Truman Capote, RIP.

Truman Capote, RIP IN COLD BLOOD, a nonfiction "novel" about two murderers, was probably Truman Capote's best book. Here he was able to apply his literary talents to the presentation of material derived from the external world, which excused him from having to imagine it. He did not have a powerful novelistic imagination, and in this, at least, he resembled Norman Mailer, whose In Cold Blood was The Executioner's Song, Mailer's best book.

Capote emerged at 23 with Other Voices, Other Rooms, emerged as a writer and as a personality. The photograph on the dust-jacket, depicting a tiny androgynous dandy, reclining, with a blond doe's stare, established the identity. His prose style, which some admired and for which he himself claimed a great deal, reinforced that idea. It was offbeat in its focus on odd details, consistently alienated, and "fragrant"--music for chameleons indeed.

In his later years he had calamitous drug and alcohol problems, not so unusual for writers, and it is useless to try to diagnose his state of mind. Perhaps he had stretched his minor talent as far as it could go; perhaps, in his social life, he was, in Barbara Gordon's phrase, dancing as fast as he could. He died last week in Los Angeles, at the age of 59.