, Buddy is consumed by shame and anger.  He too runs from the table to hide in the smokehouse, amazed that Sook "lied to save [Odd's] skin, betrayed our friendship, my love, things I thought could never happen."  He remains there for the rest of the day until finally, late in the afternoon, Sook comes to him with food and guidance.  "There's just this I want to say, Buddy.  Two wrongs never made a right.  It was wrong of him to take the cameo.  But we don't know why he took it. . . . Whatever his reason, it can't have been calculated.  Which is why what you did is much worse. . . .  It was deliberate.  Now listen to me, Buddy, there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty."  With that, Buddy learns a lesson that is remembered decades later by Truman, who realizes the justice of Sook's words, and who recalls her promise: "As long as you remember me, then we'll always be together."

"A Christmas Memory" also focuses on the relationship between Buddy and Sook, this time as disclosed in the course of their preparations for Christmas.  The play begins with Sook's announcement that "fruitcake weather" has arrived.  This inaugurates a series of almost ritual events that yearly lead up to the holiday--events recalled by Truman, and re-enacted in his memory by Buddy and Sook.  This is a deceptively simple approach on the author's part, for as it turns out we do not merely watch as a young boy and his eccentric friend make their way through the cherished routines of their lives.  Instead, at every moment, the ordinary is being transfigured for Buddy by Sook's amazing capacity to find poetry in the simplest human activities, to discover--as the climax reveals--the face of God in the everyday world.

Clearly, the first event dictated by the arrival of "fruitcake weather" is the baking of fruitcakes, thirty of them, to be sent as Christmas presents to Sook's "friends."  This process begins with a foray into a neighbor's grove to gather fallen pecans.  Then there is the shopping expedition for eggs, dried fruit, flour, and shortening.  Next is the daunting approach to the establishment of Mr. Haha Jones, a "sinful fish-fry and dancing cafe" where illegal liquor is sold--a crucial element in a perfect cake.  Finally, the cakes are baked, cooled, wrapped, and mailed to the eclectic assortment of "friends" Sook has collected over the course of her sheltered life: Baptist missionaries in Borneo, President Roosevelt, the driver of the bus to Mobile, a California couple whose car broke down outside the house.  Once this task is complete, there still remains two-inches of whiskey in the bottle provided by Mr. Haha Jones.  Sook gives a spoonful to the dog, Queenie, and splits the rest with Buddy--an extravagance that leads to spontaneous singing and dancing, and that draws a sharp rebuke from her more sober sister and brother.

Next on the agenda of pre-holiday rituals is the search for the perfect Christmas tree.  This involves a journey into the forest, across two rushing streams, far from home.  There Buddy and Sook find a beautiful specimen which, by dint of enormous labor, they haul back to the house.  Because they cannot afford to buy ready-made ornaments at the store, they must create their own: paper cats, fishes, fruits, and angels colored by hand and hung on the tree.  Finally there is the making of gifts for the other members of the family, and for one another.  This year, as in years past, each makes the other a kite.  And on Christmas day, lying on the grass and watching their "kites cavort," Buddy and Sook share a moment of perfect happiness.  "My, how foolish I am," Sook says, "You know what I've always thought?  I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. . . . But I'll wager . . . at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself.  That things as they are . . . Just what they've always seen, was seeing Him.  As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes."  Thus Sook teaches Buddy to see the divine beauty of their daily lives.

With Sook's revelation, "A Christmas Memory" reaches its climax.  In the next speech, Truman informs us that this was their last Christmas together, and as the play ends we learn that the boy is soon to leave Alabama, and like the real-life Truman Capote, to attend military school far away, all the while remembering his beloved cousin.  When, a few years later, Truman receives the news that Sook has died he feels the message "severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string."

IV. THE CHARACTERS

There are only three fully-developed characters in Holiday Memories: Truman, Buddy, and Sook.

Characters in a play define themselves by the choices they make when confronted with problems or obstacles.  To understand Truman, we need to observe that his major choice is the decision to remember, to re-create and relive the events portrayed on stage.  He does this because, as he tells us, "Moments of those few years turned out to be the happiest part of an otherwise difficult childhood."  Thus, although Truman has become a "worldly" middle-aged man, he remains at some deep level rooted in the experiences of Monroeville, especially his crucial friendship with Sook.  The two specific memories he chooses to recall tell us something about Truman: in the first play, he remembers the painful and shameful calamity of his behavior at Thanksgiving dinner.  Ordinarily we shy away from such agonizing moments in our past.  Why does Truman choose to relive his?  Presumably because, as a grown man, he now recognizes the important lesson he learned: that his refusal to recognize in his enemy a fellow human being represented a failure of the moral imagination.  The capacity for empathy and understanding, Truman reminds himself, lies at the root of all decent behavior.

In recalling his Christmas preparations with Sook, he reminds himself of another important discovery: the human capacity to create meaning and beauty out of the most ordinary materials.  Truman thus emerges for us as a man who is concerned with serious and enduring issues, matters of poetry and morality.  We learn who he is by what he chooses to remember.

In Buddy we watch a character in the process of being formed.  In "The Thanksgiving Visitor," he is a little boy who is totally wrapped up in his own fears and resentments.  This is understandable given his abandonment by his parents and his struggle to overcome isolation and loneliness.  Under the tutelage of Sook, he finds pleasure in his life in Monroeville, but he is haunted by the demonic presence of Odd Henderson.  He eagerly embraces what Sook has to teach him about the pleasures of herb picking, fishing, and gathering "curious ferns and greeneries," but he is too immature to accept the challenge of getting acquainted with Odd, of trying to overcome their enmity through knowledge.  Instead he persists in his hatred.  Out of that persistence comes the cruel moment at the dinner table--an act that brings pain to everyone concerned, including his beloved Sook.  But she manages to turn that wrongheaded decision to good purpose when she plants in Buddy's head the moral ideas that will guide him in the future.

In "Christmas Memories," Buddy is Sook's enthralled student, learning from her about the intoxicating beauty of the world.  Buddy's identity is literally being shaped by each of the indelible moments that Sook and he create together.  The hunt for pecans, the encounter with Haha Jones, the journey into the forest are all episodes in a tiny epic of childhood during the course of which Buddy is being made into Truman, the artist who will remember and write about these moments in the future.
Sook is the most vivid character in the play, the one whose choices drive the action forward.  Unlike Truman or Buddy, who often address the audience in the first person, taking us inside their minds, Sook is someone we observe from the outside.  It is her behavior that tells us who she is.  Confronted by the problem of Odd Henderson, Sook decides to invite him to dinner.  When Buddy accuses the visitor, Sook lies to protect his feelings.  And when Buddy sulks in the smokehouse, it is Sook who seeks him out to offer food and counsel.

In one sense, then, it is Sook herself who is the author of these stories.  What she does creates the events that Truman remembers; without her there would have been nothing to recall.

V. THE THEMES

"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived," Capote writes in the opening words of Breakfast at Tiffany's, a story about a worldly young woman who remains romantic and naive enough to believe she can achieve fame and riches without losing her soul.  "I want to still be me," Holly Golightly tells the narrator, "when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's."  When Capote wrote the two stories on which Holiday Memories is based, he had been "breakfasting at Tiffany's" for a long time, having embarked on the road of fame and riches in 1948, the year his first novel became a best-seller.  Perhaps through these holiday stories, based on his boyhood experiences in Monroeville, he was, like Holly, staking a claim to the continuing possession of his own soul.

The happiness that fills these stories comes from the lessons in life taught by Sook, a woman in her sixties who retains the innocence and sensibility of a child.  Shy and lonely in the world of adults, she develops her own unique understanding of life.  Each of the stories, and each half of the play, presents an experience of luminous moral insight available only to those who, like Sook, exercise the power of imagination, the capacity to see what reality conceals from the ordinary observer.

"A Thanksgiving Visitor," dramatizes Buddy's first encounter with the moral imagination, the ability to discern in our enemies the same humanity we cherish in ourselves.  "A Christmas Memory" reveals the capacity of the poetic imagination to transform the everyday world into an arena of transcendent beauty. Picking pecans, counting pennies, buying whiskey, baking fruitcakes, chopping down a Christmas tree: each of these activities is transformed into a moment of beauty or adventure by the power of imagination.  As they approach the pine woods where they will fell their holiday tree, Sook asks Buddy, "can you smell it? . . . It's a kind of ocean."  And Buddy, startled into a fresh perception of the world, responds "with surprise": "It is a kind of ocean."  Sook is constantly surprising Buddy, and us, by her capacity to transfigure experience, to make us encounter the undiscovered oceans all around us.

Flat broke in Depression-era Alabama, Sook and Buddy must rely on imagination rather than money to provide Christmas presents for one another.  As we have seen, Sook creates for Buddy a kite, a magical object that is "blue and scattered with gold and green Good Conduct stars."  And on Christmas Day, their kites aloft in a winter wind, Sook shares with Buddy a tremendous religious insight, one worthy of a poet.  Which is really what this eccentric cousin is, and what she is teaching Buddy to become through her lessons in imagination.
 

VI. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Do you agree that Buddy should not have informed on Odd at the dinner table?  If so, what should he have done about the stolen brooch?

2. Why does Odd seem to emerge the victor from the Thanksgiving visit?

3. Do you have friends or relatives like Sook?  What do the other adults in the family think of them?

4. Why do Buddy and Sook experience such tremendous satisfaction from flying their kites?

5. Is Sook correct in calling "deliberate cruelty" the worst sin?  Why is it?

6. If, as Sook says, "deliberate cruelty" is "unpardonable," why does she forgive Buddy so quickly?

7. Why does Truman choose to remember something as painful as that Thanksgiving dinner?

8. What are the most important lessons Buddy learns from Sook?

9. What does Buddy mean when he says that Sook, age sixty-something, is a child?

10. Except for Truman, Buddy, and Sook, all the male characters are played by the same actor, and all the female characters by the same actress.  What effect does this have?  How does it affect our perception of the three principals?