I'm just back from attending a wedding in Calgary, so I'll most likely be playing catch-up in both my virtual and actual lives over the next few days. Regular posting will resume as soon as possible--but in the meantime, don't miss Sheila O'Malley's fabulous post on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. There are many Capotes, as Sheila notes, but the one who invented, at great cost to his emotional and physical health, the true crime genre is in a league of his own.

I belatedly discovered Capote this summer, after a deeply disappointing experience with Jackson Tippett McCrae's Bark of the Dogwood: A Tour of Southern Homes and Gardens, which I picked up because of the great reviews it got and which I could not put down, not because it was such a good book, but because it was such a profoundly terrible book--so gracelessly over the top, so desperately trying so hard to be some unidentifiable something that all it managed to be was extremely strained, so totally unsubtle in plot and characterization that it became subtle by virtue of the sheer confusion the book's blatant badness provoked in me. I had to keep reading the novel so that I could see just how bad it was. As it got worse and worse, like an ungrammatical, overcontrived train wreck involving the mangled discarded thoughts of John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, I began reading about McCrae in the hope of finding out what he was up to with this strangely misbegotten novel.

Googling around, I found an interview that explained a lot--and that made me respect what McCrae was trying to do, even if I could not manage to respect what he had actually done. What I learned was that McCrae was paying very conscious homage to Truman Capote in The Bark of the Dogwood, even going so far as to name his narrator after Capote, whose middle name was Streckfus. That information made me finish McCrae's book, and it made me embark on what has turned out to be a much more satisfying reading jag centered on Capote: If you want to see what McCrae was going for, just read Capote's first novel, an unearthly Southern gothic coming-of-age story about a boy's relationship with a transvestite. Entitled Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Capote's early work produces with apparent effortlessness the oddly otherworldly, eccentrically erotic atmosphere that McCrae labors so hard, and so fruitlessly, to imitate.

Other Voices, Other Rooms is nothing like In Cold Blood--if you did not know they were written by the same man, you would never guess. Even so, the one lays the groundwork for the other, and even as Capote revisits the eery Southern gothic coming-of-age story repeatedly during his career, it's as if he uses those visitations to pose for himself the problems that he accidentally but satisfyingly resolved in ICB. In his gothic fiction, Capote was concerned to capture the surreal quality of lived reality; in In Cold Blood, he found his ideal subject, an actual event so surreal that it was difficult to believe and nearly impossible to comprehend. That subject in turn allowed him to realize his dream of inventing a new kind of novel: "This book was an important event for me," he wrote. "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 that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry."

In Cold Blood is such a powerful story, and such a remarkable psychodrama, that it can be hard to remember that it was also, for Capote, an aesthetic experiment of the highest artistic order. That, to me, is at least as eery, fascinating, and thought-provoking as the narrative of In Cold Blood itself.

Erin -

As ever, thanks much for the link. The Grass Harp is another example of Capote's gift - I remember reading that when I was 12 and crying like a baby when I finished it - even though it's not really a sad story. It's more about nostalgia, wistfulness, looking back. What the hell did I know about that at 12 - but something in me understood it, understood the pain of it.

But still, putting The Grass Harp next to In Cold Blood is a stunning example of Capote's true genius. The same man wrote both. Incredible.

Thanks, Sheila. The Grass Harp came to Calgary with me, but did not get read just yet due to a readerly backlog created by a thick Trollope novel that also came along. Like you, I tend to travel with too many books.

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