Word: brinnin
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...SEXTET, John Malcolm Brinnin fuses six distinct portraits into an intricate work, closer to a fragmented fiction than to a fractured reality. Chosen from among the noted and notable of two overlapping intellectual eras, his subjects resemble characters from a diffuse and impressionistic novel. Brinnin has captured them, not at their peak, but in their moments of ascent or descent, grasping or clutching, and always searching...
Spanning nearly two decades, Sextet, compiled from diary entries, letters and reminiscences, focuses on Truman Capote, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elizabeth Bowen, Alice B. Toklas, the Sitwells, and T.S. Eliot. The most comprehensive study, The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect, begins with the first meeting between Capote and Brinnin, in Yaddo during the summer of 1947. Fascinated by this small man-child from Alabama, Brinnin scrupulously details Capote's erratic life through the conception of In Cold Blood...
...Brinnin's study of Capote, from a brash youth, striving for recognition and feeding items to the gossip columns, to an older, established writer searching to maintain his integrity and voice while living as a perpetual guest and jet-set darling, is a model of character development. "I had to know what it was really like. Years and years I'd wondered: What if you woke up in the morning, so rich you were famous for it. Would you try a quiet little murder or two, just to see if you could get away with it? I've found...
...narrator, Brinnin exposes trivial in themselves, yet typical either of the emerging post-war, trans-Atlantic scene or of an insular, archaic Europe. He tracks his subjects by correspondencv and word of mouth, but stays unobtrusive. Touring America with the French photographer Cartier-Bresson, before the latter is discovered; meeting Eliot in the last years of the poet's life; paying court to Elizabeth Bowen and the Sitwells at a time when their eccentricities far exceeded their faded talents--he watches them with clinical detachment, in the throes of past and irretrievable success or in the pangs preceding recognition...
...BRINNIN'S PORTRAIT of Alice B. Toklas, some years after the death of Gertrude Stein, differs in tone from the other studies. They meet for first time in 1950, when Brinnin calls on Miss Toklas to ask for material for a biography of Stein. While she refuses at first, it becomes apparent that Toklas, her identity inextricably tied to Stein, is more concerned with projecting her own perception of her companion than with forging her own individuality. Her reluctance to live the rest of her life recounting anecdotes is surpassed by her self-appointed duty as guardian of the faith...