An unbuttoned cocktail party

Spectator, The, Mar 7, 1998 by Hillier, Bevis

TRUMAN CAPOTE:

IN WHICH VARIOUS FRIENDS, ENEMIES, ACQUAINTANCES RECALL HIS TURBULENT CAREER

edited by George Plimpton Picador, L20, pp. 498

In 1969 I published a book on posters. In it I quoted directly from so many people that I thought it necessary to insert this apologia in the introduction: I want to defend what some might consider an exorbitant use of direct quotation. I have never been able to understand the historian's enthusiasm for converting perfectly clear original statements into a mish-mash of paraphrase - the arrogant insistence that his subjects should speak through the muzzle (sometimes the megaphone) of his own style. .

Ten years later, when working on my book Young Betjeman, I was again made aware of the virtues of `oral biography' when interviewing, with my trusty taperecorder, a group of elderly people who had been schoolmates of the poet at his first school in 1912. `Of course, our games in the playground were always "French against English" ', one of the old ladies said. Those few words suddenly brought home to me - with a flash of insight what a far-off stretch of history Betjeman had been born into. Germany was not yet the enemy: the Kaiser, after all, was Queen Victoria's grandson. Children still looked back to the Napoleonic wars and the old enemy, France.

Much as I value direct recollection, however, I as biographer expect to remain the ringmaster. Or the concert conductor here bringing in the bassoons, there motioning to the piccolos to pipe down. George Plimpton's idea of oral biography is different: he just sets down, in roughly chronological order, raw chunks of different people's memories of Truman Capote, including his own. He plucks brands from the burning - or perhaps one might say, in the case of some of his contributors, faggots from the old flames. No real commentary, no footnotes, no twitch of the editorial reins. Those raw vegetables they serve with the aperitif in restaurants are called crudites, and there is a certain crudeness in the Plimpton method. It reminds me of those television language programmes for schools in which young French people, or Germans, Spaniards or Italians, just gas away in their native tongue, with no translations or subtitles. The naive idea is that, by this process, English kids will sort of imbibe the foreign language, rather as they absorbed their own, from scratch. Forget irregular verbs.

Oral biography is not a new genre, of course. Henry Mayhew practised it in London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62). Plimpton himself has given us An American Journey: The Life and Times of Robert F. Kennedy and Edie, a key book of Sixties lore, about a member of Andy Warhol's court. The technique works better with some subjects than with others. It worked supremely well in Savage Grace (edited by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, 1985), about Antony Baekeland, the plastics (Bakelite) heir who killed his mother. And for similar reasons it works pretty well with Truman Capote. In both cases, somebody very far from the norm is remembered by people much nearer the norm. By synthesis, you arrive at a balanced view of the unbalanced.

Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924 and spent much of his childhood in Monroeville, a small town in Alabama. He became a messenger at the New Yorker. In 1946 his short story 'Miriam' was selected for the O. Henry Memorial Award volume. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), made his name. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) made him money as a successful film. His masterpiece was In Cold Blood (1966), a `non-fiction novel' about two men who murdered a Kansas farmer and his family. An excellent conventional biography of Capote, by Gerald Clarke, was published in 1988. What I remember most from it is the indecent, cat-on-a-hottin-roof impatience with which Capote waited for the appeals of the two convicts whom he had befriended to be turned down. He needed them to be executed, for two reasons: first, to give his book a telling climax (he attended the hanging); and second, so the two men would not be able to protest at the inaccuracy of his account. By a nice twist of irony, Capote had to die for the present book to be published. In his lifetime, no one would have dared to talk about him with such candour - Gore Vidal, perhaps, excepted. Capote's vengefulness was too well known and feared. One of his tricks, when he had a real vendetta, was to ring Johnny Carson and ask to go on his television show that night, to put the boot in. Capote died conveniently young, at 59, in 1984, so Plimpton has been able to conscript a large cast of people who remember him. He has found both fans and bad-mouthers, including the implacable Vidal.

In a short preface, Plimpton likens the book to 'a cocktail party, in this cave of Truman Capote's acquaintances'.

With a glass in hand (probably vodka) our reader moves from group to group and listens in on personal reminiscences, opinions, vitriol and anecdote.

It is a good analogy. As a whole, the book is extraordinarily entertaining. A redneck will find the company too camp;And, as at a cocktail party, the rest of us will occasionally encounter somebody on whom we feel compelled to use the old ploy, `Excuse me a moment, I just want to freshen up my drink.' A large part of Capote's life was spent in the silliest sort of cafe society, so we meet one woman who indulges in this orgy of name-dropping as she describes how she dolled herself up for Capote's famous `black-and-white' masked ball in New York in 1966: