His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948 when Truman was Z3, received as much attention for the pretty-boy photograph on the book’s jacket as for the precocity of its contents. ‘I didn’t even choose that photograph!’ protests Capote. Ironically, he is the scandalised one these days, ‘It was not even posed! I was just lying on the couch after lunch! I didn’t even choose it, I said just take any old photograph from the drawer!’
Capote’s early novels and stories, with their cloying Southern settings and high incidence of snaggled grotesques, would have seemed to place him in the Gothic tradition of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. But in mid-career his work became squibbish and metropolitan. Above all, his novelistic ear proved adaptable: the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) showed that he could listen to New York as sharply as he had listened to New Orleans, At this time Capote was also turning out some exceptionally acute and original journalism — a cruelly finessing portrait of Marlon Brando, an hilarious account of a trip to Russia with a company of black Americans playing Porgy and Bess. During these years Capote became convinced that an unnoticed art form lay concealed within the conventions of journalism: the idea was that a true story could be told, faithfully, but so arranged as to suggest the amplitude of poetic fiction.
That idea eventually became In Cold Blood (1966), the story of the apparently pointless murder of the Clutter family in Garden City, Kansas. Capote spent six years ‘on and off — and mostly on’ following the trail in ‘this fantastically depressing Mid-West town, where, you know, there was nothing. The shaken townsfolk never took to Capote, and he had to withstand a good deal of local hostility. One day he sauntered into the courtroom and was confronted by a squad of glowering sheriffs. ‘Oh, you don’t look so tough to me,’ said Capote in his highest voice. One of the men stood up and punched his fist through the courthouse wall. ‘I’m beside myself, I’m beside myself!’ cried Capote in a sarcastic wail. ‘Those years were nerve-shattering,’ says Capote now. ‘I mean, I never knew whether I had a book or not.’
Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’ earned him several million dollars — and a highly ambivalent critical reception. The most serious attack came from the late Kenneth Tynan, who accused Capote of hastening the execution of the two murderers in order to safeguard the profitability of his book. ‘The opposite was true,’ says Capote. ‘I was just — so shocked. Right up to that moment I thought Tynan was my friend — What did he die of, anyway?’ Although Capote seems to have behaved pretty well irreproachably throughout, the controversy surrounding In Cold Blood could be seen as the start of our present permissiveness about turning tragedy into entertainment. ‘It was an interest in the form that made me write that book, nothing else.’ In terms of technique, In Cold Blood was seminal, and much-imitated. Capote himself is still following up its implications.
Meanwhile, of course, the stylish Mr Capote had ensconced himself as the ubiquitous lap-dog of high society. I imagine he cut a reassuring and innocuous figure, spryly perched on the edges of sofas and beds, with his crooning, questioning voice, no threat to the menfolk — no threat to anyone, it would seem. Capote’s presence immediately induces a mood of sympathetic intimacy — why, I myself nearly poured out my fears and hopes to him. ‘But I’m a writer,’ says Capote with a thin-lipped smile. ‘What did they expect?’
Capote is referring here to the elaborate scandals created by Answered Prayers, his unfinished autobiographical novel ‘about the Very Rich’. Four sections of this labyrinthine roman à clef appeared in Esquire in 1975, precipitating many a broken íriendship, ostracism and snub — as well as Truman’s brief bout of pill and drink cross-addiction. Nowadays he tends to pooh-pooh the extent of his own distress at the time; you feel that what bewildered him most was the fact that he had miscalculated, and so gravely. ‘I thought they’d all think it was funny. I’d have thought it was funny …”
Acrimony on this scale has a habit of feeding off itself. Soon afterwards, Capote found himself engaged in litigation with his one-time friend Gore Vidal. In a 1975 interview with Playgirl Truman claimed that Gore had been ‘thrown out’ of the White House after drunkenly insulting Jackie Kennedy (Gore and Jackie, after all, had a step-father in common).