Books in Brief: Conversations with Capote

Conversations with Capote, by Lawrence Grobel, foreword by James A. Michener (New American Library, 244 pp., $14.95)

Now that Truman has left the party before the party was over, slipping away quietly in his strange little way, what are we to make of all those notes he left scattered about? A book like Lawrence Grobel’s collection of interviews with Capote only delays the day of reckoning. It keeps Truman the “character,” the public persona and familiar outrage, around a little while longer. He was of course infinitely amusing, but also infinitely repetitive. If he had lived out the century, he’d have said nothing new, and nothing at all in a new way of saying. Reading these conversations with the selfdeclared homosexual, alcoholic, drug addict, and creative genius all rolled into one, you often get so strong a sense of déjà vu as to make you swear that you had heard it all before in one or more of Capote’s own books. Indeed, this is literally the case in the echoes one may hear from a number of the most charming of his essays in, for example, Music for Chameleons (1980). Truman Capote was one of those writers whose voice lifts right off the page because it has already been heard so often in public. So if the conversational Capote is the one we miss most, where does that leave the writings? Can the perishing Republic draw any historical sustenance from a bleeding-heart screed like In Cold Blood (1966)? Is Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) anything but a cloyingly self-conscious first novel by a gifted wise-child of our times? And how shall we go gently into that dark night of the age with anyone so slight as Holly Golightly? What’s left, then, but that lovely and sentimental tale A Christmas Memory (1966)? And, of course, those half-remembered conversations after the party is over.

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Conversations with Capote, by Lawrence Grobel, foreword by James A. Michener (New American Library, 244 pp., $14.95)

Now that Truman has left the party before the party was over, slipping away quietly in his strange little way, what are we to make of all those notes he left scattered about? A book like Lawrence Grobel’s collection of interviews with Capote only delays the day of reckoning. It keeps Truman the “character,” the public persona and familiar outrage, around a little while longer. He was of course infinitely amusing, but also infinitely repetitive. If he had lived out the century, he’d have said nothing new, and nothing at all in a new way of saying. Reading these conversations with the selfdeclared homosexual, alcoholic, drug addict, and creative genius all rolled into one, you often get so strong a sense of déjà vu as to make you swear that you had heard it all before in one or more of Capote’s own books. Indeed, this is literally the case in the echoes one may hear from a number of the most charming of his essays in, for example, Music for Chameleons (1980). Truman Capote was one of those writers whose voice lifts right off the page because it has already been heard so often in public. So if the conversational Capote is the one we miss most, where does that leave the writings? Can the perishing Republic draw any historical sustenance from a bleeding-heart screed like In Cold Blood (1966)? Is Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) anything but a cloyingly self-conscious first novel by a gifted wise-child of our times? And how shall we go gently into that dark night of the age with anyone so slight as Holly Golightly? What’s left, then, but that lovely and sentimental tale A Christmas Memory (1966)? And, of course, those half-remembered conversations after the party is over.