Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir

Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir

Author	Truman Capote
Original title	Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir
Illustrator	photographer David Attie
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	autobiography
Publisher	Holiday Magazine
Publication date	February 1959
Media type	magazine (1959), anthology (1995), print hardback (2002)
OCLC	32990674
Preceded by	Breakfast at Tiffany's
Followed by	Observations

Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir is an autobiographical essay by Truman Capote about his life in Brooklyn in the late 1950's. While it eventually became a stand-alone book and has been included in anthologies, it was first published in the February 1959 issue of the mid-century travel magazine Holiday.^[1]

The essay famously opens with the lines "I live in Brooklyn. By choice."^[2] Capote goes on to offer a short history of the neighborhood and how he came to live there, and to describe the house he lived in at the time, 70 Willow Street—which is where he wrote what many consider his two greatest works, Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood. The essay then gives evocative descriptions of Capote's favorite local haunts—everything from restaurants to antique stores to cat-filled alleyways—as well as various neighborhood characters, before ending with an ominous story about being threatened by a "Cobra," or gang member, near the East River.

John Knowles, an editor at Holiday who later became an acclaimed novelist in his own right, has said that the magazine "asked me to get Truman for them," and claimed that he recruited Capote for Holiday on the very same night that he recruited Jack Kerouac. Knowles described "Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir" as "in [Capote's] best vein, it was really very special." He also referred to the essay by a different title, "A Neighborhood in Brooklyn."^[3]

The house at 70 Willow Street actually belonged to a friend of Capote's, Tony Award-winning theatrical designer Oliver Smith; Capote merely rented some basement rooms in his years there, from 1955 to 1965. But as George Plimpton later noted, "when friends came to call, he often took them on a tour of the entire house (when Smith was not at home) and said it was his house, all his, and that he had restored and decorated every room."^[4]

The original essay was illustrated with photographs by David Attie, many of which were taken as Capote showed him around Brooklyn Heights in March, 1958.^[5] It was not their first attempt at a collaboration; Attie had been hired the previous year by famed art director Alexey Brodovitch to produce a series of photo montages illustrating Breakfast at Tiffany's for what would have been its first publication in Harper's Bazaar. It was the first-ever professional photo assignment for Attie, who had been a student of Brodovitch's. But even though the montages were completed and effectively launched Attie's career -- Capote is said to have liked Attie's and Brodovitch's layouts so much that he agreed to various editorial changes Harper's had demanded^[6] -- the magazine's publisher decided not to run the novella at all. Its tart language and subject matter were deemed "not suitable," and there was concern that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would react negatively, so the project was scuttled.^[7][8]

Curiously, while Attie photographed Capote himself for the essay's appearance in Holiday -- both at home on Willow Street and around Brooklyn Heights -- none of these portraits were used or seen until decades later. This was presumably because Capote was not yet the literary superstar he would soon become.^[9]

"Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir" was first published in book form in 2002 as "A House On The Heights" (Little Bookroom, 2002). It included a new introduction by Plimpton which explained how the essay first came to be commissioned.^[10] It is also included in the anthologies "The Brooklyn Reader: Thirty Writers Celebrate America's Favorite Borough" (Broadway Books, 1995), and "Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote" (Random House, 2007, and Modern Library Paperbacks, 2008).

References