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Never Enuff TRUMAN CAPOTE
Jan. 14th, 2024 12:24 pmThere’s an anecdote I like a lot. A journalist interviewing a Great & Lauded writer asks, “But would you kill your own mother to write a great novel?”
“Oh, of course!” the writer says. “What’s the death of one little old lady compared to War & Peace?”
(I don’t remember the name of the writer, and I don’t remember the name of the novel. But you get the gist.)
###
After the swans dropped Truman Capote, he became deeply depressed. On the very deepest level, he couldn’t wrap his mind around their defection. “What did they expect?” he lamented. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”
(Insert colorful fable about frog crossing Nile on back of scorpion.)
He took up with the Studio 54 crowd, where he began hanging out with Andy Warhol—a Truman Capote groupie from way back—and started drinking excessively, popping pills, & snorting cocaine.
He was dead eight years later. Liver disease. Of course. What else?
###
Esquire had only published four chapters of the allegedly completed manuscript of Answered Prayers. (And I must say, Capote had an absolute genius for titles. “Answered Prayers” was snagged from an almost certainly apocryphal quote attributed to Saint Teresa of Ávila: More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.)
So where was the rest of the manuscript?
People who knew Capote well were evenly divided between those who thought the whole thing was a kind of scam, that after In Cold Blood, Capote suffered from terminal writer’s block, and that the excerpts’ inelegant prose was far more embarrassing than any revelation that CBS President Bill Paley had fucked Happy Rockefeller while she was having her period; and those who believed the Answered Prayers manuscript existed.
No trace of the manuscript was ever found in Capote’s cluttered U.N. Plaza apartment or in his Sagaponack summmer cottage.
Some bits have been discovered among the papers in the Capote archives (now the property of the NY Public Library.)
And in 1984, shortly after he arrived in California to die, Capote handed his hostess Joanna Carson the key to a safety deposit box—-It’s all in there. Only he neglected to tell Carson where the safety deposit box was.
There’s a really great movie waiting to be made about the high jinx that ensue after some poor schmucky bank clerk stumbles across Answered Prayers in some routine, once-every-century check of the Holcomb, Kansas safety deposit boxes.
###
My old Tai Kwon Do instructor and occasional lover Erica once said to me, Confession is a form of self-indulgence.
(Erica was always making fabulous oracular pronouncements! Once she told me Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away was her favorite movie.
“But Erica,” I objected feebly. “That movie glorified the sexual exploitation of women! What about the scene where he makes her crawl to him and says, ‘Kiss your master’s hand?’”
Erica raised her perfect eyebrows at me: “It’s quite all right to kiss your master’s hand if you know you can kick your master’s ass.”)
It’s pretty simple, really: If you don’t want your secrets to be known, don’t tell them to anyone.
At least, don’t tell them to anybody with whom you don’t share some kind of client-professional privilege.
Especially, don’t tell your secrets to a writer!
I don’t want anybody telling their secrets to me!
Although, I will note that any time anyone tells me, I do not want you to write about this, I do not write about it. Even though that kabashes some absolutely killer material.
###
Notwithstanding the hideous prose scrapple that is the published portions of Answered Prayers, my opinion of Capote as a writer remains high.
Capote always referred to himself as a stylist, but unlike most writers, he didn’t have one single style. Style was very much a tool for him. His style was whatever prose voice could best support the underlying theme of the piece he was working on.
Thus Other Voices, Other Rooms, a moving coming-of-age story, is almost Oscar Wildian in its purple plushness.
Short stories like Miriam and Breakfast at Tiffany’s read very differently from one another. Tiffany’s is chatty; Miriam could be a story by Walter de la Mare. Capote was genius at creating completely self-contained universes.
###
And In Cold Blood is an absolute masterpiece—not the least because Capote unflinchingly describes the very strange relationship that developed between him and one of the murderers, Perry Smith. Thus, the “cold blood” of the title can refer equally to the killers’ state of mind when they slaughter the Clutter family or to Capote’s state of mind as he charms, wheedles, & extorts increasingly incriminating details out of Smith.
Capote told friends his book could never be complete unless he got to witness the execution of the two murderers with his own two eyes.
But as it turned out, he didn’t.
Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were slated to be hanged.
Somehow, Capote managed to wrangle an invitation to the hanging, and Hickcock & Smith wanted to spend the night before the execution hanging—-yuk, yuk, yuk——out with Capote.
Initially, Capote agreed to the all-nighter, but when the time came, he couldn’t do it. I picture Capote spending the night before the execution throwing up in one of the Muehlebach Hotel’s wastepaper baskets. (Finest hotel in Lansing, Kansas, the Muehlebach!)
Hickock and Smith were executed one hour apart, Hickcock first.
Capote watched that one.
But when it came time for Smith to be hanged, Capote ran straight out of the building. He couldn’t bear to watch it. Word on the street was that Capote & Smith had somehow contrived to become lovers while Capote was interviewing Smith in the penitentiary.
###
Capote must have known what the reaction would be to Answered Prayers’ publication. So maybe he published those chapters to punish himself? Because his heart whispered he’d betrayed Perry Smith? The character Jones—who’s writing a novel called Answered Prayers in the novel Answered Prayers—is said by many of Capote’s intimates to have been based on Perry Smith.
Hearts! They’re an inconvenient thing to have. When you’re a writer.
“Oh, of course!” the writer says. “What’s the death of one little old lady compared to War & Peace?”
(I don’t remember the name of the writer, and I don’t remember the name of the novel. But you get the gist.)
###
After the swans dropped Truman Capote, he became deeply depressed. On the very deepest level, he couldn’t wrap his mind around their defection. “What did they expect?” he lamented. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”
(Insert colorful fable about frog crossing Nile on back of scorpion.)
He took up with the Studio 54 crowd, where he began hanging out with Andy Warhol—a Truman Capote groupie from way back—and started drinking excessively, popping pills, & snorting cocaine.
He was dead eight years later. Liver disease. Of course. What else?
###
Esquire had only published four chapters of the allegedly completed manuscript of Answered Prayers. (And I must say, Capote had an absolute genius for titles. “Answered Prayers” was snagged from an almost certainly apocryphal quote attributed to Saint Teresa of Ávila: More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.)
So where was the rest of the manuscript?
People who knew Capote well were evenly divided between those who thought the whole thing was a kind of scam, that after In Cold Blood, Capote suffered from terminal writer’s block, and that the excerpts’ inelegant prose was far more embarrassing than any revelation that CBS President Bill Paley had fucked Happy Rockefeller while she was having her period; and those who believed the Answered Prayers manuscript existed.
No trace of the manuscript was ever found in Capote’s cluttered U.N. Plaza apartment or in his Sagaponack summmer cottage.
Some bits have been discovered among the papers in the Capote archives (now the property of the NY Public Library.)
And in 1984, shortly after he arrived in California to die, Capote handed his hostess Joanna Carson the key to a safety deposit box—-It’s all in there. Only he neglected to tell Carson where the safety deposit box was.
There’s a really great movie waiting to be made about the high jinx that ensue after some poor schmucky bank clerk stumbles across Answered Prayers in some routine, once-every-century check of the Holcomb, Kansas safety deposit boxes.
###
My old Tai Kwon Do instructor and occasional lover Erica once said to me, Confession is a form of self-indulgence.
(Erica was always making fabulous oracular pronouncements! Once she told me Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away was her favorite movie.
“But Erica,” I objected feebly. “That movie glorified the sexual exploitation of women! What about the scene where he makes her crawl to him and says, ‘Kiss your master’s hand?’”
Erica raised her perfect eyebrows at me: “It’s quite all right to kiss your master’s hand if you know you can kick your master’s ass.”)
It’s pretty simple, really: If you don’t want your secrets to be known, don’t tell them to anyone.
At least, don’t tell them to anybody with whom you don’t share some kind of client-professional privilege.
Especially, don’t tell your secrets to a writer!
I don’t want anybody telling their secrets to me!
Although, I will note that any time anyone tells me, I do not want you to write about this, I do not write about it. Even though that kabashes some absolutely killer material.
###
Notwithstanding the hideous prose scrapple that is the published portions of Answered Prayers, my opinion of Capote as a writer remains high.
Capote always referred to himself as a stylist, but unlike most writers, he didn’t have one single style. Style was very much a tool for him. His style was whatever prose voice could best support the underlying theme of the piece he was working on.
Thus Other Voices, Other Rooms, a moving coming-of-age story, is almost Oscar Wildian in its purple plushness.
Short stories like Miriam and Breakfast at Tiffany’s read very differently from one another. Tiffany’s is chatty; Miriam could be a story by Walter de la Mare. Capote was genius at creating completely self-contained universes.
###
And In Cold Blood is an absolute masterpiece—not the least because Capote unflinchingly describes the very strange relationship that developed between him and one of the murderers, Perry Smith. Thus, the “cold blood” of the title can refer equally to the killers’ state of mind when they slaughter the Clutter family or to Capote’s state of mind as he charms, wheedles, & extorts increasingly incriminating details out of Smith.
Capote told friends his book could never be complete unless he got to witness the execution of the two murderers with his own two eyes.
But as it turned out, he didn’t.
Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were slated to be hanged.
Somehow, Capote managed to wrangle an invitation to the hanging, and Hickcock & Smith wanted to spend the night before the execution hanging—-yuk, yuk, yuk——out with Capote.
Initially, Capote agreed to the all-nighter, but when the time came, he couldn’t do it. I picture Capote spending the night before the execution throwing up in one of the Muehlebach Hotel’s wastepaper baskets. (Finest hotel in Lansing, Kansas, the Muehlebach!)
Hickock and Smith were executed one hour apart, Hickcock first.
Capote watched that one.
But when it came time for Smith to be hanged, Capote ran straight out of the building. He couldn’t bear to watch it. Word on the street was that Capote & Smith had somehow contrived to become lovers while Capote was interviewing Smith in the penitentiary.
###
Capote must have known what the reaction would be to Answered Prayers’ publication. So maybe he published those chapters to punish himself? Because his heart whispered he’d betrayed Perry Smith? The character Jones—who’s writing a novel called Answered Prayers in the novel Answered Prayers—is said by many of Capote’s intimates to have been based on Perry Smith.
Hearts! They’re an inconvenient thing to have. When you’re a writer.
