Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  “Do you remember a poem of Marvell’s called ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’? The title snapped into my mind one night when we were walking by the tennis court and T.C. with that incomparable elegance and grace of movement which is sometimes his ran to the violet bed there and sitting down cross-legged began to plait violets into the buttonholes of his shirt. I couldn’t find the poem at Yaddo and just looked it up. It has some charming lines:

  Who can foretell for what high cause

  This darling of the gods was born?…

  Meantime, whilst every verdant thing

  Itself does at thy beauty charm,

  Reform the errors of the spring;

  Make that—the tulips may have share

  Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;

  And roses of their thorns disarm;

  But most procure

  That violets may a longer age endure.

  But O, young beauty of the woods,

  Whom Nature courts with fruit and flowers,

  Gather the flowers, but spare the buds,

  Lest Flora, angry at thy crime

  To kill her infants in their prime,

  Do quickly make the example yours;

  And ere we see

  Nip in the blossom, all our hopes and thee.

  Returning to Yaddo July 8, Howard was able to give his benediction in person. He looked like “a million dollars,” Newton wrote his friend Granville Hicks. But the next day Howard’s million dollars had shrunk to a few lackluster pennies, and he took to his bed. Whether it was actually seeing the two lovers together that did him in or some other emotional upset it is impossible to say; but it seems likely that despite all his generous remarks to Newton, he was more troubled by their liaison than he himself knew. How, indeed, could he not have been? “Howard was endlessly bemused by the affair between Newton and Truman,” said Brinnin, “and perhaps a little hurt.” On close inspection, even some of his gushing words of blessing reveal his ambivalent emotions. “A new marriage of Faustus and Helena” Howard had labeled their romance, ostensibly implying, in a high-flown literary way, that Truman’s youth would rub off on Newton and make him feel young too. But Newton, whose life had been spent probing beneath the surface of words, must have been a little jarred at hearing himself compared to Faustus and Truman to Helena: Helena, according to the legend, was one of the devil’s gifts to Faustus; in return, Faustus gave his soul.

  Howard did not really recover until Truman left on July 17 for his Harper’s Bazaar assignment in New Orleans. “Much of the day spent with Howard,” Newton wrote in his diary on July 18, “early in the morning at his studio, lunch there, and then the evening here in my studio. Much converse about little T.C. naturally.” They had much to discuss. Newton’s honeymoon with little T.C. was over, but his romance had just begun, and they already had arranged to meet in August at Newton’s home in Massachusetts.

  Truman’s departure had changed the atmosphere at Yaddo, and Howard and Newton were not the only ones to notice it: the catalyst for so much of the evening’s amusement had disappeared, life was duller, and those who remained behind had to search out their own fun. It was as if autumn had arrived two months early, and the leaves had prematurely turned to a melancholy gold. “Suddenly the tower room was empty, the cabals of the breakfast table dispersed,” said Brinnin. “Adrift, those of us left at Yaddo began to look for partners at Ping-Pong, Chinese checkers, croquet. Relieved of the nightly jostle for position, old friends met in an atmosphere of affectionate contempt. Truman was everywhere. To speak of him would have certified his absence. No one did.”

  15

  WAS Newton an important critic? Truman had asked Brinnin. An important critic like Edmund Wilson? Brinnin, who taught at Vassar College and was supposed to know about such things, answered yes on both counts—and he was right. Newton was not nearly so well known as Wilson, and he did not have Wilson’s enormous range, but in his own field, American literature of the nineteenth century, he ranked at the top of the list. He wrote biographies of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whitman, and Melville, the last of which won the National Book Award in 1951. His judgment was shrewd and sound, and he probably knew more about the Golden Age of American letters than any critic other than his old friend and mentor, Van Wyck Brooks.

  He was immensely, almost impossibly learned in other literatures too—he read French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and a little Greek—and one of the distinguishing marks of his criticism was his ability to place American literature in a broad historical perspective. Alfred Kazin, also a critic of considerable reputation, appraised his Melville biography as “the wisest and most balanced single piece of writing on Melville I have ever seen,” and wisdom and balance, rather than advocacy or innovation, characterized most of Newton’s writing. If he was passionate about anything, it was good writing; bad writing, he said, is a kind of immorality. His own style, as can be seen in his letters to Howard and Truman, is both lively and precise. Wilson himself praised him for his “charm of style,” adding that “among the writers who have really devoted their lives to the study of our literature, I can think of only two who can themselves be called first-rate writers: Van Wyck Brooks and Newton Arvin.”

  When he said Newton had devoted his life to a study of “our literature,” Wilson meant it in the conventional career sense; but Newton really had devoted his life to literature—so much so, indeed, that it can almost be said that he had no life outside of books. Born in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1900, he found the world most congenial on the printed page: his father, a successful businessman, spent most of his time in Chicago or Indianapolis; on those rare weekends when he returned home, he fought with his wife and made fun of Newton for being a sissy, which, by ordinary standards, he was. “Misbegotten”—which is to say contemptible—is the label Newton later applied to his younger self. He escaped East to Harvard, but once again buried himself in books, giving not a moment, as he regretfully recalled, to anything that might be considered fun. He was, in his own eyes and probably everybody else’s as well, a grind, a drudge. Although he graduated summa cum laude, his father, implacable still, refused to allow Newton’s admiring mother to attend the graduation ceremonies.

  After Harvard, he went to Smith, where he remained, except for a few brief excursions into the wider world, for the rest of his life. One of the Seven Sisters, the female equivalent in those days of the male Ivy League, Smith was one of the few places in which a man like Newton could have existed. Located in Northampton, in the hills of western Massachusetts, several hours away from both Boston and New York, the college offered a feeling of isolation and protection, which in Newton’s mind were almost synonymous. He rarely left, and even weekend trips to New York would often be cut short as he raced, in a seeming panic, for the first available train from Grand Central. “He was a fearful, timorous man,” said Daniel Aaron, who was one of his best friends on the Smith faculty. “He really could not tear himself away from Northampton; that was a bastion of safety for him.”

  Deeply ashamed of being homosexual, he made the mistake of marrying one of his students, Mary Garrison, in 1932. A large, vibrant, strikingly handsome blonde, she was his opposite in almost every way, blessed with what he called “high animal spirits.” She was outgoing where he was shy, vivacious where he was dispirited, resilient where he was depressed. Her temperament was, in fact, very much like Truman’s, and Newton was probably drawn to both for much the same reason—they gave him contact with life. Wanting to be honest with her, yet embarrassed to come right out and say he was homosexual, he tried to tell her by showing her a poem by another homosexual, Walt Whitman, which he thought would explain everything.

  Primeval my love for the woman I love,

  O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the thought of you!

  Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,

  The ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,

  I ascend—I float in t
he regions of your love, O man,

  O sharer of my roving life.

  Did she understand it? he asked anxiously, in what must have been a moment of high intellectual comedy. She said she did, and he was so relieved that he inquired no further. Her interpretation of those extremely ambiguous lines was, in fact, as different from his as his may have been from Whitman’s. She thought the poet was talking about a conflict between a man and a woman and that Newton, in his oblique and indirect fashion, was warning her that their marriage might be difficult. His real message escaped her, and the result of such confusion was eight years of misery for both of them: Newton’s bride, unlike Howard’s, did not know then or for several years thereafter that her husband was homosexual.

  “He was extremely generous and very sweet to me,” she remembered long after. “But everybody said he treated me like a child. When we got home from our honeymoon, he pointed to the telephone and said, ‘When that thing rings, no matter what anybody wants, the answer is no!’ My job was to keep people away from him and not interrupt his work. I never even knocked on his door. If I wanted to say something to him, I put a note under it.” After they divorced in 1940, both his depression and his isolation intensified. “Saw no one all day. A bath of solitude” was one typical entry in his diary. Analyzing himself with the same dispassion he might have brought to a poem by Longfellow, he explained the nature of his emotional defects to Howard: “There is such a thing as a sort of affectional impotence. I don’t mean now what is called psychic impotence or certainly literal impotence (though both or either may be involved), but, in the sphere of the emotions, a great and poignant need of love combined with an incapacity, at the last moment, either to possess or to be possessed—and again I mean something intangible. Every capacity for tenderness is present—except the one power of penetrating or being penetrated with the last intimacy.” Even in his fantasies he was by himself. Instead of counting sheep or silently reciting lines of poetry when he had trouble falling asleep, he would imagine that he was on an alien planet, and that his task was to name all the trees and creatures he discovered there. But from horizon to horizon he was the only human being to be seen. He had the entire planet to himself.

  Aside from his books, happiness eluded him, and he tried to commit suicide at least three times. One of those attempts was stamped with a particular, telling pathos. It was winter, and he walked to a pond near his apartment to watch a group of skaters, ruby-cheeked in the frigid air and glowing with the undimmed vitality of youth. It must have been a scene—and so Newton, whose mind always turned to literary analogies, may have thought too—very much like one in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger: Tonio, the writer, the observer, the eternal outsider, witnesses a similar group of carefree young people dancing—“you blond, you living, you happy ones!” They evoke memories of his boyhood, and, overcome by the thought of what could have been, he retreats to his bed and sobs with “nostalgia and remorse.”

  So it was with Newton, who at that moment probably would have traded everything he had done and all he had written if he could have exchanged places with one of those robust young athletes skating effortlessly across the ice. After gazing at them for some time, he trudged home to his apartment, opened a bottle of liquor, and played, over and over, a recording of John McCormack singing Hugo Wolf’s Ganymede. As McCormack’s rich and expressive tenor poured out, in words and music, what Newton had just seen, the glories of youth and beauty, Newton swallowed sixteen Nembutals. Luck alone brought a friend into his apartment the next morning, before they had finished their terrible work.

  This was the anguished and tormented man who came to Yaddo in the summer of 1946. “Woke again just after five,” he wrote in his diary a few months earlier. “Thoughts of death and self-destruction. ‘Morning tears.’” In May he described himself as feeling “rather blue,” and that is probably how he still felt when he met Truman, who doubtless seemed, that naughty, amusing Ganymede, to belong to the blissful race of the blond, the living, and the happy ones.

  When he was around Truman, or merely even thinking about him, Newton was a man transformed, a different person altogether from the gloom-shrouded depressive who had been muttering about suicide a few months before. He described his unfamiliar feeling of “psychological euphoria” to Granville Hicks and added proudly: “I was never more chipper in my life.” His only complaint in those waning days of July was the bittersweet one familiar to any ardent lover who is deprived of the one he loves. Although Truman was sending him as many as three letters a day from New Orleans, they were no substitute for Truman himself. Just a few weeks short of his forty-sixth birthday, Newton had apparently conquered his “affectional impotence” and with great excitement was exploring emotions he previously had encountered only in fiction. For probably the first time in his adult life he needed not just the occasional, but the constant company of another human being.

  “All would be fair indeed, on the personal plane, if it were not for this apartness from little T.C.,” he told Howard a few days after Truman had left Yaddo. “It came too soon and is lasting too long. At this stage we really should be inseparable.” He was also afraid, he added, that the Harper’s Bazaar assignment might bring illness or breakdown to his young lover, who was reporting that he and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Bazaar’s photographer, were marching miles every day in New Orleans’ tropical heat. “However, as you say, he is young, blessedly young, God be praised, and buoyant, and tough too in his way, and I am not really fretting like an old woman. But I love him so tenderly that I can’t be wholly indifferent to these possibilities.”

  Their separation only seemed long, however, and on July 28, just twelve days after they had said goodbye at Yaddo, Truman flew back to New York, raced from the airport to Grand Central, and caught the first train to Northampton. “Look where I am!” he exultantly wrote Howard that night, alone for a moment while his host was off shopping for their dinner. “Arrived today and needless to say, am delighted: with Northampton (of which I’ve seen nothing), Newton’s apartment, and Newton.” He remained delighted during the four days he was there, and on his return to New York, he gave a final accounting to Mary Louise, who was vacationing in Maine. “I had a wonderful time in Northampton with Newton. I love him most tenderly, more really than I can tell you, for he is the sweetest, gentlest person, next to yourself, that I ever met.”

  August was a busy and difficult month for both of them: Newton was unhappily teaching summer classes at Wesleyan, an all-male college in Middletown, Connecticut; accustomed to instructing women, he was finding it unnerving to lecture to men, whose faces, viewed from his podium, looked distressingly unresponsive and inscrutable. Truman’s days were equally trying: after more than a year of being treated like Harper’s Bazaar’s crown prince, he was jarred by an unpleasant dispute with the editors. In Mary Louise’s absence, they were balking at paying the full expenses for his trip South, which had turned out to be far more costly than he had anticipated, and talking also about postponing publication of the story he had written at Yaddo, “The Headless Hawk,” which had been scheduled for the October issue. The prospect of actually losing rather than making money on the New Orleans article was annoying enough, but the possibility that “The Headless Hawk” might be locked away and forgotten in some editor’s file cabinet was more than annoying; it sent him into a panic. His name had not been attached to any new fiction since “A Jug of Silver” came out in Mademoiselle at the end of 1945, and his precociously shrewd sense of how a writer should manage his career warned him that he would have to appear with a story soon or stand in danger of forfeiting the reputation he had so suddenly acquired with “Miriam.”

  Those problems were in fact resolved to his satisfaction. His finances were straightened out; “The Headless Hawk” was scheduled for the November issue, a month after “Notes on N.O.”; and he was free to concentrate his emotional energies on Newton. They faithfully wrote each other at least once a day, and for both of them the arrival of the ma
ilman was the brightest, most impatiently awaited moment of the day. “Your letters make a music like Mozart in my ears,” Newton said. In early August, Truman sent him a picture of himself as a boy and a pair of silver cuff links engraved with his initials. “Dearest,” Truman said. “The cufflinks were given to me by someone else who loved me too, dear, darling Sooky, on my 12th birthday—wear them, darling, if you can. I love you. T.” They were small treasures to Truman—Sook had died just a few months before—and Newton responded with as much gratitude as if they had been a rare first edition of Hawthorne or Longfellow. “I am still looking at the cuff links and at the little picture, my angel, with tears just behind my eyes; was ever anyone’s feller so prodigal to him as mine is? I despair of telling even you what a strange tender feeling they have given me. Could I not now, please, have one of your eyes or one of your hands by return mail? Oh, my dearest, dearest, how terribly much you signify to me. I love you.”

  A few days later, on August 14, exactly two months after that magic ring had closed around him, Newton reminded his angel how important the fourteenth day of any month now was to him. “Today is an anniversary, and I have been thinking of it for days now. I have never remembered a date like this in my life—remembered it so intensely, I mean, for of course there never was a date like June 14, before, not in this life, and I shouldn’t suppose in any.” Crowding into a few months the love letters he had not written in all the years before, he wrote again and again in the same impassioned spirit. “I woke up in the night last night,” he said, “plagued not by a nightingale but by a mosquito—and as I lay going back to sleep again, I longed unspeakably to have you there in my arms and to float off into sleep with you. Not having you was an ache of loneliness and loss.” His neat and tidy world had been turned upside-down by such unruly and unfamiliar emotions, and he half-jokingly added: “You little monster! I never planned or designed to fall hopelessly in love this way, at this time; it is extremely distracting and against efficiency; and I can ill afford the constant thought and time it entails.”