In 1979, four years after Esquire published “La Côte Basque,” the excerpt from Truman Capote’s novel Answered Prayers that led to his ostracization from New York high society, Vogue ran a personal essay titled “Truman Capote by Truman Capote.” The piece recounted his childhood; the success of his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, when he was only 23 years old (not that impressive, he says: “I’d only been writing day in and day out for fourteen years!”); and other highlights from his career, including the lengthy and challenging creative process that culminated in his 1965 book In Cold Blood. (“Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite the bullet and walk the plank simultaneously, have a lot in common with another breed of lonely men, the guys who make a living shooting pool and dealing cards.”) Finally, Capote addressed Answered Prayers*—and why he’d finally abandoned that project altogether.*
Read the full thing, from Vogue’s December 1979 issue, below. —Elise Taylor
My life as an artist at least, can be charted as precisely as a fever: the highs and lows, the very definite cycles.
I started writing when I was eight—out of the blue, uninspired by any example. I’d never known anyone who wrote; in fact, I knew few people who read. But the fact was, the only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap dancing, and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a novel but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
But, of course, I didn’t know that. I wrote adventure stories, murder mysteries, comedy skits, tales that had been told me by former slaves and Civil War veterans. It was a lot of fun—at first. It stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more terrifying discovery—the difference between very good writing and true art: it is subtle, but savage. And after that, the whip came down!
As certain young people practice the piano or the violin four and five hours a day, so it was that I played with my papers and pens. Yet, I never discussed my writing with anyone; if someone asked what I was up to all those hours, I told them I was doing my school homework. Actually, I never did any homework. My literary tasks kept me fully occupied; my apprenticeship at the altar of technique, craft; the devilish intricacies of paragraphing, punctuation, dialogue placement. Not to mention the grand overall design, the great demanding arc of middle-beginning-end. One had to learn so much, and from so many sources: not only from books, but from music, from painting, and, to be sure, just plain everyday observation. In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days were 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 very carefully typed, was more or less fictional.
By the time I was seventeen, I was an accomplished writer. Had I been a pianist, it would have been the moment for my first public concert. As it was, I decided I was ready to publish; I sent off I stories to the principal literary quarterlies, as well as to the national magazines which, in those days published the best so-called “quality” fiction—Story, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly; and stories by me duly appeared in those publications.