Posts From Author: Month: June 2014
Capote’s Undoing
I’ve never been psychoanalyzed… I’ve never even consulted a psychiatrist… I work out all my problems in my work. — Truman Capote By the time Capote died, at the age of fifty-nine in 1984, years of substance abuse had shrunk his brain. His last completed book was In Cold Blood eighteen years previously. A heavily trailed follow-up, Answered Prayers, appeared in fragments so poisonous that the Park Avenue ladies whose adoration he’d cultivated for so long made a mass exodus from Mount Truman. His later years were characterised, in the words of William Todd Schultz, by “Studio 54, cocaine, prescription pills, Stoli vodka in an unmarked glass”. In a disastrous and notorious TV interview with Stanley Siegel, an evidently fried Capote confessed that his problems with alcohol and drugs would mean that “eventually I’ll kill myself… without meaning to…” Shortly before his death, he bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, knowing that his time was short. He died in the arms of his friend Joanne Carson. Schultz’s psychobiographical Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2011) puts Capote’s spectacular implosion under the microscope, finding in his early life the blueprint for his early death. Answered Prayers was […]
Read More“How About Never – Is Never Good For You?” Bob Mankoff on the Joy of Cartoons
If you don’t know Bob Mankoff, reading his memoir, How About Never — Is Never Good For You?: My Life in Cartoons (Henry Holt, 2014), will be a glorious case of friends-at-first-sight. That’s his cheery cartoon self beaming out from the front cover there, and he’s welcoming you to the wittiest party in town: the world of the New Yorker‘s cartoon department. Inside, there’s space for aspiring cartoonists to add their name to the list of dedicatees (a roll-call of every artist ever published in the magazine), while the flap copy promises “732 FOOLPROOF SECRETS TO WINNING THE NEW YORKER CAPTION CONTEST!” It’d be crazy to forgo such hospitality. And as a cartoonist who’s overseen the publication of fourteen thousand New Yorker cartoons — and contributed more than nine hundred — Mankoff is very well placed to show us what he calls “the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, selection, editing, and publishing”. Although billed as a memoir, How About Never is as much a tribute to the art and practitioners of cartooning, and Mankoff devotes generous space to the words and pictures of his colleagues. Raised in the Bronx and Queens, Bob is the son of Mollie and Lou Mankoff, who sound a bit like a nicer version […]
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