Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  To someone who had become accustomed to hearing the word no from The New Yorker, Smith’s enthusiasm was encouraging all the same, and Truman soon went back to show her a far better, wildly comic tale called “My Side of the Matter.” In that story, a teenage bridegroom from Mobile returns with his pregnant wife to her hometown in backwoods Alabama, deposits her like a bag of groceries, then, uninvited and unwelcome, moves in with her and her two aunts. There is a hint of Arch in that freeloading bridegroom, a trace of Lillie Mae in the young bride, and bits of Jennie and Callie in the two quarrelsome old-maid aunts; Truman had obviously absorbed much of his family’s history during those hot, gossipy nights on the front porch in Monroeville. Although the manner in which the story is told, as a whining monologue by the bridegroom, was almost certainly influenced by Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” the style—loose, hyperbolic, and extremely funny—can fairly be labeled Truman’s. Smith, who came from Georgia—she was, in fact, Carson McCullers’ younger sister—was delighted with the piece. Although Truman had already sold it to Story magazine, she asked to see more of what he had written.

  The more was “Miriam,” an altogether different kind of tale, an eye-catching and arresting psychological mystery, which, once read, is hard to forget: Miriam is a sinister little girl with silver-white hair and unblinking adult eyes who attaches herself to a middle-aged widow, Mrs. Miller. At first Mrs. Miller, who lives by herself in a small apartment near the East River, is charmed by her pretty clothes and the coincidence that they both bear the same first name. Gradually, however, her tidy but solitary little world begins to disintegrate with each visit the girl makes; Miriam takes over her life and, as the story ends, moves in with her, to assume her identity as well. Truman skillfully maintains a tone of suspenseful ambiguity, and at the conclusion the reader is left with a tantalizing question: is Miriam real? is she supernatural? or is she—Truman’s own interpretation—a part of Mrs. Miller herself, the terrifying creation of a woman drifting into schizophrenia?

  One is dark, one is sunny, but “Miriam” and “My Side of the Matter” have this in common: they are both far superior to anything that Truman had written before, so insightful about character and psychology, so rich in image and metaphor, that they might almost have been written by a different person. In a sense, they had been. Those hard and lonely months in the South had enabled him to throw off the yoke of what he thought was the acceptable way to write a story and to discard the graven image of The New Yorker. In what seemed like a moment, he had made a breakthrough, leaping from conventional subjects and conventional prose into a stylistic and fictional world of his own creation. He had not only found the idea for Other Voices, Other Rooms in those generous waters at Hatter’s Pond; he had discovered his authentic voice as a writer.

  Prodded by Rita Smith, Davis was quick to respond to that voice, and shortly after Truman showed it to them, Mademoiselle published “Miriam” in its June, 1945, issue. Short stories attracted more attention in those days than they do now—people talked about them the way they might discuss a hit movie or a best-selling novel today—and the reaction was almost instantaneous, more satisfying than even Truman could have wished. That one story put him where he had always wanted to be: in the center of the literary spotlight, admired, appreciated, and sought after. “I saw ‘Miriam’ in Mademoiselle, and I said, ‘This is somebody we’ve got to get for Harper’s Bazaar,’” recalled Mary Louise Aswell. “When this little thing, this little sprite turned up, I told him, ‘I want to see anything you’ve got.’”

  He gave her “A Tree of Night,” which is a story as chilling as “Miriam,” and in many ways better. A college girl, traveling late at night on a crowded train, finds a seat across from two grotesques, a zombielike man, deaf and dumb, and a freakish-looking little woman with an oversized head and a rouge-smeared face. The two travel from one Southern town to another and perform a kind of carnival show, in which the man, who goes by the name Lazarus, is buried alive and then resurrected. For the girl, traveling with this sinister pair becomes a journey into her subconscious, and it brings back “a childish memory of terrors that once, long ago, had hovered above her like haunted limbs on a tree of night. Aunts, cooks, strangers—each eager to spin a tale or teach a rhyme of spooks and death, omens, spirits, demons. And always there had been the unfailing threat of the wizard man: stay close to the house, child, else a wizard man’ll snatch you and eat you alive! He lived everywhere, the wizard man, and everywhere was danger.” More subtle in its use of symbolism than “Miriam,” “A Tree of Night” treats the same theme in a different way, as a supposedly rational woman succumbs to the terrors that lie hidden within her soul. For Truman, the story was also a visit to the past, a return to his childhood; the model for Lazarus is of course Arch’s trickster, the Great Pasha.

  Harper’s Bazaar published that eerie story in October, 1945, and in December Mademoiselle came out with “Jug of Silver,” a warm, charming tale of a wish fulfilled. The juxtaposition of two such dissimilar works followed a pattern set earlier by “Miriam” and “My Side of the Matter,” and throughout the forties Truman’s short fiction alternated between the dark and the sunny, the terrifying and the amusing. The two magazines continued their tug-of-war over him for the rest of the decade. “Harper’s and Mademoiselle turned into temples which the cultist[s] entered every month with the seldom fulfilled hope that the little god would have published a new story there,” was the way one critic, Alfred Chester, described the interest he aroused.

  In January, 1945, Truman was an ex–New Yorker copyboy, with a bleak and uncertain future. A few months later he was already being mentioned as a potential star of the postwar generation of writers. In the spring of 1946, Herschel Brickell, editor of the annual O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, assessed the year just past and ventured a prophecy: “The most remarkable new talent of the year was, in the opinion of the editor, that of Truman Capote, the e being accented, a young man from New Orleans just past his majority. It is safe to predict that Mr. Capote will take his place among the best short-story writers of the rising generation.” That sharp-eyed and tireless little condor had finally grabbed his prey, and as he turned twenty-one, he was on his way to becoming famous.

  13

  MIRIAM, that evil little girl, opened doors for him all over New York, and Truman, like many before, and many after, discovered that once one is inside the circle, the big city is a small town and that the most significant difference between Manhattan and Monroeville is that one is in the North, the other in the South. The recognition he had wanted so desperately the year before now came his way easily, casually, almost as a matter of course; what had looked like a climb up Everest in 1944 was, only twelve months later, a stroll through a garden of summer flowers. One person introduced him to another, and that person to someone else, who led him to another still. And so it went until—it all seemed to happen in an instant—he had met everyone he wanted or needed to know.

  Admission to the circle was not just a matter of meeting the right people, of course. Many other talented writers were given the same opportunity, allowed to step inside, then booted out and lost to sight as if they had never existed. But Truman was not to be forgotten; nor, once he was inside that invisible boundary, was he to be dislodged. All the things that had shocked his colleagues at The New Yorker—his manner, his appearance, and his baby voice—guaranteed that he would be remembered; his seductive personality guaranteed that he would be accepted. When it came to charm, even Arch, who could talk a snake out of its rattles, had to stand aside for Truman.

  One of those most intrigued by him was George Davis, who recognized something of himself, or the self he had been twenty years before, behind that smooth little-boy face. “George had pipit monstrosities in his head,” said Leo Lerman, who also worked as a writer, a kind of odd-job man, for the fashion magazines. “They were absolute perfection, George’s monstrosities. He took one look at Truman and recognized the monster that lurke
d in there to produce things that were really quite beautiful.”

  For a time Davis’ relationship with Truman was almost that of a master and his apprentice. George liked to tease, banter, and instruct, and Truman was properly respectful, careful, like everyone else, not to cross him. “George had the nastiest tongue I’ve ever encountered,” said another young writer, Pearl Kazin, who discerned deep-rooted malice behind his slightly hooded eyes and exaggerated, stereotyped homosexual mannerisms. “He had that look of a rotten peach. You had the feeling that if you pressed your finger into his skin, the dent would stay.”

  It was not a bad comparison, and there was something overripe about George, a satiety with the usual pleasures, perhaps with life itself, that led him to seek the decadent and the unwholesome. Like one of those misshapen sea creatures that diving bells photograph thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface, he was at home in the dark and shied away from the light, which is to say the ordinary, that satisfied most other people. He had a fascination with the low life; he frequented seedy dives and was attracted to tough sailors and hustlers, one of whom was to beat him so badly a few years later that he nearly died. His delight in the malformed drew him to sideshow freaks, and he made frequent visits to a colony of pinheads at Coney Island, stopping only when someone was rude enough to ask him what relationship he had to the family.

  There was that side to him certainly, the dark and unpleasant side, but there was also another. Although his tongue could leave lasting scars, it could also be extremely funny. He had an epigrammatic turn of phrase that would have pleased Oscar Wilde, and his friend W. H. Auden called him the wittiest person he had ever known. George could sometimes be cruel, but he could also be as charitable as Santa Claus; many writers owed their careers, and more, to his generosity. To someone like Carson McCullers, who needed more than the usual amount of support and encouragement, he offered a plenitude of both. Typically, however, he broadcast his nasty deeds and kept his good ones hidden, as if he were afraid to be accused of something so common as sentimentality. “Knowing George was a career in itself,” said Phoebe Pierce, who worked for him at the end of the forties. “It was not that he was malicious. He was just incapable of saying anything good about anyone. Yet even while he was being bitchy, he could be doing something very nice. His mean facade concealed kindness and good judgment.”

  Truman did not make a career of it, but, fascinated by George’s odd balance of brilliance and triviality, good and bad, he did make a hobby of knowing him. Just as George saw something of himself in Truman, Truman doubtless detected a hint of what he might become in George, the monster in middle age. Evil has its attraction, and George showed him subterranean vistas that he had not known existed. When the two of them were together, Truman even took on some of his teacher’s mannerisms, in the same way that a man with a mynah-bird ear unconsciously imitates the accent of the person he is with. Gossiping about mutual friends, for instance, he would become uncharacteristically mean-spirited, much as George was, and even slow his normal torrent of excited words to the trickle of a drawl, which is how George talked. “George brought out the worst in Truman,” said Pearl Kazin, “and I didn’t enjoy seeing them together.”

  One trick Truman learned from George is that the surest way to find out a secret is to tell one—your own, if no one else’s. It seems impolite, even churlish, to keep secrets yourself when the person across the table has just discarded the last veil and left himself naked; self-revelation, or, better still, self-mortification can be used as a kind of bait to forge a bond of instant intimacy. That was a ploy that George had turned into an art. Though he told scandalous stories about nearly everyone he knew, the most scandalous, most revealing, and sometimes most humiliating ones were always about himself. Nearly everyone, for example, had heard his favorite: when he was young, good-looking, and living in Paris, he was picked up by a handsome black man who invited him to a seedy hotel for an evening of sex. Only at the end did George hear a titter from the next room and realize that he had been an unwitting actor in a sex show—an audience in the adjoining room had watched the entire performance through a false mirror.

  On the day he met Truman, he established just such a bond by spending most of a lunch giving an account of his sexual history. “He claimed that there wasn’t a single man he hadn’t been to bed with in his hometown in Michigan,” said Truman, “and he told me all about the affair he was then having with a French sea captain. George made up so many stories—but perhaps they were all true.” After that lunch, George occasionally invited him to parties in his shabby brownstone on East Eighty-sixth Street. Stuffed, basement to rafters, with Victoriana, the house could not have been called attractive. Yet there, seated on a hard and lumpy couch or standing beside a hideous statue, could be found some of the most interesting people alive, everyone from Auden and Jean Cocteau, to Dorothy Parker and Gypsy Rose Lee, who was, so they both said, George’s fiancée. “The people George knew were a legion,” said the poet Howard Moss. “You wouldn’t have been surprised if Shakespeare suddenly appeared out of another room.”

  They were one of a kind, Truman and George, but although they saw each other frequently in the next several years, they were never comfortable friends. George made it plain that Truman was Rita Smith’s discovery, not his, and that he did not share her enthusiasm for his work. With uncharacteristic obtuseness—at the time he said it, Truman was only twenty-two—he even declared that Truman’s “slender talent” had already been completely realized. Beyond his habitual sarcasm, there was a hint of envy in his comments, as if Truman were gaining the acclaim George himself would have received had he not suffered from writer’s block. In fact, George had, or was to gain, more respect for Truman’s writing than he let on. A decade later, when he was living in Europe, he asked a friend to airmail only two articles from the United States; both were by Truman.

  Truman’s feelings about George were equally ambivalent. He acknowledged his brilliance, but it was not in Truman’s nature to forgive his slights. If revenge were needed, however, he finally achieved his in 1976 when he used George, who by then had been dead for nearly twenty years, as the model for an extraordinarily unpleasant character, Turner Boatwright, in his stories “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud.”

  A much closer friend was Leo Lerman, who, on the surface, was so much like George that George’s friends called him the “fake George Davis.” Truman met him in the fall of 1945 at Mary Louise’s, sat quietly through dinner, and then, hiding on the stairs as Lerman was leaving, jumped onto his shoulders. “It was spectacular in a truly Truman way,” said Lerman, “and it should have warned me about him for the rest of my life. It didn’t.” Despite that bruising introduction, they became warm friends. Since Leo lived only a block from the Capote apartment, they saw each other almost daily. When Leo was sick, Truman went over in the morning, lit his gas stove—Leo had a morbid fear of lighting fires—and made his coffee. In exchange, Leo offered Truman refuge from Nina, who was drinking even more than she had in Greenwich. “Nina sometimes became rather violent when she was drinking,” Leo said. “One time she threw an enormous quantity of Truman’s letters out the window onto Park Avenue. Another time he suddenly appeared in the middle of the night and said, ‘She’s breaking the china!’ When he just couldn’t stand it any longer, he would fly around the corner, climb up all my stairs, and sleep on my couch.”

  Ten years older than Truman, tall, with a bald head and a long beard that already gave him the look of a middle-aged rabbi, Leo had started out as an actor, turning to writing only after a car accident destroyed his looks. After that his life did indeed parallel Davis’ in many ways. He also did most of his work for the fashion magazines, he also loved to gossip, and he also stuffed his apartment with Victoriana. Finally, perhaps the most persuasive parallel of all, he also gave parties that attracted the celebrated.

  The similarities were all on the surface, however; the differences, profound. Leo had very little of Davis’
talent, but he also had very little of his malice. Whereas George was surrounded by a halo of boredom, as if he thought life an overrated play that did not deserve its good reviews, Leo was a gusher of praise and enthusiasm, a magpie of a man who was fascinated, at least briefly, by nearly everything. His real gift was neither writing nor editing, but his ability to spot what was in vogue and whose star was rising—or setting. “He knew without a doubt the precise moment when the James ‘revival’ went into decline,” was the way Pearl Kazin described a fictional character many people assumed was modeled on Leo, “that Stendhal was old hat, Cocteau a bore, and Genet the newest freshest genius of them all. Never less than fully informed, he was always more than certain when what would happen, and where next.”

  Much of that information Leo gathered at his Sunday-night parties, which were a New York institution throughout the forties. Taking a perverse pride in being able to attract people despite the lack of the usual amenities, he served nothing but the kind of cheese usually found in mousetraps and offered nothing to drink but jug wine, so bad, he liked to brag, that wise people refused to touch it. Still they came: playwrights, poets, and novelists, Broadway stars and movie stars, ballerinas and chorus boys—almost anyone, in fact, who could survive the alpine climb up four flights of stairs. One man, who was thought to live in a cave in Central Park, always came early, gobbled a mound of the mouse cheese, spilled some red wine down his throat, and hastily departed. Another regular, a woman whose identity was equally mysterious, always wore the same Chinese dress and coolie hat, giving birth to jokes that when she was not at Leo’s, she was pulling a rickshaw along Fifth Avenue.