Ruth Leon recommends.. Truman Capote: Answered Prayers
Ruth Leon recommendsTruman Capote: Answered Prayers
Today would have been the 100th birthday of American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, actor, and socialite Truman Capote. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the true crime novel In Cold Blood.
Initially he was known as a short story writer. His sharply observed and carefully crafted stories were published in both literary quarterlies and well-known popular magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Magazine, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and Story.
Capote is credited with the invention of the creative non-fiction genre with his novel, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) This “nonfiction novel”, as Capote labelled it, was a tremendous achievement which brought him literary acclaim.
In Cold Blood was inspired by a 300-word article that ran in the The New York Times in November 1959. The story described the unexplained murder of the Clutter farm family in their home in rural Holcomb, Kansas. With no advance knowledge of the case or any of the people involved, Capote travelled to Kansas.
He stayed for four years and interviewed everybody with even the most peripheral contact with the family without knowing who had committed the crime. But in January, 1960, the case was solved, “and then I made very close contact with these two boys and saw them very often over the next four years until they were executed….. It was a tremendous effort.”
Capote spent six years writing the book, aided by his lifelong friend Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. It became an international bestseller, but Capote would never complete another novel. This and many other Truman Capote works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television productions.
For some time after the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote was the darling of the talk shows. His fey, sophisticated and affected public persona and his high-pitched childlike voice was popular with the audiences and with the interviewers who knew they would get a quotable response from him no matter what they asked him.
The apex of his social success was the Black and White Ball, a party he gave in 1966 at the Plaza Hotel in New York which was the social occasion of the year. There’s a link to a video about it above.
His friends were the cream of New York society who adopted him as a kind of mascot until he came a cropper in 1975 by publishing an article in Esquire, the first chapter of his forthcoming and as-yet unfinished novel, Answered Prayers.
This was the catalyst of Capote’s social suicide. Many of Capote’s circle of high-society female friends, whom he called his “swans”, were featured in the text, some under pseudonyms and others by their real names. It revealed the dirty secrets of these women, and aired the “dirty laundry” of New York City’s elite.
As a result Capote, now drinking heavily and unable to finish the works he had been commissioned to write, was ostracized from New York society and from many of his former friends. Predictably, overnight he became a pariah in the circles that were most important to him. From all accounts, he was unable to understand why the Grande Dames of New York society had abandoned him.
Here is one of those television interviews, recorded in 1978 with Dick Cavett, which demonstrates that wit which made him such a favourite with talk show hosts and audiences in which he discusses his fall from grace. But, as drink and drugs became ever more present in his life, the wit deserted him along with nearly all his erstwhile friends.
Illustration by artist John Minnion.
I’ll stick to reading him. Two minutes into the Cavett interview I lost patience with his affected speech pattern, and two minutes into the clip of the ball I realised I never cared about social climbers and their levels of success. I tried to watch the TV series Feud, about Capote and his “Swans,” and dropped out after about 4 episodes as it was so much detail about so many profoundly uninteresting people.
Among the more interesting non-literary aspects of his life Ms. Leon fails to mention were his feuds — a famous one with Gore Vidal, and a very literate one with Kenneth Tynan after the latter reviewed In Cold Blood a little critically. That opened up a vigorous and sustained exchange of comments in the Observer, collected in one of Tynan’s books.
Two biopics made Capote seem almost human — the one that won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar, and the better one that got lost in the shuffle, with Toby Jones as the simpering scribe. (He must appeal to actors — Tom Hollander was making a good fist of him in that series Feud that I ultimately got bored with).
But in the end I can forgive him a lot. Breakfast at Tiffany’s remains one of the very few letter-perfect things I have ever read. There is not a comma out of place: lean, perfect prose in the service of a rather poignant story.
He wrote one musical with Harold Arlen,
“House of Flowers”, wonderful cast but it didn’t last long in the early 1950’s on Broadway. Some lovely songs by Arlen though.