White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Capote identified this apparatus—the cultural press, media power—as male and Jewish. “The truth of the matter about it is, the entire cultural press, publishing...criticism...television...is almost ninety percent Jewish-oriented. I mean, I can’t even count on one hand five people of any importance—of real importance—in the media who aren’t Jewish.” Two Jews at whom he leveled his sentimental anti-Semitism were Norman Mailer and William S. Paley, men, who, by all accounts, did not want to be fucked by any idea of femininity that had fucked them up but to fuck their idea of femininity. The determination that Mailer and Pailey demonstrated in their work and lives, their absorption and accumulation of power, was in part to dispel the stereotypical image of the Jewish male, described again and again by Philip Roth and others—Yeshiva boys paralyzed by reflection, powerless to function, a Jewish mother’s stooge. But Mailer and Paley were, ultimately, far enough removed from Capote’s sexuality (whatever that was) to be sexual for him. In Answered Prayers (1986), his unfinished novel, the character widely believed to be based on Paley, Sidney Dillon, “Conglomateur, advisor to presidents,” is described by Capote’s fictitious alter ego, P.B. Jones, as a “wiry well-constructed man with a hairy chest and a twinkle-grinning tough-Jew face.” Looking at a Polaroid of Dillon, Jones recalls that Dillon’s trunks were “rolled to his knees, one hand rested sexily on a hip, and with the other hand he was pumping a dark fat mouth-watering dick.”

  That dick—as strong as any symbol—stretched across Truman Capote’s consciousness less because he identified it as being attached to power than because he saw it as an object of desire for women. In Answered Prayers, the act of romantic love is always recounted in spoken language, not described as an act, let alone of love. P.B. Jones’s introduction to the formidable woman author Alice Lee Langman, whom he sleeps with and whose protégé he subsequently becomes, is followed by: “Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn’t a sense of humor?—and she had none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist. But she was indeed a talker, a relentless bedroom back-seat driver: ...‘That’s better better and better Billy let me have billy now that’s uh uh uh it that’s it only slower slower and slower now hard hard hit it hard ay ay los cojones let me hear them ring now slower slower dradraaaaagdrag it out now hit hard hard ay ay daddy Jesus have mercy Jesus Jesus goddamdaddyamighty come with me Billy come! Come!’”

  Capote wrote: “Norman Mailer described [In Cold Blood] as a ‘failure of the imagination’...Norman Mailer, who has made a lot of money and won a lot of prizes writing nonfiction novels...although he has always been careful never to describe them as ‘nonfiction novels.’ No matter, he is a good writer and a fine fellow and I’m grateful to have been of some small service to him.”

  The operative words here are “small” and “service”—“small” Truman “servicing” Norman on the altar of the non-fiction novel. Even as he published In Cold Blood, Capote lost any claim to male authorship by presuming that his factual account of a multiple murder would create him too—in Mailer’s image. It is hard to garner privilege when you begin with none—for those who have to reach for it, it remains perpetually out of reach. Mailer would always have it and Capote would not, because Mailer assumed that he did and Capote, the perennial aunty-man no matter how hard he wrote, assumed he did not.

  For several years before 1947 Capote had been a man (a state defined by uninflected ambition) in his pursuit of authorship and his appropriation of the style, syntax, and voice of women authors generally perceived as maiden aunts (Eudora Welty) or maiden aunts in code (lesbian Carson McCullers)—women with careers less powerful than Capote’s would eventually be, but powerful in this: before Truman Capote became Truman Capote, they were themselves. Capote was not himself as a writer until Answered Prayers, a novel that grew out of his isolation and self-realization, a novel that remained unfinished.

  As an ultimately fashionable author, which is to say a person who wrote but also felt uncomfortable with the responsibility of being only a writer, he rode the wave of fashion too, observing power and trends as established by others, change as established by others. Capote was a distinctly American author, one who spoke, read, thought in no other language than American and was, therefore, parochial in his knowledge. He could respond intellectually only to those things he responded to emotionally. There was no other referent for thought. What he responded to before 1947 and thereafter, in a different way, was himself (a man) in relationship to women. Since he spoke no other language than his own (“My voice had been described as high and childish, among other things”), he had to learn to become an American writer by appropriating the language of other American writers, and what he mostly responded to intellectually was written by women authors. But his reverence for them was always tempered. (On Flannery O’Connor: “She has some fine moments, that girl.” On Carson McCullers: “She was a devil, but I respected her.”) He strove to be the ultimate version of them that, as women, they would never be for themselves.

  This was also true of Capote becoming a man. He could not simply admire William S. Paley, he had to surpass him in Babe’s affection. He had to become a more powerful media figure by becoming recognizably famous. What Truman Capote could not do was reorder Babe Paley’s ideas of her own femininity. He only did women on the page. And instead of attempting to reveal their secrets as women, he competed for an understanding of their identity as such. This was the only form of exchange he had with them, and it was different from the other exchanges these women had (or the only other exchanges Capote acknowledged them as having): being with “real” men who fucked them.

  Capote’s resentment of what these women did without him was based, as was his education as a writer, on an emotional response to two things: the ultimate impossibility of knowing or understanding women’s sexual movements (up and down, in, out, around, what, when: the gossip’s grid of information versus the writer’s nongrid of reflection), and the heterosexual male’s desire for them. Capote could not forgive his writing for obfuscating this interest. “My effects prior to Answered Prayers seemed overdone,” he complained. The writing before Answered Prayers lied by taking the (public) fag’s easy way out. It was filtered through a skein of perplexity about male and female relations.

  Truman Capote could not have become a woman without women authors and editors being interested in him. (Let us leave aside early biographical data for now—how he was abandoned by his alcoholic mother, how he was taken in by maiden aunts and cousins, etc. These facts, while interesting, have more to do with his process of self-creation than with the moment he created himself as Truman Capote, the writer and the photograph).

  The women Capote interested and those in whom he was interested were women who were interested in language. Perhaps he saw women as a form of language. Certainly those he was interested in before he became one himself had faces like words. “Not plain, not pretty, arresting rather, with an expression deliberately haunted rather than haunting,” Capote wrote of portraits of two women published in Richard Avedon’s Observations in 1959, a sentence interesting in its insistence on the word deliberately. Perhaps, even as he used the language of separation to describe them, Capote resented women separating from him.

  One of the first women to be interested in Capote was Rita Smith, a fiction editor at Mademoiselle, who, in 1945, published “Miriam,” the story, ostensibly, of a girl who can’t grow up because she exists only in the mind of an old woman who has not. This fiction can be read as a foreshadowing of Capote’s knowledge that he would become a woman, the floor plan, in a sense, of the image Truman Capote would eventually project on the dust jacket for Other Voices, Other Rooms:

  [Miriam] was thin and fragilely constructed. There was a simple, special elegance in the way she stood...Mrs. Miller decided the truly distinctive feature was not her hair, but her eyes; they were hazel, steady, lacking any childlike quality whatsoever.

 
; “Miriam” was the story that garnered Truman Capote—then twenty years old—a great deal of attention; after it appeared, the publisher Bennett Cerf signed Capote up at Random house; Random House published Other Voices, Other Rooms, and most of his subsequent work.

  It was Rita Smith who introduced Capote to her famous sibling, Carson McCullers. McCullers’s biographer states, “Never before had Carson been so enthusiastic about promoting another young writer...who many people thought served as a model for her final concept of John Henry West,” a character in her novel The Member of the Wedding. In writing about Capote, Rita Smith all but disappears after he became friends with McCullers. In order to become a woman more famous than the older, established author, Capote needed to build himself on her model and then destroy that model to prevent any subsequent excavation of the genesis of Truman Capote.

  While McCullers remained steeped in regionalism (the American South, of which Capote was a native, too), Capote went on to become a woman of the world, or enough of one to describe, in 1959, McCullers, once more famous than he, rather condescendingly as “not plain, not pretty, arresting rather”—words that also describe the exact effect of McCullers’s writing on Capote, whom McCullers eventually suspected of having “poached on my literary preserves.”

  Once certain women artists became interested in Capote, he understood how to take from their work. What he stole was more syntax than complete style. Take, for instance, the the tone of Eudora Welty’s 1941 “Why I Live at the P.O.” (a story written during her literary apprenticeship to another woman author, Katherine Anne Porter):

  I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again...Came home from one of those towns up in Illinois and to our complete surprise brought this child of two.

  And Capote’s 1945 story, “My Side of the Matter”:

  I know what is being said about me and you can take my side or theirs, that’s your own business. It’s my word against Eunice’s and Olivia-Ann’s, and it should be plain enough to anyone with two good eyes which one of us has their wits about them. I just want the citizens of the U.S.A. to know the facts, that’s all.

  Truman Capote knew—with the insightfulness of the writer who wishes not to be one sometimes and can step aside and see what his or her function as a writer means to others—that photographs were more immediate and vital than words and would eventually be more attractive to the general reading audience. And as a fashionable person, he saw attractiveness as the barometer of morality. (Recall his on-the-air feud with Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls. Capote described her appearance as not unlike that of “a truck driver in drag,” a curious statement, layered like an onion. The truck driver as sometime homosexual erotic artifact; drag as part of the [then] homosexual code or underground; a truck driver in drag being, perhaps, of interest to Truman Capote only as an image of humor. With this comment he was spitting in the face of America for its acceptance of what he could not see as a “real” woman—someone successful as an author—and its rejection of the “real” one—himself. His joke empowered him, made him greater than the woman America seemed to prefer, Jacqueline Susann.)

  Truman Capote’s travel book, Local Color (1950), with accompanying photographs by Karl Bissinger, Cecil Beaton, and so on, was an attempt to conjoin his writing with the photographic demands of publicity. “My prettiest book, inside and out,” he wrote to John Malcolm Brinnin.

  Before 1947, illustrations in the form of watercolors by Eugene Berman, Christian Berard, and the like were used, mostly, to represent authors. Truman Capote single-handedly created a new interpretation of photography for his audience. Thereafter, photographs—of the bodies that created the words—were used to sell words.

  Eudora Welty, who, in the thirties and forties, took photographs for the WPA project, also photographed Katherine Anne Porter (on whom Capote modeled Alice Lee Langman in Answered Prayers). The difference between the photographs of Katherine Anne Porter and Capote’s authoress photograph on the jacket for Other Voices, Other Rooms is this: Porter is beautiful and therefore a removed object; Capote is sexual and simply embodies the subtext of his first book. Other Voices, Other Rooms is an idea about femininity made palatable by Capote’s shallow interpretation.

  Only one woman author—not as famous as Capote—equaled the power of his 1947 photograph: Jane Bowles in Karl Bissinger’s portrait, taken in 1946 to accompany a story of hers that appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. Bowles’s photograph is a reinterpretation of what Capote projected in 1947. It illustrates the idea that femininity, as an idea, does fuck you up.

  Jane Bowles, “that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf,” was one woman author—a Jew, a lesbian, not a maiden aunt—from whom Capote tried to steal but could not. He attempted to retranslate her aesthetic—language and speech as unrepresentative of a woman’s internal life in general—in his script for John Huston’s film Beat the Devil. In it, Jennifer Jones plays Bowles (under the name Gwendolyn) and speaks with Bowles’s syntax. “Isn’t that what we’re most interested in: sin?” she inquires, just as Bowles had written to a friend, “There’s nothing original about me but a little original sin.”

  Gwendolyn’s loopy rationale (“I told him that I was in love with you when I thought you were dead...It made you seem less dead”) is also reminiscent of Bowles’s fiction; Christina Goering in Two Serious Ladies, for example: ‘“Oh, I can’t tell you, my dear, how sorry I am,’ said Miss Goering, taking both his hands in hers and pressing them to her lips...‘I can’t tell you how these gloves remind me of my child-hood,’ Miss Goering continued.”

  Jane Bowles wrote of Capote in a letter to her husband, Paul: “Alice T[oklas] was delighted that you didn’t really care for him very much...She doesn’t seem to worry in the least, however, about my liking him. So I’m insulted...again.” Bowles did not consider Capote a woman. Her interest in the female body specifically precluded her complicity in Capote’s self-delusion. Her very noncomplicity may explain why one of the few truly laudatory pieces Capote ever wrote about a woman was his introduction to her Collected Works, which came out in 1966, shortly after the publication of In Cold Blood and Capote’s reversion to manhood: “Mrs. Bowles, by virtue of her talent and the strange visions it enclose[s], and because of her personality’s startling blend of playful-puppy candor and feline sophistication, [is] an imposing, stage-front presence.”

  Realizing the authenticity behind Jane Bowles’s “feline sophistication” was the end, too, of Capote’s career as a woman author. There was no way into that sophistication without being literally exposed to women. Jane Bowles’s physical proximity to women was not something Capote could experience. And his anger, fear, and resentment of this fact led to the self-caricature he projected in the film Murder by Death, and his unforgiving descriptions of any man he did not consider one—like Rusty Trawler, the millionaire, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), who was also a portrait of the physically confused woman Truman Capote eventually became.

  [Rusty] was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom. There wasn’t a suspicion of bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if he’d been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined as a blown-up balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering.

  The above description presaged the familiar television image of Truman Capote in later years: a series of circles to be filled in by the imagination. Although his distinct, inimitable voice interfered with this imaginative process, Capote, like Rusty Trawler, could not, eventually, commit to what he had become. As Holly Golightly said, “Can’t you see it’s just that Rusty feels safer in diapers than he would in a skirt?...He tried to stab me with a butter knife because I told him to grow up and face the issue, settl
e down and play house with a nice fatherly truck driver,” a statement that recalls Jacqueline Susann, the truck driver with whom Truman Capote could not play at all.

  Writing of a woman (Janes Bowles) without malice, Truman Capote saw himself, in comparison, as a man: the author of a book (In Cold Blood) about vanity turned to pain and grief and the taking of life, life lived as a man. In Cold Blood is, above all, Truman Capote’s expression of his sadness at being a man, at the juncture writing creates between the self we see and the self we cannot know, that neither words nor photographs can ever accurately record. In Cold Blood is a book replete with this image question. Perry Smith is consumed by the idea of his face’s meaning, construction, and story; it is like language to him and to Capote. In Cold Blood is an examination of the way in which the traditional values associated with women—concern with appearance as it tells a story to the world—are adopted “naturally” by a man:

  Time rarely weighed upon [Perry] for he had many ways of passing it—among them, mirror gazing...His own face enthralled him. Each angle of it induced a different impression. It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic.

  In 1948, Capote went to Paris: “My book’s succès fou there,” he told John Malcolm Brinnin. “Why shouldn’t I be?” In 1949, he also went to North Africa, where he became reacquainted with “that modern legend,” Jane Bowles. A photograph was taken of them somewhere in Tangier. Capote is heavier than he was in 1947. Bowles is already whatever she was meant to be. She is directing her smile, her complete attention, which she equated with affection, toward Capote, who seems to be considering whether or not to accept this attention. In that moment, which appears to be a long one, Truman Capote began making his long move away from women, becoming closer still.