HOWZAT

On the one hand, he suavely accepted the literary applause for this innovation and, in interviews, attempted to cement his place in world literature with strings of literary references. On the other hand, he also celebrated publication with what was said to be the party of the century, the Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel.

The disjunction — between the high life and the life of the mind — is the same as that between Kansas and New York. Capote had introduced the provincial macabre, the contemporary American Gothic, into the salons and the suburbs. In doing this, he had taken the temperature of his age with superb acuity. Throughout the 1950s, unease had been growing beneath the glossy veneer of American affluence. Terrors, from nuclear war to communists and aliens, were thought to lurk beneath the manicured lawns of suburbia. Something was wrong. In Cold Blood condensed such anxieties into one image — a meaningless killing — and into one place, a part of America itself.

The effect of this idea, the frisson of contact with inexplicable evil and violence, can scarcely be overstated. Books and films about real crimes from the Boston Strangler to the Yorkshire Ripper are all descended from In Cold Blood. Andy Warhol’s images of car crashes and electric chairs emerged from the same impulse — and, indeed, this weirdly affected provincial gay had much in common with Capote.

In Cold Blood provided a new legitimation for our eternal fascination with the macabre. Like the medieval dance of death, it told us that beneath our comforts lay this other, darker world where all our vanities come to nothing. The contemporary belief — demonstrated in works such as American Psycho or any of the more serious serial-killer movies — that appalling violence tells us some truth about ourselves and who or what we are stems directly from Capote’s one masterpiece.

Furthermore, in elevating journalism to the level of literary fiction, the book was the supreme text of the New Journalism movement, which began with Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe and continues, in somewhat attenuated form, to this day in the interminably long, moody pieces that fill the smarter American magazines. Capote rightly pointed out that his own method of completely removing himself from the story and using fictional techniques was, in fact, quite different from the methods of the journalists. Nevertheless, the message that reality was potentially a better basis for extended prose narrative than fiction was to swell many a young hack’s chest.

All of which largely explains the potency of Capote as man and myth. He was himself disjunct, and he embodied the disjunctions of contemporary life. But a great writer? Well, he might have been. In Cold Blood is a brilliant piece of work, but it is not Ulysses, and, more to the point, it isn’t the Beckett trilogy, the Updike tetralogy, Herzog or Lolita, either. It may be among the top 50 post-war prose narratives, but it’s not among the top 10.

It is the work of a brilliantly intelligent, hugely conscientious man with a great idea, but also of a man whose art had yet to mature. His cool, superbly detached, mandarin prose is beloved of reading groups and college courses, but it always gives you slightly less than you expect, rather than more. In Cold Blood leaves you bereft, as perhaps it should, but Capote repeats the same trick of a concluding emptiness a little too often. His 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando is often praised as one of the summits of his journalistic art, but, in truth, it’s wordy, it doesn’t really engage with Brando at all and ends with a patent cop-out — “A deity, yes; but, more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy.” The smart, partytime giggle is just too close to the surface here.

My own theory about all this, for what it’s worth, is that Flaubert is the key. Capote is overwhelmingly known for one book, which, like Madame Bovary, took six years to write. Like Flaubert, he was obsessed with absolute realism and its expression in immaculate, high-style prose. Both writers regarded the provincial and the banal with fascinated dismay, and both loved to shock the bourgeoisie with the unblinking clarity of their gaze. Both moved on from their masterpieces to social comedies — Bouvard et Pécuchet and Answered Prayers. Both identified themselves with female heroines. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” said Flaubert, and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was, everybody agreed, plainly the young Capote in New York.

Most importantly, both had a profound faith in the truth. For Capote, the facts of the Clutter killings served to provide a rigid frame for his words and his imagination. Similarly, for Flaubert, the minutely observed, suffocating facts of contemporary existence contained and fanned the flames of his prose. “Of all lies, art is the least untrue,” said Flaubert. It is exactly what Capote would have said. No, it is exactly what he meant.

Capote the myth is gigantic, undeniable. Capote the writer is a failed Flaubert. It’s not a bad thing to be — you could, at a pinch, say the same about all novelists except Tolstoy — yet it’s not what he’s thought to be. Looking at the life, however, I suspect that knowing he was not Flaubert explains a great deal more than is generally realised.

Capote is released on Friday