NEW VORK LETTER
Capote's Happenings
By M. L. ROSENTHAL NEW YORK has become a city of 'happenings.' I refer not so much to the gross events themselves: the power blackout, the newspaper strike and lockout, the transit strike, and, at the beginning of February, the brutal blizzard that has wrought I do not know how much destruction up and down the country. These things affect not only New York, of course, but somehow the city becomes the dramatic centre, both for its own citizens and for the nation at large. New Yorkers live for these experiences, which make life even more unfamiliar and interesting than they make it miserable. They have a great, hungry, ultimately aesthetic need for happenings on a large scale, and at frequent enough inter- vals. It is, to my mind, the latest result of the alienation from daily experience of an overly technological and routinised civilisation.
Think of the things that emerge when these beloved catastrophes hit us. First of all, one may not be able to get to work; or if one does, one can get there late and nothing can be done in the usual way in any case. Imagine spending eighteen hours stuck in an underground train, perhaps in a tunnel under a river. Hideous, but exotic! And then someone leads you out along precarious catwalks and up slippery ladders, and some poor old thing falls and breaks a hip or has a heart attack. Out on the streets the bored kids take over traffic direction—they're authority figures, even heroes! Everyone makes jokes, and a child's unintended witticism gets into the papers and rocks the city: 'Somebody didn't pay his electric bill!' Or, with a Marlovian flourish, the Transit Workers' Union calls a strike.
The strike is unnecessary, for the new Mayor- elect, not yet in office, has very reasonably pro- posed that operation of buses and underground trains continue after the old union contract ex- pires, but that negotiations continue, too, and any agreement become retroactive. But no, the strike must go on—and for its part the Transit Authority must take out an injunction and send the union leaders to jail if they disregard it. What excitement! Sitting down and working it out reasonably would be too much to ask with so worked-up an audience; it would be like ask- ing Hamlet and Claudius to negotiate, with the Ghost as mediator, somewhere in the second act.
So there we had it. Picture the late Mike Quill, on the television, his mobile Irish face fixed solemnly before the nation, speaking with the quiet passion of a man who all his life has been at one with Jim Larkin and the 1916 martyrs: The judge in his black robes may drop dead before the union will surrender.' And the strike began. Everything in turmoil, and TV men in the way wherever anyone turned. Poor Mike, who had a weak heart, himself collapsed shortly after his arrest, and lived just long enough to see the inevitable, messily and unnecessarily fought battle end in union victory. The strike measurably increased the misery of the poorest and hardest-working people of New York. It disoriented schools and universities, just before mid-year examinations. It cost city and country millions of dollars. But a whole nation, hour after hour, could watch young TV reporters standing on street corners staring at traffic jams, or at nothing: 'Traffic hasn't been so quiet on the George Washington Bridge for years. People seem to have heeded the Mayor's plea that they
not drive into the city this morning.' Wow( No kiddin'?
The 'happening' approach to reality is the clue to a good deal of the more popular or significant recent literature in America. The latest sensa- tion is Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel,' in Cold Blood, first serialised in the New Yorker and now selling so fast that, with film rights, etc., it is now well into its second million dollars' worth of earnings for the author. Mr. Capote claims that he has invented a new genre and that his six years' work on the book taught him how to do it. The book is essentially factual. Two young men, psychopathic personalities both, murdered a whole family—prosperous, indus- trious, virtuous Herbert Clutter, his neurotic wife, his charming daughter, and his fine son—one frightful night in a rural Kansas village. They were strangers to these people. The killing was almost as impersonal, and arbitrary, as fate.
Mr. Capote read about the murder (no one knew who had done it at that time; and the young men, who had learned about the family from others far away, had long taken their leave of the scene) and decided to study the case him- self and perhaps base his next book on it. He trained himself, he says, to remember conversa- tions almost verbatim, and set himself the task of repossesting the whole atmosphere and the inner personalities of everyone concerned. The result is an absorbing, tantalising book, expres- sive no doubt of Mr. Capote's own ambivalent fascination with the perverse cruelty of which humanity is capable, but suggesting as well a number of unbearably pitiable aspects of Ameri- can life and society.
All his capacity for gossipy, demeaning insights has been used in the writing of In Cold Blood, but has been absorbed into his ennobling vision of tragic vulnerability, so that he could hardly pass judgment without seeming to go beyond the line into hubris. As we read, we know what is going to happen, yet are in suspense; we understand the events, yet cannot assimilate their enormity—they approach the realisation of the inner meaning of the statistics of impersonal violence that mark off some unfathomable mean- ing in modern life. But then again, as we read we also have the uneasy sense of being manipu- lated in an odd way; at least, I do. I feel that now I know why those poor Clutters had to die, and why those tragic fools finally had to swing for their crime. It was so that Truman Capote could 'invent' a 'new genre,' the same kind of 'genre' that was 'invented' when the TV cameras caught Oswald being hustled out of the Dallas jail, and then that bit of a hat with a revolver cocked under it somewhere that felled Oswald.
This is hard on Mr. Capote, no doubt, especi- ally since he really does write beautifully. The book will be at least as much a sensation in England as in the United States. But something is changing us all into voyeuristic statisticians, collectors of psychological 'insights' into the impenetrable, traitors to our own instincts and sense of our own reality, who more and more find ourselves staring into the big eye that reduces us all to 'phenomena' commenting to smiling, uncommitted young men on how we feel about how 'they' feel out in the world of semi-reality where people really do suffer but somehow do not exist in their (our) own right.
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