Truman Capote

Monroeville, and a job sorting cartoons

He was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans on 30 September 1924, the son of Archulus Persons, a lawyer who did not practise, and Lillie Mae Faulk of Monroeville, Alabama. His mother — who preferred to be called Nina, and who eventually killed herself — sent him to relatives in Monroeville when he was barely walking, and he spent most of his first nine years there. The surname came later, from his stepfather Joe Capote, a Cuban-born New York businessman.

An English teacher at Greenwich High School in Connecticut, Catherine Woods, was the first person he credited with spotting what he could do; he wrote poems and stories for the school paper and then stopped, having decided that either one was a writer or one was not, and that no professor could change the answer. He did not finish high school and had no further formal education. At seventeen he talked his way into a job at The New Yorker, the New York weekly magazine, which as he later described it involved sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers and lasted two years. He sold the story "Miriam" to the fashion magazine Mademoiselle in 1945; it won an O. Henry Memorial Award — the annual American prize for short stories — the next year, and the award brought a book contract and an advance of fifteen hundred dollars.

Famous at twenty-three

Other Voices, Other Rooms, a Southern novel about a boy sent to find his father, appeared in 1948, when he was twenty-three, and was a critical and financial success. From then on he was a public figure as much as a writer, and the fame kept pace with the work and often outran it. Most of what followed sold too: the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, the story collections, the reportage. His whole output came to thirteen volumes, most of them slim, which his critics — the poet and memoirist John Malcolm Brinnin, an old friend of his, among them — held against him, arguing that he had spent his talent on celebrity rather than on books.

He was blunt about the appetite. "I had to be successful, and I had to be successful early," he said in 1978. "The thing about people like me is that we always knew what we were going to do. Many people spend half their lives not knowing. But I was a very special person, and I had to have a very special life."

The years abroad

For many of the postwar years Capote travelled widely and lived outside the United States much of the time, with Jack Dunphy, the American writer who was his companion for more than twenty-five years. It was not the settled expatriation — the permanent move abroad — chosen by the American writers who made Paris their address in the same decade, Richard Wright for good in 1946 and James Baldwin in 1948; it was a working itinerancy, hotel by hotel, with the finished articles posted home to New York. The travel produced the pieces gathered in Local Color, his collection of travel sketches, and it kept him in the magazines: Vogue, Mademoiselle, Esquire and The New Yorker all ran his work while he was abroad.

The New Yorker published the longest result of that period first: The Muses Are Heard, his 1956 account of a company of Black American performers taking Porgy and Bess — George Gershwin's opera of Black life in South Carolina — on tour to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. He thought of it as an experiment rather than a travel book. "I conceived the whole adventure as a short comic 'nonfiction novel,' the first," he said. "That book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale."

The Art of Fiction No. 17

In the spring of 1957 The Paris Review — the literary quarterly started in Paris in 1953 by a group of young Americans, and still the best-known magazine of its kind — published Capote as the seventeenth subject in its Art of Fiction series, the long interviews about craft that would eventually run to Ernest Hemingway at number twenty-one and the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline at number thirty-three. The writer and artist Pati Hill conducted it at his house in Brooklyn Heights, in New York, and found him unpacking a wooden lion from a crate — destined, he said, for the fireplace, of course — in a parlour of Fabergé pillboxes (the tiny jewelled boxes made by the Russian court jeweller), marbles, blue ceramic fruit and postcards that reminded her of the contents of a very astute little boy's pockets.

What he said there is the most quoted account of his method. The short story, not the novel, was the form he cared about most: "when seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant," and whatever technique he had he owed to it. Asked what he meant by control, he did not hedge — an upper hand over the material, and a story that could be ruined by a bad rhythm in a sentence, especially near the end, or by a mistake in paragraphing or punctuation.

Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence.

Those three verdicts are characteristic. Henry James, the American novelist of The Portrait of a Lady, is praised for his handling of the semicolon; Virginia Woolf, the English novelist of Mrs Dalloway, for the sound of her sentences; and Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist of The Sun Also Rises and the writer of the age most imitated for his plain prose, for the way he divided that prose into paragraphs. Capote is judging all three at the level of the sentence and the punctuation mark, which is the level he had grown up working at himself. He added that he did not claim to practise what he preached — he tried, that was all.

In Cold Blood, the ball, and the fall

The solution he had been looking for arrived with a newspaper item. In 1959 a farm family was murdered in Kansas; Capote went out to report it, stayed, and spent more than six years on the killings, the capture of the two men who had done it, their trial and their execution. In Cold Blood ran serially in The New Yorker and appeared as a book in 1965, and it did everything at once — praise, enormous publicity, millions of dollars, and the freedom to work on the novel he had been promising for years, Answered Prayers. In November 1966 he threw a masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York for some five hundred of what he called his very closest friends.

Answered Prayers never arrived. To keep the public interested he let the magazine Esquire print portions of it from 1975, and one of them — "La Côte Basque", named after the fashionable Manhattan restaurant where such women lunched — told true and mostly scandalous stories about the rich women who had befriended him, with the names attached. He lost those friendships and many others permanently. His drinking and drug use hardened into addiction, he was treated for both in the late 1970s, and the slight blond figure of the early photographs became paunchy and bald.

In Music for Chameleons, the 1980 collection of short nonfiction, he interviewed himself about whether God had helped him and answered: "Yes. More and more. But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint." He died on 25 August 1984 at a house in the Bel-Air district of Los Angeles, aged fifty-nine, with Answered Prayers unfinished.