Nobody’s perfect
Taki
Gstaad
When excerpts of Truman Capote’s ballyhooed opus Answered Prayers first appeared in Esquire, I thought the tiny terror had written his masterpiece. Taking a second look 30 years later, Capote’s stuff seems dated, bitchy and forced. No Proust he, although when the excerpts appeared that is whom Capote compared himself with. Truman is back in the news 21 years after his departure from this world — when told Capote had expired, Gore Vidal pronounced it ‘a great career move’ — because of the film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. I have not seen it, but I’m told the actor does a hell of a job. Perhaps. I knew Capote and he was a very mean and slippery fellow. He couldn’t stand me, to be sure, and once told a girlfriend of mine that ‘anyone as aggressively heterosexual as he is simply had to be queer’.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, especially if one’s running for the LibDem leadership. But one thing is for sure, Truman never touched him, as they say in the beak-busting business — ‘him’ being Proust. Image, evocation and analogy in description were Marcel’s strengths, his portrayals of concealed emotions real gems. Capote was also very good, especially early on, at depicting small-town life in the American south, but he lost most of it as he whizzed up the greasy pole of New York café society. Which was all it was. Truman took the Paleys very seriously, as many did, but once they dropped him he went to pieces. For me, it was like taking a five count on one knee after a lucky punch by a flashy middleweight. He should have come back and put them on the canvas for good, but not Truman. Cee-Zee Guest and Lee Radziwill stuck by him, but all he did was rage and rant that the Paleys — he called Babe his swan — had done him wrong. Pathetic and sad. Now he’s back again stirring things up from the grave, thanks to Hollywood.
And speaking of answered prayers, democracy does not eudaemonia necessarily bring, n’est ce pas? President Bush’s prayers have been answered, but not quite in the way he thought they would. The trouble with the big D is it cannot be trusted to do the right thing. No greater folly has been committed by Bush and those grotesque neocons than his midlife conversion to a ‘global democratic revolution’. It is this democratic revolution which has brought the mullahs to power in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine and — if there was a true election in Saudi Osama to the land of billionaire cameldrivers. A little bit more help from democratic friends, and the Muslim Brotherhood will soon be running Egypt, Algeria and even Nigeria. But not to worry. Democracy rules OK, as they used to say in Mexico back in 1898, when the non-democratic rulers executed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, according to one briefing for President W by his neocon advisers.
One of the pleasures of my life is, of course, listening to or reading American commentators on the subject of the Middle East. Hamas hysteria is sweeping the country, the country being American politicians and hacks, who know how short their careers will be if they fail to use the T-word next to anything starting with ‘P’. Never mind, nobody’s perfect, as Joe E. Brown said in Some Like It Hot, but this is getting sort of ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as Blair’s stooges are on crime.
I spent a wonderful week in London, playing poker with Zac Goldsmith, drinking with Tim Hoare, celebrating Charlie Glass’s birthday at home — his house fits inside my aeroplane — but street crime was on everyone’s mind. I happen not to own a car in London and try to walk everywhere. From Cadogan Square to Pimlico, then back to Curzon Street, on one given day, I did not see a single policeman. Only two men handing out parking tickets like paper hankies during a flu epidemic. And when I crossed the DMZ and went over to Charlie’s house, fuggettaboutit. Coppers were as rare as a lesbian in a reunion of Manteuffel’s 7th Panzer Division. The newspaper headlines, however, gave one hope. ‘25 Somalis held on bus as youth dies in street stabbing.’ ‘Kicked to death for refusing a thug a light.’ ‘Street crime soars as iPods tempt muggers.’ Something tells me if I keep walking around rainy London town I, too, will soon be a statistic.
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