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A Terrifying ManFebruary 16, 2006 Friends razz me regularly because it took a detached retina to get me off the island; the truth is that living in "paradise" sucks up so much of my money that I can't afford to leave, and it also slowly saps your will so that you have a hard time putting one foot in front of the other and the idea of going off-island is about as thinkable as getting up naked in front of an audience of 500 Nobel laureates and giving a speech on the second law of thermodynamics. They also laugh at me because I know all this esoteric stuff about singers and feminist philosophers but I don't know what George Clooney looks like. I don't have a TV, I don't read the newspapers, and I hardly ever go to the movies -- by the time I hear that something is worth seeing, it's left the island for good, if it ever came here in the first place. Hah. I faked them out: last night I went to the movies, and tonight I'm going again. All the way to Edgartown (the Capawock in Vineyard Haven, which I can walk to, is closed for renovations or something). Hot damn. What I saw last night was Capote. Really good movie. If you're a writer or an artist or a political organizer or anyone who's ever called upon to rationalize how you use other people, it's an essential movie. And dark? Nearly everything about it is dark: most of the settings, nearly everybody's hair. Truman Capote doesn't have dark hair -- he's almost cherubic, too childlike in demeanor to be taken seriously in the circles he's taken seriously in -- but he's the darkest of all. At one point, after a wildly successful reading from the manuscript that became In Cold Blood, an admirer tells Truman how vividly he portrayed "those terrifying men." That's the gist, anyway; I think "terrifying" was the adjective used. I walked out of the theater thinking that Truman Capote was more terrifying than the killers of the Clutter family. He might have agreed: people do not generally drink themselves to death if they're at peace with themselves, and Capote never finished a book after In Cold Blood. When artists choke after a stunning success, I tend to believe they were afraid the next effort wouldn't come close to its predecessor. I think Capote -- at least the Capote of Capote -- got a face-to-face, heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind look at himself and couldn't live with what he saw. Art holds up a mirror to the artist: it takes a brave man or woman to gaze into the mirror and live with what s/he sees. What the movie showed me was Truman Capote, drop-dead articulate, dazzling the easily dazzled at parties and readings; Truman Capote, attracted to a dangerous story, because he thought it would make a brilliant book (which it did); and Truman Capote, in way over his head (which is what writers and artists have to do to keep growing), and finally realizing that words and anecdotes and stories aren't just pretty baubles to dazzle the easily dazzled with. They're serious stuff. People take them seriously. They're radioactive. They don't die. In her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: "A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you" (in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood, Perigee Books, 1979; p. 93). Same goes for any story that entices, seduces, and draws you in: your stay in Elfland may last only seven years, but you will be changed forever. If you can't assimilate the changes, well, there's booze, and there are drugs, and a few hundred other ways to ease the pain and deny the vision. At the cost of creative paralysis and/or a premature death.
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