Cocktails With Truman Capote

NEW YORK.

When the Ritz Carlton moved uptown to Madison Avene and 61st Street, they changed the name of the hotel to just plain Carlton. But the bar remained the Ritz Carlton Bar. It's not really a bar. It's a sprawling, antiseptic, and canaped cocktail lounge, staffed by maitres de and cluttered with bowls of peanuts.

Flanked by one of each, Truman (Other Voices, Other Rooms) Capote one rainy night last week discoursed on sundry things--his writing, the critics, and a public reading at Sanders Theater this December 14.

Mr. Capote is about the size of Napoleon, only thinner. He was wrapped in an off-white, chart-paper tweed suit, with a striped shirt and a black bow tie slightly askew. He looks like a blond Mr. Peepers and talks like a Fleet Street 14-year-old whose voice is about to change. He manages, however, to live down both impressions.

He divided the cocktail hour evenly between his own preferences and writing problems, and the cosmic literary questions each interview must bring.

"No, I don't like to give public readings. One very seldom achieves the proper rapport with the audience. You can tell in ten minutes, you know, if an audience is responding. When I emerged on the stage at Chicago University, it was like an arctic blast." But, he amended, it's something everyone should do.

Capote never received a rejection slip. He peddled his first story to Storybook magazine when he was seventeen, "and I've sold everything since. Of course, I'm not very prolific. I've only written a total of twenty stories in all, and I spend up to five months on one short story. If it were rejected then, that would really be a disaster."

Writing is work, at least writing for public consumption. "I write a good deal for myself. I keep a journal, which I inspect and burn every two years. Were it ever to be published, that would be a black day! What corner of the world would have me? But when I write to be read, then writing becomes work. There are all sorts of pressures, artificial standards. I imagine it must be much like the actor on the stage--the feeling of limitations, almost embarrassment."

He writes several drafts of each piece, the first couple in laborious long-hand. "When I reach the final stage, I always write on yellow paper. Then I know that I shall be unable to send it to any publisher, and it must be rewritten once more."

"Reading is the only thing I really enjoy. I have read constantly since I was twelve. I read about four or five books a week, and I have finished over 200 books in the last five months alone." Capote is particularly disposed to Proust, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Turgenev, and, among living writers, E. M. Forster. He has a voluminous Proust collection, including a number of obscure biographies.

On the cosmic questions, Mr. Capote plays the famous writer's familiar con-game. To hear the successful writer tell it, they've never heard of Jung or symbols or aesthetic theories, and they profess an admirable ignorance when confronted with such things. "I am merely trying to tell a story in the best way I can," said Capote. "Writers don't think consciously about symbols. I doubt whether Kafka ever thought about the symbolic significances of his stories. He was just trying to tell a story."

Capote particularly delights in the Harvard professor who wrote a critical article on one of his early books, entitled Truman Capote and the Search for the Holy Grail. The article was later published in pamphlet form. "He said that I had steeped myself in the Arthurian legends, that my book was really a subtle, symbolic retelling of the old myths. It was insanity! I never read the Arthurian legends, even as a child. And even today I'm still not sure what the holy grail is!"

From King Arthur he turned to other critics:

"They've been generally fair to me. Not kind. Goodness knows, no one's been more abused. But there's a difference between fairness and abuse."

On Alfred Kazin's review of Breakfast at Tiffany's in the Reporter: "I liked it. Except I didn't understand the last two lines. What does he mean by 'public vice or private tears'? I don't know what that means."

On William Goyen's review in the New York Times Book Review: "'A valentine'! Now, wasn't that a bitchy word to use?"

On Leslie Fiedler's remarks about the Harper's Bazaar "literary academy" (of which Capote was supposedly a prominent member): "Critics have to make a living." The same was true, he added, about "all this Beat Generation talk. I read Kerouac and that other fellow, that poet, and they have nothing in common. Critics just have to have something to say, to write about."

And finally, on current critical ballyhoo about the South as a source of symbol and meaning: "Tommyrot. You can say Faulkner, but not really. The only really regional writer in the South was the creator of Br'er Rabbit."

Capote's present projects include a New Yorker article scheduled for the spring, about his winter in Moscow. He returned a second time after touring with the Porgy and Bess troupe and writing The Muses Are Heard account of it all. And he found life as a private citizen more congenial than the spot-lit existence of artists on tour.

"It's a fascinating place, a new experience. One spends so much time feeling on the surface, thinking you're perceptive. And then comes a real test."

The Soviet Writers Union threw a party for him and sponsored a debate in his honor. "Most Soviet writers," he commented, "would starve to death in the U.S."

"A fellow named Mitchell Wilson is the favorite American author over there. Have you ever heard of him? I never had."

He feels that the Russian arts all froze at about 1923. Even the best motion pictures were little more than pale imitations of German experimentalism, in the 1930's. And the ballet, "while given lavish productions and excellently performed, is a little old-fashioned. Nothing modern--about 1910 in conception."

Future fiction. "I'm working on a rather long novel. But it's a very long way away. Three years or so."

Capote dramatizes his conversation with elaborate hand gestures. He has a deft trick of touching his tongue, presumably for loose tobacco ("I never smoke those filter-tips; nothing comes through"), and then touching his fingers lightly on a napkin in his lap. He has a high nervous laugh when excited about something, and postures his head in a series of attentive or thoughtful attitudes.

He is, ultimately, a mild eccentric who gives you the impression that he knows you are studying his eccentricities. And he is a gentleman. He paid for our drinks.