Capote-an Readings

[selenak]

In my review of the film “Capote” I mentioned that one of its many virtues is that it makes you want to read books. Having now read Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gerald Clarke’s biography Capote (on which the majority of the film is based) and Capotes letters, I also think it’s a great illustration on how you distill various textual sources into a new

Comments

[selenak]

At the same time, though, the way I read it, I think he did believe that at least Perry (if not both of them) was mentally ill and should have been on a psychiatric ward rather than Death Row.

It's hard to say because the only definite statements you have while they were still alive (and said to someone other than them) is that he didn't think they should be set free (when one of their later lawyers, somewhat deludedly optimistic, said to him they might be out of jail entirely, Capote writes in a letter that he thought "yes, and I hope you're the first one they bump off, you idiot"). Later on, someone point blank asked him whether he had liked them and he replied "It wasn't a question of liking them any more than I like myself. I knew them as I know myself." Make of that what you will.

it really struck me how almost creepily manipulative Capote was of Smith and Hickock.

Though as I wrote in my review of the movie, it works both ways - undoubtedly they originally gave him access and interviews because they thought he would sway public sympathy their way. However, as years went by they did come to depend on him as one of the few people who showed them any attention. Hickock still had his mother after his father died, shortly after the trial, but Cullivan aside, Capote was really the only one who visited and wrote to Smith, despite the fact his father and sister were still alive. (It was also Capote who paid for their gravestones; no one else bothered.) Gerald Clarke first quotes one of Perry's letters (as characteristic for Perry's attempt to show he had a good vocabulary), I like talented personalities very much and I feel that you are a very perspiccious homo sapiens and then adds Truman was father, mentor, perhaps even surrogate lover (for whose attention they were competing, as Perry always wanted to see the letters Dick received from Capote as well but refused to show his own). If someone becomes that much, and is the first person in your life who actually listens non-stop to your stories, it must be impossible not to open up completely.

At the same time, Capote was not Machiavelli. According to the biography, those six years were when he started to drink, and it was because of the work. (Clarke quotes Phyllis Cerf on saying "when I first knew him, we would have a little wine with lunch, then a martini. But during the writing of In Cold Blood his drinking grew, grew, grew, grew. He would start with a double martini, have another with lunch, then a stinger afterward. That kind of heavy drinking was new with him. That town, those boys started to own him."

Now think of that passage where Perry's sister wonders whether, with her dead mother and dead brother and sister and Perry in prison the family fate will catch up with her and you've got to wonder whether Capote wasn't aware he was risking self-destruction even while doing everything to get the book he wanted.

[buffyannotater]

It seems like in his depiction of Dewey's total immersion and obsession with the case, Capote was also indirectly referring to himself.

[selenak]

Definitely. Janet Malcolm in her excellent The Silent Woman reflects that every biography is also autobiography in parts, and all the more so when done by such a skillful writer.