Capote

Susan and I went to see the movie Capote tonight. Philip Seymour Hoffman gave one of the most remarkable performances I have ever seen by an actor. He transformed himself into Truman Capote. If he doesn’t win the best actor Oscar, something is dramatically wrong with the system.

You’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with the Civil War. Please be patient. I’ll get there.

I raise it because the focus of the film is how Truman Capote suffered for his art. He wrote what was probably the finest piece of true crime work ever published. He had to wait out two or three stays of execution, waiting for the final act of the drama he was documenting before he could finish his book, and the waiting tore him up, knowing what would happen once the saga did end. It literally brought about a paradigm shift. At the same time, the course of researching and writing this book took a tremendous toll on him, such that he never finished another novel or non-fiction work of any significance again for the nearly 20 years of the rest of his life. He died of alcoholism twenty years after the publication of his greatest work. The ordeal took so much out of him that it rendered him utterly unable to function as he had previously.

Now, I can honestly say that I have never suffered for my art quite like Truman Capote did. While I’ve certainly suffered with the pains and frustrations of what I do, it’s never caused me to lose direction of my entire life, and I sincerely hope that nothing I do ever will. I hope that I never end up a drunken stumblebum who literally becomes a charicature of himself like Capote did toward the end of his life, living on his past glories. Now, in fairness to Capote, he so immersed himself in the research for his book that he attended the hangings of the two killers, and it undboutedly took a heavy toll on him (which is part of the brilliance of Hoffman’s performance–he nailed the transformation of Truman Capote). Obviously, I can’t go back in time and participate in Civil War battles, so I won’t be victimized by that, and I’m not a military veteran (although I regret that I’m not. I’m a child of the 1970’s, and the very LAST thing that any of us wanted to do when I graduated from high school in the Carter Administration was enter the military, something that, with retrospect, I deeply regret today).

As a writer myself–although I would certainly never flatter myself by putting myself in the same category as Truman Capote–I could really appreciate what he went through to get it right. I’m constantly asking myself whether I’ve left some important stone unturned in the course of researching one of my projects, whether there’s something more that I could have done to tell the story better. I understand the struggle to find out how it will end, how it will come out. Sure, we know who won these battles, but the issue here is not so much who won, but how. What factors had to fall into line for things to turn out the way they did. It’s that analysis, understanding how all of that played out, is what presents the problem for me and causes all of the gnashing of teeth. As I sat and watched Hoffman’s/Capote’s ordeal unfold on screen in front of me, I could relate to almost every aspect of it. I found myself as emotionally wrung out as the character did by the end of the movie, carefully relating in my own mind the ordeal of every book I’ve ever written, including the inevitable feeling that it’s NEVER going to be finished. That part of Capote’s ordeal, I really understand and relate to.

I struggle for my art, although certainly not to the extent that Truman Capote did. I think that every writer worth his or her salt does to some extent. In the end, it makes me a better writer. Or so I hope.