How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (33 page)

This, in turn, provides the key to understanding one of the great puzzles of Capote's career: why he had such notorious difficulty writing the endings of his works. In many of his letters he complains bitterly of the torture of completing everything from
Other Voices
to
In Cold Blood
—he took a three-month hiatus before tackling the final section—and you feel that difficulty, that struggle, in the finished product. “I couldn't help feeling that you had gotten a little bit tired of the book,” Bennett Cerf wrote to him upon receiving the manuscript of
The Grass Harp
in 1951, “and were hurrying to close it in much shorter a space than you originally had intended.” Much, if not indeed most, of Capote's fiction leaves you with a feeling of incompleteness; there's often a sense of abruptness, of a failure to resolve. (
Breakfast at Tiffany's
in particular simply grinds to a halt.) Here again, the image of a child comes to mind—one who, having toyed with a bit of tinsel, or an object that has caught his interest for a while, suddenly throws it away, as if he'd been distracted by something shinier or sweeter.

 

Or, perhaps, as if something had scared him away. Surely the most revealing expression of Capote's difficulty with endings, and all that
they represent, is the lyrical scene with which
In Cold Blood
ends. He liked to say that part of the appeal of writing the book lay in the discipline imposed by having to recount a true story: “I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me and I can do nothing about it. I like having the truth be the truth so I can't change it.” The great sweep of the story he tells in
In Cold Blood
, with its severe and measured pacing—the discovery of the terrible crime; the search for the killers, craftily intercut with flashbacks to their wretched lives; the canny rhythms with which Capote presents the hasty trial and the prolonged delay before the executions—culminates beautifully in a final scene that takes place in a cemetery where, on a windswept day a few years after the killings, Alvin Dewey, the detective who solved the murders, encounters a young woman who had been the best friend of the teenage Nancy Clutter, one of the victims. A brief conversation between them pointedly gives both Dewey and the reader a gentle sense of closure, and the novel ends with one last alliterative evocation of the bleak Kansas landscape: “Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”

The problem is that this ending is too artful: as it turns out, the scene was entirely fictional. Capote added it, he later told Clarke, because the ending that real life had provided him—the hangings of the killers—didn't seem satisfying. “I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace.” Faced with an ugly reality, he withdrew into a beautiful fantasy—the kind of gentle peace that imbues his evocation of childhoods long past. (Gerald Clarke rightly notes that this final scene rehashes the ending of
The Grass Harp
.) Capote knew, finally, that he wasn't up to bringing his most serious and important work to an authentic conclusion. The coda as it stands was just the last in a series of endings that he fudged, or from which he retreated; and you can't help wondering whether the inability to face unalterable facts (as represented by this particular false ending) was, in some way, the key to Capote's disintegration. His own words suggest as much. “No one will ever know what
In Cold Blood
took out of me,” he later said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me.”

Indeed, the experience of writing his grim best seller may have traumatized the writer in profound ways unrelated to the usual creative anxieties. Norman Mailer observed a change in Capote during the Kansas years. “He was getting more masculine…. Getting to know all those people out in Kansas…had given him fiber. He was toughening up.” Capote himself acknowledged this transformation. “I've gotten rid of the boy with the bangs,” he told
Newsweek
in 1966. “He was exotic and strange and eccentric. I liked the idea of that person, but he had to go.” But once that boy left, it wasn't clear what remained.

And so, after being forced to inhabit a world other than his inner child-life for a long time, he turned inward again. But somehow, the stark confrontation with his limitations, symbolized by his inability to complete his book honestly, permanently destabilized him. The simultaneous publication of the author's stories and letters has the unintentional effect of reminding you that however enchanting Capote's interior world may have been, and however lovely the writings it inspired, it was a very limited world—a space that the writer was unable to break out of. Between them, these two new volumes—the one preserving a body of work that should have been larger, but was in fact all “too brief”; the other a too-lengthy record of a life that clung too long to childhood, a record that, like his consciousness itself, could not move beyond youth—constitute an appropriate epitaph for the writer who might have been, rather than a tribute to the one who was. Not entirely a disappointment, but no genius, either.

—The New York Times Book Review,
December 5, 2004

A
ngel,” a word that today can have connotations at once sublime and a bit saccharine, ultimately derives from a rather mundane classical Greek masculine noun of the second declension,
angelos
, “messenger.” In Greek, it's not a very exciting word at all—no more so than, say, “postman” or “radio announcer” is in English. If you happened to be an ancient Greek and had some bit of news or a message you needed to get across, an
angelos
was the man for the job; or, rather,
angelos
was the way you referred to anyone who ended up doing the job. In Greek tragedies, for instance, the character who delivers those famous fact-packed “messenger speeches”—the ones in which we learn how Oedipus handles the news that he's adopted, or just what's inside those nicely wrapped gift boxes that Medea sends to her ex's new bride—is referred to as, simply, the
angelos
.

The related verb,
angellein
, “to announce,” is equally unsensational. When the great lyric poet Simonides of Keos wrote, in his old age, the famous epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae—“Go tell the Spartans that here we lie”—the word we translate as “tell” was
angellein
. However exciting his news might be, the classical Greek
angelos
was, generally, a featureless vehicle for transmitting crucial knowledge. It
was only much later, after the word was appropriated for biblical purposes, that
angeloi
, “angels,” started to rival their messages in glamour and importance: sprouting wings, blowing mighty horns, and singing in celestial choirs, and altogether becoming religious and iconographic objects in their own right, the forerunners of the cloying figures that have become ubiquitous, in our post-millennial moment, on greeting cards, dashboards, New Age Web sites, and hit TV series such as
Touched by an Angel
, in which the eponymous, carefully multicultural leads, an attractive young Irishwoman and a soulful middle-aged African-American, go around teaching mortals Important Life Lessons.

And so the classical Greek
angelos
, grimly transmitting his urgent report of the horrors he has seen, horrors that always result when men find themselves trapped in irresolvable dilemmas, may be thought of as the Angel of Tragedy, and hence very different from the adorable, glittering sylphs who have, lately, alighted in stationery stores and aromatherapy counters and on our television screens, bringing the comfy tidings that everything will be OK: the Angels of Sentimentality.

 

Part of the excitement of being in the audience of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize–and Tony Award–winning dramatic epic
Angels in America
when it first came to Broadway in 1993 was the fact that it seemed eager to give back to its (very real) angels something like their original job description. Kushner's two-part drama turns, in fact, on the arrival of an urgent message from Heaven. The action of the first part, “Millennium Approaches,” culminates in the magnificent appearance of an angel, crashing through a ceiling in the bedroom of an AIDS-stricken gay man, and much of the second part, “Perestroika,” is devoted to an explication of what's on the angel's mind, which among other things allows Kushner to elaborate a complicated cosmology of his own idiosyncratic invention. But far more exciting than the culminating angelic message in the play (basically, that God abandoned His Creation early in the twentieth century and hasn't been heard from since, something many may have suspected even before entering the theater) was the message
of
the play.

Although
Angels
premièred in the early 1990s, Kushner had been working on it since the late 1980s, and with the exception of a brief
epilogue it's set during a five-month period between October 1985 and February 1986—which is to say, the early years of the AIDS crisis, a period in which the terrible sense of emergency and paranoia in the gay community, which at that point seemed to be horribly singled out by the virus, stood in agonizing counterpoint to the sluggish and halfhearted response of official America, represented by a deeply conservative Republican administration, from whose “family values” the homosexual victims of the illness were excluded. It was only in 1987 that President Reagan finally addressed the illness in public; it had been six years since the first cases were reported, and three since the virus that causes it had been identified, and by that point, twenty-four thousand people had died of it.

Angels in America
came as an enraged, seethingly articulate, intellectually ambitious, high-flown response to that stultifying and smug atmosphere of denial, silence, and willful ignorance. The admiration and, in a way, relief that immediately greeted its première (first on the West Coast, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, then in London and finally on Broadway) had to do with the general sense that finally someone was saying something grand, if occasionally grandiose, and important not just about AIDS, but about AIDS as a symptom of a profound rupture in American life. There had, by that point, been other plays inspired by the epidemic: William Hoffman's
As Is
and Larry Kramer's
The Normal Heart
both premièred, early in 1985, to considerable acclaim, as did the musical
Falsettos
, in 1990. But what made
Angels
feel different was its enormous scope. Here was a work about AIDS, and what it was revealing about the American body politic, on a scale sufficiently epic to suit the subject.

One of the most moving moments in Mike Nichols's new made-for-television film of
Angels
—and one of the few moments that finds a cinematic equivalent for the ambitions of the original—comes, indeed, during the opening credits, during which the camera floats elegiacally in the air above San Francisco, then zooms through banks of woolly clouds across the continent itself, hovering briefly above Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and Chicago, to settle, finally, beside the Bethesda Fountain in New York's Central Park, a monument that not coincidentally takes the form of an angel. The shot is moving because it suggests something essential about the mighty scope both of Kushner's concerns—
few contemporary playwrights are as intellectually ambitious as this one, steeped as he is in Marx, Brecht, and Melville—and of the drama he's written, which ranges from the East Coast to Salt Lake City to Heaven itself (which, we're told, looks just like San Francisco) and includes not only gays (and not only “good” gays, either) but Jews, Mormons, blacks, and Mayflower WASPS; pill addiction, loneliness, mental illness, homelessness, sexual repression; the westward migration of Eastern European Jews to America and of Mormons to Utah; the Bayeux tapestry, Tocqueville's
Democracy in America
, the McCarthy hearings, and the decisions of Reagan's judicial appointees; invented characters—there are rabbis, drag queens, housewives, nurses, doctors, and of course angels—as well as historical figures such as Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, whose ghost, in a gesture of imaginative boldness on the playwright's part that is more or less typical, says Kaddish over the body of one of the men responsible for her execution.

Angels
wanted, in other words, to be a play not about gays, or, for that matter, about AIDS and the rottenness of official America's handling of the crisis, but about the texture of American experience itself. The message—that what the AIDS crisis was revealing wasn't a moral flaw on the part of gay men, as the conservatives running the country would have it, but rather a moral failing in America itself—may not have come as a surprise to many in those first audiences, but it came as a profound relief to many that someone, finally, was delivering it with such fervor. “Greetings,” the angel intones as she crashes through the ceiling in the amazing finale of Part One, “the Messenger has arrived.” Many in the audience that first night felt that the words applied as much to the play as to the character.

 

It is for this reason above all that the
Angels
that members of the thirty million households that subscribe to HBO have been able to see since December 2003 and the
Angels
that Broadway audiences first saw late in 1993 seem to be two vastly different works. To be sure, there are other reasons that the new
Angels
looks and feels different: not least, the difference between the stage, with its self-conscious acknowledgment of itself as illusion, and TV and movies, which if anything try to seduce us into forgetting that what we are seeing isn't, in fact, real. This is a differ
ence that has particular import for a work whose author has elsewhere written with gusto of his “deep distaste” for screenplays and teleplays (“I love movies, but somebody else should write them”), and insists that
Angels
should retain its theatricality. The play, Kushner writes in the published edition,

“Opening out” any work of theater for film is a risky business, but it would be hard to think of a riskier enterprise than opening out a play like
Angels
, with its over-the-top theatricality, its ghosts and angels, its hallucinatory fantasies (some scenes are set in an imaginary “Antarctica” to which the pill-popping Mormon housewife, Harper, flees in her hallucinations), its frequent use of split scenes to emphasize parallels in its various plotlines, and above all its Jonsonian verbal grandiosity. (An early play of Kushner's, typically overstuffed with action and ideas and much better than its original audiences or critics gave it credit for being, was a farce set in seventeenth-century England entitled
Hydriotaphia or the Death of Doctor Browne
, first written in 1985 and hugely unpopular when it premièred in 1997, even after Kushner had become famous.) It's true that Mike Nichols made a name for himself translating works for the theater into films, starting with
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in 1966, but Nichols's smoothly naturalistic style of late seems antithetical to the rough, angular, hypertheatrical spirit of
Angels
. There's a glossiness to the HBO
Angels
that saps it of its original, seething vigor.

But the real reason why Nichols's
Angels
feels so different from the Broadway version has less to do with the difference between stage and screen than with the difference between 1993 and 2003. The AIDS crisis is certainly far from over, but no one can deny that it's a much different kind of crisis now from the kind it was ten years ago. (A friend
remarked to me recently that if Kushner were writing his play today, he'd have to call it
Angels in Africa
.) The paranoia and outrage of 1993 have largely evaporated, thanks in no small part to the activism that galvanized the gay community as a result of the crisis. The culture has shifted profoundly, too—again, because of the empowerment and newfound visibility that were by-products of the original crisis. When, in 1985, a prime-time drama called
An Early Frost
, about an American family's reaction to a gay son's illness, aired on network television, it was a daring entertainment “event”: the first time the subject had been given major treatment on television. Today, gay characters are not only common on numerous television shows, but there are gay-themed prime-time sitcoms, gay reality shows, and hit series like
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
whose premise is that most straight men could, in fact, stand to be a bit more gay.

Because of all this, you experience
Angels
in an entirely different way today than you did ten years ago. Not least of the advantages afforded by this shift is that much of what seemed crucial about the play then seems artificial or even dated now—you realize how much the play depends on a cozy kind of politically correct goodwill and the easy prejudices of its audience, and so you realize, too, how often it makes its points not through dramatic logic or motivational coherence, but by means of emotional gimmicks and dramatic fudging. (Some of these wires shouldn't be showing.) But a re-viewing of
Angels
now also, and somewhat frustratingly, reveals—partly because of a new cultural setting, and partly because of decisions on Nichols's and Kushner's part (emphases, cuts, new material)—the bones of a much grander and more important work than the one that the trumpets of the press corps and Sunday cultural supplements have been heralding.

 

Structurally, the TV
Angels
is similar enough to its predecessor to obviate the need for lengthy comparisons between the two versions. The first part, “Millennium Approaches,” is almost identical to the stage version; you can follow the dialogue almost verbatim from the printed
text of the play, as I did. The second part, “Perestroika,” has, on the other hand, undergone more serious revision: the five acts of this play have become three “chapters” in the TV version, mostly by means of welcome cuts and judicious rearrangement of certain scenes. (Part Two, which includes among other things the play's vision of Heaven and its explication of an elaborate Kushnerian cosmology, always felt bloated, and it still does.) In very few cases lines have been added.

Kushner, an unabashedly old-fashioned Upper West Side Socialist Jewish intellectual, has more in common with the politically motivated dramatists of the 1930s (Odets comes to mind) than with any of his contemporaries, and
Angels
is a work that hangs a great deal of ideological freight on what looks, at first, like a particularly overstuffed domestic drama. The action of “Millennium Approaches” is organized around a series of abandonments and escapes, which are meant to make us think about the issues of responsibility and love and freedom; the second part, which is organized around a series of unexpected scenes of forgiveness, shows the consequences of those flights, and is meant to make us think about change, and about redemption.