Oh hell. It was pretty Gothic. But Jim has a point – look at that crazy Yankee Joyce Carol Oates.

And Capote, distinctly unpleasant though he may have been, did something that’s pretty hard to do – he stepped out of his comfort zone and wrote his intended “journalistic novel.” It must have been hard to resist slipping a Midwestern Boo Radley in there somewhere.

I think pillorying Capote for ICB is like pillorying REM for not sounding like The Allmans – it sparks interesting discussion, but it denies that the South has changed because of the homogenization of American culture by advertising, consumer culture, etc.. I’m not sure that the gothic South now is much different than the gothic California of, say, Joan Didion.

Face it, you’ve gotta be Southern to truly understand what Southern writers are all about. Unless you’ve lived the languid pace of life, understood the types of people, and mastered the idiosyncracies of life in Dixie, you haven’t got an clue, and are at a strict disadvantage. Case in point, my son took an intro to Southern Literature course at Yale taught by a Yankee from New Hampshire. My son was raised on Southern Literature since his pablum days, and had a better grasp on the material than his professor. However, he sucked it in, kept his head down, and regurgitated the politically correct answers. He ended up with a good grade, even though he wished that he woukd have told the truth.

Jeff

I also somehow missed In Cold Blood, though I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A city person, Capote probably just wanted to forget about his southern origins. But I did read parts of his final unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, that was excerpted in Interview magazine. It was beyond awful; his concentration was shot.

Once, when I lived for a while in The Fabulous Hamptons of New York’s Long Island, he and Andrew Warhol, who founded Interview magazine, sat for a signing at a local bookstore. It was to promote an issue of Interview which I think carried one of those excerpts.

When I bought a copy and handed it to them to sign, I remember Capote as grim and unfriendly and Warhol as extravagantly polite in that way socialite women often have. One was as bad as the other.

On the plus side, Capote provided fertile territory for the most gifted actor of our generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Just the other day I added Capote to our Netflix queue and am looking forward to watching it.