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"All literature is gossip." - Truman
Capote
ANSWERED PRAYERS from False Gods
by Biron
1977 review published in "The Midwest Gay Academic Journal"
(editor, Dan Tsang)
Uninhibitable gay, Truman Capote emerged
from New Orleans obscurity with the publication in 1949 of his first novel,
OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS, at the age of 24. The novel was an international
literary success, and provided the Louisiana faggot with a front-rank position
among American writers of the post-World War II generation a position
he has maintained with other works, including THE GRASS HARP, BREAKFAST
AT TIFFANY'S, and IN COLD BLOOD, a meticulously factual account of a small
town Kansas murder case. A "darling" of TV talk shows, he made
his movie debut last year in Neil Simon's MURDER BY DEATH.
And now, ANSWERED PRAYERS...
To ascetic Christian myths, we prefer
lusty Greek mythology where Olympian gods fly about in chariots intervening
in human affairs sometimes just to raise hell and satisfy their all-too-human
carnal desires.
One small step from the golden charioteers
to today's supersonic jet-setters who sometimes meddle in our lives just
to raise hell and satisfy their all-too human carnal desires.
Truman Capote's new novel, ANSWERED PRAYERS, only partially serialized to
date, presents devastating glimpses of the rich and beautiful people such
as Lady Ina Coolbirth, Kate McCloud, Gloria Vanderbilt di Cicco, Stokowski
Lumet Cooper, Madame Marmalade, Jackie O and Lee, to drop just a few names
that belong to the world of Vendura cuff links, Cartier watches, and gold
Tiffany toothpicks.
Real and imaginary beautiful people hobnob in the novel. When they talk
what we hear is quite often racy: Tallulah Bankhead, asked by Dorothy Parker
(reported in the December 1976 Esquire installment) whether Montgomery Cliff
is a cock-sucker, replies with characteristic drawl, "Well, d-d darling,
I r-r-really wouldn't know. He never sucked my cock."
When they drink a good many are swaggering lushes: Lady Coolbirth orders
a second bottle of the best champagne (Roederer's Cristal) for lunch at
the fashionable La Côte Basque.
When they sex, they are noticeably unconventional:
many pages are devoted to homosexuals like Denny Fouts, the "Best-Kept
Boy in the World," who passes through the hands of American industrialists
and European nobility, and Ned Rorem, the "Quaker Queer" Midwestern
composer, who also serves as a "diving dildo" (read: gigolo) for
"female checkbooks"to use the vernacular of P.B. Jones, who himself
is an employee of the Self Service, a slick 'Dial a Dick" Big Apple
operation.
If male homosexuality is here presented as a consumable bisexual delicacy
of the buyer-buy-all decadent ruling class, female homosexuality does at
least offer one respite from the novel's blatantly satirical hereto/homo-sexism.
From a radical Feminist perspective, one segment of La Côte Basque
is particularly interesting. Lady Ina Coolbirth explains how she married
a dull, humorless "lucrative catch" for economic reasons ("No,
not for sex"). And although she herself "cannot live without a
man," she talks about the life of a lesbian friend with conspicuous
envy!
After five husbands, one retarded child,
several hundred breakdowns, and weighing only ninety pounds, Anita Hohnsbeen
is sent by her doctor to Santa Fe, "the dyke capital of the United
States."
While there Anita meets a lesbian, Comes
Out, and decides to settle down in the area with her lesbian lover, Megan
O'Meaghan. "Anita looks," says Ina Coolbirth, "almost as
clear-eyed as she did when we were in school together... It's one of the
pleasantest home I've ever been in. Lucky Anita!" She is one of the
very few people who leaves the city for the country (a recurring theme of
the novel), and gets her unprayed for answer.
DESTRUCTION
"St. Teresa of Avila commented 'More tears are shed over answered prayers
than unanswered ones' " says Alice Lee Langman to P.B. Jones -- the
gigolo-narrator of Capote's novel who has written a devastatingly unsuccessful
book entitled (you guessed it) ANSWERED PRAYERS. What's the point of this
novel? "The theme moving through your work, as nearly as I can locate
it," says Alice to P.B., "is of people achieving a desperate aim
only to have it rebound upon them, accentuating, and accelerating, their
destruction."
A few of the beautiful people were
rather displeased with Truman's antics. After all, if they invited him to
their exclusive parties, it wasn't to have their names smeared across the
pages of ESQUIRE. Oh, wasn't it?
"I thought it was hi-larious!" Truman said in Warhol's INTERVIEW
magazine last April. "I think they loved it. I only know one person
who didn't like it well, two, actually ."
For making Art of their small talk, shouldn't
they be eternally grateful to Mr. C?
And just because the beautiful people are in Capote's novel, doesn't mean
the novel is about them. But such aesthetic considerations bore us as much
as ascetics. We want to be entertained, and for that we need bona fide
gossip. One example: Did you hear what Capote had to say about the scotch
whiskey baron, Joe Kennedy? Absolutely shocking!
ALL LITERATURE IS GOSSIP
"All literature is gossip," Capote is quoted as saying in the
December 1976 PLAYBOY. And the author of IN COLD BLOOD can spin gossip like
Homer before him. He gossips with style by skillfully blending pure and
adulterated truth.
Truman's aesthetics can best be understood from the perspective of a gay
lifestyle which accepts the fact that rigid female/male gender roles rest
on a foundation of quicksand. "Truth as illusion," is what ANSWERED
PRAYERS is all about, says P.B. Jones in Capote's novel. "As truth
is nonexistent," he argues, it can never be anything but illusion,
but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits
nearer the unattainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators.
The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as
a woman (illusion) and of-the two, the illusion is the truer."
This distinction may appear more complex when elsewhere Capote designates
Jackie Kennedy as a female impersonator, to which in passing I can add the
name of Mae West.
Female/male drag, TV, and transexualism,
so often condemned as bourgeois decadence by the not so new New Left, provide
from a radically gay perspective, a sound basis in praxis for a dialectical
(read: dynamic) world view. A feminist consciousness, often reflected in
the awareness of the social significance of cross-gender dress and behavior
is essential if one is to stop simply talking revolution and start living
it.
CAPITALIST SYSTEM
Why are we so fascinated by these "Unspoiled Monsters"as Capote
himself labels the beautiful people? Why do we permit them liberties we
too readily deny ourselves? Could it be that like the ancient Greeks, we
are hypnotized by gods of our own creation?
The jet-set, unlike ourselves, has escaped the capitalist rat-race, and
is reaping the rewards of our efforts. Since our winner-take-all Grand Lottery
Weltanschauun does require a few visible winners, the filthy rich
and their court of beautiful people provide us with the necessary few.
Consequently we, the self-declared losers,
are reduced to admiring their inanities with the same intensity as did the
Greeks the super human feats of their gods. In short, these "unspoiled
monsters" have become our living gods with that absolute power over
human destiny (our one and only lives) which, in "our" capitalist
system, only money can buy.
Is it then any wonder that Truman Capote tantalizes us with his literary
gossip? We are guilty of a realistic fallacy that confuses far more than
Art with Life. To make visible the edge surrounding our reality is to begin
to see it for what it is just another time-worn myth among many (Olympian
myth, Christian myth, Capitalist myth) to be evaluated and soon discarded
for yet another reality whose border remains unseen.
Hopefully a new mythology will do away
with casting people as either winners or losers. Until then, Capote's hot
new novel and Warhol's splashy INTERVIEW magazine are here to keep us posted
on the very latest high society gossip our answered prayers from false
gods.
Lionel A. Biron ©1977. All Rights
Reserved. May not to be reproduced without prior written permission. Again,
OK for your personal use, but please do not reprint, publish or distribute
for any commercial purpose unless authorized to do so.
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