Truman Capote was one of the first literary celebrities. He won instant success with the publication of “Other Voices, Other Rooms” in 1948 and became a household name with “In Cold Blood,” his 1966 “non-fiction novel” about the killing of a farm family in Kansas in 1959. It seems entirely appropriate that the teller of Capote’s life is George Plimpton, a literary celebrity himself, and that Plimpton has chosen to reject the traditional narrative form and traded it for a cross between oral history and biography. Plimpton, in his “Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career” (Doubleday, 512 pages, $35), interviews many of the people–from Katherine Graham and Lauren Bacall to Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer–whose lives intersected with Capote’s, and crafts these tales and insights into a coherent, highly engaging narrative. Plimpton reflected with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor on how he goes about crafting this unusual kind of book.
Q. What rules do you follow as you interview sources, edit the interviews and link them together so they flow from chapter to chapter?
A. I don’t have rules. The techniques are that you try and make one monologue drift into another. I think the image I put in the beginning of the book is an accurate one: It’s like going to a huge cocktail party and the groups are–by chance–standing around, chronologically arranged, so that the first grouping you listen in on with your tape recorder is from Monroeville (Ala., where Capote was raised). And, like at a cocktail party, the statement, or story or view drifts into another because someone picks up on it. You try to make it sound like that.
What I did, for example, with Monroeville, I talked to a lot of people there and went to see it myself. What you do is put all those (interviews) in a folder and then what I used to do was take them out–I call them snakes, sometimes they were 23 or 24 feet long, of the transcripts, edited already, attached to each other and then you can shift them all around. It’s very hard to do on a computer.
Q. How did this process work?
A. It’s very hard to do. I pasted them together and put them on a pool table here in the apartment. The biggest ones were 40 feet long. You walk down that length and see if you can rearrange it.
I use scissors and tape. And sometimes you’ll cut a monologue with one person in half and stick something else in the middle.
There’s a lot of line editing, then this process I’ve described–put them in folders–and then take them out of the folders and rearrange what is there, and that turns into a chapter.
Q. Were there any portions you simply couldn’t give up?
A. Sometimes, when I found something that didn’t fit, I would do an interlude in the book where it’s off the chronological order. An interlude might be Kate Harrington, the girl he befriends (and who is the daughter of John O’Shea, a married, suburban banker with whom Capote had a destructive love affair). I think (that) is one of the better parts, and she talks for 17 pages and you keep that all together.
Q. How extensively did you research Truman Capote’s life? Do you have a sense of how many interviews you did? How many hours did you spend interviewing?
A. I suppose that I interviewed 200 people. I had a little help in Kansas, a friend of mine . . . did those. Some of them were 50 or 60 pages long. I traveled all over the place–I spent eight years doing this–but I would get bored and put it down and pick it up. And finally (my editor), Nan Talese, got upset, which I guess editors have to do.
I was very lucky because by procrastinating–and not by design, but because I’m lazy–all of a sudden you run into someone like Kate Harrington who came up and touched my arm on the street and said, “I’m John O’Shea’s daughter.” Just actually by chance. It was absolutely by chance. We went and had this extraordinary conversation and then she disappeared.
Q. You helped with the John F. Kennedy Oral History Project. Is that an oral history you would do in the future?
A. I’ve been thinking about people who are interesting. I’ve thought that Frank Sinatra and music would be wonderful. Lenny Bernstein would be another extraordinary one to do, except apparently people don’t buy books about Bernstein–maybe because they’re not done in the first person and tend to become a bit boring unless you have the voices firsthand.
