...Although I have had several lifelong friends who were writers, I have never much enjoyed the company of writers. I also did not realize, nor did the others at ... gatherings, that we had arrived on the scene to witness the end of the novel. Today the word novelist still enjoys considerable prestige, so much so that both Mailer and Capote chose to call works of journalism novels. But that was thirty years ago. Today an ambitious writer would be well advised to label any work of his imagination nonfiction, or perhaps, a memoir.
One day, in the spring on 1950, I was invited to lunch by a very ambitious, very young southern novelist who wanted to shine in those social circles that are, for the most part, closed to very young ambitious southern writers. Like Capote, he wanted to be accepted by what was known than as cafe society, and like Capote, he had mistaken it for the great and largely invisible to outsiders, world that Proust had so obsessively retrieved from lost time. In later years , I liked to pretend that Capote had actually picked the right ladder and I would observe,... "Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success to get out of." Truman was surprisingly innocent. He mistook the rich who liked publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home among them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing person who could be dispensed with, as he was when he published lurid gossip about them. Although of little interest or value in themselves, these self-invented figures are nothing if not tough, and quite as heartless as the real things, as the dying Swan discovered when he found that his life meant less to his esteemed ... than her pair of red shoes."
