Hildegarde

Well, sort of.  This was at Arts and Letters Daily this morning:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Intellectual-as-Courtier/126640/

As articles about this kind of thing–the craving some intellectuals have for power and celebrity, not necessarily for themselves,  but in other people–it’s rather standard stuff, not anything we haven’t noticed before.

I think the quoting from Rousseau on the utter vileness of the (professional or otherwise) “man of letters” is kind of funny, because it applies at least as much to himself as it ever has to anybody else.

Rousseau thought he was writing about Voltaire.

But the reason I linked to it today was that I have been thinking about a parallel problem–the problem of writers and intellectuals who suck up not to tyrants but to socialites, who spend themselves on the nearly endless flattery of people with lots of money and lots of fashionable “in.” 

Which is why I’ve been calling it the Capote Syndrome in my head.  As far as I know, Truman Capote was not political in any way.  He didn’t suck up to tyrants or champion socialism or do any of the other fashionable political things that were the public stock in trade of people like Noam Chomskey.

Capote sucked up to “ladies who lunch,” to people with very little to show for their lives except the money to spend on ridiculously priced handbags and overnight flights to parties in places the tourists hadn’t discovered yet.

They were, I suppose, the precursors of Paris Hilton.  They didn’t “do” anything, although some of them had husbands who did (and therefore made lots of money).  Instead, they went to lunch with each other, gave parties for each other, got invited to auctions at Park-Bernet and fashion shows at Mainbocher–and then, when that was over, went home and did it all again.

I don’t suppose there was anything terrifyingly wrong with these people.  They were just shallow and aimless and lacking in both character and distinction.  That made them like a lot of other people.  They just had more money than other people did, and they used that money to make a life that was all about who they didn’t want to know.

Who they kept out was always more important to them than who they let in.

There are, as I said, almost certainly people like that today, although Paris Hilton may not be one of them.  She seems sort of relaxed about who she lets in.

I was thinking about all this because I was reading a book, called The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, by Dominick Dunne.   It’s a book of a type I don’t really care for, but it’s tremendously well done, and I reread it every couple of years ago.

It’s a book about the lives of the kind of people Truman Capote spent his life desperately chasing from one party to the next, and there is a character in it that is a thinly disguised Capote to boot, probably because Dunne took the basic outlines of his story from the account of the same incident that appeared in Capote’s Answered Prayers.

The book itself would have been enough to remind me of all this, but I was also reminded that Dunne was a lot like Capote.  Reading his memoir, The Way We Lived Then, is enough to make your teeth hurt.

And, I’ll admit, it astonishes me. 

Truman Capote was an enormously talented man, no matter what else he was.  In Cold Blood is not just a very good book, it changed the world of writing nearly overnight, and it’s still the benchmark for true crime writing. 

He had things to offer that the people he chased after did not.  He drowned what should have been a very long and distinguished career in social climbing, parties, and substance abuse, and I can never figure out why. 

Dunne was not so talented, but he wasn’t untalented either, and he’d done quite a few things in his life.  He was something of a noise in television in the early Sixties, one of the producers of Bewitched.   He followed that with a series of best-selling novels, a popular true crime television show, and dozens of other accomplishments that most writers working freelance would have been proud.

And yet, somehow, somewhere, there was something in his head that just could never rest on that, that was always hungering after the right invitation to the right party by the right people.

Maybe it’s just the result of the fact that I am so spectacularly not a social person–I virtually never go to parties, I hate talking on the phone, I haven’t had a picture taken of me in a decade–but I remain completely and utterly mystified by the phenomenon.

I mean, even the dictators have done something with their lives.  It’s a bad something, but they’ve done it.  What is the point of Mrs. North Shore-and Sutton Place whose last really big accomplishment was giving a Marie Antoinette Party where all the guests were required to come looking as if they were headless?

I wonder sometimes what Capote would have written if he’d just, well, written, instead of doing what he did. 

And I wonder if it’s any accident that the people who do this–the artists and writers who do it, but also a lot of the non-artists in the core group who do it–require such huge reservoirs of chemicals to get through it.

There.  I’ve been depressing enough for the day.