In the spring of 1960, Truman Capote arrived in the small town of Palamós on the Costa Brava in search of some peace and quiet. The American author was hoping to finish the manuscript for In Cold Blood, the non-fiction novel that, he insisted, was to be his masterpiece. Writing the stylised account of a murder case in Kansas was taking a heavy emotional toll. But, more importantly, there were too many social distractions at home in Manhattan. And so, Capote decamped to the Spanish seaside. He stayed, on and off, for three years.
Some six decades later, the Argentine journalist and author Leila Guerriero followed his vaporous trail. The result, The Difficult Ghost — translated elegantly by Megan McDowell — is an oddly engaging curio: a book about a writer trying to write about a writer trying to write a book. And Capote isn’t the only phantom on Guerriero’s mind. “I was full of the spectral emptiness that had been left — as always happens — by the nonfiction book I had just finished writing.” She conjures up a Venn diagram of hauntings as she considers the changing fortunes of herself, her subject and a town.
In her search for signs of Capote’s time on the Spanish coast, Guerriero comes up against numerous obstacles. The remaining witnesses are a few nonagenarians — former housekeepers and hoteliers — who barely knew the author. Their accounts differ, their memories fail. Some say he was a perfect gentleman; others gossip about orgies with young Spanish men. His legacy in the region shifts like the local sea mist. In the absence of firm evidence, Guerriero produces a philosophical treatise on how everyone leaves a faint footprint, even the famous.
Locals claim that Capote arrived in Palamós with 25 suitcases, two dogs and a cat. Guerriero questions this and every other detail that has persisted over the years. Employing an effective present tense, she tails Capote (or the idea of Capote) around town as he (or the idea of him) buys gin and pastries. “He is the fifties version of an influencer,” she notes. “He has the high voice of a talking doll, a funny way of pronouncing his s’s, a deep laugh that doesn’t match that voice.”
In Cold Blood itself is the most telling piece of evidence from the period. Having won the trust of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the itinerant criminals convicted of killing four members of a farming family, Capote waited in Spain for their execution and with it the ending to his book. “Publication almost certainly meant the painful deaths of two men who regarded him as their friend and benefactor,” writes Guerriero.
Capote counselled the condemned men not to give up hope, then wrote to his friends bemoaning yet another stay of execution (the pair were hanged in 1965). Guerriero dissects Capote’s ambidextrous morality — which would later be his personal and professional undoing — but also suggests that writers need a shard of ice in their blood if they are going to be effective.
Arriving in the wake of the fact-checking debate surrounding Raynor Winn’s bestseller The Salt Path, Guerriero’s book is a timely reminder that all non-fiction is a fabrication on some level, even if only by omission and compression. While researching In Cold Blood, Capote didn’t record his interviews — quotes are approximations at best — and, even though he had become part of the story, he kept himself off the page.
Guerriero takes the opposite tack. Her book is as much about her as it is Capote. She chronicles her daily life as a literary detective. And yet her travelogue is as much an amalgamation of verity and imagination as Capote’s book. For both authors, truth isn’t really the point, it’s all about the telling.
The Difficult Ghost: Searching for Truman Capote by Leila Guerriero, translated by Megan McDowell Pushkin Press £10.99, 160 pages
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