It's hard for me to think of anything amusing to say today, for I am so saddened by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I am also surprised by the vitriol with which some people on the social media are attacking him for his own death. Having experienced the loss of a close family member who died of a heroin overdose, I am puzzled by the degree of rage, name-calling and blame this is generating in some quarters. To me, a drug or alcohol related death is a tragedy. It means that this person died an isolated death, struggling against a disease that was too powerful for him.
So what was Philip Seymour Hoffman in my life? In 2003, he was James Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." I had an orchestra seat, and even though Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave were on the same stage, it was Hoffman that I had to watch, no matter what else was going on. I did not know at the time - in fact, I did not know until his death on February 2, 2014 - that Hoffman was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and that he was thus able to bring personal insight to the role of Jamie Tyrone, the tortured alcoholic son of an alcoholic father and a morphine-addicted mother. I only knew that he was brilliant in the role, and that I was in the presence of greatness.
When I was asked to teach a class called "Writing About the Humanities" at CUNY/CCNY, I was allowed to come up with my own syllabus. The purpose of the course was to teach college students how to write about art, music, film, poetry, and literature. While everything else was in doubt, I knew immediately what the major text we would study would be, because I knew just the film I wanted to tie in with the book - In Cold Blood, in conjunction with Capote, the film for which Hoffman's tour de force performance in the title role had won him an Oscar.
Capote's "non-fiction novel" is a fascinating study in style - he steals shamelessly from, among other sources, Greek tragedy, Flaubert, and the local newspapers, and thanks to his skill and sheer audacity it all comes out as pure Capote. By gaining their trust and friendship, he manipulates his main characters - the murderers - into confiding things that no murderer hoping to escape the gallows should confide, all the while wooing the friends and neighbors of the murder victims - and even the detective who is ultimately going to crack the case - into equally revealing confessions. The book was the high point of Capote's career - his magnum opus. Lionized and lauded, he embarked upon a never-ending round of parties and social successes - but he never published another major work.
All who knew Capote agreed that the psychic toll that writing In Cold Blood took on him was enormous. It is generally thought that Capote - short, effeminate, abandoned early by his alcoholic mother, different - identified strongly with the man who ultimately turned out to be his most sympathetically depicted main character. Perry Smith - short of stature after having been crippled in a motorcycle accident, abandoned by an alcoholic mother, seen as "unmanly" by his partner-in-crime, the swaggering Dick Hickock, and thus desperate to prove himself by being the first to grab a knife and slit the throat of the "quiet, soft-spoken" Herb Clutter, whom Smith told Capote he had "liked right up to the minute I cut his throat." In order to gain the level of trust required for Smith to engage in this sort of confession, Capote invested month upon month of personal interaction, confessions of his own darkest secrets, and - yes, friendship - with this avowed murderer of an innocent family of four. For Capote's darkest secret was, perhaps, that he - like Perry Smith, like Dick Hickock - felt that he himself was the perennial outsider - that he had more in common with Dick and Perry than he had with the hapless, wholesome Clutter family. Having experienced it, Capote could understand the lifetime of rage, envy, and the devastating feeling of being perpetually less than, engendered by society's impersonal exclusion of him from everything he aspired to, that drove Perry Smith to murder four perfectly normal, kindly, charitable and morally upright strangers on the night when, as he said, "...it wasn't anything the Clutters did. They never hurt me. Like other people. Like other people have all my life. Maybe it's just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it."
Having gained the friendship and trust of this dark doppelganger, Perry Smith, Capote found himself in the unenviable position of being forced to hope that the man he identified with, the man who had become as familiar to him as his own image in the mirror, would hurry up and be executed - because only then would the book have closure; only then could he write the final page. Not only that - he must, as the eyewitness to the events of this "non-fiction novel," attend the executions and describe them in detail.
It is, perhaps, not coincidental that Capote's own descent into the alcoholism and drug addiction that killed him at the age of 59 began after the success of In Cold Blood.
It is a measure of the magnitude of Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliance as an actor that he - so physically different from the man he portrayed - was able to capture the essence of Capote - basically, to crawl inside the writer's skin and stay there. What drew me and my class into discussion, over and over again, were the questions the movie raised. Just how far is an artist justified in going in order to create his masterpiece? Is it legitimate to use other human beings, to exploit their emotions and their tragedies, in order to create a work of art that will survive the deaths of all those he has employed in the creation of that work, and of the creator himself? How far is too far? Does an artist have a responsibility to observe certain boundaries, in the name of simple human decency? Or is his obligation the reverse - to observe no boundaries whatsoever if they come between him and the creation of his magnum opus?
In an interview with Rebecca Murray, Philip Seymour Hoffman said, in regard to the angle from which its subject is portrayed in Capote,
"We knew that the story wasn't going to shine him in the best of lights. But it's a tragedy and there wouldn't be tragedy if you didn't see the self-awareness happen, which is not a pleasant one. That happens to him and it begins this downfall, so that's the story. That's the story, it wasn't like a judgment that we made, that's the story. This guy died at age 59 alone, of alcoholism, without writing another book. That's the story. We are trying to tell what we think instigated [it], started that ball rolling. But ultimately in playing him I had to go through his story, so I had to justify his actions in order for it - because he did - in order to go through it, and then ultimately understand what would be the overwhelming thing that would start this downfall in his life.”
We don't know whether Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the final days of his life, was granted the self-awareness that, as he puts it, elevates the lonely death of a substance abuser to the level of tragedy. Given that Hoffman had been sober for 23 years before slipping into re-addiction after taking painkillers in May of 2013, and given his immense intelligence and insight into the pinnacles and abysses of human experience, I would suspect that it was so. What is certain is that the world has been robbed of a great artist who will now never reach the full heights he might have scaled - and that his family, like mine, now has an aching void in it that will never be filled. And so - as Hoffman himself said - that's the story; and, to my mind, that story is a tragedy.
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