CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD remembers a brush with brilliance

Better men than me will find ways to celebrate the centenary of Truman Capote’s birth on 30 September 1924, or will have already done so. Forty years after his death, the critical consensus on Capote is of a radiant youthful talent who later developed a tragic addiction to drugs, alcohol and the attention of well-heeled café-society ladies, whilst bloating in his kitschy New York penthouse apartment like Elvis Presley at Graceland. It’s a caricature, if one with a grain of truth.

Some of Capote’s early stories, written when he was barely out of school, still dazzle today in their precocity, craftsmanship, clarity, and, above all, the tendency to leave powerful things unsaid just below the surface that he shared with Ernest Hemingway. By and large, they deal with the lives of the lonely, broken and/or marginalised in society, and it could fairly be said that their author, having grown up gay in the American Deep South of the 1920s and 30s, knew whereof he spoke. Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, written when he was 23, bears comparison in some of its broad outline to The Catcher in the Rye as acoming-of-age saga,both books in their way a definitive work on what it was like to be a teenager in those rackety immediate postwar years. Each one speaks in the unforgettably haunting voice of the adolescent at odds with an uncaring world.

I admit I can take or leave Capote’s celebrated 1966 true-crime novel In Cold Blood. It’s an arresting tale in itself – the slaughter of four innocent members of the Clutter family in their desolate midwestern farmhouse – but set against that the author’s implied sympathy for the two murderers, and the note of voyeurism throughout, always seem to produce effects comparable to mainlining castor oil. For better or worse, the book made Capote’s reputation for the ages. Sometimes considered the original non-fiction novel, it became an international best-seller but also in time took a heavy toll on its author. Capote himself later remarked following the judicial execution of the Clutter family’s killers, “I’m still haunted by the whole thing. I may have finished the book, but in a sense I never will.” For whatever reason, he never wrote anything of real substance again.

Which brings me to the events of April or May 1983 (in those blissful analogue days, I wasn’t keeping a precise diary of my movements), when I was living a somewhat makeshift existence in a basement room on the Upper West Side of New York, trying, and failing, to become a great Anglo-American novelist, or for that matter a novelist at all. A local friend had worked on and off with John Cheever, who actually was a great author – you should read his story ‘The Enormous Radio’, if you haven’t already – who had died about a year earlier at the age of seventy. Now he, the friend, was organising an informal gathering to celebrate Cheever’s life at a bar across town called The Guardsman, where the deceased had apparently often come to loiter of an evening. I went along.

The Guardsman (since defunct) was one of those dimly-lit, wood-pannelled rooms with framed caricatures of famous habitués on the walls and a perhaps overdone but not wholly unsuccessful aspiration to the general look and feel of a London gentleman’s club. Everyone there – journalists mainly – was clever, voluble, and (those were the days) beautifully dressed. Our host, for example, wore a red silk shirt and a Tom Wolfe-like luminous white suit, in which he darted hither and thither like a large tropical fish. (Wolfe himself, though living reasonably nearby, wasn’t present.) There was quiche and bite-sized sausages to eat and plenty of champagne chilling in the stainless-steel Miele fridge behind the bar. The conversation was bright, witty and ill-informed. I remember that one prominent Manhattan political columnist assured me that “that bitch Thatcher” would lose the forthcoming British general election, and I advised him not to bet on it. (When the day came, the Conservatives won their biggest parliamentary majority since the Second World War.)

It wasn’t all vacuous backslapping amongst hacks out for the night, however, because seated on a high stool at a table in the corner of the room, his tiny legs dangling down far short of the floor, was a middle-aged man in rumpled grey trousers and what looked suspiciously like a crested school blue blazer, with five or six young people standing attentively around him. “Truman,” my friend hissed in my ear, as if he might not be instantly familiar. It turned out that Capote had been both a friend and an admirer of the writer whose memory we were there to honour, which was no small accolade coming from him. This is a man who had said of James Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain fame; “I loathe his fiction; it’s crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom,” which was harsh, certainly, but almost counted as a rave review compared to his opinion of Gore Vidal. “I’m always sad about Gore,” Capote once quipped. “Very sad that he has to breathe every day.”

Catching my own breath, I went over to the centre of the action. It was Capote, all right. Diminutive, sallow-faced, such hair as remained a sort of cornfield blond-and-grey stubble, pink-framed sunglasses, the trademark singsong voice. Everyone was laughing loudly about something he’d just said, the way people do when someone with a reputation as a wit does so much as to ask what time it is. He smelled a bit musty, but with a patchy application of dynamite-strength cologne. One woman aged about nineteen was standing at the back of the circle, eating a slice of quiche. “What did he just say?” I asked her quietly as I came up to join the group. She tried to tell me, but her mouth was too full of quiche for her to reply coherently.

I had just one direct exchange with Capote. After a while he asked me my name and occupation, and when I mumbled the word “writer” he said “Oh?” and enquired what I was working on just at present.

Since he’d asked, I launched into my still-unrealised plan to publish the definitive biography of Charlie Chaplin, my hero then and now, with words along the lines of “There’s a poignancy to him that I’m not sure anyone’s ever really captured in print, when you come to consider his upbringing on the back streets of Lambeth, and how just a few years later his wealth and fame fused together to create something close to our modern definition of celebrity, beyond anything people had conceived before …” My voice trailed off as I realised, hopefully just in time, that I might have been telling Mozart about this little piece I was larking about with on the piano.

I have to say that Capote’s face – so far as it was visible behind the shades – registered nothing but good-natured interest. After a bit he gave a high, ringing laugh, which sounded something like a pile of loose change being thrown onto a counter-top, looked up at me, his eyes then seeming to dart around the room to make sure everyone was listening, and began a long and magnificently obscene story about “my friend Charlie” and his widow Oona, that concluded with an account of how a few years earlier a pair of feckless Bulgarian auto mechanics-turned-grave robbers had removed Chaplin’s body from its resting place in a Swiss cemetery in a failed attempt to extort money from his family for its return. On the whole, Capote was loquacious, unapologetically rude about certain parties, and still very funny. No doubt his Chaplin monologue might have been construed as inappropriate, or offensive, had one of today’s culture police overheard it. But everyone around Capote’s stool was guffawing. I thought him to be on cracking form, and apparently content to sip a single glass of what looked like either gin or possibly vodka, although I noticed the merest hint of a reel when, a few minutes later, he stood up, bowed to us elaborately, and made for the door. After he left, it felt as if about twelve people were suddenly missing from the room.

Although Capote appeared commendably restrained in the Bacchic rites that night at The Guardsman, I wasn’t completely amazed when I read a couple of months later that he’d been found guilty on a drunk driving charge – appearing in court, to the presiding judge’s displeasure, in a pair of tight blue shorts and a sports jacket – nor, sadly, when it was announced in August 1984 that he’d died, at the age of 59, officially as a result of ‘liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication’, to quote the coroner’s report. His old sparring partner Gore Vidal, unable to restrain his glee at the news, called his death “a wise career move.”

Some time later, I found myself thinking of the strange tale of Charlie Chaplin’s exhumation once again when it was reported that Capote’s own ashes had been twice stolen from the home of his friend Joanne Carson, and then on Carson’s own death put up on public auction, where they were sold for $44,000 to an anonymous bidder. Perhaps the Southern-gothic writer in him might have been sardonically amused by the notion of complete strangers competing to own his mortal remains. Or perhaps not. Somehow you could see Capote making it the denouement of one of those wonderful early stories with their lapidary prose style and fascination with what happens once someone moves the guardrails defining the limits of what constitutes acceptable moral behaviour.

As I say, a purely personal, thus subjective, Capote story to mark his centenary. Intelligent, opinionated, scathingly funny, arch, camp, surprisingly kind, and in my limited experience raucously good company, even if his charm came equipped with a sensitive on-off switch, his career might be broadly divided into a first half in which he was positively touched by genius – almost spoilt by fortune – and a second in which he increasingly became not so much a creative artist as a character, a carefully constructed image that seemed, frankly, to be more mask than man. On 30 September I shall raise a glass of something suitable, and re-read the last pages of Other Voices, Other Rooms, in his honour.