RPF goes professional?

[shipperx]

Sorry for Spamming.

Link to article provided by petzipellepingo
'Kansas' imagines Truman Capote-Harper Lee rift

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

When Truman Capote was asked about his research for In Cold Blood, his 1966 masterpiece about the murders of a Kansas farm family, he liked to say, "Every word is true."

Which it wasn't. Books and movies (Capote in 2005 and Infamous in 2006) make that clear. Capote, who died in 1984, would argue he was reaching a deeper truth.

Now comes Kim Powers' novel, Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, an uneasy blend of fact and fiction about perhaps the greatest back story in American literature.

That's the childhood friendship in Monroeville, Ala., of Capote and Harper Lee, whose own masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, used Capote as the inspiration for her character Dill Harris.

In 1959, Capote, by then a celebrated writer, enlisted Lee, as yet unpublished, to accompany him to Kansas. She served as his research assistant and much more as Capote tried to get into the minds of two killers and their victims. 

Something happened in Kansas, or shortly after, that chilled their friendship. Lee never published another novel and stopped giving interviews.

Powers' novel opens in 1984, when Capote, near the end of his life, phones Lee to say he's being haunted by ghosts of the Kansas murderers and their victims. That sets off flashbacks for both of them.

In imagining what might have happened, Powers uses an actual event, which, he notes, was "almost unbelievable for that time and place."

Capote, who was gay and never hid it, guided a small-town detective and his wife on a night of bar-hopping in Kansas City that included a drag show and gay and lesbian bars.

In the novel, Lee (Nelle to her friends and family) goes with them, which ends their friendship, for reasons only hinted at.

But what Powers makes up is not as interesting as what he doesn't. His writing is uneven.

He's lyrical on Capote and Lee as kids becoming writers:

"Each of them provided an essential ingredient (besides imagination and loneliness): Nelle, a beat-up Underwood typewriter that her father had donated to the cause, and Truman, a waterlogged Webster's dictionary that he carried everywhere."

But Powers also sinks to pitter-patter, one-sentence paragraphs that sound like movie ads.

It's a novel best appreciated by readers who share Powers' obsession with Capote and Lee, not just their writings, but their lives.

Capote put his on full display. Lee, 81, has done the opposite. The novel does less to solve a literary mystery than add to it.

Okay, this bothers me a little.  Nelle Lee isn't a historical figure.  Dude, she's still alive!   

Fictionalized speculation on the life of someone who is around to read the fictional account of her life seems weird to me, especially since she does not react well to these sorts of things. When she discovered that autographed copies of her books were being sold for exhorbitant amounts on ebay, she stopped signing books for anyone but close personal friends.  When Monroeville began doing yearly "To Kill A Mockingbird" plays in the old county courthouse (now a museum) she wasn't happy about it.  She's very reticent about that sort of thing.  Writing a fictional account of her life while she's still around to react to it seems quite odd (albeit she had a stroke last month so her health has declined recently.)

Comments

[kitmarlowescot2.livejournal.com]

From what I looked up about her, it was a minor stroke, and stroke usually doens't effect your mental thinking just how your body reacts. Acourse maybe a stroke could effect your mind.
I am sure she had heard of it, and might take some action. Or her family will.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Her sister is a lawyer (although a retired one).

[cy-girl.livejournal.com]

If that's not flat out illegal, it's just plain rude. Poor woman.