Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  He had arrived at that decision several years before. “For some reason I began to read in Alabama and discovered I loved it,” he said. “Then one day, when I was nine or ten, I was walking along the road, kicking stones, and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, an artist. How did it happen? That’s what I ask myself. My relatives were nothin’, dirt-poor farmers. I don’t believe in possession, but something took over inside me, some little demon that made me a writer. How else can it be explained?”

  The same question might be asked, of course, about most writers who do not grow up amidst books or in the company of those who love them, and the answer is never satisfactory. Although the Faulks were neither poor, as Truman claimed, nor illiterate, as he implied, it is true that they were not readers. Except for the Bible, there was little to read in the house on Alabama Avenue.

  To drop the question there would be misleading, however. Truman’s background was not literary in a conventional sense, but more than he liked to acknowledge, it did provide a literary viewpoint, a way of looking at people as characters in a drama and a way of viewing life itself as a tale to be unfolded. His relatives did not read stories; they told them or listened to their neighbors telling them in the normal course of conversation. Plots, centering on family feuds, were close at hand, and on a hot summer night dozens of tales would be recounted on the front porches of Monroeville. Truman could not find many books in the Faulk house, but he heard the equivalent of hundreds in the soft, dusky hours between dinner and bed.

  His father’s side of the family was not bookish either, but in their own way the Persons clan were extremely literary. For years not a week passed without an exchange of letters between Arch’s mother, Mabel, and her three boys, and a further exchange among the sons themselves. Mother and sons felt compelled to lay out their lives on paper, and taken together, their letters, which number in the hundreds, paint a multihued picture of both their family and the South itself during the Depression. Almost all are well written; many bear the imprint of true writers: they are vivid, uninhibited, and pungently phrased, with sudden and surprising flashes of insight. Truman inherited both their compulsion and their talent. He could read before he set foot inside a schoolroom, and when he was still in short pants, no more than five or six years old, he was carrying a tiny dictionary wherever he went, along with a pencil and paper on which he could scribble notes. He later set up a little office in a corner of his room on Alabama Avenue, and there he sat for hours tapping out stories on his own typewriter. By the time he entered Trinity, his choice of career was fixed and unshakable. “He’s the only one I ever knew who at age twelve knew exactly what he wanted to do and discarded everything else,” said his friend Howard. “He did not care about anything but writing.”

  There are few surviving examples of his early expeditions into the craft, and those few—sixteen themes, stories, and poems—were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford. Twelve were written in the sixth grade and four in the eighth, after he returned from St. John’s. The sixth-grade efforts seem unremarkable for the most part, about what could be expected from a boy of that age, with many obvious grammatical errors and many more misspellings. The four later pieces, those from the eighth grade, are still the work of a boy, but now a boy with talent. Truman is self-consciously reaching for literary effects—a woman does not say something, she ejaculates; a man does not smile, he smirks in delight—but they move swiftly, with a small measure of grace, and so far as can be judged on such slim evidence, he is trying to give his work shape as well as size.

  The most interesting story from those Trinity years, however, is one that exists only in memory. His ninth-grade English teacher, John Lasher, handed it one day to a colleague, C. Bruner-Smith, without saying who had written it. The story described, in a dream-like way, the sensation of rolling down a hill and tumbling into unconsciousness. “It was a rather lengthy manuscript,” recalled Bruner-Smith, “and I was struck and impressed by it. It had to do with children, and it had a feeling that I found very remarkable. Very few writers, even great writers, are able to get inside the mind of a child. Mark Twain could do it, and so could Booth Tarkington. But Shakespeare couldn’t. The story that Lasher handed me showed that facility. The spelling was bad, but I still couldn’t believe that a boy of thirteen or fourteen could have produced it. ‘Who wrote this?’ I asked Lasher, and he answered, ‘Truman Capote said he did.’ And so he had.”

  Not long after that, Truman’s life once again abruptly changed course, and in June, 1939, the Capotes left New York for Greenwich, Connecticut. They rented a house on Orchard Drive in the Millbrook section, a small upper-middle-class enclave that maintained a careful, if friendly, distance from the rest of the town. Stone columns marked its entrance from the main road, a private policeman patrolled its pretty, winding streets, and its ninety or so houses were, like the Capotes’, all built in traditional Tudor styles. To give it a rural appearance, the people who laid it out in the twenties had left reminders of the country: hills, trees, streams, and two large lakes, which were used for boating in the summer and skating in the winter. Small as it was, the community had its own country club, to which only residents could belong. Millbrook was not the richest part of Greenwich, nor was it the most prestigious, but those who lived there usually stayed there; people from Millbrook tended to spend their time with other people from Millbrook.

  Joe and Nina, gregarious both, soon felt at home. They brought with them their maid and her husband, whom they employed as chauffeur, and Nina was free to spend her afternoons shopping, playing bridge, or gossiping with other wives at the country club. Then, nearly every night, shortly after the commuting husbands returned from Manhattan, there would be a larger gathering. Liquor flowed freely in Greenwich, and the Capotes’ new acquaintances enjoyed a good time as much as they did. For Joe and Nina, who had been enjoying themselves in such ways and with such friends for the better part of a decade, the party had merely changed addresses.

  Surprisingly, considering the pain previous disruptions had caused him, the move to Greenwich was just as easy for Truman, who entered Greenwich High School as a tenth-grader in September. A few hostile remarks were directed his way, of course. By the standards of the time, he did not look right, sound right, or dress right; while the other boys wore slacks and shoes, he came to class, a generation too early, in sloppy-looking blue jeans and sneakers. But it was mild disapproval, all in all, and if Truman cared what was said about him, he did not show it. “Those who knew him accepted him as an equal,” said one of his classmates, Crawford Hart, Jr. “He looked down his nose at the others.”

  Indeed, he probably welcomed the attention. At Trinity he had learned how to set himself apart from everyone else; at Greenwich he went a step further: he discovered how to turn the spotlight on himself and himself alone. “Truman was vividly nonconventional,” said Thomas Flanagan, a classmate who later became a historical novelist of considerable renown. “He was full of energy and self-confidence, and quite flamboyant, a show-off. He had a sense of himself as a special person, a fact he was under no impulse to conceal from other people. For Truman to like you you had to have something special, like wit or social status. That was not a characteristic that was likely to win friends, and those who didn’t like him—and they were a sizable group—would have described him as affected and precious. But he was not crushed by the harsh opinions of others.”

  What did crush him was to be ignored. Even to receive second billing in something as unimportant as a school play was hurtful to his ego, and he was keenly disappointed, Flanagan recalled, when he was assigned a bit part in an historical epic, If I Were King. While the rest of the cast swept across the stage in colorful costumes, he and Flanagan, who played executioners, were little more than props. It was obviously not a large enough role for a fourteen-year-old show-off, and Truman was determined to make it bigger. If he could not play François Villon, the man who saved France, he could at least be the most loq
uacious hangman in the history of the theater, and on opening night he used the script merely as a starting point for his own soliloquy on hanging: “Not every day of a hanging is like this. Do you remember four years ago when we hanged…” It was as if one of the spear carriers in Hamlet had pushed the lead aside to recite “To be or not to be,” and even before the curtain was down, the furious drama teacher was chasing him across the stage—a scene that was doubtless more interesting, and certainly more amusing, than any that had preceded it. “At the end of the play Villon is almost hanged,” said Flanagan, “and I thought to myself: ‘If Truman really wants to star, next time he’ll hang the son-of-a-bitch for real.’”

  Such a display of ego did not make him popular, but Truman’s real problem at Greenwich was not his fellow students; it was the school administration, which did not view kindly his poor attendance record, his refusal to work at anything that bored him, and his loud and adamant boycott of gym classes. “His attendance was very irregular, and he demonstrated his creativity with his excuses for his tardiness and absentee record,” recalled Andrew Bella, the school principal. “His downfall was Physical Education. He was the despair of the coaches, and I remember one of his numerous visits to my office. Standing at the tall office counter, he spread his elbows like wings, his chin barely above the top, and announced defiantly: ‘I will not take gym.’ Our explanation that gym was required by state laws and that a doctor’s excuse was necessary to get him out of it was of no avail. He thought it was not necessary for him.”

  Bad marks and failures—he flunked algebra, French, and Spanish—did not deter him from concentrating, doggedly and single-mindedly, on the only thing that mattered to him: his writing. Given his fierce determination, he doubtless would have persisted despite every discouragement, but every young writer, however confident, needs encouragement, someone older to assure him that his scribblings are not just adolescent doodles. Truman was no exception, and he had the extreme good fortune to come under the wing of an English teacher, Catherine Wood, who not only shared his faith in himself, but believed that it was her duty, her mission and sacred obligation, to help bring his talents to blossom.

  He came to her attention as aggressively as he could manage. She was taking her students on a tour of the school library and had just picked out a book by Sigrid Undset to give to one of the girls. “Suddenly,” she said, “this little fellow, who was not in my group, turned around from where he was sitting and interrupted me. ‘Must be wonderful to read her in the original,’ he said. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of anything else!’ I replied, although of course I didn’t know a word of Norwegian. From that time on I saw Truman, and when he came into my class the next year, in the eleventh grade, I saw him all the time.”

  A tall, gray-haired spinster who shared a house with another English teacher off the Post Road, Miss Wood invited him often to dinner, read his stories, catered to him in class, and encouraged her colleagues to do the same. “I made out a schedule for him,” she said, “and tried to make the other teachers understand him, so that they would not expect a great deal from him. Some people objected to my doing that, and the principal, who did not appreciate him, wouldn’t make any exception for him. So I told him: ‘I know that the time will come when you would like to say that Truman Capote graduated from Greenwich High School!’” Even Nina could not escape the empassioned advocacy of this resolute woman with the long, sheeplike face. “His mother couldn’t understand this boy who liked such different things,” she said. “I remember sitting in my little dining room and saying to her that it was hard for me to tell his own mother this, but that in years to come the other, regular boys, who do the usual things in the usual way, would still be doing those things while Truman would be famous.”

  Truman himself was convinced of it, and the hours he spent practicing his craft at last started to show results. At Trinity the best evidence of his ability had been his persistence; with a few exceptions, like his stream-of-consciousness description of rolling down a hill, his writing itself had not been unusual. At Greenwich his talent began to bud, if not flower, and it was soon displayed in the pages of the school literary magazine, which published several pieces of prose that were, considering his age, remarkably good.

  Written when he was sixteen, the best of the lot is “Lucy,” a beautifully painted portrait of Lucy Brown, the black maid who brought him north from Monroeville in 1932: her thrill at coming north, her eventual homesickness, and finally, her return South. “New York was just vast loneliness,” Truman wrote. “The Hudson River kept whispering ‘Alabama River,’ yes, Alabama River, with its red, muddy water flowing high to the bank and with all its swampy little tributaries.” The other pieces are equally proficient in terms of style, but are marred by contrived plotting and an obvious and self-conscious literary tone. Yet all his Greenwich works are highly polished, products of a surprisingly sure and confident hand. More important than technical competence, which many diligent students can acquire, they show a genuine and unmistakable gift for the creation of real and vital characters, which is, after all, the primary duty of any writer of fiction.

  10

  IF many of his contemporaries in Greenwich disliked Truman, those he wanted to be his friends, those he went after, he usually got. Few could resist the unrelenting onslaught of his affection. “He had a great, and immense, capacity for friendship,” said Phoebe Pierce, one of the first to succumb. Others soon followed, and before long he was the leader of a sprightly and spirited Millbrook band, a group of a dozen or so that included, most prominently, the pretty little Jaeger sisters, Marion and Lucia, handsome Ted Walworth, wild Joan Ackerman, and Phoebe herself, whose ambition to be a poet was as strong as Truman’s was to be a writer. Bright and lively, with the shining smiles, radiant confidence, and all-American good looks of models in a toothpaste ad, they were normality itself in that pre-war world of the jitterbug and the jalopy. Yet invariably, when they could not think what to do, they turned to the distinctly abnormal newcomer from New York. “Truman brought happiness into our lives,” said Marion Jaeger. “He said, ‘Let’s do it! Don’t be afraid!’ He created the fun, and if we got bored, he would come up with an idea of how we could get un-bored.”

  After school they would often rendezvous at his house, and his bedroom became a hangout where they could smoke Joe’s long, dark Cuban cigarettes; drink liquor, mostly sweet fruit brandies they had filched from their parents; and dance to jazz records. On weekends they would move their boisterous convention to the cavernous old Pickwick Theater on the Boston Post Road. Emboldened by the omnipresent sweet brandy, which they would sneak in in paper bags, they would laugh when they were expected to cry, pretend to cry when they were supposed to laugh, and vie with one another in embellishing Hollywood’s love scenes with a more amusing dialogue of their own invention. Eventually the actors themselves could not be heard above their din, and the weary ushers yet again would chase them out into the evening twilight. “We were out to shock and we did,” said Phoebe. “We were just awful. We couldn’t buy an ice cream cone without causing a riot. We were rude and intolerant, and we had perfected to the point of magnificence what the British army calls ‘dumb insolence.’ We did things partly to please ourselves and partly to set everybody else on edge. We were creative troublemakers.”

  Friday or Saturday night, they might drive to nightclubs in nearby towns, like the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle or Aladdin’s Cave in Stamford, to dance to the music of the big bands. Truman, who was almost always short of cash, would depend on the dutiful Jaeger sisters to help pay his share of the bill; but there was one memorable occasion on which he made up for past omissions. All that day he walked the halls of Greenwich High, asking everyone he met for a penny to buy a stamp, and when they set out for Aladdin’s Cave that night, his pants were sagging from the weight. “I’ve got a surprise,” he explained mysteriously. Later, when the two sisters automatically reached for their purses, he stopped them. “This is my treat,” he
announced proudly. Emptying his bulging pockets, he covered the table with a coppery mound, hundreds of his hard-earned pennies. To the sputtering waiter he said: “Just because of your rudeness we don’t care to come here again. We don’t like the people who come here, anyway.”

  It was a privileged and, to all appearances, a carefree, idyllic life Truman and his company enjoyed in those months before Pearl Harbor. Spring and summer they would swim and play tennis at the country club. Winter they would skate on the upper lake, and Mrs. Jaeger would greet them with steaming mugs of hot cocoa when they returned, cold but exhilarated, to shore. Autumn they would attend a never-ending round of parties.

  Nina herself organized one such party, a scavenger hunt, setting the example, with her usual flair in such matters, for many happy evenings to follow. “It was the Halloween of 1939,” said Howard Weber, Truman’s friend from Trinity days, who was visiting that weekend. “There was a full moon and it was a clear, crystal night, with a smell of burning leaves in the air. You had to draw a name out of a hat, and when I drew mine, Truman’s mother said, ‘Ah, you’ve got the cream of the crop!’ She was right—the name I had drawn was Phoebe’s—and off we went, shuffling through the un-raked leaves to people’s doors, asking them to loan us statues of the Venus de Milo or whatever else was on our list. When we had found what we needed, we rushed back to the Capotes’, where everybody danced, including the parents. The boys all wore coats and ties, and the girls looked sensational in their sweaters and skirts, saddle shoes, and camel’s-hair coats. We had a great time. Truman had some wonderful friends, and I was so envious I could hardly see straight to watch them having as much fun as they were.”