George Plimpton TRUMAN CAPOTE
Plimpton, George: TRUMAN CAPOTE: IN WHICH VARIOUS FRIENDS, ENEMIES,
ACQUAINTANCES, AND DETRACTORS RECALL HIS TURBULENT CAREER
New York: Doubleday, 1997. First edition.
Amazon.com
Nobody can match George Plimpton as an adroit weaver of interviews into a
tight narrative fabric. Plimpton can make even a negligible life into a
magic-carpet ride, as in his editing of Jean Stein's perennial bestseller,
Edie, about Andy Warhol's victim-starlet Edie Sedgwick.
In Truman Capote, Plimpton has an infinitely more important subject, who
worked his way down from the top into the shallow pit of druggy celebrity.
His book doesn't knock the definitive biography Capote off the shelf, but
it's much more fun to read. Plimpton interviewed more than a hundred
people--from Capote's childhood to his peak period, 1966, when his Black and
White Ball defined high society and In Cold Blood launched the true crime
genre, all the way down to his last, sad days as a bitchy caricature of
himself. Joanna Carson complains that Plimpton's book is "gossip," which it
gloriously is. But it's also brimming with important literary history, and
it helps in the Herculean task of sorting out the truth from Capote's
multitudinous, entertaining lies; for instance, In Cold Blood turns out to
be not strictly factual. James Dickey, whose similar self-destruction is
chronicled in Summer of Deliverance, delivers here a good definition of
Capote's true gift to literature: "The scene stirring with rightness and
strangeness, the compressed phrase, the exact yet imaginative word, the
devastating metaphorical aptness, a feeling of concentrated excess which at
the same time gives the effect of being crystalline." --Tim Appelo --
Near Fine with Near Fine jacket. Very light wear.
starting bid: $5.00
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