Monday: more Fosca recording with Tom. Song titles: “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”, and “Come Down From The Cross, Someone Else Needs The Wood”.
Tuesday: To see ‘Capote’ with Ms Shanthi. Difficult to come out of the cinema without speaking in Mr Hoffman’s cartoonish Capote voice; though if anything, Capote was more cartoonish in real life. Thought-provoking stuff about the writer as amoral magpie, secretly wanting their subject to die so they can get on with the immortalising in print. Biographers and their love-hate relationship with their subject. Gielgud told his official biographer to wait until his death before publishing. Of course, he then lived way into his 90s, outliving his peers (Olivier, Ralph Richardson) by some time. He was 94 when he played The Pope in Cate Blanchett’s ‘Elizabeth’. Just as well the biographer hadn’t died before him.
It’s hinted in the movie that Capote had a kind of platonic love for the convicted murderer he was writing about, and then just like Wilde’s “each man kills the thing he loves”, once he’d got the confession he wanted, he cut off contact. He wanted the young man to hurry up and be executed so his already publicly acclaimed book (In Cold Blood – excerpts had already been published) can be finished. We see him at a luxurious NYC bar, whining that the wait for his subjects to be hanged is ‘torture’.
We browse in Borders Books afterwards, and I note there’s a current non-fiction bestseller called ‘Stuart: A Life Backwards’, about the life of a homeless beggar. I bet the subject has died, I muse, and flick through the text to find out. Yes, yes he has.
Good, I say inwardly, it makes the book better. And now I feel the amoral magpie guilt myself.
