Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  19

  WHEN he was not jousting with Gore or adding new names to his address book, Truman continued in much the accustomed pattern. He still labored over Other Voices, still worried about Nina, who had finally turned to Alcoholics Anonymous for help with her drinking. After giving up his rooms in Brooklyn for a small flat on Second Avenue, he saw even more of such old friends as Mary Louise Aswell, Leo Lerman, Phoebe Pierce and Andrew Lyndon, who had moved to Manhattan to be with his new lover, a rising young photographer named Harold Halma. None of them had much money, and rather than go out, they frequently ate dinner at one or another’s apartment—at Andrew’s most often, in grateful deference to Harold’s culinary skills. “Well, is he taking all of his meals over there?” an exasperated Nina finally asked Andrew, after Truman had skipped several dinners at 1060. Truman had accepted, however reluctantly, Newton’s singular need for solitude, and approximately twice a month they joined each other for long and happy weekends. Come summer, they planned to spend several unbroken weeks together, as they had at Yaddo, and in March Truman signed a two-month lease on a house in Nantucket. “It sounds charming, and I can think of no more attractive scene or circumstance for our summer together,” wrote Newton. “How I long for June to come!”

  Taking Andrew with him, Truman arrived on the island first, on Tuesday, June 10, and telephoned Newton with an enthusiastic description of the house, which was comfortable but otherwise nondescript, filled with the dilapidated wicker furniture peculiar to rented summer cottages. Newton came a week later, and almost a year to the day after they had met, they attempted once again to close that magic ring around them.

  Mornings they all worked: Truman on Other Voices, which was nearing completion, Newton on his Melville biography, and Andrew on a short story. Afternoons, depending on the weather, Truman and Andrew sunbathed and swam; Newton sometimes joined them, but more often he stayed in the house and relaxed with what he considered light hammock reading: Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Don Quixote, Pascal, Schopenhauer, and Shakespeare. Evenings they drank Manhattans or martinis before going off to dinner in Siasconset, the nearby town. After dinner they returned home, talked for an hour or two, then headed early to bed. Occasionally they went to the movies or exchanged visits with another group congregating around Leo, who had rented a converted Coast Guard station at Quidnet, a forty-five-minute walk down the beach. Over the Fourth of July holiday they entertained Barbara Lawrence and Mary Louise, who was preparing to return with her two children at the end of the month. Aside from those small diversions, nothing interrupted their placid routine, and their first few weeks on the island were both peaceful and productive. “We are keeping a regular schedule of work, and I am getting a tremendous lot done,” Truman told Mary Louise. “A few weeks more, and the book will be finished. Can you believe it?”

  Living at 1060 had inured him to noise, and, unlike many writers who need a still, quiet place in which to work, or a special desk or particular chair, Truman could write almost anywhere, under almost any circumstances. On Nantucket he wrote in bed, which was his usual custom, allowing nothing to distract him during those sacred hours before noon. “‘To watch Truman concentrate is one of the most frightening sights of the twentieth century,’ Tennessee once remarked, and I could see what he meant,” said Andrew. “He would clench his hands, grit his teeth, and squint his eyes so hard that he would cause a muscle to flick on his cheekbone. He could concentrate through anything. A bomb going off in the next room wouldn’t have caused him to blink an eyelid.” Andrew and Newton received daily, sometimes hourly, reports on his book’s progress; eager for a response, he would often stop at the completion of a paragraph and read it aloud. Three days after Newton arrived, Truman finished his next-to-last chapter and read it to them; then, without pausing for a moment’s breath, he began his run to the finish line, starting the final chapter the following morning.

  He knew how his book would end: indeed, one of his compulsions as a writer was his need to know how a book or a story would end before he could begin. Having a conclusion in mind was not the same as having it on paper, however, and the final chapter of Other Voices proved unexpectedly obstinate. The book that had leaped from a “creative coma” on a frosty December afternoon in Alabama two and a half years earlier slowed to a crawl during those warm summer mornings at ‘Sconset. “These last few pages! Every word takes blood,” Truman wrote Linscott. “I don’t know why this should be, especially since I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  As he was agonizing over those last few pages—twenty-nine pages, ultimately—Newton, who had read the rest of the novel bit by bit over the preceding year, went back to the beginning and started all over again, so that he could view it as a whole, with the eye of a critic rather than a lover. He made “some small corrections,” he told his diary, probably in spelling and grammar, and methodically jotted down his observations. He apparently did not suggest major changes, but it is probable, given his acute literary intelligence, that he was helpful nonetheless, if only in pointing out the weak spots that bedevil almost any long piece of prose. Yet on July 30, the day Newton left and Mary Louise and her children arrived, Truman was still wrestling with that final obdurate chapter. Mary Louise was upstairs when he wrote the last words on August 11. “Truman’s little voice came floating up,” she recalled, “and he said, ‘I’ve finished!’” They danced a celebratory jig, and that night Newton was pleased to note: “T.C. called me just after lunch to tell me the great news that he had just finished his book.”

  The magic ring closed only briefly around them that summer. Deprived of his baths of solitude and made nervous by unfamiliar faces, Newton suffered bouts of anxiety and depression. Andrew moved over to Leo’s establishment when Harold Halma came to the island July 9, but four days later Newton’s tranquility was shattered again when he and Truman welcomed two new and lively guests, Christopher Isherwood and his lover, Bill Caskey. Soon Newton was complaining to his diary: “A difficult day owing to my jitters—guest trouble.”

  The blame belonged to Truman, who, without consulting him, had impulsively issued the invitation in May. An expatriate Englishman who lived in California, Isherwood was visiting Random House when his friends there, invoking the hallowed name of Proust, bragged about “this remarkable young writer” they wanted him to meet. “I thought, ‘Ha! Just another young writer,’” said Isherwood, “when this extraordinary little figure came into the room with his hand raised rather high, possibly indicating that one should kiss it. My first reaction was ‘My God! He’s not kidding!’ But then I realized that though he was putting on an act, it was an act that represented something very deliberate and quite genuine. Something happened which one wishes occurred far more often in life: I loved him immediately. We hadn’t been talking for more than a few minutes when he invited me to spend some weeks on Nantucket. I went back to Bill Caskey and said: ‘The most astounding thing has happened. I’ve done something I never, never have done before. I’ve accepted an invitation from a complete stranger for both of us to stay with him. When you see him, I think you’ll know why.’ Bill met him and had exactly the same reaction. We were both delighted with him. He was perfectly cool-headed, but at the same time he was a sort of cuddly little koala bear.”

  Truman was no less delighted with Isherwood, the author of Goodbye to Berlin, the creator of the irrepressible Sally Bowles, and the storyteller who, in Somerset Maugham’s opinion, held “the future of the English novel in his hands.” His company was much sought after by younger writers, who hoped that he might confide in them some of the secrets of their craft, and who breathlessly quizzed him, as Truman did, about the English literary world and the famous writers he had known. Truman was undoubtedly thrilled at the prospect of having such a literary celebrity as his guest, but knowing Newton, he must also have known that he would cause him pain and anxiety when he issued the invitation that brought Isherwood and his friend to ‘Sconset on July 13.

  Although the mornings wer
e still dedicated to work, the afternoons and evenings were suddenly alive with the activity Truman thrived on—and Newton so profoundly detested. Looking much younger than forty-two, Isherwood was still the “appreciative merry little bird” that Virginia Woolf had called him ten years earlier. Caskey, a good-looking American in his mid-twenties, was just as merry, with an uninhibited, loose-tongued sense of humor that often shocked staider folk. When the three happy spirits of the Capote household combined with those in Leo’s house, the adult world was banished, and Nantucket became a boys’ camp from which all the counselors had mysteriously disappeared. As always, Truman was the ringleader, the one who decided what they should do, and at his direction they made daily trips to the beach, took bicycle tours around the island, and played hide-and-seek and various other childhood games.

  Nearly everything they did was too silly for Newton, certainly, who remained “very much in the background, rather like a tutor,” said Caskey. He never accompanied them to the beach, and he hid in the house more and more, sometimes scrambling eggs for himself so that he did not have to take part in their long, laugh-filled dinners. Yet, ironically, he too reverted to childhood, which for him had meant only misery and humiliation: locking himself inside the house with his books while everyone else was outside having fun was exactly what he had done as that misbegotten boy in Indiana. “I stay here & mope,” he disconsolately told his diary on July 15. Even after Isherwood and Caskey had gone, he was jumpy, counting the hours until he would be once again safely encased behind his bookcases at Smith. “I am uncontrollably eager to get back to Hamp this week and dig my way in at the office for a long, steady, uninterrupted spell of work on the [Melville] book, such as I can only do there at home, and must do, if the goblins are not to get me,” he wrote Mary Louise just before he departed the island. “It’s been a wonderful outing down here,” he added politely, “but I don’t want to spend ages in Purgatory on the ledge of Sloth.”

  Truman returned to New York four days after completing Other Voices, and a few days later he also traveled to Northampton, where he helped Newton celebrate his forty-seventh birthday. “Very happy owing to T.C.’s being here” was how Newton recorded the date. “Supper here—with cake and candles.” A month later another candle-studded cake was placed on that table for Truman’s birthday, his twenty-third. So went the autumn, with the two of them quietly resuming their New York–Northampton shuttle after their long and, for Newton anyway, not altogether successful summer on Nantucket.

  The only real excitement that fall was an impromptu evening of farce in late November, when Truman took a small party, including Andrew, Newton, and Phoebe, up to Harlem for the Celebrity Club’s annual drag dance. It was always one of the best shows of the year, and things proceeded in their usual amusing fashion—“The queens all flamed like Marie Antoinette,” said Andrew—when another uniformed contingent, dressed in policeman’s blue, burst through the doors. “A raid! A raid!” screamed the drag queens, lifting their gowns as they sprinted toward the exits. “Oh, my reputation, my reputation,” moaned Newton, who imagined his name spelled out in the next morning’s headlines. “Your reputation isn’t worth a damn if you’re caught up here, honey,” Phoebe said to herself as Truman’s band of revelers fought their way to the door. Only when they were safely outside did they learn that it had not been a raid at all and that the police were merely checking for violations of the fire code. But when they regrouped to head back downtown, they could not find Newton, who had disappeared in the panic—some suspected that his fright had already driven him halfway to Northampton. Going back inside to search for him, Truman discovered him hiding in a telephone booth. “Do you think it’s all right to come out?” he fearfully asked as Truman pulled him out. Even by his standards, Newton’s account of the night was a masterpiece of understatement. “To Blackie’s (the Celebrity Club) in Harlem, which we have to leave in a hurry at midnight,” he wrote in his diary.

  Relieved of the burden of working on his book, Truman accepted an assignment that fulfilled at least one of the ambitions he had harbored in Greenwich: Vogue asked him to fly to California to take a fresh look at an old subject, Hollywood, and write the same kind of nonfactual, impressionistic piece he had written about New Orleans for Harper’s Bazaar. He made his pilgrimage to the Hollywood shrine in early December and was pleased to discover that at least in some ways it was just as he had imagined. “I’m the only person of any sex whatever who’s not being kept in this place,” he breezily wrote Andrew. “And you wouldn’t believe what they think worth keeping in Southern California!”

  Oona O’Neill, who was now Mrs. Charlie Chaplin, gave a party for him, and Joan Crawford, “the fabled Miss C.,” as he discreetly disguised her in print, invited him to lunch. Dressed in a housecoat, with no makeup and her hairpins dangling loosely, Crawford “skipped like a schoolgirl across the room,” apologizing for keeping him waiting—she had been upstairs making the beds. Katherine Anne Porter, who was moonlighting as a screenwriter, cooked dinner for him at her apartment in Santa Monica. “Still on the prowl for celebrities, he couldn’t have been in a more promising ambience,” Porter sourly recalled, forgetting all their good times at Yaddo. “He was surrounded by famous people he had always wanted to know. And he was determined to meet them.” Meet them he did during his two busy weeks, and Porter offered an equally acerb, but probably accurate account of one of their conversations:

  “Guess who I had lunch with yesterday?” Truman asked. “In the star’s dining room, I’ll have you know.”

  “I can’t possibly imagine, Truman, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “Well, it was Greta Garbo herself, and she was perfectly delightful.”

  “How wonderful. But how did you manage this magnificent coup?”

  “Well, I’ve got my ways, Katherine Anne. I’ve got my ways.”

  That encounter with the great Garbo had magically lengthened into seven full days when it came time to describe it to his New York friends. “I spent the first week with Greta Garbo and the second week with Charlie Chaplin,” he informed Cerf, who, star-struck himself, believed every word.

  Nineteen forty-seven ended for him, as it began, in Northampton, and on Christmas Eve, just two days after his return from Hollywood, he yet again made that familiar journey north from Grand Central. Unlike the previous New Year’s, the beginning of 1948 truly marked a turning in his life. Random House had begun shipping Other Voices to the stores while he was in California, and reviewers were at last able to read and judge the first book of the most famous unpublished novelist in America. “[Truman’s] novel comes out in mid-January,” Newton wrote Granville Hicks. “Something of an Event, inevitably, and one hopes that the publishers and others have not Built it Up to a dangerous hubristic extent. All those New York gents (and ladies) will destroy him if they can—destroy him as a writer, I mean—but my impression is that they will have real difficulty in doing so. He has a kind of toughness they may not suspect.”

  20

  “Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons,” Truman wrote a quarter of a century later, “an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.” Self-deception perhaps, unpardonable no, and the middle-aged man who pronounced that judgment was too severe on the young author who produced a work of such extraordinary power and intensity. Indeed, it was his good fortune that he was blind, at least on the conscious level, to what he was doing. Self-consciousness would have stilled his hand helplessly above the page if he had realized that he was in fact writing not just a novel, but his psychological autobiography: charting, under the guise of fiction, the anguished journey that ended in his discovery of his identity as a man, as a homosexual, and as an artist.

  His self-deception is understandable, because on the surface there are only a few similarities between the
course of his own life and the gothic plot of his book. His hero is thirteen-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, who, after his mother dies, is sent from New Orleans, where he has grown up, to live in an isolated plantation house with his father, whom he has never seen and whose last name, Sansom, he does not even bear. As the book begins, he makes his way to Noon City, the town nearest the plantation. There he is met by an ancient black retainer, Jesus Fever, whose mule-drawn wagon carries him, as if in a dream, along dark and lonely country roads to Skully’s Landing, the house in which his father resides.

  The remnant of what once was a great mansion, Skully’s Landing is a place outside time, ruled by decadence and decay. There is neither electricity nor running water, and five white columns, the only reminders of a burned-down wing, give the garden “the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin.” The only occupants are Joel’s sharp-tongued stepmother, Miss Amy; her effeminate, narcissistic cousin, Randolph; and Joel’s father, who, despite Joel’s inquiries, remains mysteriously out of sight. All those who live in and near the Landing are in some way abnormal and even grotesque: the twins from a neighboring farm, feminine but prissy Florabel and her wild tomboy sister, Idabel; dwarfish Jesus Fever, who has a touch of the wizard in his century-old eyes; his granddaughter, Zoo, whose giraffelike neck displays the knife scar her bridegroom gave her on their wedding night; and Little Sunshine, a black hermit who makes his home in the swamp-shrouded remains of a once fashionable resort, the Cloud Hotel. Most disturbing of all to Joel is the apparition of a spectral face he sees peering at him from a top-floor window, a “queer lady” wearing a towering white wig with “fat dribbling curls,” like a countess at the court of Louis XVI.