In any case, I was reviewing some of the books I took back from New York City only to find The Rolling Stone Interviews on my shelf. I'm following this story/interview of Truman Capote with Andy Warhol in 1973. Rolling Stone Magazine commissioned Truman Capote to cover the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street tour but after several months, he still can't seem to deliver. Instead, the magazine asked Andy Warhol to interview Capote instead and figure out what happened with him and why he can't seem to write the story.
Having just read In Cold Blood last month on the Kobo (this was before my stupid reading/sleeping accident last week that involved my iPad 2), I'm quite curious as to why Capote can't seem to file his story.
Here's his answer on why he couldn't write the article:
"The reason was—two fold. One: As the thing progressed, I saw more and more trash written about the entire tour, and ordinarily that sort of thing doesn't bother me: I mean, for instance, I could cover a trial that's being covered by seventeen or eighteen newspapers at the time, and it doesn't faze me in the least because I know it has nothing to do with what my own insight is.
But my trouble with this was that especially in journalistic writing… au reportage… there has to be some element of mystery to me about it. And the problem with me with this piece was that there was no mystery. There was not a thing about it that set some mystery going into my mind as to why this should be or that should be, because it was all so perfectly timed… staged—I mean psychologically—I'm not talking about the performance itself. Just the whole combination of the thing was so perfectly obvious. The people were so obvious, and so they really had no dimension beyond their own. I mean, Mick Jagger has a certain mystery to him, but simply because he's a bit of a doppelgänger. I mean, he's a highly trained performer, and on the other hand, he's a businessman par excellence. And the whole thing is perfectly obvious, and so it had no mystery to it. Since there was nothing to "find out," I just couldn't be bothered writing it. Does that make sense to you?"
He poised that question to Andy Warhol, and I think I'd rather answer that.
Yes that makes perfect sense! How many times have I abandoned a celebrity story only to pick it up again come deadline time because I have to turn it in? (Unlike Capote, I cannot just miss a deadline!) I get bored with one-dimensional subjects easily, which makes it difficult when I realize in the middle of an interview that all they're giving me are their PR answers.
On material:
"Yes, there's material, but it's just that. Material. It's just that. It doesn't have any echo. It isn't that you want to forget about it because of the unpleasantness; it's just because it doesn't have any echo. Nowhere in the whole story of the Rolling Stones could I find anything sympathetic except the naïveté of the kids… which wasn't—maybe in itself—true, either. Maybe it was just sentimentality."
On guilt about not finishing the story:
"Not in the least. When I make up my mind about something, I never feel guilty. That's ti. No artist should feel guilty. If you start painting and you don't like it, you don't finish it."
On telling the editor:
"Well, because I hadn't really made up my mind. I had all of the material there, and it was sitting there, and it was bothering me, and I kept thinking, "Well, it would be so easy, really, to do it." Finally the time came that I just made up my mind that I wasn't going to do it. And I just told him. They voted me Rookie Reporter of the Year."
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| Truman Capote by Richard Avedon |
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