It’s not the first time this has happened. But this year, it was nice to see people actually expressing interest in Truman Capote’s work (even my mother-in-law, a doctor, asked to borrow In Cold Blood). And it was timely of publishers to recycle E. Annie Proulx’s 40-page short story by releasing a new edition of Close Range: Wyoming Stories, albeit with a big movie tie-in cover.
Told in Proulx’s free-range vernacular, "Brokeback" contains just about every bit and morsel that can be found in the film. Even the little catchphrases chewed over by Heath Ledger’s character ("Jack, I swear…" and "If you can’t fix it, you got to stand it") come straight out of the story. Director Ang Lee was smart enough to get Larry McMurtry – writer of Hud, The Last Picture Show and other modern-day cowboy flicks – to transfer the dialogue faithfully. The trick was to pad out a 40-page story into two hours of screen time. Hence, lots of "beautiful cinematography."
What’s interesting about Proulx’s story is that it’s so casual. She just lays out the story, as though telling it over a campfire, which is the effect most of the tales in Close Range have. (Actually, "Brokeback" makes more contextual sense when you read the entire collection.) Probably, she didn’t envision that her little take on this corner of prairie reality would become such a big Hollywood cause célèbre.
On the other hand, one writer who always did have cause célèbre in mind was Truman Capote. Ask most Filipinos what books he’s written, or what they’ve read by him, and they’ll go blank. But mention that he had a small role in Murder By Death, the 1978 spoof of murder mysteries, and they’ll nod and smile: "Oh, yeah! Yeah! Him!"
I could never quite figure out why so many Filipinos of my generation know about this movie. It’s corny as hell: a sub-Mel Brooks mélange of Charlie Chan, Sam Spade and Agatha Christie riffs. They must have broadcast Murder By Death endlessly to Pinoy youth during martial law as some kind of subtle mind control. Most Pinoys I know have seen it on TV at least once. And they always remember Truman Capote as mystery writer "Lionel Twain."
Others have heard of, or at least seen, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the novella that became the movie that introduced the world to Holly Golightly. But not as many have actually read the book, as an early Seinfeld episode makes clear. (When George Costanza wants to impress a girl from his book club, he vows to read the Capote book, but falls asleep; desperate, he watches the movie version, never realizing that the gay subtext has been excised.)
Capote wanted celebrity, of course. He gained early fame with his precocious novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (remembered more for its precocious "come hither" back cover photo than for the actual writing), then got a name as a sharp profile writer for magazines, including mesmerizing portraits of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe for The New Yorker. But even though he was the talk of New York City by the late ’50s, a "major" work still eluded him. Until In Cold Blood.
The film Capote makes it clear that the gay writer saw the story of the Clutter murders in Kansas as "a goldmine." Finally, he had found a tale to properly evoke his Southern Gothic streak.
If Capote serves no other purpose, the movie will get a new generation of readers to pick up In Cold Blood and see how a new literary form – the "non-fiction novel" – was born. Yes, at times Capote seems overly enchanted with his own voice and descriptive powers. But all this lengthy description serves as a chilling contrast to the cold-bloodedness of his subjects, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The blows, when delivered to the reader, come with the same "thud-snap" of the gallows used to execute the killers.
(Another good crossover would be to watch the 1967 Richard Brooks film of In Cold Blood – starring a truly young and feral Robert Blake – back to back with 2005’s Capote.)
Capote’s gamble in the book – and it’s important to recall what a gamble it was, since "senseless" crime and murder in America was virtually unknown, or at least "uncelebrated" back in 1960 – also served as a template for future New Journalists. The idea was to immerse yourself in the subject – even insert yourself in the story, as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson later did. Take as long as you need to get it right. Live and breathe your subject. This was Capote’s lesson.
In Cold Blood also opened up the doors for writers to explore virtually every known subject in non-fiction, and even now, as the lines between biography and fiction continue to bend and blur in service of the marketplace (see: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) it will surely be those pioneering works of New Journalism – based on hard work and observation – that endure.
But the lesson came at a price. "When God hands you a gift," Capote was fond of saying, "he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation." The epilogue of Capote claims the writer "never finished another book" after In Cold Blood, but that’s not quite true. He did issue Music For Chameleons in 1980 – a hodgepodge of profiles, short pieces, fiction and a "non-fiction novella" called Handcarved Coffins that, sadly, pales next to the glory days of In Cold Blood.
And he did endeavor to complete Answered Prayers, a thinly veiled tell-all in which he spills the beans on many of his famous friends – an act for which he was socially ostracized, though only a few chapters of it were ever published. Legend has it that Capote – who died in 1984 of chronic alcoholism and other grievous insults to the brain – did finish the rest of the book, and it’s locked away in a vault somewhere until all of its thinly disguised real-life characters die off. But that could just be legend. And come to think of it, that’s the kind of legend that Hollywood loves the most.