This was originally done as an assignment towards my masters degree and probably useless and uninteresting to anyone except academics or those involved. However, I always liked the way I approached the situation, which was to create a hard copy of an interview or conversation using source work from my intended masters degree project. As Oscar Wilde said, the only forgivable situation for having created something useless is that you admire it intensely.
Masters of Arts Professionals seminar
University of Iowa, fall 1994
James D. Wolf, Jr.
Interviewing the Impossible
"I'D RATHER BE A FRIEND OF MINE THAN AN ENEMY." -TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote is dead, which makes him hard to interview. This is a regrettable situation as far as my project is concerned. Fortunately, he did leave behind a large amount of writing on himself, first person accounts of the work he was doing or had done. He wrote about why he wrote, why he chose different styles or subjects, what he thought he had accomplished or failed at. He even conducted two "interviews" with himself, one of which he included in Music For Chameleons, the other in The Dogs Bark.
This paper will use the introduction to Music For Chameleons, interspaced with quotes from Tom Wolfe's introductory comments from The New Journalism. The intention is a dialogue of their thoughts -- or perhaps more accurately an interaction between their monologues -- to show how two different writers approached similar problems in the same field.
The form is meant to show relationships between their writings and philosophies, not to construct a conversation that never happened. The reader should keep in mind that the writings used not only came from different places, but also from different years: 1973 (Wolfe) to 1979 (Capote); the writings were meant to stand alone and not as commentaries on each other.
The writings do, however, show how two very different writers came to the same genre despite two different backgrounds. The paths they chose tend to mirror each other as they get closer to the destination, the New Journalism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which indicates a correlation between the writing the two have produced in the field.
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In the preface to Music For Chameleons, Capote looks over his career as a series of phases. The first phase, he says, started with him learning the craft while still young and ended with his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, just as a piano virtuoso's beginnings would have started with learning the five-finger exercises as a child and gone on to give the first solo performance. This is his impression about those beginnings:
Capote: One had so much to learn, and from so many sources: not only from books, but from music, from painting, and just plain everyday observation.
In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days was the plain everyday observations that I recorded in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbor. Long verbatim accounts of overheard conversations. Local gossip. A kind of reporting, a style of "seeing" and "hearing" that would later seriously influence me, though I was unaware of it then, for all my "formal" writing, the stuff that I polished and carefully typed, was more or less fictional.
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Wolfe's early days of writing were done in newspapers and magazines around New York City. And his early experiences were shaped by that and by the fact that he had a doctorate in American studies, no doubt. In The New Journalism, he talks about the field that helped shape his work: feature writing. Of the general mindset of colleagues then, he says:
Wolfe: What they had in common was that they all regarded the newspaper as a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph. The idea was to get a job on a newspaper, keep body and soul together, pay the rent, get to know "the world," accumulate "experience," perhaps work some of the fat off your style -- then, at some point, quit cold, say goodbye to journalism, move into a shack somewhere, work night and day for six months, and light up the sky with the final triumph. The final triumph was known as The Novel.2
. . .
And yet in the early 1960s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere. It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would . . . read like a novel. Like a novel, if you get the picture. This was the sincerest form of homage to The Novel and to those greats, the novelists, of course. Not even the journalists who pioneered in this direction doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever. All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him . . . until the day when they themselves would work up the nerve and go into the shack and try it for real . . . They were dreamers, all right, but one thing they never dreamed of. They never dreamed of the approaching irony. They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature's main event. 3
Capote was also arriving at a similar conclusion about journalism but approached it from a different direction.
Capote: From the point of view of my creative destiny, the most interesting writing I did during the whole of this second phase first appeared in The New Yorker as a series of articles and subsequently as a book entitled The Muses are Heard. It concerned the first cultural exchange between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.: a tour, undertaken in 1955, of Russia by a company of black Americans in Porgy and Bess. I conceived of the whole adventure as a short comic "nonfiction novel," the first.
Some years earlier, Lillian Ross had published
Picture, her account of the making of a movie, The Red Badge of Courage; with its fast cuts, its flash forward and back, it was itself like a movie, and as I read it I wondered what would happen if the author let go of her hard linear straight-reporting discipline and handled her material as if it were fictional -- would the book gain or lose? I decided, if the right subject came along, I'd like to give it a try: Porgy and Bess and Russia in the depths of winter seemed like the right subject. The Muses Are Heard received excellent reviews; even sources usually unfriendly to me were moved to praise it. Still, it did not attract any special notice, and the sales were moderate. Nevertheless, that book was an important event for me: while writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary.
For several years I had been increasingly drawn toward journalism as an art form in itself. I had two reasons. First, it didn't seem to me that anything truly innovative had occurred in prose writing, or in writing generally, since the 1920s; second, journalism as art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism, and when they did, it took the form of travel essays or autobiography.
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Wolfe: In the spring of 1963 I made my own entry into this new arena, although without meaning to. I have already described (in the introduction to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) the odd circumstances under which I happened to write my first magazine article . . . in the form of what I thought was merely a memorandum to the managing editor of Esquire. This article was by no means like a short story, despite the use of scenes and dialogue. I wasn't thinking about that at all. It is hard to say what it was like. It was a garage sale, that piece . . . much of it thrown together in a rough and awkward way. That was its virtue. It showed me the possibility of there being something "new" in journalism. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that -- plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space . . . to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.5
Capote: From a technical point, the greatest difficulty I'd had in writing In Cold Blood was leaving myself completely out of it. Ordinarily, the reporter has to use himself as a character, an eyewitness observer, in order to retain credibility. But I felt that it was essential to the seemingly detached tone of that book that the author should be absent. Actually, in all my reportage, I had tried to keep myself as invisible as possible.
Now, however, I set myself center stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people: the superintendent of my building, a masseur at the gym, an old school friend, my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages of this simpleminded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing.
Later, using a modified version of this technique, I wrote a nonfiction short novel (
Handcarved Coffins) and a number of short stories.6
Wolfe: The voice of the narrator, in fact, was one of the great problems in non-fiction writing. Most non-fiction writers, without knowing it, wrote in a century-old British tradition in which it was understood that the narrator shall assume a calm, cultivated, and, in fact, genteel voice . . . Understatement was the thing. You can't imagine what a positive word "understatement" was among both journalists and literati ten years ago. There is something to be said about the notion, of course, but the trouble was that by the early 1960s understatement had become an absolute pall. Readers were bored to tears without understanding why.7
. . .
[I began] to create the illusion of seeing the action through the eyes of someone who was actually on the scene and involved in it, rather than as a beige narrator. I began to think of this device as the downstage voice, as if characters downstage from the protagonist himself were talking.
I would do the same thing with descriptions. Rather than come on as the broadcaster describing the big parade, I would shift as quickly as possible into the eye sockets, as it were, of the people in the story. Often I would shift the point of view in the middle of a paragraph or even a sentence . . . I switched back and forth between points-of-view continually, and often abruptly, in many articles I wrote in 1963, 1964 and 1965. Eventually a reviewer called me a "chameleon" who instantly took on the coloration of whomever he was writing about. He meant it negatively. I took it as a great compliment. A chameleon . . . but exactly!
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Of all the writers in the New Journalism movement, Capote and Wolfe are the easiest to work with. Both have a respectable body of work and were influential in the field. They also left a easily followed trail in their writings which shows how they came from the two different backgrounds (Capote is literary while Wolfe is journalistic) which made up the New Journalism movement.
It is because of this that I will use them in my project. The similarities between these two opposing individuals mirrors part of what I will attempt to prove in my project, that the New Journalism movement was based in American literature. And it is rare to find such perfect examples.
Bibliography
Capote, Truman. Music For Chameleons. 1980. New York:
Signet, 1981.
Wolfe, Tom and E. W. Johnson, eds. The New Journalism. New
York: Harper & Row, 1973.