You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

The cow goes moon. Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is George Plimpton.

He has been the editor-writer of an oral biography of Truman Capote,

in which various friends, enemies, acquaintances, and detractors recall his turbulent career.

Now, I wanted to begin.

There was something I noticed about Capote and recognized it again when I was rereading the first paragraph of children on their birthdays,

that this is a writer who wants to charm.

It's not just in the social world.

It's in the fiction.

He wants to make the reader say,

I would die to meet him.

And he seems to be with J.G. Salinger,

the writer who both wants to attract in his writing,

a huge fandom,

and at the same time, in a a certain way to spurn and resist them. And I wondered if you could talk about those polls and Capote.

Well, I had not thought of Capote quite in that sense. I would agree that he's an extraordinary

stylist, which I suppose is a method, a net in which you try to catch your reader, and absorb his interest.

And that might be the type of seduction that you're talking about.

...