Answered Prayers

As truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion – but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he recreates himself as a woman (illusion) – and of the two, the illusion is the truer.

I learned of Answered Prayers while reading The Swans of Fifth Avenue, and although it's an “unfinished novel”, the history behind this book just might be more interesting than the book itself. Wanting to make a Proustian tableau of the rich and famous of his day (in an effort to record Perfect Truth), Truman Capote went to work on his journals and correspondence, arranging and rearranging decades worth of anecdotes into a nonfiction novel of his own life. Capote had been paid a large advance for this book, but despite always assuring his publisher that it just needed a bit more polishing, the due date kept getting pushed back (by years), Capote would negotiate more advances by bundling this title in with other books he was working on, and in the end, he died without finishing it. Capote did, however, arrange for Esquire to publish four chapters from Answered Prayers over the years (one chapter was later published in a different collection of stories, leaving three completed chapters for this book proper) and those excerpts had a devastating effect on Capote's personal life: Telling the secrets of his high society friends led to at least two suicides and Capote's banishment from their inner circle. Capote's response: What did they expect? I'm a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think that I was there just to entertain them? 

From the three chapters that are finished, the linking factor is the narrator P. B. Jones: a bisexual hustler who uses his youth and good looks to go from penniless orphan to the companion of jet-setters. Of his childhood he says: I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore – there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate. (This character is apparently an amalgam of Capote and one of the killers from In Cold Blood, Perry Smith, that Capote is said to have fallen in love with.) As Jones is a gigolo, there is a lot of sex in this book, and as Capote was working from his collection of anecdotes about the rich and famous, there's a very catty, gossipy vibe. Some could be funny:

Both Dietrich and Garbo occasionally came to Boaty's, the latter always escorted by Cecil Beaton, whom I'd met when he photographed me for Boaty's magazine (an overheard exchange between these two: Beaton, "The most distressing fact of growing older is that I find my private parts are shrinking." Garbo, after a mournful pause, "Ah, if only I could say the same.")

And some could border on defamatory (the following is from a section apparently based on Tennessee Williams):

     “How about it?” he said, blowing the ash off his cigar. “Roll over and spread those cheeks.” 

     “Sorry, but I don't catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no.” 

     “Ohhh,” he said, his way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet potato pie, “I don't want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar.”

Consistently, Capote is able to capture a character with just a few sentences; often scathingly:

• Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck inside her, she'd look like a porcupine.

• She was somewhat porcine, a swollen muscular baby with a freckled Bahamas-burnt face and squinty-mean eyes; she looked as if she wore tweed brassieres and played a lot of golf.

With just the three non-consecutive chapters (and despite totalling nearly two hundred pages), it's hard to evaluate Answered Prayers as a novel. The writing is certainly interesting (although I got the impression that Capote was trying a little too hard to be shocking while acting blasé; I chose “clean” quotes believe it or not) and each section does stand up as a short work on its own. I'd love to know if Capote ever finished any more of it (he always claimed to have finished this book although no drafts of any form surfaced after his death), or if he cared more about his social suicide than he let on; if along with his friends he lost his confidence and his muse. I don't know if Capote would have achieved the Proustian ideal, but I'm giving four stars for the quality of what he did accomplish; truth is another matter.

That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.