Capote – Gerald Clarke, 1988 ★★★½

Tracing the Fall of a Little Giant

There’s a mystery behind every great author; behind Truman Capote the mystery may simply be this: Which of his books wound up killing him?

If you accept the movie adaptation of this biography, the one which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for the title role in 2006, the villain is clearly In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel” whose emotionally harrowing subject matter sent the sensitive Capote over the edge.

But within the pages of Capote, another culprit is promoted: Answered Prayers, the unfinished novel Capote struggled to produce over the last decade of his earthly existence and lived just long enough to regret what did get out.

Whichever book did him in, the strength of Capote lies in the weakness of its subject in coping with success. In true James Boswell fashion, biographer Gerald Clarke finds ways of enhancing your respect for Capote by detailing his flaws so minutely.

“My general principle about him is that it isn’t necessary to like him as much as one admires him,” noted one of the many men, often literary, sometimes rich, usually gay, who found their way into Capote’s Manhattan-centered social circle at its mid-1960s apex and who make up a kind of Greek chorus for Clarke’s book.

The central brilliant fact of Capote was not who he was, or even what he produced (his output was decidedly sporadic; even Jacqueline Susann, one of his many targets, cracked wise about that). Rather, it was how he wrote, employing a lyrical, jazzy style that eschewed drab details and entranced dour critics of his day.

Clarke employs something of the same approach right at the start of his book, explaining how Capote’s biological parents first met:

In those days people moved more slowly down there, and Arch, who did just the opposite, might almost have been taken for a Yankee. Strutting down the street on that April afternoon, pausing only long enough to raise his hat to ladies he knew, he seemed to walk faster, talk faster and think faster than anybody else in Troy, or anybody else in all of Alabama for that matter…

It’s a classic Capote opening, drawing you in to a conversation already in media res, leaving out crucial information in expectation you will care enough to keep reading so as to get it. The narrative voice has a hint of Southern drawl about it, too, much like its subject.

Clarke doesn’t try to keep this voice going for the next 547 pages. At times his narrative drags, even before Capote hits the skids. But if you want a book that gives you the essence of a man who can say with total authority: “There was nobody like me before, and there ain’t gonna be anybody like me after I’m gone,” Capote makes for fascinating company.

There is some psychoanalysis in Clarke’s depiction of young Capote. Arch, his father, was largely absent from Capote’s life until fame came. Lillie Mae, his mother, kept Capote at arms’ length, preferring to spend her time with a regular rotation of male lovers and lots of booze. This would be Capote’s own M. O. later on. His was an emotionally needy childhood, not rooted in any fixed location South or North.

It was only when Capote reached New York City, particularly glittering Manhattan and its quieter appendage Brooklyn, that his life found an anchor. For a time he worked as a copyboy at The New Yorker, but it was an unhappy fit. He had a better time with more fashion-conscious magazines, who ate up his early short fiction like bon-bons.

Clarke captures the Manhattan phase of Capote’s journey with special vibrancy: What he made it in those postwar years was a never-ending party, with clusters of people scattered around a vast room that extended all the way from Ninety-sixth Street down to Greenwich Village.

Truman Capote as a young man, enjoying early success and his most celebrated love affair, the one with the camera. Image from http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2015/11/threshold-early-stories-truman-capote 

After some time of enjoying this “hummingbird” existence, Capote settled down somewhat. Clarke’s narrative focuses in on Capote’s close circle of fellow homosexuals, not all lovers but available to him in some form or another. Later followed the “swans,” glamorous women of high society whom Capote became a quasi-courtier, seeking their ears at ritzy parties and exchanging juicy gossip.

Clarke’s focus on Capote’s gay life gets a bit much; his attention to the swans more so. They are the Achilles heels of this otherwise fine book. Do you really need to know that John Gielgud found Capote’s toenails dirty? Or another account of Babe Paley, wife of CBS boss William Paley, impressing with her perfect, regal beauty?

When Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms comes out, Clarke spends much of his ink analyzing the impact of the author’s portrait on the dust jacket, which made him look like a wood nymph and would trigger some post-photal regret:

Photographs had always served him well, however, and if that one made him both a target and a figure of fun, it did at least achieve its primary purpose: it gave him not only the literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted.

Clarke’s counterbalancing argument for his often-frivolous focus might be that Capote left one little else to write about. After publishing Other Voices and another novel, The Grass Harp, three years later, Capote abandoned that form, dabbling instead in occasional plays for stage and screen, nonfiction essays, and eventually a novella, “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” which would cement his place as a producer of light fiction for the discerning classes.

The turning point of Capote’s life, what he is known for today and which makes up the bulk of the film adaptation, shows up for the first time on page 317 of Capote: the 1959 murder of a family of four at their isolated farm in Holcomb, Kansas which provided the basis of Capote’s famous “non-fiction novel,” In Cold Blood.

That the experience of writing In Cold Blood changed Capote is a notion Clarke doesn’t dispute. But while the film focuses more or less exclusively on the impact of that case, and in particular Capote’s relationship with one of the convicted murderers, Perry Smith, Clarke’s bio pushes a different reason for Capote’s collapse: rejection by the swans.

It happened after Capote had returned to fiction-writing in the mid-1970s. Via his connections with wives of the rich and powerful, he had accumulated a lot of material. Now he put that material to use, detailing the foibles of several thinly-disguised society figures, including Babe Paley and other like luminaries who appeared as themselves, like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in “La Côte Basque 1965.” It was an early glimpse at a novel Capote was working on which he felt would put him on par with Proust: Answered Prayers.

The fallout from “Basque” proved both terminal and fascinating. Capote hopelessly tried to talk to his old friends, only to find himself shut out. Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s sister, Lee Radziwill, whom Capote once chaperoned through an unsuccessful attempt at an acting career, dismissed Capote to friends as a “fag.” William Paley hurt him as deeply by claiming he had started reading it, then fallen asleep.

Capote, typically, had it both ways, enjoying the notoriety even as he suffered. Asked how his book was coming, he would wave a finger and yell: “You better be careful, or you’ll be in it!”

Exactly how badly Capote suffered is hard to understand, looking in from the outside. The relationships he cultivated with his “swans,” as Clarke points out many times, carried a sense of shallowness, of mutual fame-whoring.

“He was the best pal ever, someone who would coo at you and tell you that you were wonderful,” noted one of his more loyal swans, Carol Marcus. “What’s love? It’s a mirror saying you’re a perfect person.”

Clarke’s narrative rallies a bit as Capote does the same, pulling himself together enough to write a final book, Music For Chameleons, in 1980. But attempts at writing what would have been his magnus opus, Answered Prayers, proved abortive. Struggling with a succession of opportunistic, lukewarm boyfriends; unable to concentrate on anything literary; drug-addled and in poor health; he came to see death as a release.

Clarke records his last hours with a California friend, Joanne Carson. “No more hospitals…Just let me go. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve decided to go to China, where there are no phones and there is no mail service.”

This sad ending tinges the entire book. Clarke was a close friend of Capote’s in his last years, when things were most rotten. Perhaps this accounts for why the bad times here outweigh the good.

Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days [that] are so voluminously documented. Clarke quotes this passage from Capote’s notes for Answered Prayers in the form of an epitaph. While it is tailor-made for the theme of the book, the best parts of Capote are those rarer glimpses you get of the man in his prime, holding court and riling adversaries with a wag of his finger.