# A look at Vidal, Mailer and Capote...



## billc (Aug 17, 2012)

Here is an article looking at the authors Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote...

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/0...all-failed-to-write-the-great-american-novel/



> Why were they better at non-fiction than fiction? A big part of the reason is that a great novelist needs to have the gift of profound empathy &#8211; the ability to create, care profoundly about, and comprehend to the depths of their souls characters radically different from himself. To be a great novelist requires that one be able to stand alone, as it were, at the edge of the party and observe other people patiently and unobtrusively &#8211; to look into their eyes and, in doing so, try to see into their souls.
> None of these three were up to that; all were too wrapped up in themselves. Yes, they were all formidably gifted. Of the three, Vidal was the most intelligent, widely read, and critically discerning; Capote was the most sensitive to lived experience and the finest prose stylist; Mailer had, well, a certain feisty energy and ardor, an urgent sense of the _Zeitgeist, _and a terrific knack for figuring out how to place himself in the center of things so that he would have something spectacular to write about.
> But none of them was a born novelist &#8211; far from it.
> Important question: what does it mean that all three of them befriended murderers? Capote became smitten with Perry Smith, one of the two twisted young creeps who committed the crime &#8211; the slaughter of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 &#8211; that became the subject of _In Cold Blood. _Norman Mailer entered into a correspondence, and eventually became chummy, with the killer Jack Henry Abbott, whose book he helped get published in 1981 and whose release from prison he was instrumental in arranging &#8211; and who, after being out of the slammer for six weeks (during which he was, thanks to Mailer, the toast of the New York literary scene), stabbed to death Richard Adan (also, coincidentally, an aspiring writer), who was working as a waiter in a Manhattan café into which Abbott had happened to wander in search of a men&#8217;s room. Vidal, for his part, answered fan letters from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and ended up being pals with him, praising him as a &#8220;noble boy&#8221; before McVeigh, like Perry Smith before him, was executed. (Abbott, after being sent back to prison for the murder of Adan, ended up hanging himself in his cell.)
> This fondness for murderers suggests that, for all their differences and their mutual hostility, Mailer, Capote, and Vidal had something in common that separated them from most of the rest of us. Even as all of them adored the limelight, they were drawn to the dark side. If they weren&#8217;t, in the final analysis, great, or even particularly good, American novelists, perhaps it was, in large part, not because of a lack of raw talent but because they all felt, to some degree and for various reasons, alienated from ordinary Americans to a degree that made it impossible for any of them to write with sufficient empathy and understanding about their countrymen &#8211; except, perhaps, those who had killed in cold blood. To be capable of a perverse sympathy for psychopaths but incapable of contemplating ordinary American life without feeling contempt and condescension (and this last applies less to Capote than to the other two) is not the formula for producing enduring literature.


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