Showing posts with label Truman Capote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Truman Capote. Show all posts
9/15/18
TRUMAN CAPOTE (1950) HOLLYWOOD - LOCAL COLOR COLLECTION
Yesterday, feeling greedy, I remembered ravishing displays of fruit outside a large emporium I'd driven admiringly past a number of times. Mammoth oranges, grapes big as ping- pong balls, apples piled in rosy pyramids. There is a sleight of hand about distances here, nothing is so near as you supposed, and it is not unusual to travel ten miles for a package of cigarettes. It was a two-mile walk before I even caught sight of the fruit stand. The long counters were tilted so that from quite far away you could see the splendid wares, apples, peaches. I reached for one of these extraordinary apples, but it seemed to be glued to its case. A sales girl giggled... "Plaster," she said, and I laughed too, a little feverishly perhaps, then wearily followed her into the deeper regions of the store where I bought six small, rather mealy apples, and six small, rather mealy pears.
Excerpted from:
Page 363-364
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002
4/15/09
GORE VIDAL Quote From PALIMPSEST
From PALIMPSEST a memoir by GORE VIDAL
page 239 hardback
...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."
...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."
8/22/08
USING REAL PEOPLE YOU'VE OBSERVED, MET, OR KNOWN IN FICTION AND NON FICTION
USING REAL PEOPLE YOU'VE OBSERVED, MET, OR KNOWN IN FICTION OR NON-FICTION
By Christine Trzyna
Recently a proud poet presented to me and a few other friends a poem she had written about us and grief and loss. For each of us she had taken a bright yellow marker and colored the lines that were about us. She signed it with an artistic flourish in the bottom right hand side of the paper like a painter adding a little hug. She thought she was giving us a gift - empathy.
Being the fastest reader of the group I quickly sensed that my friend Joy was going to be insulted when she read what the poet had written about her. The poet had made an unfortunate word choice, using the word "lost" that made it sound like Joy had her legs amputated when actually she meant to say that Joy had lost the easy use of her legs due to knee injuries. Another woman was upset because her real name was used in a passage about her loss which was the custody of her children.
Situations like this are common within poetry circles and at readings where everyone knows everyone. But using real people you've met, observed or known during your life is literary tradition. Perhaps Truman Capote is now most notorious for having a used a group of society women he called "The Swans," as characters in a novel. They recognized themselves and all but one of them shunned him from that time on. He literally (!) ruined his career as a result.
Why did I use Joy's real name above, when Joy is actually not aware that I blog? Because when I think of Joy I attach to her more closely rather than using the distance of a fake name or alluding to "one." And I think that even the reader who doesn't know anyone named gets a sense about this, that ring of truth that is so important in fiction too.
In my own writing I sometimes struggle with creating a composite character out of a few people I know who are a lot alike in some way, and coming up with fake names that still "fit" a character born of my imagination or based on a live person.
Being the fastest reader of the group I quickly sensed that my friend Joy was going to be insulted when she read what the poet had written about her. The poet had made an unfortunate word choice, using the word "lost" that made it sound like Joy had her legs amputated when actually she meant to say that Joy had lost the easy use of her legs due to knee injuries. Another woman was upset because her real name was used in a passage about her loss which was the custody of her children.
Situations like this are common within poetry circles and at readings where everyone knows everyone. But using real people you've met, observed or known during your life is literary tradition. Perhaps Truman Capote is now most notorious for having a used a group of society women he called "The Swans," as characters in a novel. They recognized themselves and all but one of them shunned him from that time on. He literally (!) ruined his career as a result.
Why did I use Joy's real name above, when Joy is actually not aware that I blog? Because when I think of Joy I attach to her more closely rather than using the distance of a fake name or alluding to "one." And I think that even the reader who doesn't know anyone named gets a sense about this, that ring of truth that is so important in fiction too.
In my own writing I sometimes struggle with creating a composite character out of a few people I know who are a lot alike in some way, and coming up with fake names that still "fit" a character born of my imagination or based on a live person.
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