The opprobrious term ”poison dwarf” could almost have been invented for Truman Capote. In later life he became renowned for his queeny cattiness, and his final, long-delayed and never-finished novel, Answered Prayers (published after his death in 1984), managed to distress all the rich socialites he had been fêted by and then, in their eyes, betrayed. He was famous for being bitchy about everyone, but also for bursting into tears of self-pity on national television. The fact that he was addicted to alcohol and pills can’t have helped. A 1980 guide to novelists says primly that ”Capote has for the time being lost his status as a serious author”.
The figure portrayed in Capote is the Capote of the early 1960s, a transitional Capote. He had arrived on the American literary scene in the late 1940s with the sexually daring novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which might be described as Southern Gothic Lite. The seductive author picture on the back of the book attracted as much comment as the novel itself. Then Capote charmed the mid-1950s with his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a twinkly urban romance with little substance, which was made into a successful film with Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard.
Then, all of a sudden, he inaugurated the ”non-fiction novel” with In Cold Blood (ancestor of such hybrid works as our own Country of My Skull). This was a huge surprise to everyone who knew him as a social gadfly and, moreover, as a diminutive homosexual with a squeaky little voice and a nervous disposition. That he went, in 1959, to a small Kansas town to investigate the apparently pointless slaughter of a whole family, and stuck with the story long enough to write this ”true account of a multiple murder and its consequences”, as In Cold Blood describes itself, must have amazed his contemporaries and fans.
When it was eventually published in 1966, In Cold Blood was a massive bestseller and made Capote world-famous. In that respect, it did for him what he wanted — it provided him with a big work that made him the ”serious author” some doubted he could be. But it also had negative consequences, as Capote shows.
Rereading In Cold Blood now, it is interesting to note how Capote erased himself from the text. He spoke to many of the people involved, including the murderers (and developed a close relationship with one of them), obviously had access to privileged information, and certainly did a lot of careful listening and observing, but nowhere in the book does he say ”I”. The author is invisible, and thus supposedly objective — as reporters, for instance, are supposed to be.
This is a fallacy, of course, as it was when realist novelists were expected to keep their authorial personae out of the reader’s view, to simply pull the strings from behind the scenes. This is what Jacques Derrida saw as concealing the conditions of the work’s production, and the author’s self-effacement is as much a style as a strong authorial presence. Few writers of even such ”non-fiction novels” do it nowadays; in fact, their work is often all about themselves. What the movie does is reinsert Capote himself into the story of the making of In Cold Blood.
And it’s not a pretty picture. Capote does not emerge well from the tale told in the movie, and the whole thing leaves a somewhat sour taste, but it’s impossible to see what else could have been done with this slice of Capote’s biography (let alone what came after), and perhaps that sour taste is the right taste for this story. It is riveting, nonetheless.
Philip Seymour Hoffman in the titular role is extraordinary. Never having seen Capote doing the rounds of the TV chat shows, as so many Americans did, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this impersonation, but many have. For Hoffman, who is a big guy, to transform himself into the petite Capote is a wonder. So much so that for at least the first half-hour of the movie one keeps looking for any tricks the camera may be performing, as in The Lord of the Rings, to make Hoffman appear Capote-sized.
If there is a flaw in this portrayal of Capote, it is that the surface is so meticulously realised that the inner workings of this complex man are left opaque. One doesn’t feel the makers of the movie have entirely got his measure, though we are being asked to judge him on the basis of his behaviour. But this is an imaginary Capote, in a fictional reconstruction of what happened. Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke, on whose book the movie is based, has attested to the basic accuracy of the movie, despite some compressions and elisions. Still, it’s not a documentary — and even a documentary is not necessarily a mainline to the truth.
Capote being a sober, well-crafted movie, we are expected to ask questions about Capote as author and person and about In Cold Blood, and perhaps about whether such a thing as a ”non-fiction novel” can actually exist or will always be in some way mendacious. And so one begins to ask similar questions about the movie, about the odd ways in which fiction and fact get mixed up together but, like oil and water, never quite manage to blend.