When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/01/truman-capote-true-crime-in-cold-blood/672747/
35 comments
https://archive.is/zG4XB
this bit from a diff article made me lol--
'When I wrote 'In Cold Blood' many were critical,' Capote said. 'I spent six years on that book wandering the plains of Kansas and nearly went mad but I saw it through. (Fellow author Norman) Mailer called it 'a failure of the imagination,' and now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I'm glad I was of some small service to him.'
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great capote interviews are Paris Review 17 and especially controversial Playboy 1968 interview....holy moly
you can't believe the actual meat and saucy opinions this guy really said out loud
Compare to the insipid 'i love puppies and rainbows' interviews of writers today, ughhhh
'When I wrote 'In Cold Blood' many were critical,' Capote said. 'I spent six years on that book wandering the plains of Kansas and nearly went mad but I saw it through. (Fellow author Norman) Mailer called it 'a failure of the imagination,' and now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I'm glad I was of some small service to him.'
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great capote interviews are Paris Review 17 and especially controversial Playboy 1968 interview....holy moly
you can't believe the actual meat and saucy opinions this guy really said out loud
Compare to the insipid 'i love puppies and rainbows' interviews of writers today, ughhhh
I just read that whole interview. Crazy to think that he was basically at his peak at that moment, while he clearly thought he was just getting started.
1968 interview: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/books/truman-capote-playboy-in...
Playboy: How do you react to those critics who deride the form of documentary crime writing employed in In Cold Blood as inferior to the novel?
Capote: What can I say, except that I think they’re ignorant? If they can’t comprehend that journalism is really the most avant-garde form of writing existent today, then their heads are in the sand. These critics seem unable to realize, or accept, that creative fiction writing has gone as far as it can experimentally. It reached its peak in the Twenties and hasn’t budged since. Of course, we have writers like William Burroughs, whose brand of verbal surface trivia is amusing and occasionally fascinating, but there’s no base for moving forward in that area—whereas journalism is actually the last great unexplored literary frontier.
…
Playboy: The gulf between someone of your background and two such brutal criminals would seem impossible to bridge. But you’ve said, “Hickock and Smith became very, very good friends of mine—perhaps the closest friends I’ve ever had in my life.” How did you establish rapport with them?
Capote: I treated them as men, not as murderers. To most people, a man loses his humanity the minute they learn he’s a murderer; they could be talking with him one moment and then the next someone would whisper, “Do you know he killed five people?” and from that moment on, the man would become unreal to them, an uncomfortable abstraction. But I find it relatively easy to establish rapport with murderers; in the past few years, I’ve interviewed more than 30 of them in all parts of the country. Before I began In Cold Blood, I knew nothing about crime and wasn’t interested in it; but once the book was under way, I began interviewing murderers—or homicidal minds, as I call them—in order to have a basis of comparison for Smith and Hickock; and I met many more recently while doing a television documentary on capital punishment. The second we begin talking, I find that they are ordinary men with extraordinary problems, set apart only by their ability to kill; in some it’s a total lack of conscience, in others a passionate destructive drive. But I have found a certain pattern. One common denominator, for example, is their fetish for tattoos. I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes. I’ve met few killers who didn’t start laughing when I finally managed to force them to discuss the murder—which isn’t easy. When Perry Smith started to tell me about the murder of the Clutter family, for example, he said, “I know this isn’t funny, but I can’t help laughing about it.” Just a while ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old boy named Bassett in the San Quentin death house who is extremely intelligent. He’s a slight, thin boy, with a delicate face and figure, a college student, and he writes poetry and short stories. He murdered his mother and father when he was 18; he’d been planning to do it since he was 10 years old. And when he started telling me about how he killed his parents, he began laughing and cracking little jokes, just as though he was telling me the most humorous story. They’re mostly like that; they’ll tell you how they cut someone’s throat and it’s as if they were watching a clown slip on a banana peel.
…
Playboy: You don’t agree, then, with the adage that it’s better for a dozen guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be unjustly convicted?
Capote: It’s a charming sentiment, but more apropos in the halcyon days of yore, when our cities had not yet been turned into jungles and a citizen could still stroll the streets in safety. I’m afraid that today, for the very self-protection of our society, it’s better that one innocent man be punished than that a dozen guilty men go free. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the harsh reality we face.
Playboy: How do you react to those critics who deride the form of documentary crime writing employed in In Cold Blood as inferior to the novel?
Capote: What can I say, except that I think they’re ignorant? If they can’t comprehend that journalism is really the most avant-garde form of writing existent today, then their heads are in the sand. These critics seem unable to realize, or accept, that creative fiction writing has gone as far as it can experimentally. It reached its peak in the Twenties and hasn’t budged since. Of course, we have writers like William Burroughs, whose brand of verbal surface trivia is amusing and occasionally fascinating, but there’s no base for moving forward in that area—whereas journalism is actually the last great unexplored literary frontier.
…
Playboy: The gulf between someone of your background and two such brutal criminals would seem impossible to bridge. But you’ve said, “Hickock and Smith became very, very good friends of mine—perhaps the closest friends I’ve ever had in my life.” How did you establish rapport with them?
Capote: I treated them as men, not as murderers. To most people, a man loses his humanity the minute they learn he’s a murderer; they could be talking with him one moment and then the next someone would whisper, “Do you know he killed five people?” and from that moment on, the man would become unreal to them, an uncomfortable abstraction. But I find it relatively easy to establish rapport with murderers; in the past few years, I’ve interviewed more than 30 of them in all parts of the country. Before I began In Cold Blood, I knew nothing about crime and wasn’t interested in it; but once the book was under way, I began interviewing murderers—or homicidal minds, as I call them—in order to have a basis of comparison for Smith and Hickock; and I met many more recently while doing a television documentary on capital punishment. The second we begin talking, I find that they are ordinary men with extraordinary problems, set apart only by their ability to kill; in some it’s a total lack of conscience, in others a passionate destructive drive. But I have found a certain pattern. One common denominator, for example, is their fetish for tattoos. I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes. I’ve met few killers who didn’t start laughing when I finally managed to force them to discuss the murder—which isn’t easy. When Perry Smith started to tell me about the murder of the Clutter family, for example, he said, “I know this isn’t funny, but I can’t help laughing about it.” Just a while ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old boy named Bassett in the San Quentin death house who is extremely intelligent. He’s a slight, thin boy, with a delicate face and figure, a college student, and he writes poetry and short stories. He murdered his mother and father when he was 18; he’d been planning to do it since he was 10 years old. And when he started telling me about how he killed his parents, he began laughing and cracking little jokes, just as though he was telling me the most humorous story. They’re mostly like that; they’ll tell you how they cut someone’s throat and it’s as if they were watching a clown slip on a banana peel.
…
Playboy: You don’t agree, then, with the adage that it’s better for a dozen guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be unjustly convicted?
Capote: It’s a charming sentiment, but more apropos in the halcyon days of yore, when our cities had not yet been turned into jungles and a citizen could still stroll the streets in safety. I’m afraid that today, for the very self-protection of our society, it’s better that one innocent man be punished than that a dozen guilty men go free. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the harsh reality we face.
Just want to say that it's one of my favorite twists of history that the guy who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's invented "true" crime.
Why? Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a remarkable book. If you’ve only seen the movie you might get the wrong impression of the book. I had to turn the movie off after just a few minutes.
The movie actually incorporates a surprising amount of material from the book. I read, and then watched six months ago.
It embellishes by establishing a romantic relationship between Holly Golightly and the narrator, and then also makes the narrator himself into essentially a prostitute, as Holly was also. Moon River is also a major addition, as is Holly's decision to remain in New York at the conclusion.
They even kept the cat in the plot, for most of the same story.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_at_Tiffany's_(film...
It embellishes by establishing a romantic relationship between Holly Golightly and the narrator, and then also makes the narrator himself into essentially a prostitute, as Holly was also. Moon River is also a major addition, as is Holly's decision to remain in New York at the conclusion.
They even kept the cat in the plot, for most of the same story.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_at_Tiffany's_(film...
The movie is beyond racist. If you don't believe me just watch it. You don't even need to be an identitarian to see it's horrifically outdated.
The very idea of art becoming "outdated" because of changing political and social norms is absurd. Even if most of us no longer share the sentiments behind a piece of human cultural history or its creators, doesn't mean we should reject it as a part of our history or not be able to appreciate something of it at the very least for reasons of historical learning. A vast proportion of history's most interesting thinkers, creators and writers were full of flaws that in some cases would today be considered literally criminal, should they be erased from modern appreciation because of this foolish idea of "outdated"?
Mickey Rooney's performance was called out as racist even back then, these aren't some new decency standards we made up along the way.
Who says erased? They're just outdated, that's all.
For many of them, not even that. Is Socrates outdated, or Thomas Jefferson? How about Picasso? The first of these is widely believed to have been what we would today call a pedophile (this being common in his culture and time), the second was a slave owner and the third was an abusive, jealous womanizer.
Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.
Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.
In the movie, Mickey Rooney plays a horrible caricature of a Japanese man, Mr. Yunioshi. But in the book, Mr. Yunioshi is just a Japanese man, not a racist stereotype.
Gone with the Wind is horrifically racist yet quite reasonably justifiable to watch on its merits.
[deleted]
What merits?
I understand your sentiment, and agree with it in some contexts, but look what HBO Max added as an intro [1]: "a prime text for examining expressions of white supremacy in popular culture ... it is precisely because of the ongoing, painful patterns of racial injustice and disregard for Black lives that Gone with the Wind should stay in circulation and remain available for viewing, analysis and discussion. ... an opportunity to think about what classic films can teach us." [2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)#Anal... 2. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/opinions/gone-with-the-wind-i...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)#Anal... 2. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/opinions/gone-with-the-wind-i...
This is true of basically all literary journalism. How do so many interesting things happen to these people that they can write about it? Easy, they make it up. David Foster Wallace is another example, said as someone who enjoys his essays. And David Sedaris, not that he really styles himself as a journalist.
The article digging into Sedaris was especially silly since it's clear that he's a comic (and a great one at that) and the fact that he may have taken NPR for a ride just makes him funnier.
His wild and delightful caricatures are often so absurd it’s comical to imagine someone reviewing each under a microscope seeking evidence of exaggeration or falsehood… that’s sort of the point!
Which article is this?
Embarrassingly I can't find it now. It was styled as am expose that proved that elements of Santaland diaries were untrue.
DFW’s essays are more about his personal insights into the subject rather than the subject itself. I’m sure not everything written is 100% word-for-word accurate, but I don’t get the impression he embellishes too much because he doesn’t have to. The subjects of his essays are quite mundane: a mediocre cruse, a middling tennis player, 4H, etc.
It's not so much that he embellishes what happens but seems to have fabricated context to write about at all. In the essay where he visits a midwestern state fair with a long-time local acquaintance, for example, a lot of the interest of the story is in the observations and "folk witticisms" of his companion. That companion doesn't seem to have existed at all, which drastically changes the character of the piece and is not merely an embellishment.
Similarly the cruise essay has a memorable scene where he plays a game of chess against a child. His biographer and close friend, who rarely challenges the DFW mythology directly, specifically calls that one out and explains why he believes it didn't happen and that child didn't exist. Again this isn't embellishing a detail for the sake of a good story, this is much closer to fiction writing, which in contemporary literature is also often closed tied to direct personal experience in this way.
I don't think writing in this way is dishonest, fwiw, or that this indicates anything bad per se. I think characterizing it as journalism, or even nonfictions essays is a mistake though. It's easy to see why it would have been sold that way at the time, but we don't have to stay with that classification now. I don't think it's likely that DFW published anything that could be considered strictly nonfiction. Ambitious as he was, this is almost certainly the reason he never agreed to publish anything in the new yorker which would have been such an obviously ideal publication for his "nonfiction," if it weren't for their sophisticated and ruthless fact checkers.
Similarly the cruise essay has a memorable scene where he plays a game of chess against a child. His biographer and close friend, who rarely challenges the DFW mythology directly, specifically calls that one out and explains why he believes it didn't happen and that child didn't exist. Again this isn't embellishing a detail for the sake of a good story, this is much closer to fiction writing, which in contemporary literature is also often closed tied to direct personal experience in this way.
I don't think writing in this way is dishonest, fwiw, or that this indicates anything bad per se. I think characterizing it as journalism, or even nonfictions essays is a mistake though. It's easy to see why it would have been sold that way at the time, but we don't have to stay with that classification now. I don't think it's likely that DFW published anything that could be considered strictly nonfiction. Ambitious as he was, this is almost certainly the reason he never agreed to publish anything in the new yorker which would have been such an obviously ideal publication for his "nonfiction," if it weren't for their sophisticated and ruthless fact checkers.
> a middling tennis player...
If you're referring to the 2006 NYT piece on Roger Federer, I think you're not supporting the "quite mundane" characterization
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fed...
If you're referring to the 2006 NYT piece on Roger Federer, I think you're not supporting the "quite mundane" characterization
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fed...
I was talking about the essay "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness"
Michael Joyce's highest ranking was 64.
Michael Joyce's highest ranking was 64.
64 in what? 64th worldwide is obviously not a middling player; 64th of his local club probably falls shy of that lofty moniker.
Perhaps you meant "middling professional player"? Because I don't think there's enough money to be made to pay for expenses and support you year-round if you do not crack the top-100.
Perhaps you meant "middling professional player"? Because I don't think there's enough money to be made to pay for expenses and support you year-round if you do not crack the top-100.
You should read the essay, I think you’d like it. Your comment strikes the heart of the matter.
Yes, Michael Joyce was the 64th best in the world. He’s reached a level of tennis that almost every other player in the world can only dream of. Joyce’s ability to play tennis was rivaled only by a small handful of people in the entire world. And yet… not many will ever hear of Michael Joyce. He won’t be able to earn a sustainable wage playing the game. Ultimately, he might be even worse off than the 64th best player at a local club. So what’s the point? Why does Joyce do it?
Yes, Michael Joyce was the 64th best in the world. He’s reached a level of tennis that almost every other player in the world can only dream of. Joyce’s ability to play tennis was rivaled only by a small handful of people in the entire world. And yet… not many will ever hear of Michael Joyce. He won’t be able to earn a sustainable wage playing the game. Ultimately, he might be even worse off than the 64th best player at a local club. So what’s the point? Why does Joyce do it?
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail. As he put it in a later television interview: "There was a rumor in Philadelphia about Ed Muskie being addicted to ibogaine. I know, I started it."
Yeah, that book is 75% fiction, at least. But it's a fun read.
>This is true of basically all literary journalism. How do so many interesting things happen to these people that they can write about it? Easy, they make it up.
It is not all made up.
>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-ecstatic-t...
It is not all made up.
>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-ecstatic-t...
Steinbeck too (Travels With Charley).
Which stuff in DFW's essays did he make up?
This is from memory, but ISTR people claiming that Wallace's characterizations in essays like "Shipping Out" are mostly fictionalized for (successful!) literary value.
Edit: Found it: Franzen thinks that his dialogues were implausible[1].
[1]: https://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonat...
Edit: Found it: Franzen thinks that his dialogues were implausible[1].
[1]: https://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonat...