To Be Both a Literary Giant and a Giant Procrastinator

Jessica Winter at Slate wonders about the literary legacy of Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote after they each penned their best and most successful books. While both talked about and worked on a new opus, both of them left their work uncompleted when they died decades later. In Ellison's case, he worked on his second novel for 40 years, before leaving it behind undone. Capote published only snippets of his long anticipated new work before he died in 1984, twenty years after the publication of In Cold Blood and after he began to speak publicly about the never-finished text called Answered Prayers.

So what the h-e-double hockey sticks happened? Winters talks with biographers of both men to sort it out. She comes down to considering the difference between procrastination and writer's block ... but I'm left unsatisfied with that. It seems to be what they call hair splitting, when something bigger must have been going on to undercut their creative work so thoroughly. I'd like some further consideration of what was really happening because, frankly, I'm rather terrified at the fact that two ambitious, talented writers would spend decades with their books and never finish them, particularly when public support was wildly in their favor. What happened, indeed?

Comments

[Tony Christini]

Yes, Winter doesn't begin to approach what happened, but I don't see much mystery, necessarily. Capote doesn't appear to me to have much by way of conviction about much of anything that would compel him to, or sustain him in, a not-so-easy art like novel making, not over the long haul.

As for Ellison, his novel Invisible Man is largely autobiographical, or at least related to his dynamic early life, cutting intimately and profoundly across age, class, region, race of course, and more. I'm not aware that his later life was remotely as dynamic, and it seems to me he had perhaps some other reasons not to write as frankly or honestly about it.

If you follow the development of their thinking, viewpoints, lives, and demonstrated capacities as writers - by reading their fiction, nonfiction, and some of the biographical work about them - their lines of progression or lack thereof seem rather understandable.