Breakfast at Tiffany's

"One of the first places to use the Myers Briggs Type Indicator in the wider world was the Institution for Personality Research and Research (IPAR). It was housed at a fraternity house in Berkeley that had been purchased by a psychologist named Donald MacKinnon, the first person to buy the Myers Briggs Type Indicator from Isabel. At IPAR, MacKinnon wanted to create what he called a ‘house party approach’ to testing. He’d bring people to live in this fraternity house for long weekends. He’d give them personality tests; he’d have them compete against each other in games; he’d put them in deliberately stressful situations. And he’d have psychology graduate students watching their behavior to see what they could discern about personality from this very strange, immersive testing experience. It was a kind of a proto-Real World. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter MacKinnon was obsessed with the question of what made people creative. This was at the height of the Cold War, when people believed that creativity was what would help the U S win the space race, and researchers were highly preoccupied with figuring out whether creative types could be created, or whether creativity was innate and couldn’t be taught. MacKinnon got a ton of money from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation to investigate creativity. One of his approaches was to bring in creative writers—including Truman Capote, Kenneth Burke, MacKinlay Kantor, and Howard Baker, and on other weekends William Carlos Williams, Norman Mailer, and Marianne Moore—to live in the fraternity house together and submit to his tests. Some of them didn’t! He writes to Katherine Anne Porter and says, will you come and do this? And she tells him it’s ridiculous and that he’ll learn nothing about what he wants to know through this experiment, “even less than the good Doctor Kinsey learned about sex.” Many of these social-psychological projects from the mid-century just seem so utterly ludicrous to us today! It’s hard to imagine how they got off the ground in the first place. The weekend that Truman Capote comes to live at the house, one of the exercises that they do—in addition to figuring out their MBTI types—is a storytelling exercise. The five writers there for the weekend sit in a circle together. A staff psychologist tells them that they’re all going to tell a story together, and each person gets to introduce a new character. As new characters are introduced, the writers can draw connections between all of them, integrating them into one overarching narrative. One writer introduces a poor but handsome young man, an aspiring writer. Another introduces an older, wealthy gentleman. Another introduces an older waitress at a diner where all of the characters are eating. Then Truman Capote introduces a character he calls Anna Bouchari, a young girl who has moved from the country to the city. She’s actually much younger than she says she is; she pretends she’s 22. She wants to live in an apartment in New York, be fabulous and independent, throw parties and be wealthy, and she’s trying to decide whether she should be kept by the wealthy gentleman in the diner or whether she should run away with the young, penniless writer. Anna Bouchari is, in many ways, a prototype for Holly Golightly, who would appear in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in Harper’s a few months later—and which Capote had not actually written until his experiences at IPAR. So much of that novella is about personality, and about the way one is liberated by personality or burdened by it. Here is Capote on Holly Golightly and Mildred Grossman, an oily-haired, bespectacled “grind” the narrator once knew in school: The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul—desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change …. [H]ere were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they’d been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. I think for Capote, evidence and traces of his experience at IPAR discovering his own personality seem to be knitted throughout the novella. There’s this wonderful moment in the storytelling exercise where one of the other writers there that weekend, the famously stoic literary critic Kenneth Burke, gets into a fight with Capote. Burke is angry that Capote has taken over the story. He isn’t moved by what the staff calls Capote’s ‘Boy Wonder’ affectations, and starts lecturing him very sternly in the language of the serious scholar. Capote is deflecting all of his lecturing with these little quips and comments about the stage, the screen, and his friends. Things get very heated. I suppose this is what happens when writers and critics end up in the same room as each other. She’s a personality in a different sense of the word: she’s a playgirl, a “glamor girl,” a “movie starlet,” a mass media personality. That’s why the metaphor of her hair shining like a shampoo ad is so perfect—she’s a consumerist fantasy. She reveals Capote’s dark and more ironic understanding of personality, which was the incessant exhibition of the self so the self could be traded on what Erich Fromm called “the personality market.” He was very aware of how he was operating as a celebrity on that market. As a celebrity, people project personality onto you in so many ways, but they can’t ever have access to anything real. Holly Golightly holds these various understandings of personality in tension. I think that’s exactly right. The operative term that I don’t think Capote could ever take seriously was the idea of the soul. For Briggs, that’s a very serious term—the revolution of the soul is the ultimate end goal of all her talk of type. But for Capote, there’s a weariness with, even a fear of, the idea of the soul. His interest in personality has much more to do with the way that celebrity and personality are wedded together to create a projection of individuality, whereas Briggs isn’t interested in that at all. She’s interested in personality as being private rather than public; the latter is Capote’s understanding of it."