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 in the arts
from April 2006
Think of the bitchiest, most venomous queen you’ve ever come across, destroying the reputation of everyone coming through the pub door, and you will have a good insight into the character of Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood.
He is the subject of the biopic Capote which focuses on the years when he became obsessed with two drifters, Perry Smith and Richard Hicock, arrested for the brutal murders of the Cutter family in rural Kansas in 1959. There is strong evidence for a homoerotic attraction between Capote and Perry Smith. Capote initially intends to write a short article for the New Yorker Magazine but this soon turns into a project for a nonfiction novel that will turn out to be the publishing phenomenon of the decade. It proved to be his last complete work. His life goes downhill afterwards - regarded as a social pariah when his rich friends recognise unflattering portraits of themselves in a draft chapter in a subsequent novel. His relationship with his long term love Jack Dumphy deteriorates and Capote has a series of unstable affairs with rough trade hunks who hang around Andy Warhol. He descends into spiral of drug and alcohol dependency. The Greeks would call this hubris - righteous revenge from the gods for overweening ambition.
Capote quickly realises that there are literary prizes to be won for his account of the life of a brutal killer. He has a brilliant title: In Cold Blood. He wheedles out a glimpse of Perry Smith’s journal, gaining his confidence by promising to get legal counsel to achieve a success appeal. However. Capote’s literary antennae tell him that the novel would sell even better if its ends with executions. He therefore neglects to get the legal help requested, lying to Perry, on death row, ‘I did everything I could, I truly did!’
His childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird responds to his apology: ‘There isn’t anything I could have done’ with ‘Maybe not but the fact is you didn’t want to.’ Ghoul-like, Capote watches the execution of Perry.
The truth is that Truman Capote is a massive ego, always keen to have the last word and to put down literary rivals. He is a fey, pixie like figure with a high pitched voice, the stereotypical New York faggot who is a world away from the dour Kansas police chief and the rural mid West. He shows little concern for the Clutter family, brutally gunned down for a paltry $40. But he used his early draft to give an inspired reading to a literary gathering. And to be fair, he has a dazzling prose style.
This is a tightly produced narrative that switches effortlessly between New York gay bars and prison cells. The spacious Kansas landscape is as photogenic as the backcloth to Brokeback Mountain. Capote is brave in one sense, being an obvious gay in a homophobic culture. He is an outsider - a southerner in New York and a New Yorker in Kansas. His childhood with a mother who was an adulterous alcoholic mirrors that of Perry Smith. Capote is played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman who exactly catches his tics and mannerisms. This is an acting tour de force.
We watch Capote to see an author falling into tragic decline, though it is hard to sympathise. We perhaps feel more sorry for the murderers who naively thought Capote was their knight in shining armour. All this is probably far removed from our dull suburban lives but we can always admire literary achievement, however flawed, at a distance. You wouldn’t want to exchange put downs with Truman Capote in person. Just remember that here is someone a good deal worse that your average bar room bitchy queen!
Nick Tyldesley
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