The second point concerns In Cold Blood and the business of the ‘non-fiction fiction*. In the Conversations, while incidentally rubbishing Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Capote repeats his contention that the non-fiction fiction is, or can be, at least as ‘imaginative’ as the non non-fiction fiction: i.e., the novel. Now it is true that Capote (and Mailer) expends a good deal of imagination and artistry in the non-fiction form. What is missing, though, is moral imagination, moral artistry. The facts cannot be arranged to give them moral point. When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder — and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death.
* * *
Jackie Kennedy? ‘I hate her.’ John Updike? ‘I hate him.’ Jane Fonda: ‘ucch, she’s a throw-up number.’ Joyce Carol Oates: ‘she’s the most loathsome creature in America. She’s so… oooogh!’ As for Georgia O’Keeffe, ‘I wouldn’t pay twenty-five cents to spit on a painting [of hers]. And I think she’s a horrible person, too.’ While gentle, twinkly old Robert Frost is ‘an evil, selfish bastard, an egomaniacal, double-crossing sadist*. In such a galère, literary comrades are doing pretty well if they are merely ‘ghastly’ (Thomas Pynchon), ‘unreadable’
(Bernard Malamud), ‘boring’ and ‘fraudulent’ (Donald Barthelme), or ‘unbelievably bad’ (Gore Vidal).
Truman Capote lived the life of the American novelist in condensed and accelerated form. By the age of eight he was a writer, by the age of twelve he was a drunk, by the age of sixteen he was a celebrity, by the age of forty he was a multimillionaire, and by the .age of fifty-nine he was dead. All the excess, solipsism, enmity, paranoia and ambition of American letters was crammed into those years — and, glancingly, into these pages. One would expect Conversations with Capote to provide some scandalous entertainment; but the book, semi-accidentally, goes one further and gives us an endearing portrait of the man.
Called ‘the Interviewer’s Interviewer’ by Playboy magazine (his frequent employer), Lawrence Grobel is disciplined, persistent, thorough, and stupid. He is not quite as stupid as James A. Michener, who contributes a wonderfully galumphing foreword, but he is not nearly as smart as Truman Capote. Thus Grobel is thoroughly insensitive to Capote’s standard interviewing persona, which is that of the Tease. Frowning now at his tape-recorder, now at his list of questions, Grobel unsmilingly processes the wanton bitchiness and boastfulness that Capote tosses out at him.
There is hidden comedy here, in the narrative links. Grobel is always telephoning, pestering, suddenly flying in from Los Angeles; with some awe and cautious affection, yet quite without self-consciousness or pudeur, he repeatedly nags Capote into yet another session with the Sony. And there is pathos too, for by now Capote often has to drag himself from the sickbed to cope with the Californian wretch.
Actually the whole book glows with the pale fire of illness, and one suspects that not a day of Capote’s life was uncoloured by it. ‘This small brilliant man’, as Grobel dubs him, had everything in the American package — everything except brutish good health. His medical chart is dotted with seizures, addictions, dryouts; and yet the malaise sounds habitual and pervasive, as if Capote drank and drugged chiefly to assuage pain. Towards the end, his life appeared to be a bleak alternation between major surgery and Lawrence Grobel. One admires Capote the more for giving such a spirited account of himself.
Serious literary questions are raised, by Capote, and left hanging there by Grobel. This isn’t surprising, because the Playboy interviewer shows no differentiation of interest, whether the subject is John Updike or Jackie Kennedy. Presumably a fuller treatment of the life and work is on the way. Let us leave Capote, for now, in one of his more triumphant moments, displaying a characteristic mix of fearlessness, spite, and, no doubt, self-flattering embellishment:
I was sitting there with Tennessee. And this woman came over to [our] table … and she pulled up her shirt and handed me an eyebrow pencil. And she said, ‘I want you to autograph my navel’ … So I wrote my name: T-R-U-M-A-N C-A-P-O-T-E. Right round her navel, like a clock … Her husband was in a rage. He was drunk as all get-out … He looked at me with this infinite hatred, handed me the eyebrow pencil, unzipped his fly, and hauled out his equipment … Everybody was looking. And he said, ‘Since you’re autographing everything, how’d you like to autograph this? There was a pause … and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can autograph it, but perhaps I could initial it.’