'When I wrote 'In Cold Blood' many were critical,' Capote said. 'I spent six years on that book wandering the plains of Kansas and nearly went mad but I saw it through. (Fellow author Norman) Mailer called it 'a failure of the imagination,' and now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I'm glad I was of some small service to him.'
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great capote interviews are Paris Review 17 and especially controversial Playboy 1968 interview....holy moly
you can't believe the actual meat and saucy opinions this guy really said out loud
Compare to the insipid 'i love puppies and rainbows' interviews of writers today, ughhhh
I just read that whole interview. Crazy to think that he was basically at his peak at that moment, while he clearly thought he was just getting started.
Playboy: How do you react to those critics who deride the form of documentary crime writing employed in In Cold Blood as inferior to the novel?
Capote: What can I say, except that I think they’re ignorant? If they can’t comprehend that journalism is really the most avant-garde form of writing existent today, then their heads are in the sand. These critics seem unable to realize, or accept, that creative fiction writing has gone as far as it can experimentally. It reached its peak in the Twenties and hasn’t budged since. Of course, we have writers like William Burroughs, whose brand of verbal surface trivia is amusing and occasionally fascinating, but there’s no base for moving forward in that area—whereas journalism is actually the last great unexplored literary frontier.
…
Playboy: The gulf between someone of your background and two such brutal criminals would seem impossible to bridge. But you’ve said, “Hickock and Smith became very, very good friends of mine—perhaps the closest friends I’ve ever had in my life.” How did you establish rapport with them?
Capote: I treated them as men, not as murderers. To most people, a man loses his humanity the minute they learn he’s a murderer; they could be talking with him one moment and then the next someone would whisper, “Do you know he killed five people?” and from that moment on, the man would become unreal to them, an uncomfortable abstraction. But I find it relatively easy to establish rapport with murderers; in the past few years, I’ve interviewed more than 30 of them in all parts of the country. Before I began In Cold Blood, I knew nothing about crime and wasn’t interested in it; but once the book was under way, I began interviewing murderers—or homicidal minds, as I call them—in order to have a basis of comparison for Smith and Hickock; and I met many more recently while doing a television documentary on capital punishment. The second we begin talking, I find that they are ordinary men with extraordinary problems, set apart only by their ability to kill; in some it’s a total lack of conscience, in others a passionate destructive drive. But I have found a certain pattern. One common denominator, for example, is their fetish for tattoos. I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes. I’ve met few killers who didn’t start laughing when I finally managed to force them to discuss the murder—which isn’t easy. When Perry Smith started to tell me about the murder of the Clutter family, for example, he said, “I know this isn’t funny, but I can’t help laughing about it.” Just a while ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old boy named Bassett in the San Quentin death house who is extremely intelligent. He’s a slight, thin boy, with a delicate face and figure, a college student, and he writes poetry and short stories. He murdered his mother and father when he was 18; he’d been planning to do it since he was 10 years old. And when he started telling me about how he killed his parents, he began laughing and cracking little jokes, just as though he was telling me the most humorous story. They’re mostly like that; they’ll tell you how they cut someone’s throat and it’s as if they were watching a clown slip on a banana peel.
…
Playboy: You don’t agree, then, with the adage that it’s better for a dozen guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be unjustly convicted?
Capote: It’s a charming sentiment, but more apropos in the halcyon days of yore, when our cities had not yet been turned into jungles and a citizen could still stroll the streets in safety. I’m afraid that today, for the very self-protection of our society, it’s better that one innocent man be punished than that a dozen guilty men go free. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the harsh reality we face.
Why? Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a remarkable book. If you’ve only seen the movie you might get the wrong impression of the book. I had to turn the movie off after just a few minutes.
This is true of basically all literary journalism. How do so many interesting things happen to these people that they can write about it? Easy, they make it up. David Foster Wallace is another example, said as someone who enjoys his essays. And David Sedaris, not that he really styles himself as a journalist.
The article digging into Sedaris was especially silly since it's clear that he's a comic (and a great one at that) and the fact that he may have taken NPR for a ride just makes him funnier.
DFW’s essays are more about his personal insights into the subject rather than the subject itself. I’m sure not everything written is 100% word-for-word accurate, but I don’t get the impression he embellishes too much because he doesn’t have to. The subjects of his essays are quite mundane: a mediocre cruse, a middling tennis player, 4H, etc.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail. As he put it in a later television interview: "There was a rumor in Philadelphia about Ed Muskie being addicted to ibogaine. I know, I started it."
>This is true of basically all literary journalism. How do so many interesting things happen to these people that they can write about it? Easy, they make it up.
It is not all made up.
>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”
[+] [-] lioeters|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savryn|3 years ago|reply
'When I wrote 'In Cold Blood' many were critical,' Capote said. 'I spent six years on that book wandering the plains of Kansas and nearly went mad but I saw it through. (Fellow author Norman) Mailer called it 'a failure of the imagination,' and now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I'm glad I was of some small service to him.'
-----
great capote interviews are Paris Review 17 and especially controversial Playboy 1968 interview....holy moly
you can't believe the actual meat and saucy opinions this guy really said out loud
Compare to the insipid 'i love puppies and rainbows' interviews of writers today, ughhhh
[+] [-] tunesmith|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __jf__|3 years ago|reply
Playboy: How do you react to those critics who deride the form of documentary crime writing employed in In Cold Blood as inferior to the novel?
Capote: What can I say, except that I think they’re ignorant? If they can’t comprehend that journalism is really the most avant-garde form of writing existent today, then their heads are in the sand. These critics seem unable to realize, or accept, that creative fiction writing has gone as far as it can experimentally. It reached its peak in the Twenties and hasn’t budged since. Of course, we have writers like William Burroughs, whose brand of verbal surface trivia is amusing and occasionally fascinating, but there’s no base for moving forward in that area—whereas journalism is actually the last great unexplored literary frontier.
…
Playboy: The gulf between someone of your background and two such brutal criminals would seem impossible to bridge. But you’ve said, “Hickock and Smith became very, very good friends of mine—perhaps the closest friends I’ve ever had in my life.” How did you establish rapport with them?
Capote: I treated them as men, not as murderers. To most people, a man loses his humanity the minute they learn he’s a murderer; they could be talking with him one moment and then the next someone would whisper, “Do you know he killed five people?” and from that moment on, the man would become unreal to them, an uncomfortable abstraction. But I find it relatively easy to establish rapport with murderers; in the past few years, I’ve interviewed more than 30 of them in all parts of the country. Before I began In Cold Blood, I knew nothing about crime and wasn’t interested in it; but once the book was under way, I began interviewing murderers—or homicidal minds, as I call them—in order to have a basis of comparison for Smith and Hickock; and I met many more recently while doing a television documentary on capital punishment. The second we begin talking, I find that they are ordinary men with extraordinary problems, set apart only by their ability to kill; in some it’s a total lack of conscience, in others a passionate destructive drive. But I have found a certain pattern. One common denominator, for example, is their fetish for tattoos. I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes. I’ve met few killers who didn’t start laughing when I finally managed to force them to discuss the murder—which isn’t easy. When Perry Smith started to tell me about the murder of the Clutter family, for example, he said, “I know this isn’t funny, but I can’t help laughing about it.” Just a while ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old boy named Bassett in the San Quentin death house who is extremely intelligent. He’s a slight, thin boy, with a delicate face and figure, a college student, and he writes poetry and short stories. He murdered his mother and father when he was 18; he’d been planning to do it since he was 10 years old. And when he started telling me about how he killed his parents, he began laughing and cracking little jokes, just as though he was telling me the most humorous story. They’re mostly like that; they’ll tell you how they cut someone’s throat and it’s as if they were watching a clown slip on a banana peel.
…
Playboy: You don’t agree, then, with the adage that it’s better for a dozen guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be unjustly convicted?
Capote: It’s a charming sentiment, but more apropos in the halcyon days of yore, when our cities had not yet been turned into jungles and a citizen could still stroll the streets in safety. I’m afraid that today, for the very self-protection of our society, it’s better that one innocent man be punished than that a dozen guilty men go free. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the harsh reality we face.
[+] [-] lordleft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcme|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahelwer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EamonnMR|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcme|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everybodyknows|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geepound|3 years ago|reply
It is not all made up.
>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-ecstatic-t...
[+] [-] giardia|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackstraw14|3 years ago|reply