Hit and miss | 24 August 2017

Truman Capote should have been called Truman Persons. His father, Archulus, abbreviated his first name and introduced himself as Arch Persons. ‘And that,’ scoffed his son, ‘sounded like a flock of bishops.’ The young scribbler was thrilled when his divorced mother married a rich Cuban, Joseph Capote, whose zippy and eccentric name he gladly adopted. He got a job at the New Yorker and found the magazine’s celebrated wits, including Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, were embittered molluscs who hated each other. Capote’s literary life, as related by Bob Kingdom, is a parade of inspired bitchiness. He had the knack of getting to a character’s core problem. For Gore Vidal it was the knowledge that he had never written a masterpiece. Marilyn Monroe simply lacked the ability to give or to receive love. Capote was never better than when peering behind fame’s mask to encapsulate the disappointments of success. ‘Who gave him wings to soar,’ he wrote, ‘took away the sky.