He told me that he thought the story closest to perfection in Music for Chameleons was ‘Then It All Came Down’, which records a visit he paid to Robert Beausoleil in prison, the mystery man in the Charles Manson cult. ‘It’s as linear as a fish bone,’ Capote said, drawing the spine in the air with his fan. ‘It moves, it has narrative energy and drive.’ To illustrate, he snapped his fingers and sketched a little dance on the rug with his bare feet. ‘No one understands anything about style, about what I’m trying to do. Now the story “Dazzle” in Music for Chameleons it’s taken me forty years to learn how to write that way, to make it simple. Most writers start simple, then they become more and more complex. Then they have to unlearn everything they’ve acquired. Simplicity and swiftness: that’s what I value.
‘Of course, the most subtle story, the real subtlety ’ he lingered on the word as though he had invented it, or as though it were some foreign expression I might not have caught ~ ‘the most subtle story is “Music for Chameleons”. Even sophisticated readers don’t understand it. They think it’s about a visit with a woman; they think it’s a travel piece about Martinique.’ Spasm of laughter that stopped on a dime. ‘But it’s actually a meditation on murder, about how our passions flog us.’ He took off his glasses and stared at me with two perfectly clear blue eyes, the pupils tiny as gnats in the poisonous yellow light.
I asked him how he ever remembered the conversation he had had with Marilyn Monroe in 1955 after a funeral -one of the most touching and charming pieces in Music for Chameleons. ‘Well, Marilyn was a great friend. I loved her a lot. And never have I read anything that has anything to do with that girl at all except the basic -’ his voice died away and his face sank into a grimace worthy of the Greek mask for tragedy ‘. . . unpleasant facts . . .’ He suddenly brightened and turned to me; unfortunately the sun was glaring on his gray-tinted granny glasses and I’m staring into two silver dollars. ‘But, you see, I keep these extraordinary journals. And I suddenly remembered I had written down everything we’d said that day. Other people who knew her tell me I’ve caught the most perfect likeness. She was my first choice to be in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She and Maureen Stapleton even worked up a wonderful scene for an Actors Studio class; I saw it, but Marilyn was too afraid to do it in class. Excuse me.’
Capote left the room. When he regained the couch, he spoke to me in profile. His voice was high and weak and drawling and his pronunciation slack-jawed, mushy, like a child’s or like Baby Snooks’s. As he picked up confidence, volume, clarity, he turned the two silver dollars toward me. He shook the fan at me to cool me off. I stared down at his long yellow toenails, which reminded me of those four-inch thumbnails the mandarins grew to prove they were so rich they never had to pick anything up. Incapacitating nails and bound feet: emblems of regal dependence on others.
Capote is an entertainer who is never dull, who appeals to the reader’s curiosity without endangering his or her values, Who adds to our store of experience without undermining the categories by which we process that plenitude, whose tales of underdogs and heartbreaking failures only reinforce the political status quo. Capote’s fascinating criminals, lovable maiden aunts, precocious kids and wilted gentry, while appearing to upset the order of things, are in fact the exceptions that prove the rule. They may be rebels but Capote’s presentation of them is never subversive.
(White quotes a passage from Capote's writings) Here we have the pairs of balanced opposites (elegant and tune less, shabby and rich, wraithlike and eternal, comfortable and severe) that serve to stabilize, even freeze character which, moreover, is read through the house and its furnishings.
To interpret the self from its possessions is the great nineteenth~century fictional method (and a bourgeois habit of mind). Earlier novels described actions, not belongings; later novels dramatized inner conflicts, so often at odds with the milieu. That Capote found such a tight fit between his characters and their settings reflected his nostalgia for the traditional society of the Old South. His first novellas Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp take place in that South of small towns and big pretensions, of genteel manners and savage prejudices.
Capote shuffled out of the room again. I, too, stood up, as though to throw off the heat squatting on me like a nightmare in a Fuseli painting. Art and fashion books sat in the sort of stylish piles decorators used to distribute around rooms to give them a studied ‘casual’ look. The bookshelf itself contained mostly various editions and translations of Capote’s own titles. Puppies, kittens and cobras seemed to be the dominant motifs everywhere' (Now I’m interpreting Capote from his belongings). As I strolled about I spotted other puppies, kittens and snakes on desks, woven into pillows, resting on the window-sill fitting emblems, I suppose, for a man who celebrated domestic love in ‘A Christmas Memory’ and has written the most detailed modern chronicle of murder, In Cold Blood. A dozen calla lilies fresh from the florist crowned the coffee table, but the geraniums along the window looked parched, neglected, a bachelor’s plants. .
When Capote re-emerged a minute later he’d picked up vitality. The photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his assistant arrived, and Capote and I posed for our picture against a Japanese painting of fish. ‘The Japanese, of course, didn’t paint in oils for the longest time,’ Capote explained. ‘This one, which was done in the nineteenth century, is one of the first oils. The artists reached the 'height and then, naturally, committed suicide. All the best Japanese artists commit suicide.’
Mapplethorpe told us to look at each other, at the window, at him and we did so rather stiffly as though we were puppets gloving arthritic hands. The sweat flowed freely over our bodies. Although Capote, as he told all the world, was homosexual, he seemed not even faintly interested in either the handsome Mapplethorpe or in his friend, Marcus Leatherdale, who resembles James Dean. Not the faintest sexual interest, that is; he does express his admiration of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Capote let out a sigh and stood: ‘I can’t take it. I can’t be photographed one second more,’ and he hurried down the hall for the third time in twenty minutes.
Mapplethorpe and his friend left. I ambled around the living room and stopped to examine two decorative windows placed on the facing wall. The borders were painted with fruits and birds and the inner surface was studded with abstract shades of tinted glass and mirror. ‘The Shah of Iran gave those to me,’ Capote told me as he returned. ‘They’re very old and valuable national treasures. I’m terrified the Ayatollah will send someone to recover them.’ ,
Capote was now doing a sort of fan dance, listlessly waving his Palmetto and slowly jogging in place. He dropped his fan and rubbed his stomach in long strokes.
In the extant chapters of Answered Prayers, he depicts some of the jumbled elements of his own life (much as Nabokov does in Look at the Harlequins!). The results were so scandalous, the clefs rattled so noisily, that Capote lacked the courage to press on. Drink and drugs dimmed his lights. The book’s jet-set milieu, however, which he’d first touched on in ‘Greek Paragraphs’, a minor travel piece, appealed to his temperament. At last he was free from his sexless youths and corrupted adults, his fairy-tale romances and objective reportage.
The rich have the means to realize their whims and the effrontery to avow their desires. Sex, travel, gambling and intrigue are their sports, while their itineraries and adulteries provide them with conversation, just as loyalty to the clan, devotion to fashion and the display of perfect manners constitute their virtues. Above all, jet-setters love a good story. Too bad Capote didn’t stay sober long enough to betray his friends more thoroughly.
To find the psychic energy to pursue a long career, it seems to
c, a writer must juggle between a Vigorous, recording curiosny “gout the world and how it works and the ongoing process of :elf.creati0n. It is the imagination, of course, that negotiates be/ tween reality and the ego, between the repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle. If the self is utterly eliminated we end up with journalism: if the ego is shamelessly gratified, we have the [angueurs of the intimate journal. If both the self and the world are held at bay and the imagination is given free reign, then the result would be pure fantasy or tedious sci-fi. The successful novel cleverly adjudicates among these temptations and somehow combines newspaper story, confession and fairy tale.
Capote’s most successful response to these various claims is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a sort of rewrite of Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Holly Golightly plays Sally Bowles, the impoverished and sexless young Capote stands in for the similarly disabled Herr Issivoo, and in both books the various eccentrics, lovable or menacing, parade past like vaudeville performers doing their exotic ‘turns’. Both Sally and Holly are at once wish-fulfilment and object-lesson, real girls and gay boys in drag, as well as innocents playing at adult vice. In both Capote’s and Isherwood’s tales the results make for very seductive reading.
He excused himself, but when he returned this time he didn’t seem livelier but dangerously fatigued. I started to leave. ‘I’ve been very anxious,’ he said. ‘It’s something that’s been hanging over me for two and a half years. Partly professional and partly personal. I thought it was over, but it isn’t. That’s why I’m so nervous. I can’t tell you about it it’s a secret. But when you do eventually learn about it, then you’ll understand why it’s been so hard for me to finish Answered Prayers. Everything will come clear then.’
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