Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  The action begins when Verena, spying big profits in Dolly’s dropsy cure, tries to extract the formula from her so that she can sell it commercially. Dolly refuses and runs away with Catherine and Collin to take up residence in a tree house in the woods. Soon they are joined by two other free spirits, Riley Henderson, an older boy whom Collin idolizes, and Judge Cool, a retired judge, who has eyes for Dolly. Verena calls out the powers of law and authority to shake the rebels from their tree, but the runaways will not budge, and their leafborne raft takes each of them on a voyage of self-discovery. Judge Cool becomes Truman’s spokesman, as Randolph was in Other Voices, and his message is much the same: no matter how it is expressed, love is always sacred. “A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love,” says the Judge. “First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it—I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”

  Eventually the “five fools in a tree,” as the Judge calls them, return to ground, and having learned who they are, make their compromises with society. Dolly declines the Judge’s offer of marriage and goes home to a much-chastened Verena. Collin becomes a lawyer. He does not turn his back on the world, as Joel did; he joins it, as Truman himself had done, albeit in his own way and on his own terms.

  Just as Truman had hoped, Taormina proved to be an ideal spot in which to write. Except for occasional interruptions, such as that caused by his involvement in the Robert Horan melodrama, his days were placid; even when there were visitors, and he had drunk too much or stayed up too late, he doggedly marched up to his room every morning to work. “I hope this book will be half-worth all these sacrifices—like coming home, like being with the people I love,” he grumbled to Mary Louise. “When I think back on our years together, I think of that as the heroic time,” Jack was to remark of the first years of their relationship. “We lived a straight, almost a hard life. We were miraculously cocooned against the traveling faggots and deep neurotics. It was a soldierly sort of existence, but very, very enjoyable, because neither of us had any fear. That’s the whole thing: we did not know fear.”

  In that soldierly spirit, Truman began The Grass Harp about the first of June, 1950, completing it almost exactly a year later, on May 27, 1951. He sent two chapters to Random House in September, 1950, before leaving for Venice with Nina and Joe. While he was there, he received Linscott’s first reaction by cable: “WONDERFUL WONDERFUL WONDERFUL.” Sweeter music a writer could not have heard, and a few days later Linscott added more such cello notes: “There is a perfection about these two chapters that is simply miraculous. I read and reread and love every word.” Linscott could be stern as well as supportive, however. Hearing that Truman was considering returning to New York in the spring, he virtually forbade him to leave Sicily until he had finished his book. “Rumor has it that you plan to return in March,” he said in January, 1951. “I hope this means with the completed manuscript, as it would be a pity to leave such ideal working conditions before the job is done.”

  Truman dutifully stuck it out on his windswept hill—probably he would have done so even without the exhortation—and before April was over, Linscott had all but the last fifteen percent of the book. “I adore every word of the novel that you have written to date,” he said. “I read it all through last night from beginning to its present end and had to stop every few paragraphs to hug myself with pleasure. If the last chapter is as good as the preceding ones, this is really going to be a masterpiece.”

  That closing comment must have caused Truman some pause, for it was precisely that last part that worried him most, causing him even more agony than the final pages of Other Voices. His problem was: having placed his five free spirits in the tree, how was he to bring them down without making his ending an anticlimax? how could he let Dolly say no to Judge Cool’s offer of marriage and return to Verena, as he felt she must if she was to be psychologically true to her character? Such concerns loomed before him, he said, as daunting as Mount Everest or Kilimanjaro. To Mary Louise he confessed: “A great deal depends on the last chapter—unfortunately I am very tense with it; I feel as though I were holding my nose under water: when I’m finished, I’m going to take a long gulp of air and do a mile of handsprings.”

  With what he termed a “kind of slave anguish” he did finish, and on June 4, 1951, airmailed that much-anticipated last section to New York. “Oh Bob, I do hope you are pleased with the book,” he said. “Let me know at once.” But he was in no mood to turn handsprings, or even dance a jig, as he had done when he closed his notebook on Other Voices. “I’m relieved that it’s over, but sad too,” he explained to Donald Windham. “As the tension drains away I feel as though my head were made entirely of biscuit.” Jack had finished his novel as well, and on June 10, thirteen months after they first ascended that rocky goat path, they said their farewells to the Fontana Vecchia, where they had worked so well. Their friends saw them off at the train station, and after a four-day stopover in Rome, they proceeded to Venice, where, in the congenial atmosphere of Harry’s Bar, Truman anxiously awaited Linscott’s verdict.

  When Linscott did not reply as quickly as he usually did, Truman nervously prodded him, unable to bear the suspense any longer. “As of this moment I’ve not heard from you about my chapter etc.—but daresay I will in the next day or so,” Truman hopefully wrote on June 19. A week later he learned the cause of the delay, and it was worse than he had feared: Linscott did not like his ending, and neither did anyone else at Random House. “You are no doubt indignant—and justifiably so—at my failure to cable,” Linscott belatedly responded. “The reason, as you may have guessed, lies in the fact that I wasn’t altogether happy about the last chapter, probably because the first half was so absolutely divine that I had hoped for a continuing miracle. Anyway I wanted to wait until Bennett and Bob Haas had a chance also to read it, hoping—in vain as it turned out—that their great enthusiasm would counter balance my small lack of it. Not, you understand, that it isn’t good as a story and superb as a piece of writing. Nor is there any specific criticism to be made; just that we all had a slight feeling of letdown; of the story tapering off a little, with the end coming too soon and lacking the profusion of delight that had so entranced one up to that point.”

  A similar response, but with more detailed criticism, came from Bennett. “In our opinion, the book is absolutely perfect until Dolly and her party all climb down from the tree house and go back home. From this point forward, I couldn’t help feeling that you had gotten a little bit tired of the book and were hurrying to close it in much shorter a space than you originally had intended. Dolly’s giving up the Judge so promptly the moment Verena shows signs of wanting her back home may be necessary for your story, but will give a lot of readers, I am sure, a feeling of frustration. After all, we’ve learned to consider Verena the enemy, and to suddenly feel sorry for her and see her get Dolly back home, even if on altered terms, did not make me happy. The last chapter, when you are wrapping up the story, seemed particularly like a synopsis to me. I do wish this part of the book could be expanded a little bit, especially in light of the fact that the overall length is now little more than a novelette. We’ll have trouble selling it as a complete novel.” If Truman disagreed and did not want to follow their suggestions, Bennett added, Random House would swallow its doubts and publish the novel just as it was written. “We’ll pray the critics won’t have the same feeling of vague letdown in the last half that afflicted us.”

  Though he may have expected some reservations about the ending, Truman had not anticipated such a fusillade. “I cannot endure it that all of you think my book a failure,” he wrote Linscott. “I am stricken by such an overpowering trinity of opinion. Perhaps you are right about the last chapter. Yet I don’t see what could have been done differently. You describe
it as tapering off… which is exactly what I intended. When they leave the tree house, that is the climax of the book; but what point would the book have unless the last chapter were written in exactly the mood it is: the destination of each character has been prepared from the beginning. I think the end very moving and right. But of course at the moment I am too near to it really to know.”

  Unfortunately, his Random House editors were right. The conclusion of The Grass Harp is a letdown; it does lack the profusion of delight, as Linscott had so elegantly phrased it, of all that had gone before. Linscott was also right not to offer any specific criticism, as Bennett had done. The problem with the ending is not that it is too short or that Dolly should have set up housekeeping with the Judge—although either or both of those things may be true. It is rather that having cast his spell of fantasy, Truman has not dispelled it in a believable way. “The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this,” Truman was later to say. “After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?” Other Voices passes his test; The Grass Harp does not. Other Voices seems complete, final, and, taken on its own terms, real. The Grass Harp seems naggingly incomplete, less final and less real.

  Flawed though it is, it cannot be regarded as a failure, however. It contains several scenes of brilliant comedy, an enduring warmth and charm, and some of Truman’s best writing. His prose is under firmer control than it was in Other Voices, yet still so rich and vivid that Linscott was probably not exaggerating when he said that he had to keep stopping to hug himself with pleasure as he read it.

  “Flaubert’s attitude toward writing, his sense of perfectionism, is what I would like mine to be,” Truman said, and his approach to fiction was, like his French master’s, almost teleological: he knew from the start where his characters were going and what they would do when they got there. He could not comprehend how some writers he admired—Dickens, for example—could give in to impulse, letting their pens fly across the page and allowing their characters to wander down their own, often surprising paths. His own temperament was such that he had to be in control, and Flaubert’s dictum was his as well: “We must be on our guard against that feverish state called inspiration, which is often a matter of nerves rather than muscle. Everything should be done coldly, with poise.”

  His practice was in distinct contrast to the image he conveyed or the seeming spontaneity of his writing style. When he sat down in the morning with his pad and pencil, Truman was not the flighty-looking young man the Sicilians saw rushing toward the Americana Bar in the late afternoon, trailing an absurdly long scarf and yelling in a high-pitched voice to his friends across the square. During those prenoon hours, he was as calculating as an accountant checking receipts. He endlessly deliberated over such basics as structure and order; he could spend hours examining a single paragraph, like a diamond-cutter deciding how to transform a rough and homely stone into a glittering jewel; and, with some exceptions, he constantly and compulsively revised what he had already written. “If only I were a writer that could write, not just rewrite,” he lamented to Donald Windham. When he made a mistake, as he did in the ending of The Grass Harp, it was an error of judgment, not a casual slip caused by sloppiness or inattention.

  So much investment in his work sometimes made him even more thin-skinned than many other authors: his critics seemed to be attacking not just a few pages, but his judgment as well. It also, paradoxically, made him tougher: when he had finished with something, he was convinced that it was as good as it could be, and few could shake his confidence. Thus, after he had read his novel afresh, from beginning to end, he no longer felt stricken by the rebuffs from his friends in Manhattan. He liked it—all of it—and, holding Bennett to his word, he cabled: “HAVE READ PROOFS AND PREFER PUBLISH BOOK AS IS.” Bennett gave in with stylish grace. “If it is now in the form that you wish to keep it, it’s good enough for me,” he replied, and in that form The Grass Harp was presented to the public on October 1, 1951.

  Bennett’s generosity was in a sense rewarded: the reviewers did not agree with him and Linscott, and The Grass Harp was generally, sometimes excessively, applauded. Truman’s second novel, said the Sunday New York Herald Tribune, showed “the maturing and mellowing of one of America’s best young writers.” Orville Prescott in the daily New York Times thought it a “vast improvement” over Other Voices. “Within the slim compass of this work, Truman Capote has achieved a masterpiece of passionate simplicity, or direct, intuitive observation,” said Richard Hayes in The Commonweal. With almost audible relief, several critics praised the absence of the homosexual theme that had bothered them in Other Voices. Bennett was also mistaken in suggesting that readers would not buy such a short novel (it came to only 181 pages). Sales totaled 13,500, almost double those of A Tree of Night and triple those of Local Color. “All books today are far too long,” Truman cheerfully informed an interviewer. “My theory is that a book should be like a seed you plant, and that the reader should make his own flower.”

  27

  “TELL me, darling, do you know anything about a young man called Saint Subber?” Truman had inquired of Cecil in May. “He had something to do with producing Kiss Me Kate etc. What is his reputation—professionally, I mean. Because he has made a crazy proposition: wants to give me option money—just in the event I ever do write a play. It’s rather mad. I’m tempted only because at the moment I do need money. Should I?” In fact, Saint Subber had not just had something to do with Kiss Me, Kate, a Cole Porter musical that ran for more than two and a half years on Broadway; he had produced it, and he had come to Taormina to persuade Truman to move his tree house to a stage—to turn The Grass Harp into a play.

  If he had taken his own lofty advice, Truman would have said no instantly. He had forcibly expressed his opposition to such adaptations just two years before, in a review of a dance interpretation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. “The transposition of one art form into another seems to me a corrupt, somewhat vulgar enterprise,” he had stated sternly. “Nature being what it is, these experimental inbreedings must logically make for Cretin offspring. Why can’t a novel be simply a novel, a poem a poem?” But he had been speaking then about an adaptation of another writer’s work; now that he had been asked to do one, the concept no longer seemed corrupt or vulgar. He had loved the smell of greasepaint ever since he had played Little Eva in the fourth grade, and, like many other writers, he envied the camaraderie of those who work in the theater. Beyond everything else, he was indeed short of cash—“more broke than Little Orphan Annie,” as he phrased it—and a Broadway hit was a money-making machine that would answer all his financial problems. If Carson could turn her slim novel The Member of the Wedding into dollars at the box office, why couldn’t he do the same with The Grass Harp?

  He had ample time to answer that question during the weeks that followed Saint Subber’s departure. After their Venetian idyll, at the end of July he and Jack departed for home on another slow Norwegian freighter. In the middle of August, a few days after they docked in New York, he left for Cape Cod to spend the rest of the summer with Newton—old habits die hard. He undoubtedly discussed Saint’s suggestion with Newton, and by the time he received a contract, he had made up his mind. He signed it—and then sat down to master the unfamiliar art of creating dialogue for the stage. Thus, less than three months after he thought he had said goodbye forever, he reintroduced himself to his five fools in a tree.

  Saint wanted to begin rehearsals as early as February, 1952, which did not give Truman much time to write a two-hour play, even if he did have an outline—the novel itself—already in front of him. As he sat down to write, he realized, moreover, that he had a bigger job than he had thought: substantial changes needed to be made to make The Grass Harp work dramatically. He discovered, for example, that he had not defined Collin sharply enough in the book to make a convincing stage character, and he merged him with the col
orful and more robust Riley Henderson, eliminating Riley altogether. For the sake of simplicity, he also discarded the wandering evangelist, Sister Ida, and her fifteen children, who provide much of the book’s humor. To take their place, he gave a brief spot in the second act to a new comic character, a traveling cosmetics saleswoman he named Miss Baby Love Dallas.

  When he had finished, the first act followed the original plot fairly closely, but the second act was greatly different, concluding on a considerably happier and more upbeat note: the criticisms of Bennett and Bob Linscott had produced results they could not have imagined. “I think I do like to work under the pressure of a deadline,” he told one interviewer. “There’s something exciting about knowing you have to get something done by a certain time. It’s not at all like having months to write in.” His breathless pace eventually exacted a price, sending him to the hospital in November with a combination of flu and fatigue. But he met his deadline; in early January, 1952, less than five months after he began, he handed Saint two polished acts. “I have been working so hard and under such pressure,” he said when he had finished, “that I feel as if I were in a perpetual coma.”

  His exhaustion was physical, not emotional, as it had been during the last few weeks of writing the book, and busy and harried as he was, Truman was having fun. All the people he knew were talking about him, his name was popping up with gratifying frequency in the papers and magazines, and most of Manhattan seemed to be lining up to buy tickets for the first play of its favorite Wunderkind. Sassy was a word he applied to himself, and sassy he was. “Well,” he told a reporter who requested a description, “I’m about as tall as a shotgun—and just as noisy.” Like a traveler returning from some primitive spot where he had been required to eat tasteless meals out of cans, he greedily feasted on the rich and delicious gossip that, as far as he was concerned, was the native cuisine of that skyscrapered island. “Isn’t it extraordinary about George Davis getting married?!!!” he wrote Cecil, joyfully indignant at the latest and perhaps most curious episode in the chronicle of that singular man. “And to that Lotte Lenya. I’ve always thought myself a lad of the world; but this beats all—and is in such bad taste, don’t you think?”