Intelligence apart, attention is important: I pay attention to my friends, am concerned about them, and expect the same in return.
Q: Are you often disappointed by a friend?
A: Not really. I’ve sometimes formed dubious attachments (don’t we all?); I’ve always done it with my eyes open. The only hurt that hurts is one that takes you by surprise. I am seldom surprised. Though I have a few times been outraged.
Q: Are you a truthful person?
A: As a writer—yes, I think so. Privately—well, that is a matter of opinion; some of my friends think that when relating an event or piece of news, I am inclined to alter and overelaborate. Myself, I just call it making something “come alive.” In other words, a form of art. Art and truth are not necessarily compatible bedfellows.
Q: How do you like best to occupy your spare time?
A: Not sexually, though I have had my enthusiastic periods. But, as more than a casual pastime, it is too heart-scalding and costly, however you interpret the latter adjective.
Really, I like to read. Always have. There are not many contemporary writers I like too well. Though I have admired, among our own Americans, the late Flannery O’Connor, and Norman Mailer, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, the early Salinger.
And oh, really, a number of others. I’ve never liked Gore Vidal’s fiction, but I think his nonfiction is first-class. James Baldwin, ditto. But for the last decade or so I prefer to read writers I’ve already read. Proven wine. Proust. Flaubert. Jane Austen. Raymond Chandler (one of the great American artists). Dickens (I had read all of Dickens before I was sixteen, and have just now completed the full cycle again).
I am partial to films, too—though I leave in the middle quite a lot. But I only like to go to films alone, and only in the daytime when the theater is mostly empty. That way I can concentrate on what I’m seeing, and depart when I feel like it without having to discuss the merits of the project with someone else: with me, such discussions always lead to argument and irritation.
I prefer to work in the mornings, usually for about four or five hours, and then, if I’m alone in a city, any city, I meet a friend for lunch at some favorite restaurant (in New York: Lafayette, La Côte Basque, Orsini’s, the Oak Room at The Plaza, and, until its unhappy demise, the Colony). Many people say they hate to lunch; it fattens them, fatigues them, altogether spoils their day. It makes mine. There are some men I enjoy lunching with, but by and large I prefer beautiful, or at least extremely attractive, alert, and au courant women. I count in this category several very young ladies (Lally Weymouth, Amanda Burden, Penelope Tree, Louise Melhado—the latter, alas, married to a very square stockbroker).
But I don’t consider that any woman deserves full marks until she attains and maintains qualities of style and appearance and amusing good sense beyond the point of easy youthful beguilement: this, a partial list, and a prejudicial one, would have to include Barbara Paley, Gloria Guinness, Lee Radziwill, Oona Chaplin, Gloria Cooper, Slim Keith, Phyllis Cerf, Kay Meehan, Viola Loewy, D. D. Ryan, Evelyn Avedon, Pamela Harriman, Kay Graham—well, one could go on for quite a while, though certainly the names would not top fifty.
Notice, the persons I mention are private citizens, not public; after all, for certain public characters—Garbo (an ultimately selfish and tiresome woman) or Elizabeth Taylor (a sensitive, self-educated lady with a tough but essentially innocent attitude—if you sleep with a guy, gosh, that means you have to marry him!)—allure is their trade.
Though I know I’m supposed to be very sociable, and though some of the above statements would seem to testify to that, I like to be alone. I like fast, finely made cars, I like lonely motels with their ice machines and eerie anonymity; so sometimes I get behind the wheel and, without warning, without particular destination, drive all alone as far as a thousand miles. I’ve only once consulted a psychiatrist; instead, I should have gone for a drive with the top down and a wind blowing and a sun shining.
Q: Of what are you most afraid?
A: Not death. Well, I don’t want to suffer. But if one night I went to sleep and failed to wake, that thought doesn’t trouble me much. At least it would be something different. In 1966 I was nearly killed in an auto accident—was flung through the windshield head-on, and though seriously wounded and certain that what Henry James called The Distinguished Thing (death) was nearby, lay fully conscious in pools of blood reciting to myself the telephone numbers of various friends. Since then, I’ve had a cancer operation, and the only altogether upsetting part was that I had to loiter around an aimless week between the day of diagnosis and the morning of the knives.
Anyway, it strikes me as absurd and rather obscene, this whole cosmetic and medical industry based on lust for youth, age-fear, death-terror. Who the hell wants to live forever? Most of us, apparently; but it’s idiotic. After all, there is such a thing as life-saturation: the point when everything is pure effort and total repetition.
Poverty? Fanny Brice said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.” Well, I disagree; at least I don’t think money makes any ultimate difference to anyone’s personal adjustment or (moronic word) “happiness.” I know very well a considerable number of very rich people (I don’t count anyone rich who can’t quite quickly summon up fifty million dollars in hard currency); and there are some who say, when feeling in a bitchy mood, that I don’t know anybody else (to which one can best reply, at least they sometimes pick up the check, and never ask for a loan).
But the point is: I can’t think of a single rich person who, in terms of contentment, or a lessening of the general human anxiety, has it easier than the rest of us. As for me, I can accept it either way: a furnished room on some side street in Detroit or Cole Porter’s old apartment in the Waldorf Towers, which the decorator Billy Baldwin transformed into such an island of sublime and subtle luxury. What I couldn’t survive is the middle ground: the sound of lawn mowers and water sprinklers outside a two-car-garage ranch split-level in Scarsdale or Shaker Heights. Well, I never said I wasn’t a snob. I only said I wasn’t afraid of being poor.
Failure? Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. No, I’ve drunk that special hemlock, bit that bullet (especially working in the theater) enough to now scorn it. Honestly, I don’t give a damn what anybody says about me, either privately or in print. Of course, that was not true when I was young and first began to publish. And it is not true now on one count—a betrayal of affection can still traumatically disturb me. Otherwise, defeat and criticism are matters of indifference, remote as the mountains of the moon.
Q: Then what does frighten you?
A: The thought that I might lose my sense of humor. Become a mind without a soul, start down the path to madness, and thereby, as the Zen riddle runs, spend the rest of a ruined life listening to the sound of one hand clapping.
Q: What shocks you? If anything?
A: Deliberate cruelty. Cruelty for its own sake, verbal or physical. Murder. Capital punishment. Child-beaters. Animal-baiters.
Once, long ago, I discovered that my best friend, aged eighteen, was having a fully realized love affair with his stepmother. At the time I was shocked; needless to add, I’m not now, and thinking back, can see that it was probably a positive benefit to them both. Since then, I’ve never been surprised, not to say shocked, by any sexual-moral arrangement. If so, I’d have to lead the parade of our nation’s million-upon-million hypocrites.
Q: It is now six years since you published In Cold Blood. What have you been working on since then?
A: Published as a book a long short story, “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Collaborated on a film, Trilogy, based on three of my short stories (“A Christmas Memory,” “Miriam,” “Among the Paths to Eden”); made a documentary film about capital punishment, Death Row U.S.A., which was commissioned by ABC but never shown in this country (others, yes; Canada, for one) for reasons still mysterious and unexplained. Have also recently completed a screenplay of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—a nearly perfect short novel (or, really, long short story), but hell to dramatize because it consists almost entirely of long-ago exposition and, as it were, offstage scenes. Personally, I like my adaptation, but the producers, Paramount Pictures, are of a different opinion; my pity to whoever attempts a rewrite.
It took five years to write In Cold Blood, and a year to recover—if recovery is the word; not a day passes that some aspect of that experience doesn’t shadow my mind.
However, prior to beginning In Cold Blood, in fact soon after finishing Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1957, I began to prepare the notes and structure for an ambitious novel then entitled, and entitled now, Answered Prayers, which derives from a remark of St. Theresa’s: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I think that’s true:
