Music for Chameleons is a collection of short stories published in 1980. Besides another short story and an essay on Tennessee Williams, to whom this collection was dedicated, it’s the last thing Capote published before his death in 1984. The book is divided into three parts. The first is the eponymous short story along with five others; the second is a piece called “Handcarved Coffins” presented as a “A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime”; the third is a series of “Conversational Portraits”, encounters and indeed conversations with a Manhattan maid, with Marilyn Monroe, with Willa Cather, and with other notables. In the final piece, “Nocturnal Turnings”, a character named Truman Capote has a wistful and gossipy talk with another character also named Truman Capote. The preface, in which Capote graciously accepts the credit sometimes given him for having invented with In Cold Blood the “nonfiction novel”, sees him resolving his writing difficulties by including himself in his work, reconstructing conversations with all manner of people, and thus producing a framework “into which [he] could assimilate everything he knew about writing.” This method is certainly apparent in “Music for Chameleons” itself, to a lesser degree in the five stories that follow it. Because both “Handcarved Coffins” and the “Conversational Portraits” are largely written as interview transcripts, and have a more explicit relationship to journalism and magazine writing, I will address only the six stories contained in the first section, as autobiographical and thus genre ambiguous as they might be.
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