“New York society defeated Capote as a writer”

Truman Capote (New Orleans, 1924) is an extremely talented author, perhaps destined to be Faulkner’s heir, but whom New York society He won as a writer, the social life of the elite prevailed and his work faded awaysays narrator Alejandro Espinosa Fuentes.

The Mexican writer will give a talk on September 26 Breakfast at Coapa: A dialogue with Capote’s early work from south to southa few days before the centenary of the birth of the man who silenced his pen after his masterpiece novel, In cold bloodto become the life of the party, despite the fact that from a very young age he demonstrated his genius.

Espinosa says that Truman “is a character whose biography or the gossip surrounding him sometimes gets in the way of reading his work. His first texts are indeed commented on, but in very specialized places. It seems that everyone sticks with the New York Capote or the one who went down to Kansas to write about the crime he narrates in In cold blood (1966), but no one mentions that he was also a child prodigy who grew up in the South, with a family broken between New Orleans and Alabama. That is what I like to relate to what I have in my work and in my idea.”

Reviewing his novels and stories, the specialist considers that He is a craftsman, he never has a bad sentence, he writes with a very precise attention. However, his work is very scattered throughout the decades. It also meant a very sad end, which ended in alcoholism, drugs and rejection by the entire New York bourgeoisie..

The 100th anniversary of the birth of Truman Capote will be celebrated on September 30th and for this reason the Casa Estudio Cien Años de Soledad and the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas have called together three contemporary writers in order to approach the American author in a series of talks that will be broadcast on the Internet.

The cycle coordinated by Juan Villoro began with the conference Narrating the crime: from Capote to Ayotzinapawhich was given by the chronicler Emiliano Ruiz Parra on September 12. Based on the non-fiction novel about the Clutter family murders in Holcomb, he reflected on the crimes and their writing, which other authors have tried their hand at, such as the Mexican Vicente Leñero, the Argentine Leila Guerriero and the American John Gibler.

Olivia Teroba will address the protagonists of narratives today with the conference The uprising of tenderness.

Finally, Espinosa Fuentes will close the cycle with a conversation about his early work, for example, his first novel Other voices, other areas (1948), as well as The grass harp (1951) y Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), as well as some short stories, to analyze the evolution of his writing style.

“It is in the sense of a fixation with the idea of ​​the south as a whim, whether it be the south of the United States, Mexico City or another place. So I wanted to see where the creative germ of the possibility of imagining that south that is in the stories and his first two novels came from. I am going to talk specifically about that so as not to repeat the same subject of the non-fiction novel or that gossip of the 60s and 70s, that of ‘he was a friend of Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘he fought with Audrey Hepburn’, which sometimes get in the way of reading his work as a very powerful writer with a lot of potential.”

The author of the novel Anchored world He points out that it is in the South where Capote forges the search for very capricious themes that appear throughout his work, such as coexistence with the African-American population, which is very natural and where he learns superstitions and the visions of talismans that are repeated in his stories and first works.

He was also close to the writer Harper Lee, of whom he painted a portrait in Other voices, other areasas she describes in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird to a very nice short, white guy named Dill, who is Truman Capote.

In the South, the American author forged his imagination. He will always have a predilection for southern characters with torn youths. However, That potential was not fulfilled; social life, alcohol and drugs destroyed it a little, but in those early days, at 20 years old, it was a very powerful pen.concludes Espinosa Fuentes.