The method writer

THE worst line in this collection of Truman Capote’s shorter nonfiction (the first piece is dated 1946, and the last is dated 1984) is to be found in a 1967 entry titled “Extreme Magic”: “What new can one say about Dubrovnik anyway?” I bring this up because it gave me a laugh and also because it is the only bad line in the whole collection, which is why it pops out of pages and pages of remarkably evocative, careful and well-observed prose that delineates, in a measured and elegant manner, one of the most remarkable American literary lives of the 20th century.

What new can one say about Truman Capote anyway? He said much of what there was to say himself -- in fact, about three-fifths of the way through “Portraits and Observations,” in an introductory essay to a volume of his early work, Capote gives himself a review: “But something like ‘A House on the Heights,’ where all the movement depends on the writing itself, is a matter of how the sentences sound, suspend, balance and tumble; a piece like that can be red hell, which is why I have more affection for it than ‘A Ride Through Spain,’ even though I know the latter is better, or at least more effective.” And then, at the end, he gives himself a very bad review: “Again and again I read all that I had written of ‘Answered Prayers,’ and I began to have doubts -- not about the material or my approach, but about the texture of the writing itself.” His doubts did not go away, though he changed his approach again, and then again. At the time of his death, Capote still had not done what he wanted to do, and so we may, I think, wonder whether he died considering himself a failure.

By the evidence of this volume (arranged chronologically), far from it. Every piece is a treasure of effects, and over the whole 500-plus pages and 38 years, the effects hold together and speak back and forth to one another. The result is a visible evolution and a telling portrait of what happened to Truman Capote -- not to his life but to his aesthetic, with his life as a frequently fascinating background.

Capote set out as a boy in elementary school to learn to write. By the time he published his first pieces in his early 20s, he had, by his own estimation, 14 years of steady practice writing stories, keeping journals, noting down overheard conversations, and keeping his eyes peeled. His first pieces are rigorously descriptive -- although they are written in the first person, the narrator does nothing but position himself and observe the scene. His goal is scrupulous truthfulness and also, as far as possible, completeness. If only a few moments are being described, the effect is to make these moments represent all that is essential about a time and a place (New Orleans, Hollywood). Capote first attained what he wanted with this method in a long piece for the New Yorker (“The Muses Are Heard”) about accompanying an American theater troupe performing “Porgy and Bess” to Moscow, and, indeed, the method works perfectly -- you are there and very glad that Capote was.

Satisfied with the results of his technique, Capote cast about for another subject and found one in the newspaper -- the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in western Kansas. “In Cold Blood,” upon which Capote worked for six years, was, of course, a huge success, both artistically and financially. It enhanced Capote’s social capital in numerous ways, and one of them was that not only did he begin hanging out with the international jet set, he also (at least by his own testimony in this volume) began hanging out with murderers. He interviewed Bobby Beausoleil, a Manson family associate who happened to be already in jail for a killing on the nights the Manson family committed the Tate and LaBianca murders. Capote also (he says) had a passing acquaintance with Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin; Robert M., “a slender, slight, harmless-looking young man who was then a prisoner on Death Row at San Quentin”; and others. I think it is safe to say (and Capote would have said it) that our author was a connector extraordinaire, who at one time or another, and independently, met just about every interesting person, including Lee Harvey Oswald, whom he claimed to have encountered in Moscow in 1959, while on the way to dinner with an Italian newspaper correspondent (there is some dispute about his meeting Oswald, however).

Capote called “In Cold Blood” a “nonfiction novel” and considered it a literary innovation, but he wasn’t able to repeat his triumph -- for several reasons, even though, with “Answered Prayers,” he intended to out-Proust Proust. One reason was that Capote’s method of capturing his subjects was time-consuming and difficult; he memorized long conversations and interviews, then wrote them down later, allegedly word for word. He produced a lot of material, then winnowed it down, always attempting to concentrate it even more (hence, I think, the frustration with “overwriting” that he speaks of toward the end of his life).

The distinction that normally exists between the novel and the nonfiction account disappears in Capote’s work: A novel is always supposed to be complete; it is satisfying because we readers feel we know everything about the characters -- more, in fact, than the characters do themselves. Nonfiction can’t be complete, because we feel that we can’t know everything about real people or real situations, and so we are skeptical of nonfiction that seems “complete.”

And then there’s this: With “In Cold Blood,” Capote stumbled upon subjects who were happy to be famous on any terms, so they opened up to him, and by the time the book was published they were dead and couldn’t reconsider. With “Answered Prayers,” Capote’s subjects were alive and well, didn’t know he was writing about them, and considered his publication of their adventures a betrayal. Unfortunately, no sections of “Answered Prayers” are included in “Portraits and Observations,” but if his depictions of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe are any clue, my guess is that his take on the high life was detailed, sympathetic and more or less benign -- but, then, he says that Brando didn’t like Capote’s portrait of him.

There is another distinct and intriguing evolution in Capote’s nonfiction too -- he begins by leaving himself out and ends by putting himself squarely in the picture. One piece, titled “Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex,” written in 1979, takes us straight to the opening moment in “Swann’s Way,” where M. awakens suddenly and contemplates the nature of consciousness. Capote, though, his mind divided, awakens suddenly and contemplates the nature of inner conflict. TC and TC (the piece is told in dialogue) argue until TC tells TC to leave him alone. After some wrestling, the two of them agree to disagree, then say a prayer and fall asleep. The effect is witty, honest, and a little creepy, as TC knew it would be.

Hard as it is to believe after reading this volume, TC is dead now. His voice, in every one of these pieces, is so immediate that he just seems to be away on vacation (he loved to go on vacation). The spots he visited, including Soviet Moscow and Spain in 1950, seem just around the corner too -- owing to his eye for detail and his care in constructing a picture. More than that, the evidence here is that Capote was drawn to the eternal within the ephemeral. He was good at letting people speak for themselves, good at witnessing the human. He may have had an eye for the zeit, but his great loyalty was to the geist.