CAPOTE AND US

The movie called “Capote” really ought to be called “In Cold Blood.” At the heart of it is the question of how much Truman Capote wrote his book “in cold blood,” that “masculine” phrase, while he tried to write about Perry Smith’s cold-blooded murder of a nice, white, prosperous, well-loved family precisely because they were what he could never be. Perry was Cherokee, at least partly, and wanted very much to be a poet and artist but had no education. which led him into the kind of blundering pretensions that Capote finally could not stand and used against Perry. All along Capote used his own sad story to call out identification and trust from Perry, but was tripped up when the electricity ran in the other direction and he saw himself in this little murderer. Capote’s own jealous rage at not being part of a proper warm and nurturing family led him not to murder (the legal system took care of that part) but to a sort of suicide. He never finished another book. The two people closest to him, his partner and Harper Lee, his lifelong friend, saw exactly what he had done by lying. This movie doesn’t tell, it shows, with the help of a very skillful impersonation by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

It was a dangerous movie for me to watch last night because I’m writing about and with Tim Barrus, who was so flamboyantly “exposed” as a Navahoax, in a way that was mostly not factually wrong -- just so thoroughly incomplete as to be a hoax about a hoax, a compounding instead of a clarifying. Am I Truman Capote, so very interested in someone else’s life that I can’t see whether I’m exposing my own? Tim and I have moved from writing about Cinematheque to writing about Tim himself and the most obvious thing to do is what that sneering little LA Weekly journalist did: interview people from the past on the phone. At least those who would talk. Capote didn’t do that.

It is a major difference to be writing WITH Tim. Capote consistently withheld what he was writing, even lying to escape Perry’s suspicion about the title. Perry was excluded twice: once by his incapacity to understand what was going on and secondly by Capote deliberately treating him as only a case study. At one point he wished Perry dead because that was the only way he could finish his book. At the same time he was telling Perry that he was trying to find a lawyer to defend him -- which he wasn’t, though he had earlier when he needed a delay to get more interview time with Perry. The second killer, who turned out not to be the shooter, was a little smarter and had an idea what was happening. It was a classic tale of a seducer (Capote) working towards his own goal, while his opposite tried to seduce Capote into saving him. Both fell in love. It was a dead end for both, Perry literally and Capote a little more elaborately over time.

Tim and I are like a Venn diagram. (Academics love Venn diagrams.) In this case our two life circles overlap in rather strange and subtle ways, but we are both strong adults with most of our lives lived outside the overlap. We are self-aware and we share both actual writing and, where you don’t see it, considerable disclosure like that between friends. It is more like formal courtship than seduction, though one could easily argue that “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping” is a very seductive book. It sure worked on me. Not many could tell Tim much about seduction in the mental and physical sense. In our case, since we’ve never met, there is no physical seduction. But since most of my more successful seductions (on purpose & by accident) have been in the context of ministry with major moral safeguards, I have some clear boundaries. I’m saying there's a lot of dancing and no consummation. Most people enjoy watching a dance, but maybe only the porny want to see the consummation. Perhaps I’m being too cryptic and too risky at the same time. Let’s just say my specialty has been unrequited love on both sides. Headtrip romance for the sake of the action.

Tim knew Capote. I think that’s true but irrelevant. Tim is not in the least like Perry Smith nor Capote either. Tim admires Capote’s writing and so do I, but maybe our moral outlook (both of us) is more like Harper Lee, Capote’s lifelong friend and the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which is not so innocent a book as most readers think. She is unblinking. Capote’s eyes fluttered quite a bit.

I hadn’t really noticed until recently how many biographies are written about people who already have biographers, including God. Some of them have spoken for themselves (presumably, like God) and others have simply left an ambiguous legacy asking for interpretation (certainly like God). Some describe Caravaggio this way and others look at him that way. We seem to enjoy the varipelagic versions. (I love Hyde’s neologism! I’ll get back to Hyde’s theories about tricksters in another post or two. Gotta read more.)

This blog has morphed quite a lot, not unlike the way my column in the Glacier Reporter, “The Merry Scribbler,” began to change after a while. It started out to be a natural history and “American West” column but gradually drifted over into something else -- maybe muck-raking -- until I offended the mayor and got shut down. My biography of Bob started out to be a fact-finding expedition and turned into a kind of moral investigation as well, probably one I will eventually go back and finish in a second book. I’m talking about the secondary and tertiary levels of arts exploitation that has become almost feverish in the Western art world: the galleries, the museums, the curators, the collectors, the writers, the investors. And about how it corrupted Bob himself. Very parallel to the world of Native American literature, except that the Western art people exclude Indians almost entirely. It’s a mini-version of what has happened to publishing entire.

This means my readership is undoubtedly shifting as well and it ought to. Sort of like a church congregation changing when a new minister comes with a new message. The Blackfeet will probably stick with me because they say I “kick butt,” though the tin pot shamans will only be reading to see what I’m writing about them. (Which is a good reason NOT to write about them.) The bourgeois who take the arts to be markers of prosperity and “niceness” will veer off. Bye, bye. Publishers of the mainstream kind will see no money in it. Shrug. Bloggers don’t need publishers. My old friends and relatives never read my blog anyway. Tim’s readership has got to be bored to death by me and wouldn’t look for me in the first place.

So in what sense am I Capote writing about Perry Smith? Well, consider what it would have been like if Perry Smith had been capable of writing about Truman Capote with as much passion and elegance as Capote had. What if they had been equals? Both writing. It’s the process: writing is a river than runs through both our dreams. It's not what it's about, it's about the process.