Trump and Satire

Original

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 14th December, 2024

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In September this year, Saturday Night Live began its 50 season on the air. The show is an American institution, one fifth as old as the USA itself. Like America, SNL has had its ups and downs. Like America, it has always pulled through, at least so far.

Just six weeks into SNL’s birthday season, reality spoilt the party. Donald Trump won the presidential election. On the first show back after his victory, the tone of the opening sketch was sombre, even funereal.

The cast, one by one, delivered a stony-faced speech to camera. “To many people watching this show,” they said, Trump’s victory was “shocking, and even horrifying. Donald Trump, who tried to forcibly overturn the results of the last election, was returned to office by an overwhelming majority.”

After about a minute of such grim stuff, SNL’s longest-serving cast member, Kenan Thompson, cracked the show’s first joke of the second Trump era. Given Trump’s propensity to punish his enemies, Thompson wanted to clarify something. “We at SNL would like to say to Donald Trump … We have been with you all along.”

The joke, of course, was that SNL had strenuously opposed Trump’s return. Kamala Harris herself had made a cameo appearance on the last episode before the election. The studio audience gave her a rapturous ovation. SNL had done its best to stop Trump, but its best hadn’t been good enough.
 
Hence the mood of despair on that first post-election show. This mood was widespread among America’s TV comedians. On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel cried during his monologue. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart got angry. “This is not the end,” he insisted.
 
We can only hope he’s right. But one thing that’s surely finished is the idea that American comedy can still make a political difference. Here was an election that America’s entire entertainment community, minus a few pro wrestlers, had ardently wanted Trump to lose. America’s sharpest minds threw their best stuff at him. And it bounced right off.
 
What will this do to the self-confidence of American comedy? At the age of 50, SNL may be plunged into a mid-life crisis. If it can’t take down a barn-sized target like Trump, what is the point of it? What place is left for satire, in a country where Linda McMahon will be Secretary of Education?
 
Jason Reitman’s movie Saturday Night, currently playing in cinemas, offers a reminder of the crackling sense of self-belief that fuelled SNL at its birth. Set backstage on the night of the show’s debut, the film captures the boundless cockiness of that first group of SNL writers and performers. The show was live. Network TV was central to the culture. America was watching. Anything could happen.
 
In SNL’s early days, the political satire was broad. During the show’s first season, the bumbling Gerald Ford was president. Chevy Chase, who looked nothing like him, became the show’s resident Ford impersonator. He didn’t wear any special makeup or anything. He just fell over a lot.
 
When Jimmy Carter succeeded Ford as president, Dan Ackroyd portrayed Carter without even shaving off his moustache. In later years, SNL got more serious about its political impersonations. Dana Carvey, wearing all the appropriate prosthetics, did a bang-on George Bush Sr. Darrell Hammond did a candidly libidinous Bill Clinton. Will Ferrell played Bush Jr as a gibbering ninny. Tina Fey did a withering Sarah Palin.
 
In 1976, the real Gerald Ford made a cameo appearance on the show, inaugurating a tradition of comity between SNL and the politicians it pilloried. Bush Sr invited Dana Carvey to the White House, and the two became close friends. Bush Jr claimed to enjoy Ferrell’s mockery of his verbal misadventures. Brutal as Tina Fey’s impression of her was, Sarah Palin was gutsy enough to appear on the show and face the music in person.
 
This was all very civilised: it showed that America’s politicians were on the same page as its comedians. They had the same basic values, the same innate commitment to democracy. “The fact that we can laugh at each other,” said Bush Sr, “is a very fundamental thing.”
 
All this changed during Trump’s first term. Before becoming president, Trump hosted SNL twice. Once he was in power, relations between him and the show curdled. When Alec Baldwin played him on the show, Trump rancorously denounced him, via Twitter, as an unfunny hack with a “mediocre dieing (sic) career.”
 
In reply, Baldwin vowed to keep playing Trump until the job was done. “I’d like to hang in there for the impeachment hearings,” he tweeted, “the resignation speech, the farewell helicopter ride to Mar-a-Lago. You know. The good stuff. That we’ve all been waiting for.”
 
Many American norms were eroded or upended during the first Trump administration. Certainly the norms at SNL changed. The show had always gone after American politicians. But never before had it suggested that one of them posed an existential threat to democracy. With Trump, the gloves came off.
 
Baldwin played Trump 46 times on SNL between 2016 and 2020. Halfway through that stint, he was already wondering if there was something counter-productive about his Trump impression. “I think I’m going to do some [more] of it, but not a whole lot,” he said in 2018. “There is a lot of fatigue here.”
 
Fatigue was right. Half the people in America didn’t need Baldwin to keep reminding them that Trump was absurd. They could see it with their own eyes. The rest of America either didn’t agree, or didn’t think absurdity was an undesirable trait in a president. 46 impressions of Trump was both too much and not enough. There was something about the man that defied or defeated satire.
 
“Ours is a useful trade,” Mark Twain wrote in 1888, speaking on behalf of America’s humorists. “With all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose … the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.”
 
Hard as America’s satirists tried to laugh Trump off the scene, the underlying logic of their trade no longer seemed to apply in the Trump era. The exposure of pretentious falsities? If you were listing Trump’s flaws, pretentiousness wouldn’t make the top fifty.
 
Previous American politicians had always at least pretended to have qualities – intelligence, decency, integrity – that everybody agreed were virtues. But Trump was cheating the satirists. He wasn’t playing by the old rules. You can’t be false to an ideal if you don’t even acknowledge that the ideal exists.
 
With Trump, there was nothing for the satirists to expose that hadn’t been grotesquely visible for years. The problem isn’t that his faults remain hidden. It’s that not enough people consider them to be faults.
 
In 2021, the all-star disaster movie Don’t Look Up took satirical aim at Trump. A giant comet was heading towards Earth. Doom was inevitable unless the world, led by America, could get its act together.
 
But the American President, played by Meryl Streep, was a female Trump – an unserious oaf with a dangerously short attention span. Instead of blowing the comet out of the sky, she urged her base to chant the reality-denying slogan “Don’t look up.”
 
Meanwhile Leonardo DiCaprio, playing an exasperated astrophysicist, vainly tried to make his fellow Americans see sense.  
 
“If we can’t all agree at a bare minimum that a giant comet the size of Mount Everest hurtling toward planet Earth is not a f—ing good thing,” he said, “then what the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves?”
 
Don’t Look Up failed to avert Trump’s second coming. But at least it succeeded in diagnosing the underlying problem. Nowadays, there is no bare-minimum proposition, no matter how flagrantly true it would seem to be, that all Americans can agree on. That makes it hard for satire to function. But forget about satire. Democracy itself is in trouble, when people stop believing in a common reality.
 
On the last SNL before the election, the show’s current version of Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, addressed a rally. “I’m out of gas,” he said. “I’m exhausted … Make it stop … Who cares? Nobody cares.”
 
That sounded more like the writers talking than Trump. Trump never runs out of gas. It was everybody else who did: the fact-checkers, the satirists, the voices of reason. Trump was indefatigable. The comet hit the Earth.
 
Were the satirists right to fear that its arrival will end American democracy? It’s too early to know. When the dinosaurs died, it wasn’t the asteroid’s impact that killed them. It was all the poisons it released into the atmosphere.

Video referees

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, September 16, 2024

The NRL’s longest serving coach, Wayne Bennett, is a man of few words. But the words he grudgingly parts with are always worth hearing.
 
Last week, after Bennett’s Dolphins exited the finals race, the laconic SuperCoach delivered an uncharacteristically lengthy speech about the NRL’s video refereeing system, known colloquially as the Bunker.
 
Bennett’s argument was simple. Video referees are human beings. They make mistakes, just like the referee on the field. The only difference is that the mistakes of the video refs take much, much longer to be perpetrated.
 
How do we fix this? Bennett’s answer was concise. “Get rid of it,” he said.
 
In four crisp words, Bennett spoke for multitudes of sports fans. Get rid of it. Lose it. Deep-six it. Video review technology is changing the character of the sports we love. Its overuse has become a form of madness.
 
Everyone seems to know this except the people who run sport. According to them, the real act of madness would be to have this technology at our disposal without using it an awful lot.
 
The NRL’s CEO, Andrew Abdo, said as much last week, as he swiftly moved to assure the public that Bennett’s eloquent appeal to common sense was in no danger of being heeded. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Abdo said, “to consider a sport not using technology to make decisions.”
 
It was bold of Abdo to portray himself as a foe of the ridiculous. For Bennett’s whole point was that the situation is ridiculous already. It’s ridiculous right now.
 
In one recent match, play stopped for several minutes while the Bunker pondered the staggeringly insignificant question of whether the ball, after being kicked into the air, had illegally brushed the pinkie of an attacking player on the way down.
 
The tape was played over and over, as if it were the Zapruder film. Maybe, if you rewatched it often enough, evidence of the microscopic infraction would reveal itself.
 
After all, the technology to do this exists. Therefore it must be used.
 
If that’s the argument, why not send a CSI team onto the paddock to dust the ball for prints? If utter certainty is the goal, let’s get David Caruso out there to do some DNA swabs.
 
Fanaticism, said George Santayana, consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. Somehow George came up with this line without ever seeing a Bunker referee in action. In their quest to enforce the rules with sub-atomic precision, the video refs seem to forget what the rules are for.  
 
Surely they exist so that play can generally be got on with. If a player breaks them in a way that’s visible to the naked eye, in real time, that’s an offence. Otherwise, play on.
 
Video refereeing puts the cart before the horse. These days, play is constantly being suspended so that enforcement of the rules can be got on with.
 
Why do we watch sport in the first place? Because it’s a heightened version of life. In sport, as in life, there are goals, striving, disappointment, ecstasy. But in sport, the lulls and complications are edited out. Life is messy. Sport isn’t. Or anyway it shouldn’t be.
 
Take soccer. The object of the game is beautifully simple. Get the ball into the opposition’s net. This is very hard to do. So when your team finally does it, it’s time to go unequivocally off your nut.
 
But wait! Not so fast. Put your frenzied celebrations on ice. Some unseen bureaucrat is speaking into the referee’s earpiece. It seems that the goal you’ve so rashly allowed yourself to feel happy about may not be a goal after all.  
 
Now the referee is walking towards the sideline. There’s an alfresco TV set over there. The referee starts watching replays of the goal on it. Many, many replays.
 
The players stand around on the field, talking among themselves. 40,000 fans in the stadium twiddle their thumbs. They’d thought they were there to see a soccer match. Instead they’re looking at a guy in a bright yellow shirt watching a very small TV.
 
Time passes. Glaciers melt. Eventually, the referee either awards the goal or erases it from history.
 
Either way, the moment of jouissance has been lost. One of life’s most straightforwardly glorious experiences – the experience of seeing your team bang one into the onion bag – has been fundamentally altered. A goal isn’t a goal any more. It’s something that may or may not become a goal in about four minutes’ time.
 
Next time around, you won’t make the mistake of celebrating so much, or at all. Sport is becoming more and more like real life, and not in a good way.
 
Things don’t have to be like this. If we’re smart enough to invent the technology, we’re also smart enough to decide whether it’s working for us. If it isn’t, we have the power to get rid of it. We can always bring it back, if we find that we miss it. I don’t think we will.

Sweet Jesus, not Sweet Caroline again ...

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, June 1, 2024

First let’s get a couple of things straight. I have no issue with Neil Diamond per se. Far from it. I like his stuff more than most people do. I like it to an extent that some might even consider uncool. 

I don’t even dislike the song “Sweet Caroline.” Or rather, I didn’t dislike it before. My beef – and it’s a very intense beef – has to do with the grotesque overplaying of “Sweet Caroline” in public places.

You can’t get away from it. When you go to the football, they play it at half time, so loud that you can’t conduct a conversation with the person beside you. During the chorus, the DJ (and who decided we need DJs at football games?) whips down the volume after Neil sings the titular phrase, so that assorted enthusiasts in the crowd (who are these people?) can sing the missing horn part (bom, bom, bom).

Then the volume goes back up, so Neil can sing the next bit: “Good times never seemed so good.” Then the volume goes down again, so the people who are still enjoying themselves (again, who are these people?) can interpolate the words “So good, so good!”

Nor can you evade the song by staying home and watching the match on TV. You’ll still hear it in the background, blaring impertinently over the PA. If you switch channels, you’ll probably find yourself watching an ad for a certain brand of bourbon, in which “Sweet Caroline” starts playing in a pub. A boisterous singalong ensues, complete with many an excruciating “so good” and “bom”.

The ad’s point seems to be that if you drink enough hard liquor, you might find that you quite enjoy being made to yell “bom bom bom” in a social setting. But I’m not looking for ways to enjoy saying “bom bom bom.” I simply don’t want to say it at all, under any circumstances whatsoever. 

Besides, there’s no time between the opening bars of the song and the chorus to get drunk from scratch. So what’s the suggestion? That we should all walk around with a permanent skinful just in case a Sweet Caroline situation should arise?

How did this idiotic tradition begin? Apparently it started in Boston, in 1997. At Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, the music director knew someone who’d just named their baby Caroline. The song was played as a tribute. The crowd seemed to like it. That crowd has a lot to answer for. 

If that kid in Boston had been named Jolene, presumably Dolly Parton would now be driving us up the wall on a weekly basis. If the kid’s name was Bruce, it would be ELO.  

But the kid’s name was Caroline. The rest is history, except that it isn’t yet over. It’s globalisation at its worst. Some kid named Caroline gets born in Boston, and 27 years later I can’t have a civilised halftime conversation with my footy pals without being forcibly drafted into a mass Neil Diamond singalong. 

Good times never seemed so good? Actually, Neil, they seemed way better just a moment ago, before some unseen twerp started blasting out “Sweet Caroline.” They will seem good again in thirty seconds, when the singing stops. But for the moment, I’m suddenly having an infinitely worse time than I was before. 

Even in America, the home of questionable taste, Red Sox fans found that Diamond’s song began to pale after several million iterations. A backlash set in. “Sweet Caroline sucks,” wrote one Boston journalist. 

I see what he meant, but I think his verdict needs some tweaking. “Sweet Caroline” didn’t always suck. It doesn’t suck inherently. It only started sucking because certain entertainment officers, who do suck, started playing it with ungodly frequency so that certain other people, who arguably suck too, can convince themselves they’re having fun. 

One Bostonian wag, when asked what song should replace “Sweet Caroline” at Fenway Park, said: “Anything.” I disagree. What should replace “Sweet Caroline” isn’t anything, but nothing. Sporting contests don’t need a musical score. If the ball goes over the sideline, let’s see if we can all cope with ten seconds of silent reflection before play resumes. At halftime, let the dying art of conversation rebloom.

Good times, by definition, are already good. They don’t need to be artificially improved. That’s what sucks: the very American idea that if you’re consuming one form of entertainment, other forms of entertainment must be inserted into every spare cranny of the action, lest people with very short attention spans start dying of boredom or demanding refunds. 

Am I saying we’ve reached Peak Caroline? Dear God, let’s hope so. Imagine if we haven’t. Imagine a future with yet more unasked-for renditions of “Sweet Caroline” coming at us from even more angles. 

Together, we can prevent that future. Next time some grinning DJ invites us to sing “bom, bom, bom” in a public place, let’s not do it. Let’s yell out something else instead, like “Enough!” or “Shut it off!” or “If you can’t begin to know when it began, why do you keep telling me about it?” Or even, as Neil himself cried in another context, “Good Lord!” 

Kafka

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, June 14, 2024

A century ago this month, Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of 40. He had published only a handful of stories and novellas in his lifetime, none of them over 60 pages long. His startling fictions had earned him a small circle of admirers in his native Prague, but had made little splash in the wider world.

When Kafka’s illness became terminal, he made preparations to erase himself from literary history. He left written instructions for all his unpublished papers – including three virtually complete novels – to be “burned unread and to the last page.”
 
As for his published works, Kafka ordered that they must not be “reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary,” he wrote, “should they disappear altogether that would please me best.”
 
Fortunately for the world, Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, disobeyed his late friend’s instructions. Far from disappearing after his death, Kafka became recognised as the 20^th century’s most prophetic writer. Indeed, posterity has paid him the greatest tribute a writer can receive. His name has become an adjective. In more than a hundred languages there is a word that corresponds to our word Kafkaesque.
 
Even people who haven’t read a line of Kafka know what that word means. Modern life is full of Kafkaesque moments. Trying to speak to a live human being on a help line can be a Kafkaesque experience. The Robodebt affair was deeply Kafkaesque. Arguably, the world is more Kafkaesque now than it was in Kafka’s own day.
 
The secret of Kafka’s enduring relevance is that his fiction resonates on two levels. First it affects you privately. Kafka taps straight into your unconscious, in a way no other writer does. Reading him, you get the sense that he has eavesdropped on your strangest dreams.
 
Above and beyond that, Kafka seemed to tap into the unconscious mind of history itself. Somehow, by writing about his own worst dreams, he forecast the great public nightmares of the 20^th century – the deranged, murderous bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  
 
George Orwell earned his own adjective – Orwellian – for anatomising the methods and psychology of Stalinism. But Orwell made his diagnosis on the basis of historical facts. He wrote 1984 in 1948, when the evidence about Stalinism was largely in.
 
Kafka achieved a far spookier feat. He described the 20^th century’s terror states before they even existed. When Kafka died, Adolf Hitler was still nine years away from becoming chancellor of Germany. Joseph Stalin had only just assumed power in the USSR.
 
And yet you could swear, when reading Kafka’s eerie fictions, that he had observed the workings of modern totalitarianism from the inside. “His most hallucinatory discoveries,” said the critic George Steiner, “turned out to be the grimmest reportage, but reportage before the facts.”
 
How did Kafka achieve this feat of clairvoyance? For a start, he wasn’t like everybody else. He was an acutely neurotic man. “He is absolutely incapable of living,” said his lover Milena Jesenska. “He’s exposed to all those things we’re protected against. He’s like a naked man among a multitude who are dressed.”
 
One thing Kafka was nakedly exposed to was the authority of his domineering father. Hermann Kafka was a sturdy and successful Jewish businessman who found his sickly son a grave disappointment. As a child, Franz bore the brunt of his father’s tyranny. Outside the home, he was subjected to the anti-Semitism that was ominously routine in Europe at the time.
 
Trained as a lawyer, Kafka worked as a paper-pushing civil servant by day and pursued his literary ambitions by night. He wrote in German, the official language of Austro-Hungarian Prague.
 
Kafka was morbidly self-critical, and fanatically choosy about what he published. He wrote the best part of three strikingly original novels – Amerika, The Trial and The Castle – but never finished them to his satisfaction. He considered them “bungled pieces of work.” He threatened to burn the manuscripts, but never got around to it.
 
Instead he left the task to Max Brod, who wisely failed to perform it. Soon after Kafka’s death, Brod licked the unfinished novels into shape and had them published in German editions. English translations followed in the 1930s.
 
In The Trial and The Castle, Kafka’s vision received its fullest expression. In both novels a defenceless individual is progressively crushed by the weight of an irrational, labyrinthine bureaucracy. Here is the famous opening sentence of The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
 
In deadpan prose, Kafka plunges you straight into the middle of a living nightmare. The nightmare deepens as the novel proceeds. Since Joseph K. has been arrested, it follows that he must be tried. Everything unfolds with the logic of a bad dream. As K. desperately produces his identity papers, he sees that the arresting officers have sat down and started helping themselves to his uneaten breakfast.
 
It’s a typically surreal Kafka touch. And yet such surreal scenes soon became the stuff of everyday reality all over Europe. “Give us a man and we’ll make a case,” Stalin’s secret police used to say. When they came to take people away, they would soften the blow by offering them a lolly from a box kept in their pockets.
 
Is it possible to be so sensitive that you can foretell the future? Not quite. But Kafka’s temperament made him hyper-susceptible to human cruelty and mediocrity and brutality. And those were precisely the elements that Stalinism and Nazism – the systems that were about to immiserate half of Europe – were made of.
 
In Kafka’s novels the state is always right, the individual always wrong. A similar dynamic had governed Kafka’s childhood. The father, even at his most arbitrary, was always right. The son, by definition, was always in the wrong. Hermann Kafka had zero sympathy for his son’s literary ambitions. He wanted him to marry, work in the family business, and generally behave like a normal bourgeois person.
 
Kafka failed on all counts. His father’s disapproval left him with a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority and shame. In 1919, at the age of 36, he itemised his grievances against his father in a long unsent letter, posthumously published as Letter to My Father.
 
In one telling passage, Kafka described an episode from his childhood. One night, lying in bed, the young Franz had whined for a glass of water. His father’s response was to pull him out of bed, carry him out to the balcony, and lock him outside in his nightshirt.
 
“I daresay I was quite obedient afterwards,” Kafka wrote. “But it did me inner harm … For years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that a huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, could come, almost for no reason at all, and take me out of bed in the night.”
 
That primal sense of dread would echo through all Kafka’s fiction. Joseph K. isn’t the only Kafka protagonist to suffer a sudden violation in the privacy of his bed. Gregor Samsa, the unfortunate hero of Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, wakes up one morning to find himself “transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.”
 
A reader once asked Kafka if he’d done “extensive research in a lunatic asylum.” “Just in my own,” Kafka replied. His sense of inner harm enabled him to imagine, and unwittingly predict, the rise of entire states dedicated to the persecution and extermination of the individual.
 
In a way it’s unfair to Kafka to read his books through the lens of the barbarities that came after him. His best work is touching, funny and humane. To speak of him in the same breath as Hitler and Stalin is to make his stuff sound far grimmer than it really is.
 
Still, the historical resonances of Kafka’s work can’t be ignored. When the Nazis came to power, they banned and incinerated his books. They would have incinerated Kafka himself, had he still been alive. All three of his sisters were murdered in concentration camps. After the war, his work was banned behind the Iron Curtain, including in his native Prague.
 
Most writers want their work to be universal. Kafka was terrified by that prospect. In what kind of world would his hellish visions come to seem representative? His friend Gustav Janouch, who wrote the book Conversations with Kafka, once put it to Kafka that his work might be “a mirror of tomorrow.”
 
Kafka reacted by covering his eyes with both hands, and rocking his whole body back and forth.
 
“You are right,” he said. “You are certainly right. Probably that’s why I can’t finish anything. I’m afraid of the truth … One must be silent, if one can’t give any help … For that reason, all my scribbling is to be destroyed. I am no light. I’m a dead end.”
 
As usual, Kafka was selling himself short. It was totalitarianism that was the dead end. But it was a dead end created by human beings, which means it can always happen again. One way of ensuring it won’t is to stay in touch with the legacy of better human beings, like Kafka. He will always be a light, whether he wanted to be one or not.
 

Capote and The Swans

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, February 17, 2024

When Truman Capote died in 1984, his arch rival Gore Vidal called his death “a wise career move.” Unkind as that suggestion was, it hasn’t turned out to be untrue. Capote’s career was indeed at a low ebb when he died at the age of 59. He hadn’t produced a full-length prose work since In Cold Blood (1966). Mainly he had spent the last third of his life destroying himself with drink and drugs. 

Since his death, things have taken a positive turn for Capote. He has published a series of posthumous works, including the lost novel Summer Crossing (2005). He has been the subject of three major screen productions. Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for playing him in Capote (2005). Some said that Toby Jones made an even more convincing Capote in Infamous (2006). 

Now we have Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (Binge), in which Tom Hollander brilliantly becomes Capote at all phases of his career, from glittering wunderkind to bloviating old wreck. Feud has put Capote back in the headlines. Suddenly he’s the talk of the town again. Gore Vidal must be spinning in his grave.

What other American author has been portrayed on screen three times? But Capote was always a one-off: the story of his life is as extraordinary as anything he wrote himself. At his peak, he was the most celebrated writer in America. Norman Mailer, who wasn’t known for heaping praise on his contemporaries, called Capote “a ballsy little guy” and “the best writer of my generation”.  

The ballsy little guy had humble origins. An only child, Capote was unwanted by his father and mother. When he was 6, his mother left him to be raised by a houseful of her elderly cousins in rural Alabama. 
Apart from the Bible, there were few books in the house. As a reader and then a writer, Capote was largely self-taught; his favourite childhood toys were his dictionary and typewriter. By a remarkable coincidence, the young Capote lived right next door to the young Harper Lee, future author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The two became fast friends; Lee later helped Capote do the legwork for In Cold Blood.

Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published in 1948, when he was 23. It caused a sensation, partly because of the brooding photo of the boyish author on the back cover. Capote was a striking figure. He stood at just 5 feet 3 inches, or 160cm. His head looked too big for his body. He spoke in a voice so high-pitched that – as Vidal quipped – it could be understood only by dogs. 

Right from the start, Capote made not the slightest attempt to conceal his sexuality. Considering the era he grew up in, this policy was astoundingly courageous. In the 1970s, when the novelist Jacqueline Susann went on TV and implied he was gay, Capote was unfazed. “Big news!” he said.

Capote’s career as an author of pure fiction peaked with the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958). When Audrey Hepburn was cast to play Holly Golightly in the movie, Capote was peeved. He had wanted Marilyn Monroe.

After Tiffany’s, Capote felt an itch to turn from fiction to the documenting of American fact. In 1959, his eye was caught by a newspaper story about a brutal unsolved murder in Kansas. He set out to chronicle the crime from all angles, using all the tools of a novelist. He even claimed to have invented a new form: the non-fiction novel. 

But writing about reality had its challenges. When Capote went to Kansas to start the book, his story had nothing more than a beginning. If it was going to have a middle and end, he would have to wait until reality supplied them. 

He soon found himself saddled with ethical and emotional problems, too. After the two murderers were captured and convicted, Capote spent hundreds of hours interviewing them on death row. He formed an especially intense bond with one of them, the diminutive, poetry-writing Perry Smith. 

This put Capote in an agonising position. Clearly, his book couldn’t be finished and published until “the boys”, as he called them, were executed. On the human level, he dreaded that outcome. But as a writer, he couldn’t help wishing that the denouement of his story would hurry up and happen. 

Smith and his partner in crime, Dick Hickock, were hanged in 1965. In Cold Blood appeared the following January. Immediately hailed as a masterpiece, it earned its author $2 million by the end of the year. Capote celebrated by throwing a lavish masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Among his 500 guests were Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

By the end of 1966, there was no doubt that Capote had made it. The flamboyant outsider from Alabama had become an insider. To prove it, he’d become an intimate friend of New York’s most prominent socialites: Babe Paley, wife of the CBS boss Bill Paley; Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy; the elegant trend-setter Slim Keith. Capote called these women his “swans”; he told them his most outrageous secrets, and they told him theirs. 

But how was he going to follow In Cold Blood? Capote began telling the world that his next book would be his masterpiece: the American answer to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Entitled Answered Prayers, it would be a dark comedy about American high society – a world that Capote seemed ideally qualified to describe from the inside.

Capote signed his first contract for Answered Prayers in 1966. Before writing a line of the book, he sold the movie rights for $350,000 – an outrageous sum at the time. He was contracted to deliver the novel on January 1, 1968. Too busy living the high life to meet that deadline, he negotiated the first of many revised contracts, which featured ever-larger advances and ever-later delivery dates. 

By 1975, Capote’s work on Answered Prayers had ground to a halt. After writing a handful of chapters, he’d become lost in the fog of his addictions. People were starting to wonder if he was still a writer. To prove that he was, he took the drastic step of letting Esquire magazine publish four chapters from his work in progress. 

It was a remarkably self-destructive move. Capote’s supposed masterwork turned out to be little more than a hotchpotch of ugly, mean-spirited gossip about thinly disguised real-life figures. Among those easily identified figures were his swans. Stories they’d told him in confidence were plastered all over the text. When a friend warned him that the swans could hardly fail to notice this,  Capote said, “Nah, they’re too dumb.”

He wound up paying for that callous miscalculation. His cherished swans understood what he’d done, all right. Feeling betrayed and hurt, they shut him out of their glamorous lives. 

Capote was shattered. Whether he wrote another word of Answered Prayers afterwards remains a mystery. He assured interviewers that the book was still happening. “Just wait till they see the rest of it,” he said. Some of his friends later swore that Capote had read them other completed chapters of the work. But when his files were searched after his death, no other parts of the novel were found. 

What happened to the rest of the book? For a while, it was rumoured that Capote had stashed the finished work in a safe-deposit box somewhere. Another theory had it that he’d destroyed the manuscript before his death. Others believed that Capote never wrote any more of the book than the fragments published by Esquire, which posthumously reappeared in book form as Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel.

Another mystery is psychological. What made Capote betray his swans, and why was he so stunned when they reacted in the normal human way? The best theory is that it had something to do with his mother – “the single worst person in my life,” as Capote called her. When she dumped him in Alabama with his elderly aunts, the young Capote seems to have decided that he would never be rejected again. From then on, he would always get his rejections in first.

In Feud, Capote’s mother appears to him as a garishly dolled-up ghost, played by Jessica Lange. The show is full of juicy roles for fine actresses: Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Demi Moore. At one point Chloe Sevigny, playing the socialite C. Z. Guest, blasts Capote for his failure to heed the laws of ordinary human decency. 

“What about civility?” she asks him. “Respect for people one loves?” Answered Prayers may well be a work of art, she says. “But it seems too high a price to pay.”

That last point looks stronger when you consider that Capote paid the price without delivering the goods. By the time he wrote Answered Prayers, his literary judgment was fried. Much as he wanted to show the world he was still an artist, he could no longer do it by producing a work of art. The best he could do was make the kind of ruthless, self-destructive gesture that dedicated artists are known to make. 

Capote was already pushing it when he set out to emulate Proust. The idea that he could do it while self-medicated to the eyeballs was a fantasy. Instead of writing a cool satire about American materialism and excess, he became a casualty of those very forces. The title of his doomed book came from a maxim attributed to St Teresa: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Capote began by imagining that his title referred to the answered prayers of his swans. By the end, it also referred to his own.

The Australian Open

Firs

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, February 3, 2024.

We seem to have two New Year’s Days in Australia. The first one – the one that happens on January 1 – is harmless, because it doesn’t really signal a return to the yearly slog. There are fireworks on TV, the calendar flips over, then the summer party resumes. 

For me, the real New Year doesn’t begin until the Australian Open ends. Straddling the last two full weeks of January, the Open is the great watershed event. When it begins, the silly season is still in full swing. The air is still thick with barbecue smells and far-fetched resolutions. By the time the tennis ends, there’s no denying the carnival is over. It’s time to get back to real life. 

This week I’ve been walking around with a tennis hangover – the post-Open blues. I’ve still got an after-image of centre court branded on the back of my eyelids. I’m still hearing phantom tennis sounds. The squeak of rubber soles on hardcourt, the slap of ball against net tape. The sound of Jim Courier getting all hushed and grave in the commentary box (“This is some tough sledding for Stefanos”) before exploding with approval on a big point (“Oh, that is clutch!”).

I’m also still hearing the ads. At the Australian Open, a change of ends lasts for just one minute. Advertisers have a limited chance to get into your head. Borrowing an approach from the field of enhanced interrogation, they assail you with the same insufferable ad over and over, as if they can infuriate you into parting with your cash. 

Last year it was the fantastically annoying ANZ ads (“You make me feel like financing”). This year it was Andre Agassi for Uber One. “You know what is disappointing?” Agassi kept saying. “Not having a mullet and mullets are back.”

Even after four hundred viewings, I never quite made up my mind about Andre’s mesmerisingly naff line-reading. Was it so bad it was good? Or was it just bad? Why did he say “and” instead of “when”? Did he botch the line or was it written that way? Did the ad’s makers know it would play thirty times a night for fifteen nights straight? If so, why didn’t they politely ask Andre for one more take?

But these are quibbles. The star of the show was tennis, which is surely the greatest spectator sport ever devised. Like a cross between boxing and chess, it’s a supreme test of both body and mind. The key to the game’s magic lies in its scoring system. No match is over until it’s over. The biggest lead can melt into defeat if you lose your nerve.

Out on the court, the players engage in a struggle that feels like a metaphor for life itself. Work hard in the small moments and the big moments – the clutch moments – will come. Seize those moments and glory will be yours.

But it won’t last forever. Time comes for everyone in the end. This year it came for Novak Djokovic, the most formidable player in history. Going into the tournament, he hadn’t lost a match at Melbourne Park since 2018. This year he meekly succumbed in the semis to 22-year-old Jannik Sinner, who went on to win the final. Watching the 36-year-old Joker run out of answers, you felt the sun setting on an era. 

No other game reveals the personality, or the character, the way tennis does. The distinction between those terms is important. Martin Amis once said that in tennis, “personality” has effectively become a synonym for another word – one that starts with “a” and ends with “hole.” He also observed that the game’s all-time greats – Rosewall, Ashe, Navratilova – didn’t need “personality” because they had character.

Among the current Aussie players, Alex de Minaur has the winningest blend of character and talent. Like Ash Barty and Dylan Alcott, the Demon comes across as an exemplary human being – a paragon of pluck, energy, and commitment. 

This year he was stopped in the fourth round by the flame-haired Russian Andrey Rublev. Even as his dream unravelled in the fifth set, the Demon continued to applaud Rublev’s canonball winners in the time-honoured way, by clapping the heel of his spare hand against his strings.

Meanwhile, up the other end, Rublev was being a personality. With a hairstyle like the top of a Bunsen burner, Rublev ranted in Cyrillic after every bad shot. This would have been easier to take if he was losing, as opposed to crushing the Demon’s dream. But I’d be lying if I said that Rublev’s anger-management struggles were not, in themselves, deeply fun to watch.

By historical standards – by the standards of McEnroe and Connors – Rublev is a poor excuse for a tennis bad boy. But tennis misbehaviour is a dying art these days. The Australian Open did away with line judges in 2021. Since then the line calls have been fully computerised. 

As a result, today’s tantrum-chuckers have precious little material to work with. You can’t argue with a computer. A modern hothead like Rublev has nothing to rage against except his own shot selection. 

This is why I’m calling for the Australian Open to scrap the computers and bring back human line judges. Gripping as this year’s tournament was, something vital was missing from it. Tennis has robbed itself of the crackle of suspense – the tasty danger that a bad line call, real or imagined, might trigger a spectacular psychological meltdown at any moment. 

Purists will say that’s a good thing. But I freely admit that I’m not a purist. I watch tennis for the theatre as well as the skill. I appreciate a good drop volley, but I also like watching cheesed-off adults behave appallingly under controlled conditions. 

I’m also a sucker for quality sports commentary. The best line of the tournament was uttered by Peter “Salty” Psaltis, during an epic five-setter between Alexander Zverev and Cameron Norrie. As the final tie-break began, Salty dug deep for the clutch phrase, and delivered the line that said it all. He said, “I just feel sorry for people who don’t have sport in their lives.”