April's Affections and Intrigues: Love and Mystery Bloom
Truman Capote
"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."--
Capote
Throughout his career, Truman Capote remained one of
America's most controversial and colorful authors,
combining literary genius with a penchant for the
glittering world of high society. Though he wrote only a
handful of books, his prose styling was impeccable, and his
insight into the psychology of human desire was
extraordinary. His flamboyant and well-documented lifestyle
has often overshadowed his gifts as a writer, but over time
Capote's work will outlive the celebrity.
Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his
mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in
Monroeville, Alabama. As a child he lived a solitary and
lonely existence, turning to writing for solace. Of his
early days Capote related, "I began writing really sort of
seriously when I was about eleven. 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."
In his mid-teens, Capote was sent to New York to live with
his mother and her new husband. Disoriented by life in the
city, he dropped out of school, and at age seventeen, got a
job with THE NEW YORKER magazine. Within a few years he was
writing regularly for an assortment of publications. One of
his stories, "Miriam," attracted the attention of publisher
Bennett Cerf, who signed the young writer to a contract
with Random House. Capote's first book, OTHER VOICES, OTHER
ROOMS, was published in 1948. OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS
received instant notoriety for its fine prose, its frank
discussion of homosexual themes, and, perhaps most of all,
for its erotically suggestive cover photograph of Capote
himself.
With literary success came social celebrity. The young
writer was lionized by the high society elite, and was seen
at the best parties, clubs, and restaurants. He answered
accusations of frivolousness by claiming he was researching
a future book. His short novel, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S
(1958), took much of its inspiration from these
experiences. With the publication of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S
and the subsequent hit film staring Audrey Hepburn,
Capote's popularity and place among the upper crust was
assured. His ambition, however, was to be great as well as
popular, and so he began work on a new experimental project
that he imagined would revolutionize the field of
journalism.
In 1959, Capote set about creating a new literary genre --
the non-fiction novel. IN COLD BLOOD (1966), the book that
most consider his masterpiece, is the story of the 1959
murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the
Clutters. Capote left his jet-set friends and went to
Kansas to delve into the small-town life and record the
process by which they coped with this loss. During his
stay, the two murderers were caught, and Capote began an
involved interview with both. For six years, he became
enmeshed in the lives of both the killers and the
townspeople, taking thousands of pages of notes. Of IN COLD
BLOOD, Capote said, "This book was an important event for
me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a
solution to what had always been my greatest creative
quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel,
something on a large scale that would have the credibility
of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of
prose, and the precision of poetry." IN COLD BLOOD sold out
instantly, and became one of the most talked about books of
its time. An instant classic, IN COLD BLOOD brought its
author millions of dollars and a fame unparalleled by
nearly any other literary author since.
To celebrate the book's success, Capote threw what many
called the "Party of the Century," the famous "Black and
White Ball." This masked ball, at New York's elegant Plaza
Hotel, was to be the pinnacle of both his literary
endeavors and his popularity. Overwhelmed by the lifestyles
of the rich and famous, Capote began to work on a project
exploring the intimate details of his friends. He received
a large advance for a book which was to be called ANSWERED
PRAYERS (after Saint Theresa of Avila's saying that
answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain
unanswered). The book was to be a biting and largely
factual account of the glittering world in which he moved.
The publication of the first few chapters in ESQUIRE
magazine in 1975 caused a major scandal. Columnist Liz
Smith explained, "He wrote what he knew, which is what
people always tell writers to do, but he just didn't wait
till they were dead to do it."
With these first short publications Capote found that many
of his close friends and acquaintances shut him off
completely. Though he claimed to be working on ANSWERED
PRAYERS (which many imagined would be his greatest work),
the shock of the initial negative reactions sent him into a
spiral of drug and alcohol use, during which time he wrote
very little of any quality. When Capote died in 1984, at
the age of fifty-nine, he left behind no evidence of any
continued progress on ANSWERED PRAYERS. Though many feel
that Capote did not live up to the promise of his early
work, it is clear from what he did write that he was an
artist of exquisite talent and vision. With both his
fiction and his non-fiction, he created a body of work that
will continue to move readers and inspire writers for years.