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Truman Capote Caparrós

Preface to Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote

My life - as an artist, at least - can be projected on a graph with the same precision as a fever, recorded high and low cycles specifically defined .

I started writing at eight years, unexpectedly, without the inspiration of a model. I knew no one to write. In fact, he hardly knew anyone to read. The fact was that only four things I was interested in reading, going to movies, tap dance and drawing. Then one day, I started writing, not knowing that I was chained for life to a noble but merciless master. When God gives a gift, at the same time gives us a whip, and it only aims at self-flagellation.

But of course I did not know. I wrote adventure stories, detective stories, skits, stories I had told former slaves and Civil War veterans. I had fun much at first. I stopped having fun when I discovered the difference between good and bad writing, and then made an alarming discovery: the difference between good writing and true art. A subtle difference, but fierce. After that, dropped his whip.

Just as some people practicing the piano or violin four to five hours a day, I practiced with my pens and papers. However, did not show anyone what he was doing. If someone asked me what I was busy all the time, told them to my homework. In fact, never did homework. The literary kept me fully occupied: it was my learning the altar of art, craft, the devilish complications of paragraphing, punctuation, use of dialogue, not to mention the great overall design, the great arc that requires a beginning, middle and end. Had to learn, and many sources: not only books but music, painting, the mere observation daily.

In fact, the most interesting thing I wrote at that time were simple everyday observations that sat in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbor. Long verbatim transcripts of conversations heard. Local gossip. A kind of story, a way of "seeing" and "hear" more forward would seriously affect me, but then I did not realize, because all the "formal" writing, so carefully polished by machine and spending was more or less fictional.

at seventeen I was an accomplished writer. Of being a pianist, that had been the right time for the first concert in public. Being a writer, I decided it was time to publish. I sent stories to the major literary publications and nationally distributed magazine, which published the stories in those days more "quality" as Story, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly. My stories appeared punctually in them.

Then in 1948, I published a novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. It was well received by critics and was a bestseller. Also, due to an exotic picture of its author in the back, was the beginning of a certain notoriety that has haunted me all these years. In fact, many people have attributed the commercial success of the novel to the photo. Others downplayed the book as if it were a freak accident: "Amazing that someone so young can write so well." Surprising? Only fourteen years to write, day after day! In general, the novel was a successful conclusion the first stage of my development.

A short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, completed the second season in 1958. For ten years I experimented with almost all literary forms and styles, trying to master a variety of technical virtuosity achieved so strong and flexible as a fisherman's net. Of course, I failed in several areas that I tried, but it is true that one learns more from failure than from success. That was in my case, and later I could apply what I learned great benefit. Anyway, during that decade of exploration wrote collections of short stories (A tree at night, I remember Christmas) essays and portraits (Local Color, Comments, the work contained in Dogs bark), plays (The Grass Harp, House of flowers), scripts for films (Beat the Devil, The Innocents), and an enormous number of reports, mostly for The New Yorker.

In fact, from the point of view of my creative destination, the most interesting thing I did throughout this second phase first appeared in The New Yorker as a series of articles, and later in a book called the muses are heard. The topic was the first cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States: a tour made by Russia in 1955 by a series of black Americans representing Porgy and Bess. I conceived the whole adventure as a short comic novel "true", the first of all.

few years earlier, had published Picture Lillian Ross, a history of the making of a film, The Red Badge of Courage. With its quick cuts, flashbacks, or anticipatory, was in itself, like a movie, and as I read it I wondered what would happen if the author left his harsh discipline and direct reporting line to treat the material like it's a novel: win or lose the book? I decided to see what happened, when I submit the appropriate topic. Porgy and Bess in Russia, in winter, it seemed appropriate.

muses are heard received rave reviews, including media was generally praised by some benevolent me. Still, it drew special attention, and sales were modest. However, the book was an important event for me, as I wrote, I realized I may have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary.

For many years I was attracted to journalism as an art form in itself, for two reasons: first, because it seemed that nothing had been truly innovative in the prose, or literature in general, from the decade 1920, and second because journalism as an art was almost virgin territory, for the simple reason that very few writers are engaged in journalism and, when they did, writing travel essays and autobiographies. Muses are heard made me think quite differently. I wanted to write a journalistic novel, something on a larger scale than had the plausibility of the facts, the immediate quality of a film, the depth and freedom of prose and precision of poetry.

Only in 1959 a mysterious instinct directed my steps towards a dark theme-murder case in an isolated region of Kansas, and finally, in 1996, I publish the results: In Cold Blood.

In a story by Henry James, I think The Middle Years, the protagonist, a writer in the shadows of maturity, he laments: "We live in darkness, we do what we can, the rest is the madness of art. He says this, more or less. Anyway, James spoke frankly, telling us the truth. The darkest of the dark, the worst of the madness is the inevitable risk involved. The writers, at least those who are willing to take real risks, venturing to all, have much in common with another breed of loners, those who make a living playing pool and cards. Many thought he was crazy to spend six years roaming the plains of Kansas, while others rejected my conception of "true novel" Decree unworthy of a writer "serious." Norman Mailer described it as "a failure of imagination", meaning, I suppose, that a novelist should write about something imaginary and not real.

Yes, it was like playing very high stakes poker. For six long years, I felt the nerves insane, I did not know whether it was a book. Were long summers and cold winters, but what remained firm against the table, playing the best hand. Then, it turned out he did have a book. Several Critics complained that "nonfiction novel" was a term to call attention to a fraud, and that there was nothing new or original in what I had done. Others, however, felt differently. They realized the value of my experiment and will soon put into practice. No one was faster than Norman Mailer, who won a lot of money and won many awards with his novels nonfiction (The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, The Executioner's Song), but has been careful not to describe never "true novels." No matter: it is a good writer and a great guy and I'm thankful for being able to do a small favor.

The zigzag line on the graph of my reputation as a writer reached a healthy level, and there I left a while before going to my fourth cycle, which I assume will be the last. For four years, roughly between 1968 and 1972, I began to read, select, edit and sort my own letters, those of others, my day (which contain detailed descriptions of hundreds of scenes and conversations) for the period 1943-1965. He intended to use much of this material in a book he planned for years: a variant of the novel true. I titled Answered Prayers (Prayers heard), which is a quote from St. Teresa, who said: "More tears are shed for answered prayers not heard." I started working on this book in 1972, first writing the last chapter (always good to know where one). Then I wrote the first, "Monsters are not spoiled," after the fifth, "a severe insult to the brain", then the seventh, "La Côte Basque." I continued in this way, writing several chapters out of sequence. I do so because the argument, or arguments, rather, were true, and all the characters, real. It was hard to remember everything, because I had not invented nothing. However, it was not my intention to write a roman à clef, that genre where the facts are disguised as fiction. My intentions were the opposite: to remove the costume, not manufacture them.

In 1975 and 1976 four chapters of the book published in Esquire. This anger in some circles, in which it was felt that I was betraying confidences, abusing friends and / or enemies. I will not argue that it's about social policy and not artistic merit. Simply say that all you have to work the writer is the material that has gathered as a result of their own efforts and observations, and not be denied the right to use it. It may condemn its use, but not deny.

Yet Answered Prayers interrupted in September 1977, a fact that had nothing to do with public reaction received by the parties and published. The interruption was because I was having a terrible time, going through a personal and creative crisis while. As the face was not related staff, except very tangentially, with the creative, you need only refer to the creative chaos.

Although it was a real torment, now I'm glad it happened. After all, changed my whole conception of literature, my attitude towards art, life, the balance between them and my understanding the difference between true and really real.
For starters, I think most writers, even the best, recharge the ink. I prefer to lighten them, using a simple and crystal field as a stream. I discovered that my style became too dense, I took three pages to get effects that should be achieved in a single paragraph. I read and reread everything I had written in Answered Prayers, and I began to have doubts, not about the material or my approach, but the texture of the style. I reread In Cold Blood and I had the same reaction: in many parts of the style was not as good as it should be, and did not release the full potential. Slowly, with an alarm was increasing, I read that never once in my writing career, had exploited all the excitement and energy contained in the material aesthetic. I realized that even in the best parts, working with half or even one-third of the potential he had. Why?

The answer, I was released after months of meditation, was simple but not very satisfactory. He did nothing, of course, to lessen my depression. On the contrary, the worse. The response created a seemingly intractable problem and, if he could not solve, the better stop writing. The problem was: how can a writer combined with good outcome in one way, say the story-all he knows of all other literary forms? Well, this was where my work was often poorly lit, the voltage was, but to restrict myself to the techniques of how he wrote at the time, not using all he knew the art of writing, all what he had learned of librettos, plays, stories, poems, stories, nouvelles, novels. A writer should be available on his palette, all colors, all abilities so that they can combine and, where appropriate, be applied simultaneously. The question was: how?

I returned
Answered Prayers. Dismissed a chapter and rewrote two centers. Better, definitely better. But the truth was that he should return to kindergarten. There was, again, at a table game, but excited because I was lit by an invisible sun. Still, my first attempts were clumsy. I looked like a child with a box of crayons.

From a technical standpoint, the biggest difficulty I had to write In Cold Blood was not participating. Typically, the reporter must enter into the play as a character witness as an observer, if he wants to keep the book within the realm of the plausible. I felt it was essential for the seemingly objective tone of the book that the author was absent. In fact, in all my stories, I always tried to stay as invisible as possible.

Now, however, I put them on center stage and began to rebuild, in a severe and minimum daily conversations with ordinary people: the manager of my building, a trainer at the gym, an old school friend my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages simple, I get a style. He had discovered a framework within which he could take everything I knew about the art of writing.

More Later, using a modified version of this technique, I wrote a true nouvelle (Coffins carved by hand) and a number of stories. The result is this book, Music for Chameleons.

How has all this to the rest of my work in progress, Answered Prayers? Considerably. Meanwhile, here I am alone, lost in my dark madness, all alone with my deck of cards and, of course, the whip God gave me.