Arts and Letters

With certain deaths a double vision sets in among the living; there is no escaping it. When a noted person has just died, there is that gap, that disparity, that possible sameness with regard to what the press, in all its clamorous efforts to summarize, finds fit to say, and a kind of private estimate in the mind of each of us. If the person is someone we knew or admired, or disliked, we are inexorably drawn—or driven—to the press to see how the public summation compares with ours. Speaking for myself, I was deeply shocked and terrified at the death of Truman Capote, and like others went to the newspapers to see what the world felt about him. I was afraid of what I would find, and I was not mistaken. The journals I read, some of them quoting friends and acquaintances of the deceased, were of the opinion that, though Capote was a writer of real ability who had produced a best-seller from which a movie was made, he had ruined himself—his talent along with his health—for money and publicity.

It would be foolish to deny the International-Café-Society, jet-set, Beautiful-People, name-dropping Capote, or to downplay this aspect of his life. If we don't include it, we are not really talking about the person who existed. I was never bothered, myself, by this side of Truman Capote's career—that is, the careerism—but always rather enjoyed from afar the intimations of the fabulous that it contained. If there is any magic in American life, it is to be found where great sums of money are spent in groomed and luxurious settings which exist for exposure and pleasure: a corrupt and debilitating magic, but the only one in which our culture truly believes. Scott Fitzgerald was right, far more perceptive than Hemingway in the famous exchange, when he said that "the very rich are different from you and me." They are, and how they are different fills the magazines, the newspapers, the films, and television every day we go into the world that surrounds us.

In regard to this last medium, incidentally, I think of the opportunities that the life and career of Truman Capote could give to the literature of soap opera! Could a man—a young man many took, for years of his adulthood, to be a child—born in the South, product of a broken home, shunted around among relatives in obscure villages, cultivate in secret a literary talent which would bring him into international society, a close acquaintanceship with movie stars, high politicians and their wives, millionaires and millionaire hostesses on four continents? Could such a thing happen to a writer, particularly if he were a good writer, introspective and poetic in the true rather than the conventional sense? It seems unlikely, and yet something like this happened, and is the only case of its kind. Strange indeed, and unignorable.

As I said, my response to all this was more favorable than not; at least one of us had made it! I remember enjoying public photos of Capote, who had written "Miriam" and "The Headless Hawk," disporting with selected friends on the rocks of Taormina, and dancing cheek-to-cheek with Marilyn Monroe, rich and famous as few writers are—again, few good ones. I lived this part of Capote's existence with considerable vicarious relish, when I was not devilled with envy, a dark shape usually somewhere in the background. To wear a white sequined mask at one's own ball at the Plaza and to have written "The Headless Hawk," too, the real and private accomplishment underlying the publicity, the money, and the pleasure! Where else would you find it?

Yet a reaction against the talk-show Capote, the masked-ball Capote, was inevitable, and Capote suffered from it more than he should have had to. The notoriety, the campy put-on quality of some of the episodes, the cattiness, the public fights, the lawsuits—all of those things were regarded by many as evidence of a falling-off, a sell-out, a deterioration, a waste, a betrayal, an outrage, a tragedy. But were they? Were they entirely so?

Unfulfillment continues in the mind. I cannot help being reminded, for example, of certain parallels between the situations of Truman Capote and Marcel Proust. I am not talking about performance—that would be ridiculous—but of the similar opportunities that both writers had for observing at first hand and at length the crumbling-away, the loss of morale and sense of consequence, the desperate and defiant secret lives, the hyperactive despair and ruinous lack of self-discipline of the monied class of our time: of being highly observant and intelligent witnesses to the Decline of the West itself, spies in the house of Trimalchio. This is, I realize, a lot to charge Truman Capote with having the ability to carry off in any such manner as did Proust; the four published excerpts of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, are not strong evidence that he had either the capacity or the desire. Yet I continue to be haunted by the undone, the opportunity. Proust's world, various and multi-layered, is, even so, limited to a very small segment of the population, and geographically confined to Paris and a few small French villages. In contrast, Capote had the chance to observe the glittering process of decay at work in many places and kinds of situations, many climates, many languages. And he had talent as well, of a different order and scope than Proust's, it is true, but plenty of it just the same. He had the will, when he wanted to use it, and he had the vantage point, an overview of a doomed society that very few have, or have ever had: the Death of the Soul in America, Italy, France, Africa, Russia, all over the place! What a death, and what a work of literature might have resulted!

All speculation, indeed, but death brings on and encourages speculation as nothing else can. Could Capote have done something like this? If one surmises that he might have come to attempt it, what would be the factor that caused him to try? The belief in his own talent. Did this exist? It did; indeed it did.

The talent of Truman Capote: that is where we can engage him, all speculation aside. This small childlike individual, this self-styled, self-made, self-taught country boy—what did he teach himself? To concentrate: to close out, and close in: to close with. His writing came, first, from a great and very real interest in many things and people, and then from a peculiar frozen detachment that he practiced as one might practice the piano, or a foot position in ballet. Cultivated in this manner, his powers of absorption in a subject became very nearly absolute, and his memory was already remarkable, particularly in its re-creation of small details. He possessed to an unusual degree this ability to encapsulate himself with his subject, whatever or whoever it might be, so that nothing else existed except him and the other; and then he, himself, would begin to fade away and words would appear in his place: words concerning the subject, as though it were dictating itself. In the best of his work, this self-cancelling solipsism, if this be not too self-contradictory an estimate, amounted to Truman's vision of things, and he could call it into service under any circumstances, and with any person, from Marlon Brando or Isak Dinesen to Bobby Beausoleil in San Quentin or Perry Smith on Death Row in Kansas. All Truman's work was a result of this power of isolation-with, of concentration and super-attention. His journalism, including his so-called "non-fiction novels," was made possible by means of it, but I prefer to speak of a deeper, more lasting thing than the pursuit of fact allows, and look, if only momentarily, at what came to Truman in the form of words when he closed not with Marilyn Monroe or Perry Smith, but with himself and his own life: what words then took the place of him?

Words standing for one of the purest and most generally-felt conditions of our human time, or of any human time: isolation, loneliness, forsakenness, lostness: the lostness that tends to hallucination, dementia, paranoia: "The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing," but which also, taking as refuge and resource the imagination, calls another order of being into play, into existence:

"You ever see the snow?"

Rather breathlessly Joel lied and claimed that he most certainly had; it was a pardonable deception, for he had a great yearning to see bona fide snow; next to owning the Koh-i-noor diamond, that was his ultimate secret wish. Sometimes, on flat boring afternoons, he's squatted on St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snowclouds into sifting coldly through the boughs of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonderbeasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr. Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vie Carré tearoom. "It was one stormy night in Canada that I saw the snow," he said, though the farthest north he'd ever set foot was Richmond, Virginia.*

I find myself returning often to Other Voices, Other Rooms, but more often to the shorter pieces of The Tree of Night, and I believe I do this because I think of Capote's gift as essentially lyrical, poetic: the stamp-minted event, the scene stunning with rightness and strangeness, the compressed phrase, the exact yet imaginative word, the devastating metaphorical aptness, a feeling of concentrated excess which at the same times gives the effect of being crystalline. One can say of these stories, like "Miriam" and "Shut a Final Door," which in other hands would bear too many resemblances to Gothic movies, with lots of melodrama, props, grotesque stage businesses, that they are saved by the only quality that can save any writer's anything: his personal vision, which in Capote's case runs to unforgettable images of fear, hopelessness, and dream-death: in addition to cold, also its opposite: airlessness, heat, ripe rot, the submerged corpse green in the moveless pool.

It is maybe paradoxical, but not finally so, that such images—many of his best—of the stultified, the still, the overhot and overripe come like the others from Truman Capote's lens-like detachment, and suggest, rather than lushness and softness, things wrought by the engraver's delicate hammer, the artist working with otherworldly intensity upon materials from the world, as the universe makes a snowflake, the most fastidiously created of artifacts, resulting in a true work of literature, which, unlike the snowflake, keeps on existing. The sure-handed crystal-making detachment, the integrity of concentration, the craft of the artist by means of which the intently human thing is caught, Truman Capote had, and not just at certain times but at all times. This we remember, and will keep, for it gave us what of him will stay. Keep him we will, and from such a belief come these few lines, something "To Be Done in Winter By Those Surviving Truman Capote":

What you hold,
Don't drink it all. Throw what you have left of it
Out, and stand. Where the drink went away
Rejoice that your fingers are burning
Like hammered snow.
He makes no sound: the cold flurries, and he comes all the way
Back into life; in the mind
There is no decay. Imagine him
As to behold him, for if you fail
To remember, he lies without
What his body was.
His short shadow
Is on you. Bring him in, now, with tools
And elements. Behold him
With your arms: encircle him,
Bring him in with the forge and the crystal,
With the spark-pounding cold.**

*Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Random House, Inc.), 1948, p. 35. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. **Copyright© 1985 by James Dickey