Title : The Ghost of Truman Capote
Author:Leila Guerriero
Editions: Shores
Release date: September 4, 2024
Gender : Essay
Leila Guerriero is an Argentinian journalist. Except that here, she is investigating in Spain, on the Costa Brava, in Palamós, not far from Barcelona. She is following in the footsteps of Truman Capote, who “locked himself away” here, far from the high society life of Manhattan, after having collected several thousand pages of notes to write his new novel, In cold bloodin the early 1960s. The investigation can then begin. But where on earth could Capote have set foot?
Such a novel is perhaps only of interest to people who write, journalists, authors. The investigation is not a priori more breathtaking than that: did Capote go to buy his bread at the Collboni pastry shop or at Samsó? And his newspaper, in which bookstore did he go to buy his newspaper, in this village in Franco’s Spain in the 1960s? And then, in fact, how did he end up there? Was it thanks to the writer Robert Ruark? But then, why did you show him so little friendship afterwards? Who is telling the truth?
We will agree that this story is not the most exciting. Unless you have read In cold blooda novel that elevates twentieth-century literature and all literature to a major art, through its astonishing mastery of its subject, the exhaustive description of the murder of this family by two hicks who had been falsely told that they had some money. The Ghost of Truman Capote will also delight you if you are vaguely familiar with the author’s reputation as a decadent dandy. In cold bloodconsidered “the inventor of the non-fiction novel.”
Leila Guerriero therefore goes to the scene of the crime, the birth of a masterpiece of literature. She questions this tourist route in Palamós, in pursuit of Capote, built on a fictional novel, that of Màrius Carol. She also meets little (very) old ladies and little (very) old ladies, who say everything and its opposite. One thing comes up often: Capote did not go unnoticed, behaved “in a very homosexual manner” without it bothering anyone, in this lost village of the 1960s, and lived his life without speaking to many people, except his partner and his pets, since he did not speak Spanish and the village did not speak English.
Guerriero takes the opportunity to tell the story of her visit to the place where Capote is said to have written: in a hotel, in this room (or is it the one on the lower floor?), in this villa specially prepared these days for writers’ residences. She also shares her life with other writers, who are in residence, and realizes how almost impossible it is to describe this monotonous and regular work combining running, writing, reading, conversation and swimming. How can one describe happy days, when difficult times can be described in dozens of pages, since Capote makes very little reference in his many letters to the village of Palamós?
Capote also takes the time to write letters, in which he expresses all his faith (and all his simultaneous doubts) in what he thinks will become his masterpiece, his ambiguous fear that the two murderers with whom he sympathizes will not be hanged, which would not allow him to return to the United States, following a promise (which he will not keep, since the accomplices will be hanged in 1965 and he will leave Spain in 1962) that he had made to himself. Guerriero’s novel is a book about the story of reality, about writing, about Spain in the 1960s, but also and above all a book about Capote, about his way of the cross that was the writing of this In cold bloodwhich would last almost 5 years, and how this work would affect him mentally until his death.
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