Remarkably, Capote’s child-prodigy persona carried him nearly into his forties. “Yes, he’s a genius, Ma’am,” his friend Cecil Beaton told the Queen Mother late in 1962, when Capote was thirty-eight. But again it was unclear what, precisely, “genius” referred to. In the fifteen years since Other Voices, Other Rooms had been published, he’d added to his oeuvre just two slight novellas (The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany’s), a few stories and a short book, The Muses Are Heard, that grew out of a long New Yorker piece about touring the Soviet Union with the cast of Porgy and Bess. Still, the royal lady found him a genius, “quite wonderful, so intelligent, so wise, so funny,” over a lunch together at which Capote laughed and “whooped with joy when the summer pudding appeared,” as Beaton later recalled. That last detail suggests why it was so hard not to think of the author as remarkable. Throughout his life he loved to play the child, and people reacted accordingly—they kept treating him like a prodigy into his middle age. Again and again in the various biographies and memoirs of Capote, you’re struck by how often and how naturally people comment on this particular aspect of his charm. “A precocious child, so cute and funny,” Eleanor Lambert declared at the beginning of his career; a “wonderful but bad little boy,” David Selznick remarked, when Capote was twenty-eight.
Capote was certainly a bad little boy in one respect: he was an inveterate liar. (He enhanced the story of his lunch with the Queen Mother in later retellings, shifting the venue to Buckingham Palace and enlarging the guest list to include the Queen herself.) But it was with a work ostensibly devoid of any invention at all that he secured what was to many his most plausible claim to being a genius. In 1965, when he was forty, he completed In Cold Blood, his harrowing, tautly written account of the murders of four members of a wealthy Kansas farm family by a pair of young drifters—a “nonfiction novel” that used the techniques of fiction to achieve a narrative power rare in reportage. After an electrifying debut as a four-part serial in The New Yorker, the book was published in January 1966 and became an enormous best seller, adding considerable wealth to solid literary acclaim. Capote sealed this artistic triumph later that year with his greatest social success: the legendary Black and White Ball he gave at the Plaza Hotel in honor of Katharine Graham, one of the many rich women whom Capote, who prided himself on his social as well as his literary genius, so assiduously cultivated.
The second word Capote could never get right was one he often spelled “dissapoint.” This, too, has a special resonance. For almost immediately after the double triumphs of 1966, something went catastrophically wrong. During the writing of In Cold Blood he’d begun to drink heavily; his friend Phyllis Cerf, wife of the Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, later claimed that writing the book had, essentially, made Capote an alcoholic. As the Sixties went on, and then the Seventies, he drank more and more, began taking pills, and wrote less and less. Increasingly, his public appearances became occasions for embarrassment. (In 1977 he had to be escorted off the stage at the beginning of a reading after he began to mumble incoherently.) There were halfhearted attempts to get back to work: Capote talked about doing a series of articles on a string of gay sex-torture killings for The Washington Post—all too clearly a reprise of In Cold Blood—and a magazine piece about touring with the Rolling Stones (just as clearly a ghost of The Muses Are Heard). But they never got written.
The one work he claimed to be seriously embarked on was a grand, “Proustian” novel that he had been contemplating for a long time—an epic work in which he planned to set down everything he knew about the very rich, whom he had been studying all these years. (The only standards he seems to have maintained, at the end of his life, concerned money: “In this day and age, you’ve got to have at least $500 million. Free. That you can pick up,” he told an interviewer who had asked him his definition of “rich.”) But the few chapters from this work in progress that appeared in Esquire in the mid-Seventies—like a naughty schoolboy, Capote kept claiming that he’d written much more but that it had been lost, or even stolen—suggested that he’d lost his touch. Amounting to little more than thinly disguised items of high society gossip, they were flatly, even slovenly, written and notable for a child’s obsession with bodily functions and parts. One story concerns a sexual encounter between characters meant to be William Paley and the menstruating wife of the former governor of New York; another eavesdrops on Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo discussing their genitals.
For betraying the secrets of the ladies whose lapdog he’d been, Capote was exiled from the jet set. By that point, his private life was a mess anyway. Increasingly estranged from his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, and now in his forties—undoubtedly a traumatic milestone for anyone as invested as Capote was in both looking and acting boyish—he embarked on a string of affairs with ostentatiously ordinary, and ostensibly heterosexual, family men. These lovers were repairmen, bartenders, and midlevel bankers, men whom Wyatt Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt’s husband, recalled as “men without faces”—chosen, many couldn’t help thinking, to outrage his posh friends. (“Ooooh! I didn’t want an air-conditioning man for a friend,” Mrs. Graham exclaimed.) By the end, those few of his former set who still spoke to him encountered what looked like a parody of the old Capote: a bloated, baby-faced man, who soiled himself during alcoholic stupors and whose former naughtiness had curdled into a viciousness that was not always merely verbal. (One entry in the index of Clarke’s biography is “O’Shea, John, Capote’s hit men and”: he twice had people vandalize the property of boyfriends who’d left him.) His boyish qualities had persisted, but less attractively. “I feel like a trust officer dealing with the senile and the infantile,” John O’Shea, one of the men without faces, griped when he tried to organize the alcoholic writer’s business affairs. Capote died in August 1984, a month shy of sixty, after nearly two decades of decline.
In his inexorable disintegration, Capote represents a distinct type of American failure—the artist whose early success is so spectacular that both life and art are forever trapped by, and associated with, long-past triumphs. (Orson Welles and Marlon Brando, whom Capote famously profiled in The New Yorker, maliciously and brilliantly, come to mind.) It was precisely because he himself was so dazzled by his own early persona—the literary golden boy and enchanting, honey-tongued child of high society—that Capote clearly felt he had to cap his career with that Proustian masterpiece. But it was a work he all too clearly didn’t have the resources to write—and not merely because by the time he set out to write it, he was a pill-popping alcoholic. After grilling him on the subject, Gore Vidal concluded that Capote had never actually read Proust, and shrewdly observed that “Truman thought Proust accumulated gossip about the aristocracy and made literature out of it.” Capote’s problem was that he had the gossip, but didn’t know how to make it mean anything to anyone not interested in the real-life figures behind it. He had, indeed, already written his great book; but because In Cold Blood was grittily realistic, Dreiserian rather than Proustian—because it didn’t fit his image of himself—Capote didn’t know it. Thus seduced by his own reputation, he failed to pursue an artistic avenue that could well have led him to greater success.
As his life spun out of control, Capote had more and more opportunities to misspell “disappoint.” He became obsessed with the idea that his work had been inadequately recognized: he never got over being passed over for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for In Cold Blood. He grew bitterly jealous of the acclaim enjoyed by authors (Norman Mailer, for instance) who, he felt, had stolen his ideas and methods, particularly the technique of the nonfiction novel. In a letter to Bennett Cerf in the summer of 1964, Capote complained that Cerf had decided not to publish his Selected Writings under the “august imprint” of the Modern Library. “Can you imagine how very galling it is for me to see so many of my contemporaries…included in this series, while the publisher of same ignores its own writer? It’s unjust—both humanly, and in terms of literary achievement.”
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nbsp; Since then, Capote has received the recognition he so eagerly sought: there are now four volumes in the Modern Library devoted to the author’s work. To that continuing project of canonization his old publisher, Random House, is now adding two more volumes of Capotiana: Clarke’s new volume of the letters, entitled Too Brief a Treat, and The Complete Short Stories of Truman Capote. And yet although both volumes are undoubtedly meant to shore up Capote’s posthumous reputation as an American classic, they end up shedding as much light on his shortcomings as they do on any genius he might have had. Together, they provide intriguing insights into the nature both of his gift and of his terrible failure.
Despite its imposing title, The Complete Stories of Truman Capote is a slender affair, twenty pieces in all. It is a startlingly insubstantial output for a writer whose career lasted forty years, and who was most comfortable in the short form. Of the twenty stories, moreover, fourteen were written before Capote turned thirty (a dozen, indeed, before he was twenty-five); another three were written during his thirties; and the final three during his forties.
Another way of putting this is that in the Complete Stories you’re dealing, essentially, with a volume of juvenilia. What strikes you now is, in fact, how adolescently lurid and creepy the earliest stories are—and yet how earnestly “serious” and grown-up they’re meant to be. At least half the new collection falls into this unfortunate class. There are hammy tales of erotic obsession (“The Headless Hawk,” 1946); heavy-handedly dark stories like “Shut a Final Door” (1947), in which the comeuppance of a ruthless social and professional climber arrives in the Twilight Zone–ish form of anonymous phone calls that follow him wherever he goes; and morality tales about doomed young innocents, like the college girl in “A Tree of Night” (1945) who falls victim to sinister freaks on a train, or the depressive young working woman in “Master Misery” (1949) who sells her dreams to a man who’s known as Master Misery and who may well be…the Devil. (“I figure it this way, baby: dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us. Now Master Misery, maybe he hasn’t got a soul, so bit by bit he borrows yours.”)
These works, with their affected Gothic darkness, are often marred by leaden symbolism (a number of them feature long dream sequences—always a crutch), juvenile awkwardnesses (“the hostess went toward her sudden guests”), and overwriting of the sort that characterized the young Capote’s hothouse style. (“A knot of pain was set like a malignant jewel in the core of his head” is a sentence likely to induce a few headaches of its own.) But you can also see what caught people’s eye. In “Miriam,” the story that first won Capote serious attention, in 1945, a middle-aged widow called Miriam is befriended by a small girl, also called Miriam, who gradually insinuates herself into the older woman’s apartment and eventually takes over her life. Here you can see the author struggling to control the prose and put his effects in the service of the narrative. Near the beginning of the story, a snow begins to fall during which “foot tracks vanished as they were printed”—a nice way of suggesting how the elder Miriam herself will soon be erased.
Others of these early tales give you glimpses of the aptness of detail and rigorousness of style that were so enthusiastically celebrated later on. In “The Bargain” (1950), a short story discovered among the writer’s papers after his death, the awkwardness of a transaction between a wealthy woman and her impoverished friend, who’s trying to sell an old fur coat, is beautifully conveyed in the matron’s somewhat pretentious lapse into French when the difficult subject of money comes up. (“Combien?”)
In these early stories, Capote often wrote about upper-crust ladies who experience tiny epiphanies. Small wonder. Capote, who was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans in 1924 to unhappily married parents—the father a pathetically failed huckster, the mother a child-bride beauty with, to put it mildly, convenient morals—spent only the earliest years of his childhood with the eccentric Alabama relatives he later memorialized in stories and novellas. From the age of eight (when his mother was remarried, to a rich Cuban whose name he later adopted) he lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and later on Park Avenue. Glamorous ladies and fur coats were very much a part of his life. It was not a particularly happy life: Capote’s mother, Nina, a narcissistic alcoholic, was horrified by her son’s all-too-evident effeminacy, and frequently abused and humiliated him.
All this bears mentioning only because pretty much all of the stories tend to fall into either of two categories that reflect the author’s bifurcated childhood. One of them features those grim, rather dutiful tales of doomed cosmopolites, New York ladies or well-brushed suburban girls, falling victim to Destiny. But the best of Capote’s short fiction belongs to a second, far smaller group, which draws on his happier memories of Alabama, when he was cosseted by three elderly spinster cousins. It’s a remarkable experience to encounter first the empty posturing of “Master Misery” and then to read “Jug of Silver,” a charming tale about a poor Southern boy bent on winning a jar filled with coins at the local drugstore, or “My Side of the Matter,” a slyly funny first-person narrative of a young Southerner’s conflict with his bride’s less-than-welcoming family. Here the young writer is clearly at home in every way, his assurance and perfect pitch evident in the kind of delicious details that can’t be counterfeited. “The Odeon had not been so full since the night they gave away the matched set of sterling silver” tells you more about the sociology of its small-town setting than ten pages of earnest exposition could.
In these stories, too, the first of a distinctively Capote type of character appears: the stubborn misfit whose refusal to heed convention transforms and elevates those around her—not least, by reminding the grown-ups of the beauties and pleasures they knew as children but have since forgotten. “I think always,” says Miss Bobbitt, the precocious ten-year-old heroine of “Children on Their Birthdays” (1947), “about somewhere else, somewhere else where everything is dancing, like people dancing in the streets, and everything is pretty, like children on their birthdays.” This motif would reappear throughout the fiction for which Capote is best remembered: The Grass Harp, in which a crew of adorably eccentric Southern misfits leave their homes to go live in a tree; Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whose heroine, Holly Golightly (née Lulamae Barnes), has, largely thanks to the 1961 film, become a cultural byword for a certain kind of enviable free-spiritedness.
Given the ferocity of his attachment to the distant happiness and emotional comfort of his Alabama years, it’s not hard to see why Capote kept returning to this theme. When he does so, all his graces as a writer combine—the wise-child humanity, a real rather than faked lyricism, strong detail. This is nowhere truer than in “A Christmas Memory,” his 1956 reminiscence of baking holiday fruitcakes with his elderly Alabama cousin. The story’s stately, delicate, spun-caramel narration lends an incantatory aura to its almost hieratic lists of actions and ingredients (“cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour…”)—all in the service of evoking a memory whose delight is enhanced by the inevitable parting at the end. The story represents, perhaps, the acme of Capote’s fictional art, whose special character lies in its ability to give voice to the childlike in us. The part of us, in other words, that resists adult strictures, that wants to retreat, delightfully, to treehouses or to the inviolable past; the part to which he himself had such remarkable access.
And yet you close The Complete Stories of Truman Capote with a sense less of genius than of disappointment—a feeling that there’s somehow less than you thought there would be, and that the ingenious talent for spinning cotton-candy charm you may have recalled is, in fact, seldom in evidence. An overview of the career is likely to leave you with a similar feeling; the catalogue of Capote’s substantial published work is disarmingly short, at least in proportion to his reputation. That narrowness of output is matched by—and, I think, ultimately explained by—an infantine narrowness of outlook.
/> “Narrow” may seem unfair, given the way Capote’s work veers from enchantment (in his best stories) to terror (those other stories, and of course In Cold Blood). But the extremes between which Capote’s work seems to move may, in the end, be seen as no more than the poles of a child’s consciousness, divided as it is between golden fantasies of pleasure and omnipotence, on the one hand, and terrors of the dark, on the other. That Capote’s oeuvre should oscillate so consistently between the two was, if anything, overdetermined: the alternation clearly reflects the bifurcated nature of this particular child’s early life, split between the womblike snugness of that house in Alabama and the cold limestone of 1060 Park Avenue, where lurked a monster who was, for him, only too real.
It is, indeed, in this light that Capote’s famous characterization of In Cold Blood as “a reflection on American life—this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe,” takes on its proper meaning. If In Cold Blood is, of all Capote’s work, the one that can stand as a classic outside the context of Capote’s time and persona, the reason has much to do with the way it cannily maneuvers between the extremes that framed his artistic vision. There is, again, the alluring, cherished surface calm: the meticulous pacing, the careful enumeration of small details, everyday objects and moments (“for the longest while she stared at the blue-ribbon winner, the oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust”). And there is the horror that lurks, always about to explode—and which, like a child, you both do and don’t want to see, when it’s finally described. Here Capote’s mature stylistic rigor, his eye for the telling detail, and the oral tradition of his haunted Southern boyhood brilliantly come together to create what is, essentially, one of the great ghost stories—a tale that continues to have the power to enthrall and terrify precisely because it conflates our childish fears of things that go bump in the night with our adult understanding of what those things can actually be.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 30
