Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Carson had already been in residence more than a month when Truman arrived, and during the eleven weeks he was there—he left July 17—a score of others came or went, including several who became his particular favorites: Marguerite Young and John Malcolm Brinnin represented the younger generation of writers and poets; Newton Arvin and another of Carson’s friends, Howard Doughty, were the middle-aged academics; and Katherine Anne Porter, still beautiful at fifty-six, was the glamorous and much-admired older writer.

  Adhering to Yaddo’s schedule with as much determination as everyone else, Truman worked on Other Voices, Other Rooms, wrote a short story, “The Headless Hawk,” and prepared to return, when his stay was up, to New Orleans for Harper’s Bazaar, which wanted him to do an impressionistic travel article. During the other hours, playtime, he was, as might have been expected, the center of attention. With the tail of his shirt flapping outside his trousers, “he always seemed to be stepping right out of a cloud,” said Marguerite Young. “He walked as if every step were choreographed to some music that he alone heard. You would see him—or just the tail of that white shirt—for an instant and then he would be gone. I remember him as being absolutely enthralling that summer, high-spirited, generous, loving. We all thought he was a genius.”

  That was the Ariel side, but there was also Puck, who was the instigator of most of the amusements that year. “Spontaneous when others are cautious, he has a child’s directness, a child’s indifference to propriety,” Brinnin wrote in his diary, “and so gets to the heart of matters with an audacity strangers find outrageous, then delightful. Yet nothing he says or does accounts for the magnet somewhere in his makeup that exerts itself like a force beyond logic; he’s responsible for turning the summer into a dance of bees. His slightest movements throughout the mansion, about the grounds, or on the side streets of Saratoga are charted and signaled by sentries visible only to one another. Schemes to share his table at dinner are laid at breakfast, sometimes by single plotters, sometimes by teams united in shamelessness. There’s always laughter at his table, echoing across the moat of silence in which the tables around it are sunk.”

  Although Carson, an accomplished attention-getter herself, remained only through May, they behaved like brother and sister while she was there. Whatever he had she wanted; she wore his clothes, even his shoes, and snatched his long-tailed white shirts whenever she could. Rummaging through his chest of drawers one day, she discovered a paper that carried his original name and threatened to inform everyone that he was an impostor, not Truman Capote at all but someone with the leaden name of Truman Streckfus Persons. “You just go right ahead, honey chile,” he coolly told her, “and I’ll tell them your real name is Lula Smith.” Even Porter was fascinated by the surprising spectacle they made dancing together in the huge kitchen: the tall partner, Carson, awkwardly jiggling up and down while the short one, Truman, was doing graceful little pirouettes of his own devising. In all her wanderings she had probably never seen anyone like Truman before, and turning to Mrs. Ames, who was hard of hearing, she asked, in a voice so loud that her Southern accent could be heard across the room, “From where did he come, dear?” “From Harper’s Bazaar,” was Mrs. Ames’s unperturbed if nonsensical reply.

  Katherine Anne, who danced with him too, later averred that he was a career climber who had latched on to her because of her literary fame, but in a letter to Mary Louise he seemed notably unimpressed and, indeed, rather cheeky in his description of her. “She must be about sixty,” he said, “but oh how she can do the hootchy-cootchy. She tries to act like a Southern belle of sixteen or so. She is so unserious it is hard to believe she can write at all. She thinks I am a wonderful dancer, and makes me dance with her all the time: it is simply awful, because she hasn’t the faintest notion of how to do the simplest steps.”

  Something similar could have been said about poor Leo, who, out in the country, away from the friendly pavements he was used to, exhibited a whole new array of curious frights and phobias. Assigned to a studio away from the mansion, as Truman was, he kept a light burning all night to ward off ghosts, and once begged Truman to let him stay the night in his studio, where he then huddled in an old wicker chair until the sun came up. Sending a dispatch from the front to Mary Louise, Truman bravely reported that he himself was not afraid—except, of course, when bats flew into his room. “I simply can’t stand that cheap cheap crying as they circle in the dark,” he told her.

  The existence of spirits was a matter of speculation; the presence of snakes was not and led, indirectly but very quickly, to Truman’s receiving a severe reprimand from the ever-watchful Mrs. Ames. In another letter to Mary Louise—at the top of which he commanded “Destroy!!!”—he explained what had happened. “Well, I knew it was too good to last: I’m in trouble, and it’s all Leo’s fault. According to Mrs. Ames, Howard Doughty and I are ‘insistently persecuting’ him. See, Leo has a real aberration about snakes: he makes me escort him every day from the mansion to his studio; but he has dramatized the whole thing to such a ridiculous extent that everybody here thought he was half-way joking. So yesterday Howard came to my studio for lunch. When he left he stepped on a snake in my yard, and picked it up. Leo, who was standing in his doorway across the road, saw it, and began to scream: ‘You’re mean, you’re cruel!’ then slammed his door, pulled down all his shades, and curled up under his desk, and stayed there the whole afternoon, in a real fit of terror: no one, of course, had any intention of frightening him. But two workmen who were putting firewood in our studios saw the whole thing and reported it to Mrs. A., who promptly sent a little ‘blue note’ (all communication is carried on through these blue notes) saying that Mr. Lerman had been made ill by our (Howard’s and mine) insistent persecution. I suppose it will blow over, but it’s all too absurd for words. Leo, of course, feels very badly that he got us in so much trouble. Howard wrote a wonderful reply explaining everything (we felt like little naughty schoolboys, which annoyed Howard, for he is a professor at Harvard, and 42 years old).”

  In one of his letters to Mary Louise, Truman listed the friends he had made at Yaddo, then added, “Of all the people here I like Howard Doughty best.” He neglected only to give the reason: he and Howard had become the latest chapter in Yaddo’s long history of summer romances, and it was to their affair Truman was probably alluding when he wrote Mary Louise that “the strangest thing is going on, I’m dying to tell you, but am so afraid of putting it in a letter.” To the consternation of Howard, who maintained a public facade of heterosexuality, Truman told nearly everyone else, however. “The little one has been talking again,” Howard would grimly inform a friend who was in on his secret. Years later Truman succinctly summarized their relationship. “Howard and I just got together for sex,” he said. “He was very attractive, but I wasn’t in love with him.”

  Both statements seem to have been true. By all accounts Doughty was an attractive man, lean and lanky, about six feet tall, with dark hair, a craggy face and the aristocratic manners befitting a descendant of Cotton Mather. “He had a marvelous voice,” recalled Brinnin, “with all those echoes that take ten generations to produce.” Much of his adult life, upwards of twenty years, was devoted to a biography of Francis Parkman, the great nineteenth-century historian. Finally published in 1962, too late in his life to be of much help to him in the academic job market, his book, beyond its other merits, showed his spiritual affinity with Parkman. “Howard was prone to very depressed spells,” said his wife, Frances, who was aware of his homosexuality even before they married. “He had some breakdowns, and he had many spells of just wanting to turn his head to the wall. Ours was not an easy marriage, and I contemplated getting a divorce. But we liked so many of the same things, and for the most part we had a very good life together, except sexually.”

  If Howard had been born a generation later, he probably would not have married at all, but would have become instead, insofar as either of them was capable of such involvement, the lifelong companion of
Newton Arvin, a professor of literature at Smith College and almost certainly the strongest influence on his adult life. Even without a formal relationship, the bond between them was indissoluble. They saw each other frequently for thirty years or more and, according to Arvin’s diaries, made love almost every time they met. Though each had separate affairs, in their hearts they were never far apart. “You know how much I love you,” Arvin wrote Howard on May 14, even as Howard may have been making love to Truman. “It is a luxury only to allow oneself to say it from time to time. I am still, after all these years, incredulous that I should have come upon you. Is a completer mutual sympathy conceivable between fallible human beings? I should certainly not expect it.”

  It was at that point that Truman, without hint or warning, entered their lives, hurtling toward them like a shooting star, stunning them, dazing them, dazzling them altogether. “Have you happened to run across any of Truman Capote’s stories?” Howard wrote Newton on June 2. “The child really has an uncanny talent—almost frightening. He seems to have had practically no education except the back-files of the little magazines and is almost entirely unencumbered with ideas except on the practice of his art, but a mediumistic voice speaks through him in the most impeccable of accents. It’s a long time since I’ve read anybody with such a specific gift for writing—like a musician’s for music.”

  Arvin himself arrived on June 12 for his annual summer visit. Within hours that shooting star had struck him, and he professed himself instantly smitten, encircled by what he called the “magic ring” of love. Howard immediately decamped for Boston—whether by prearrangement or sudden inspiration, it is hard to say—and as he departed, he took with him the singular picture of his past and present lovers walking hand in hand into nirvana.

  The date that magic ring closed, which probably meant the first time Truman and Newton made love, was Friday, June 14. “I can’t down the desire to tell you, and only you,” Newton wrote Howard a few days later, “how magically the powers of nature, beginning last Friday (June 14, 1946, as I am not likely to forget), and outward circumstances generally connived to furnish the kind of medium or ambiente for this Thing that one can surely expect but once or twice in a lifetime. The weather was supernatural on Friday, and then again on Sunday, and on Tuesday too; and maybe some time I can tell you what the cool blue air, and the green light, and then a certain wash of moonlight falling into this room of mine as the twilight fused imperceptibly into it—what things of this sort did to my eyes and my command of speech and my senses, and my whole nature.”

  For Truman, June 14 was also a supernatural day. In a moment he had forgotten Howard’s aristocratic voice and his Jimmy Stewart looks and had fallen in love with Newton, the least likely candidate for his affections: forty-five, bald, bespectacled, slight, shy, anemic, a victim of depression, vertigo, and a score of other psychological ailments—almost a parody, in short, of the popular image of the mousy college professor. “Newton looked like a clerk, and his attraction was a puzzle to me,” said Brinnin, who was expressing a common opinion. Truman viewed him with different eyes, and saw virtues that probably even Howard had missed. “Newton was a charming person,” he said, “cultivated in every way, with the most wonderfully subtle mind. He was like a lozenge that you could keep turning to the light, one way or another, and the most beautiful colors would come out.”

  Given such feelings on both sides, there was no need for courtship, and during the next month the new lovers enjoyed the equivalent of a honeymoon, a honeymoon made more delicious still because of its surprise: it was as if they had walked from Yaddo’s broad, sunlit public lawns into the woods beyond and discovered a hidden glade carpeted with bluebonnets and perfumed by wild wisteria. They had lunch and dinner together, alone or with others, went into town to the movies, and at the end of the evening took long walks around the grounds.

  Although they talked constantly, Newton, a man of the pen, also felt compelled to put his tender feelings on paper. “But you know, dearest T.C.,” he said in one note, “that if I ever really began a ‘letter’ to you it could have no imaginable end—or even beginning—for it would just have to circle forever and ever, like a great wheel, about the one central fact, and you know what that fact is, and there are either millions of ways of telling it or only one way. I love you dearly, and if you wish, I will write that over and over again until this page is filled up, and many more pages, like a bad boy kept in after school, whose teacher (in some perverse way) wishes to make him happy instead of wretched. Only I’m not a bad boy, and neither are you; we are very good indeed, and we shall be better and better as time wears on—for we are at the source of good, and we are drinking the water of truth, and what we are making between us is purely beautiful. Is it possible to be better than that?”

  Newton had not read any of Truman’s stories—to answer the question Howard had asked in his letter of June 2—but he quickly did his homework at Yaddo and left him a note of praise, touchingly worded and elegantly phrased: “I have read three of your stories, dearest T.C., ‘A Tree of Night,’ ‘Miriam,’ and ‘Jug of Silver.’ They are very lovely and frightening and pure and tender, and they have given me a strange, beautiful experience. I respect you so much for having written them. They will gleam out in my mind from time to time for many days, and indeed much longer, like something seen suddenly and magically by snowfall or in some watery light: I have not found the right way of saying how real and yet how fantastically poetic they seem to me. A famous man once said (quotes) that there is no true beauty but has some mark of strangeness on it, and he was very right, and all good writers have always known it: you know it too, dear Truman, and no one can take the knowledge from you. It will deepen and enrich and amplify itself with every day you live, and there need be no end to what you can express for all of us of what it is to be human and afraid and in love and intensely happy. So many things! It’s all before you, and you won’t make the mistake of not boarding the train that is drawing out to your destination.

  “It would not be possible, it seems to me, for me to cherish you more tenderly, with more of myself, than I already do, but if it were possible, the reading of your stories would have that effect. Where did you come from, Truman? and how did I find myself moving toward the point where you were? It’s the agency of some beneficent geniuses, I can only imagine.”

  Newton had only one worry while he was imbibing the water of truth, and that was that in falling in love with Truman he had injured Howard. “As for T.C. I can hardly broach that subject in this letter,” he nervously wrote Howard on June 17, beginning several days of what was to be a flurry of charming, richly brocaded letters between them. “My head is still whirling with quite a different kind of vertigo from that I complained of to you, and I am too deeply moved to talk about it easily. The important thing for the moment is that this should not in some clumsy way be made still another source of anxiety and confusion to you.”

  Whatever he felt, Howard could scarcely have answered more graciously than he did two days later: “You dope—how can you think for a moment that a rapprochement (to use a very feeble word for what I surmise to be the circumstances) between you and T.C. would cause me the least iota of anxiety or confusion—would be the source to me of any emotion but the warmest delight? I have never in my life known in anyone, man, woman, or child, such delicacy and purity of feeling as is the native habitus of T.C.’s psyche, nor can I think of anyone on the wide earth except you, my dear, more capable of responding to these feelings as they should be responded to or with a more abundant store of wisdom and experience to enrich and deepen them. God’s benison on you both.”

  Thus assured, Newton felt emboldened to describe the heavenly rapture he was experiencing inside what he called a magic ring. “You are very understanding and imaginative, as I secretly knew you would be about T.C. and me,” he answered, with obvious relief. “I only dislike so intensely the thought of giving you a moment’s pain that I ran out ahead of the unreal danger
as if that would avert it! Now that I both intuit and ‘know’ how unreal it is, nothing is left—absolutely nothing, as it seems to me—to jar or discolor the unbelievable perfectness of this experience. I am hopelessly contradictory about it: at one moment I feel that I must tell everyone within hearing distance how preternaturally happy I am, and why; at another moment, I feel that I cannot and will not say one word about it to any mortal soul, even you. And for the time perhaps this latter is the wiser impulse.”

  To which Howard replied on June 21 with more extravagant words and a bouquet of seventeenth-century poetry: “I can’t tell you, my dear, how glad I am all this has come about. It seems to me a miracle. Don’t you feel that every minute of your life is justified, all the scrupulous ‘cultivation’ of one’s sensibilities and perceptions, the keeping in trim of one’s psyche, the discipline of spirit that sometimes seems so hard until it is triumphantly vindicated by what it can bring to moments like these? And the false trails you have been up, the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t see what was good for them—and now the miracle of time that has brought forth T.C. Really, it gives me the frisson of an historic moment—a new marriage of Faustus and Helena.