Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
Tru Confessions
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career
by George Plimpton
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 498 pp., $35.00
Chatty, gossipy remembrances of the deplorable history of Truman Capote's last years may be read, in some instances, as revenge or payment-due for the dead author's assaultive portraits of friends and enemies, although few of the interlocutors can command Capote's talent for the vicious, villainous, vituperative adjective. George Plimpton has spent some years tracking down and taking down the remarks of those who crossed Truman's journey to literary fame and to his unique crocodilian celebrity. The remarks are deftly arranged to avoid lumps of monologue piling up one after another like wood stacked for the winter. Instead the voices having their say about the charms and deficits of the absent one find Plimpton at the console professionally mixing the sound, as it were. His phrase for the effect is the unrehearsed, companionable exchange at a cocktail party. This is a large accommodation to raw opinion, to mincing literary judgments of hapless inappropriateness, to character analysis sweet as peaches or impugning as a jailhouse witness for the prosecution. It must be said that method and result have a suitability to the subject, since Capote himself, when not writing, was party-going, forever receiving and producing banter about feckless stumblings and torrid indiscretions.
Review, 5132 words
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