My story Mexico has been well received, people are reading it.
I'm going to write about the lionized American author Truman Capote.
A few nights ago I dreamt I met Truman while boarding a plane at La Guardia airport. He was wearing a trench coat, taking it off he autographs the coat with a felt tip pen.
My first thought was,
can I sell the autographed coat on eBay?
I nudge Truman with my shoulder and say,
In Cold Blood is a masterpiece. He brushes it off.
Truman Garcia Capote, born Truman Streckfus Persons, what a fucking name, Streakfus, was born on September 30, 1924.
Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations, discovering his calling as a writer at 8.
He was born in New Orleans to Lillie Mae Faulk and salesman Archulus Persons.
Truman’s parents divorced when he was 2 and he was sent to Monroeville, Alabama to be raised by Nanny Faulk, a distant relative he called Sook. Later in life, he says,
her face was remarkable— not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, tinted and by the sun and the wind.
During high school in Monroeville, he was friends with Harper Lee, who would go on to become an acclaimed author and a lifelong friend. Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird— it’s intriguing how great-attract-great.
In 1932 he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband José García Capote, a former colonel in the Cuban army during Batista’s reign.
In his early days, Truman says,
I was writing really sort of serious when I was about 11. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it.
At the age of 21 Capote worked as a copyboy in the art department of The New Yorker. He worked there 2 years and was fired for angering the poet Robert Frost, how odd.
During World war II, he was called for induction but turned down because army shrinks diagnosed him as neurotic, today I would be called
During 1946 Truman wrote a string of short fiction, including, Miriam, My Side of the Matter, and Shut the Final Door, winning an O. Henry Award for it.
During an interview in The Paris Review years later, he spoke of his short story style saying,
obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?
In the 60s a Harold Halma photograph was used to promote Truman’s book Other Voice and the photo was considered vexing because it showed Capote reclining exotically with a flower in his mouth gazing fiercely into the camera.
When Andy Warhol moved to New York he went bat shit crazy trying to meet Capote. Andy’s passion for Truman led to his first one man show, 15 Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote at the Hugo Gallery.
During the same period, he wrote an autobiographic essay for Holiday Magazine, Brooklyn Heights— A Personal Memoir.
Then going on to write Breakfast at Tiffanys a novella brought together by three shorter tales— House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory, which was first published in Harper’s Bazaar.
Oddly at the time in the late 50s the language and subject matter of the novella was deemed not suitable because of a concern by an advertiser, Pond’s Cold Cream.
In 1965 Radom House published Capotes book In Cold blood— A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences. The story described the unexplained murder of the Clutter family in rural Holcomb, Kansas— quoting the the local sheriff as saying,
this is apparently the case of a psychopathic killer.
Fascinated by this brief news item, Capote traveled with Harper Lee to Holcomb and visited the scene of the massacre.
Over the course of the next few years, he became acquainted with everyone involved in the investigation and most of the residents of the small town and the area.
Rather than taking notes during interviews, Capote committed conversations to memory and immediately wrote quotes as soon as an interview ended. He claimed his memory retention for verbatim.
Truman recalled his years in Kansas when he spoke at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1974,
I spent four years on and off in that part of Western Kansas there during the research for that book and then the film. What was it like? It was very lonely. And difficult. Although I made a lot of friends there. I had to, otherwise I never could have researched the book properly. The reason was I wanted to make an experiment in journalistic writing, and I was looking for a subject that would have sufficient proportions. I'd already done a great deal of narrative journalistic writing in this experimental vein.
So I went out there, and I arrived just two days after the Clutters' funeral. The whole thing was a complete mystery and was for two and a half months. Nothing happened. I stayed there and kept researching it and researching it and got very friendly with the various authorities and the detectives on the case. But I never knew whether it was going to be interesting or not. You know, I mean anything could have happened.
When the killers were arrested I made very close contact with these two boys and saw them very often over the next four years until they were executed. But I never knew ... when I was even halfway through the book, when I had been working on it for a year and a half, I didn't honestly know whether I would go on with it or not, whether it would finally evolve itself into something that would be worth all that effort. Because it was a tremendous effort.
In Cold Blood brought Capote much praise from the literary community, but there were some who questioned certain events as reported in the book. Writing in Esquire in 1966, Phillip K. Tompkins noted factual discrepancies after he traveled to Kansas and spoke to some of the same people interviewed by Capote.
Truman was openly gay. One of his first serious lovers was Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin, who wrote a Herman Melville biography in 1951 and to whom Capote dedicated Other Voices.
Ambitious university professors wrote books to maintain their tenure.
Capote spent most of his life until his death with Jack Dunphy, a fellow writer. In his book, Dear Genius—A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote, he explains the Capote he knew as,
success driven, and eventually drug and alcohol addicted who existed in a world outside of their relationship.
Capote was well known for his distinctive, high-pitched voice and odd vocal mannerisms, his offbeat manner of dress, and his fabrications. He often claimed to know intimately people whom he had in fact never met, such as Greta Garbo.
He professed to have had numerous liaisons with heterosexual men including, Errol Flynn claiming they snorted and rub cocaine on their penises, surely a bogus tale.
He traveled in an eclectic array of social circles, hobnobbing with authors, critics, business tycoons, Hollywood and theatrical celebrities, royalty, and members of high society, both in the U.S. and abroad.
As for Hollywood Truman Claimed,
I lost an IQ point for every year I spent on the West Coast.
Capote never finished another novel after In Cold Blood.
Blasted on LSD, he accompanied The Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour doing a bit for Rolling Stone Magazine
In the late 1970s, Capote was in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics, and had a number of nervous breakdowns.
He realized the only way he was going to get off the shit was to kill himself.
After a hallucination-based seizure in 1980 that required hospitalization, Capote became a recluse.
Capote died in the Bel Air Los Angeles home of Joanne Carson, wife of late night TV host Johnny Carson.
Through out his life there was an ongoing freud between Truman and Gore Vidal, who said of Capotes death,
a wise career move.
