Calling Truman Capote - excerpt from 'Conversations With Capote'

Interview, Dec, 1997 by Brad Goldfarb

Truman Capote may have kicked thirteen years ago, but he's still kicking up a storm today. Whether as a result of the influence of his work, the beauty of his writer's voice, the inventiveness of his language, or his well-reported tendency toward self-abuse and -destruction, Capote has done anything but quietly slip from our collective consciousness. This month, however, he will be making even more noise than usual. Just consider the following: A film adaptation of Capote's first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, will be released this month; George Plimpton's much anticipated oral biography, Truman Capote (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese), is expected to reach bookstores not long after: Ballantine will be rereleasing in softcover Gerald Clarke's 1988 best-selling biography of the writer; and Hallmark will be airing a television production of A Christmas Memory, a story Capote considered one of his greatest works of short fiction. In many ways, Capote's willingness to openly display and address his problems placed him ahead of his time. As we ourselves continue to tangle with the various issues that plagued him in a monumental way, it only highlights his relevance to our lives today.

In 1979 Capote began to write a regular column for this magazine titled "Conversations With Capote." The piece excerpted below first appeared in Interview's August 1979 issue; it recounts a heart-to-heart Capote had with himself one sleepless night. When a person becomes a myth, what often gets lost is how that happened in the first place - in other words, what made him or her tick. The following "conversation," written expressly for this magazine - a place Capote knew he would not encounter censorship or limited ways of looking at the world - is really his own self-portrait, and it is a gold mine of insights into who Truman Capote really was.

BRAD GOLDFARB

Q: What frightens you?

A: Real toads in imaginary gardens.

Q: No, but in real life -

A: I'm talking about real life.

Q: Let me put it another way. What, of your own experiences, have been the most frightening?

A: Betrayals. Abandonments. But you want something more specific? . . . When I was nine years old, I was bitten by a cottonmouth water moccasin. Together with some cousins, I'd gone exploring in a lonesome forest about six miles from the rural Alabama town where we lived. There was a narrow, shallow crystal river that ran through this forest. There was a huge log that lay across it from bank to bank like a bridge. My cousins, balancing themselves, ran across the log, but I decided to wade the little riven Just as I was about to reach the farther bank, I saw an enormous cottonmouth moccasin swimming, slithering on the water's shadowy surface. My own mouth went dry as cotton; I was paralyzed, numb, as though my whole body had been needled with novocaine. The snake kept sliding, winding toward me. When it was within inches of me, I spun around, slipped on a bed of slippery creek pebbles. The cottonmouth bit me on the knee.

Turmoil. My cousins took turns carrying me piggyback until we reached a farmhouse. While the farmer hitched up his mule-drawn wagon, his only vehicle, his wife caught a number of chickens, ripped them apart alive, and applied the hot bleeding birds to my knee. "It draws out the poison," she said, and indeed the flesh of the chickens turned green. All the way into town, my cousins kept killing chickens and applying them to the wound. Once we were home, my family telephoned a hospital in Montgomery, a hundred miles away, and five hours later a doctor arrived with a snake serum. I was one sick boy, and the only good thing about it was I missed two months of school.

Once, on my way to Japan, I stayed overnight in Hawaii with Doris Duke in the extraordinary, somewhat Persian place she had built on a cliff at Diamond Head. It was scarcely daylight when I woke up and decided to go exploring. The room in which I had slept had French doors leading into a garden overlooking the ocean. I had been strolling in the garden perhaps half a minute when a terrifying herd of Dobermans appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; they surrounded and kept me captive within the snarling circle they made. No one had warned me that each night after Miss Duke and her guests had retired, this crowd of homicidal canines was let loose to deter, and possibly punish, unwelcome intruders.

The dogs did not attempt to touch me; they just stood there, coldly staring at me and quivering in controlled rage. I was afraid to breathe; I felt if I moved my foot one scintilla, the beasts would spring forward to rip me apart. My hands were trembling; my legs, too. My hair was as wet as if I'd just stepped out of the ocean. There is nothing more exhausting than standing perfectly still, yet I managed to do it for over an hour. Rescue arrived in the form of a gardener who, when he saw what was happening, merely whistled and clapped his hands, and all the demon dogs rushed to greet him with friendly wagging tails.

Those are the instances of specific terror. Still, our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings they create. . . .