MARTIN AMIS. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

At once Truman disappeared for a long and complicated session in one of the nearby bathrooms (the first of several noisy visits during my two-hour stay). Shrugging, I looked round the room. Saul Bellow has a thousand ways of describing the human face; Truman Capote, in his fiction and journalism, is the litanist of habitats, furniture, surfaces, clothes, scents.

The room was plain, almost functional. The curtains were three-quarters drawn behind the wickerwork headboard of the bed. The white bedside tables were stacked with medicines, magazines and books — Di-Gel, Vogue, Interview, Kenneth Tynan’s Show People, The Great Houses of Paris. Next to the glass-fronted bookcase lay three pairs of sorrily crumpled shoes. The half-darkness held the authentic, sleepy tang of the convalescent room.

Following a final, convulsive series of nose-blowings and bark-like sneezes, Truman tiptoed back into the room and lowered himself gingerly on to his cot. Poor Truman. In his long-nailed fingers he furled a pink silk handkerchief.

With the great man at such an obvious disadvantage, I naturally felt that I needn’t mind much what I said to him. Although Capote is doubtless as touchy as the next Great American Novelist, he gives off very little amour propre. He generates vulnerability and candour, and has none of the regality of, say, his old friend Tennessee Williams or his old enemy Gore Vidal. As Capote points out in his new book, Music for Chameleons: ‘I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.’ As casually as I could, I asked the recumbent Truman about his current relationship with pills and drink.

‘No, I’m just — exhausted … Did four hours of TV interviews about the new book … No, you know, I uh never drank that much! I mean … I just developed a kind of — suddenly an allergy. It would make me, not exactly — oh, well, very, very sick, like someone who’s drunk a quart and a half or something. Norman Mailer must drink… twenty times as much as I ever did. In one day, you know, and it doesn’t seem to affect him. Irwin Shaw!… drinks a tremendous amount. Practically everyone I know does. Tennessee! Edward Albee!’

I had read somewhere that Capote’s voice was thin and high. But nothing had prepared me for this quavering, asthmatic singsong, a mixture of Noel Coward and Lillian Carter. Turds, ee-bait, inner-stain and wide-ass, for instance, are his renderings of ‘towards’, ‘about’, ‘understand’ and ‘White House’. Capote was born in New Orleans, and was then farmed out to rural relations; much of his childhood was spent as a resident of Monroeville, Alabama. There is still something of the erudite hillbilly about him, and this perhaps explains how his obsession with the beau monde co-exists so peacefully with an interest in the underworld of murder and madness. He gives new scope to the cliche about ‘knowing everyone’. Capote knew Bob Kennedy, but he also knew Sirhan Sirhan.

Capote knew Jack Kennedy, but he also knew Lee Harvey Oswald — whom he met in Moscow in 1959, at which point Oswald was a gibbering paranoid considering defection to the East … When I mentioned early on in our talk that I also worked for the Observer, we discussed the paper’s relationship with its current owners, Bob Anderson’s Atlantic Richfield Company. Capote then added reliably: ‘I know Bob Anderson very well. He’s one of my closest friends. He’s a very cultivated man, you know — a charming man, a shy man. We went to Iran together once, had the most fantastic day with the poor old Shah.’ (Laughter and coughing.) ‘You know, this oil business, this ARCO thing — that’s just a sideline for Bob. He’s the world’s largest single property-owner. Brazil, Arizona, New Mexico, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles of ranches. As a matter of fact it was me who told him to buy the Observer.’

‘Well, could you tell him not to sell it,’ I said.

‘Oh all right. If you want.’

Fame and its mysteries have always been intimately bound up with what Truman Capote does and is. ‘I knew damn well I was going to be rich and famous,’ he has often said. He appears to have sensed early on that celebrity, particularly in America, can be self-generated.

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