A response to D. G. Myers‘ „Remembering Truman Capote“ (»» Deutsche Version lesen)
••• Now that D. G. Myers’s „Remembering Truman Capote“ has been posted here in German, I can finally begin to respond. How much one likes Capote may vary—one may not even like him at all—but what Myers does posthumously to the eccentric Truman demands explicit contradiction.
At least four claims in Myers’s post rub me the wrong way. He begins with the claim that Capote’s novels before „In Cold Blood“ are mere collages of what Capote had read. Apparently, this is made sufficiently clear (otherwise it would not have been worth mentioning) by the fact that Capote’s debut, „Other Voices, Other Rooms,“ was published when the author was just 24. Well, whoever thinks a twenty-four-year old can have nothing to say except what he has read surely did not have a complex childhood shaped by unstable relationships and abandonment; beyond that, though, whether the author has experienced and suffered every detail of what he relates has never been a valid literary-critical criterion.
Immediately after that point, Myers claims that Capote’s prose is so clearly mannered that it is hardly worth mentioning. I would really like to know the basis of this assertion. To me, „Breakfast at Tiffany’s“—as I am already on the record as saying here—is a flawless novel. It may not shed light on whatever the world revolves around, but in terms of technique, the book seems to me to be beyond criticism. Capote himself may have been mannered—but his prose is not. This is not just my opinion. None other than Norman Mailer, after all (who definitely had at least one or two hard-to-swallow experiences with Capote), admitted that
Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation. … I would not have changed two words in „Breakfast at Tiffany’s“
Such a blanket condemnation as Myers’s must be justified in detail. I cannot accept how it has just been tossed off so acidly.
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