Mild it was compared to what was to come. It struck one not as a Swiftian fury against the flesh, but as a wormy scorn of men and women together. Still, the gritty vividity here - grinding dentures, doggy whimpers - was a repulsive surprise. Describing how the protagonist Sarah makes love to her roly-poly psychiatrist (if “Mojave” were a movie, the doctor would be played by Jack Weston), Capote writes: “To judge from appearances, orgasms were agonizing events in the life of Ezra Bentsen he grimaced, he ground his dentures, he whimpered like a frightened mutt… it meant soon his lathered carcass would roll off her…” Of course, compared to Updike and Roth and Mailer, Capote’s contribution to the literature of sex has been nugatory, and in journalism and fiction he has always been more comfortable with tomboyish heroines like Holly Golightly. Pleasing also was the near absence of the John-Boyish nostalgia-clogged sentimentality which constitutes crowd-pleasers like “A Christmas Memory” and “A Thanksgiving Memory,” and muddies even the best passages of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Since for my taste Capote has always written most memorably at a small scale - as in the exquisite travel sketches of “Local Color,” the novellas “The Grass Harp” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” - the lapidary delicacy of “Mojave” was pleasing. As the husband tells the story of an old blind man abandoned by his cheating wife in the desert, I heard echoes - 0f Gide, of Paul Bowles - and at the conclusion of this chronicle of estrangement among the rich, one thought of John O’Hara at his terse best. And we never understand why” - and a banal central metaphor (e.g., the Mojave Desert as the nadir of pitilessness), the story managed to suggest wisps of dread drifting through the sumptuous Beekman Place lair of the protagonists. Even with sententious dialogue - “We all, sometimes, leave each other out there under the skies. Despite Esquire’s pompous black-limousine presentation of “Mojave” (the editors commenced the story on the front cover), I thought it a modest but genuine accomplishment. All objections overruled.Īnswered Prayers, which Truman Capote has been preparing since 1957, and which he once promised to complete by 1969, has thus far been published in Esquire in three installments: “Mojave” (June 1975), “La Cote Basque, 1965” (November 1975), and “Unspoiled Monsters” (May 1976). This, then, is a provisional report and as such objections can be raised against it.
Considering the scandal that Answered Prayers has kindled, perhaps now is an appropriate lull in which to consider it in its sections as a work of art, gossip, and autobiography.
Lee - one critic hailed the book three years before it was published - and Capote has publicized Answered Prayers for a full decade, reportedly receiving offers of $1,500,000 for paperback rights, a toweringly handsome sum for a work not yet completed. In Cold Blood (of which the cover of my paperback copy shouts “Over 3,500,000 sold!”) was promoted with the tactical genius of Robert E. Indeed, his signature mannerisms - the way he habitually wipes his eye, his flickering saurian tongue, the mewing, skinned-cat voice - have been appropriated by comedians to upholster shabby faggot jokes.īut commercial success can armor one against such whizzing arrows.
For almost 30 years, his image has been shaped vividly in the public consciousness: from the spookily precocious man-child on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms to the lordly host of that celebrity-celestial party of 1966 from the video Capote, giggling grisly stories on the Tonight show to the movie Capote, swollen and tremulous in Murder by Death. Has any writer since Boswell possessed a shrewder sense of careermanship than Truman Capote? Gore Vidal expertly packages his arch, marcelled aphorisms for television consumption, Norman Mailer at his most combative has an Elizabethan bravado (though Mailer of late seems sullenly muted), but at fashioning a persona and hustling one’s work, Capote is peerless.