Other writers have uncovered other discrepancies. He mentions using neither a tape recorder nor a notebook during interviews with his subjects, an approach embraced by other writers of the emerging New Journalism school of the s, which sought to apply the techniques of literary fiction in chronicling real-life events.
Instead, Capote relied on memorization. I had a natural facility for it, but after doing these exercises for a year and a half, for a couple of hours a day, I could get within 95 percent of absolute accuracy, which is as close as you need.
Here, he describes how Smith spent time behind bars as one season gave way to another:. A month passed, and another, and it snowed some part of almost every day. Snow whitened the wheat-tawny countryside, heaped the streets of the town, hushed them. Squirrels lived in the tree, and, after weeks of tempting them with leftover breakfast scraps, Perry lured one off a branch onto the window sill and through the bars.
It was a male squirrel, with auburn fur. How did such a fly-on-the-wall perspective emerge from a writer whose colorful public life so often placed him in the foreground? Though he never lacked for care, that early abandonment by his parents left an emotional wound that remained open until the day he died.
To keep a truce with everyone else, Sook and her young charge skirt the edges of daily domestic life—making cheerful conspiracies in corner rooms, hunting for homely treasures in the woods, indulging hushed conversations while the rest of the clan sleeps. It was here, quite possibly, that Capote developed the skills of sublimation that allowed him to blend into the background and conduct his reporting.
His sense of living at the margins was surely compounded in later years by being gay at a time when homosexuality was taboo. Joanne Carson, his longtime friend who was with him at the end of his life, said Capote claimed that the story was his most perfect work. In this passage, Sook and Capote—she called him Buddy—take their dog Queenie into the woods to look for a Christmas tree:.
Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch-black vine tunnels. Another creek to cross: a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam.
On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but enthusiasm. In one of the strangest coincidences in American letters, Capote grew up with Lee in Monroeville, the tiny community producing two celebrated writers. Like the works of all three women, his writing has a keen sense of the tragic and the transitory and is alert to capture the moment, in lapidary detail, before it fades from view.
Relocated to the East Coast, Capote was now at the doorstep of a Manhattan literary scene that he would, as he grew to manhood, come to dominate. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms , published in , established him as a rising star.
The project helped him hone techniques he would use in In Cold Blood , which made him a sensation. Life seemed more glamorous then—sex was sexier, success more attainable. Even the moon, as the space program promised, was within reach for the very first time. Capote, the once lonely child from a hardscrabble hamlet, was now the ultimate arbiter of Manhattan society. Not everyone greeted the ball with enthusiasm.
Columnist Drew Pearson, voicing a sentiment shared by a number of other commentators, questioned the taste of throwing a party to toast a book based on the terrible suffering of the Clutter family. He abused drugs and alcohol, sometimes appearing inebriated in public. Here are some facts about this true American original.
By 11, he was already writing his first short stories. After he and his mother moved to New York City from Monroeville, Alabama, he attended a number of high-profile institutions, including the Trinity School, St.
While finishing up his high school education, Capote worked as a copyboy for The New Yorker , which served as his post-high school proving ground. It took place backstage at a theater. I walk onstage… but I just stumble about, mortified. Have you ever had that dream? Although Capote headed out on the road with the band, he did not finish the article , later telling Andy Warhol in an interview for the magazine, "I enjoyed [being on tour]. You know? But I enjoyed it as an experience. I thought it was amusing During a scene in the famous comedy, Alvy Allen and Annie Diane Keaton are engaging in some casual people-watching at the park.
Capote reportedly even had the blanket on the day he died. The author had started work on his Answered Prayers back in , and the salacious send-up of high Hollywood society hung over his head for years to come.
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