by Ned Rorem
But the nature of our rapport was to sour horridly.
On the eve of my fortieth birthday in 1963 Glenway Wescott gave a dinner party. There were five of us, with Truman doing most of the talking. Luridly he recalled his recent stint in Kansas, detailing for our amazement the qualities of mind and body of two young murderers (one of whom he was clearly in love with) standing trial there. He was making a book out of it—a nonfiction novel, he called it—“but it can’t be published until they’re executed, so I can hardly wait.” Truman’s position vis-à-vis those poor boys was admittedly unprecedented; he’d spent more than a year living near them on death row (and would eventually return to Kansas to witness their execution). Still, I remember asking myself later that night if he had quite the right attitude. Did he believe what he said? Or was I—as he called me, when I objected to his repeated use of the word “nigger”—a hick, who missed the finer points. (Truman was not a racist, but he did possess a personal vocabulary.)
On 14 April 1965, Patrick Smith and Richard Hickock were hanged. Immediately The New Yorker, in four long installments, published Capote’s account which came out as a book at the end of the year under the title In Cold Blood. Even before the first printing the author was said to have earned, with subsidiary rights, etc., two million dollars. In February of 1966 I sent this letter to The Saturday Review which printed it:
Capote got two million and his heroes got the rope. This conspicuous irony has not, to my knowledge, been shown in any assessment of In Cold Blood. That book, for all practical purposes, was completed before the deaths of Smith and Hickock; yet, had they not died, there would have been no book. The author surely realizes this, although within his pages it is stated that $50,000 might have saved them—that only the poor must hang.
Auden, in his libretto Elegy for Young Lovers, portrays a poet who, for reasons of “inspiration,” allows two people to perish, and from this act a masterpiece is born.
Now I am suggesting no irresponsibility on the part of Capote other than as a writer: I am less concerned with ethics than with art. Certainly his reportage intrigued and frightened me, and certainly he presented as good a case against capital punishment as Camus or Koestler. But something rang false, or rather, didn’t ring at all. His claim to an unprecedented art form gives cause to wonder.
An artist must, at any cost, expose himself: be vulnerable. Yet Capote the man, in his recent work is invisible. Could it be that, like the Ortolan-eaters so admirably depicted in Janet Flanner’s recent Paris Journal, he is hiding his head in shame?
(The Ortolan reference is to the tiny yellow sparrows which, according to old French engravings, are roasted alive and consumed, bones and all, “with napkins hoisted like tents over [the eaters’] heads to enclose the perfume, and maybe to hide their shame.”) A month later Kenneth Tynan took up my tack in the New York Post, Truman retaliated—and became more famous. I was not invited to his fabulous party at the Plaza, the high point of which was reportedly the entrance, not of such guests as Tallulah Bankhead or Candice Bergen or Janet Flanner herself, but of the law enforcement contingent from Holcomb, Kansas.
In 1967 I and three other composers were honored at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I duly noted the occasion in my diary, and concluded the entry thus:
What I shall remember, however, is not the glamour of the ceremonies proper but the appearance during the earlier informal festivites of Truman Capote, with dark blue shirt and coral tie, as he approached me with an uncharitable glint in his eye. Beginning softly, he crescendoed to a point where a crowd gathered, and finished off with frenzy: “I’ve liked what I’ve read of yours lately, Ned, etc. etc., I didn’t see it, but friends told me you’d written something in Saturday Review against my book. Now I worked hard. You didn’t go through what I went through. I produced a work of art, and you have no right to attack it.…” This! twenty-eight months after the fact.
Anyone has the right to attack a work of art, especially when the work is self-advertised as documentation. An author who claims his facts are unassailable because they’re art wants it both ways: Don’t hit me, I’m a lady.
I never saw Truman again. Two years later I was doing a “signing” at the Gotham Book Mart for my new Critical Affairs. Truman was invited, and apparently got as far as the shop downstairs. Andreas Brown, who runs the Gotham, later said that Truman picked up the book, found his name in the index, read the reference, and decided not to come upstairs. I had written:
Truman Capote, in adapting for other mediums his goodies of the past, gets a lot of mileage from a comparatively meagre output. His art becomes his life. Like record producers, he glories less in creation than in distribution. But distribution is the art of today. Nor will there be, in any case, posterity for anyone.
Time passed. I didn’t think much about Truman, there was nothing much to think. He appeared oftener on the tube than in type, talking about writing rather than writing; what he declared was, in essence, that he was good and “they” were bad, but he offered no proof. I did, however, enjoy two or three visits from his biographer, Gerald Clarke, for whom I dredged up scenes of childhood. Suddenly one morning in May of 1976 a friend phoned and told me to rush out and get the current Esquire, for in the second installment of Answered Prayers, called “Unspoiled Monsters,” Truman Capote had immortalized me. (He is writing here of “the leathery little basement bar” in the Hôtel Pont Royal:)
Another customer of this bar, whom I met there and who was friendly enough, was the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, esteemed poet, a saloniste who presided over a drawing room where the ectoplasmic presence of Proust and Reynaldo Hahn were at any moment expected to materialize, the eccentric spouse of a rich sports-minded Marseillais aristocrat, and an affectionate, perhaps undiscriminating, comrade of contemporary Julien Sorel: my slot machine exactly. Mais alors—another young American adventurer, Ned Rorem, had emptied that jackpot. Despite her defects—rippling jowls, bee-stung lips, and middle-parted coiffure that eerily duplicated Lautrec’s portrait of Oscar Wilde—one could see what Rorem saw in Marie-Laure (an elegant roof over his head, someone to promote his melodies in the stratospheres of musical France), but the reverse does not hold. Rorem was from the Midwest, a Quaker queer—which is to say a queer Quaker—an intolerable combination of brimstone behavior and self-righteous piety. He thought himself Alcibiades reborn, sun-painted, golden, and there were many who seconded his opinion, though I was not among them. For one thing, his skull was criminally contoured: flatbacked, like Dillinger’s; and his face, smooth, sweet as cake batter, was a bad blend of the weak and the willful. However, I’m probably being unfair because I envied Rorem, envied him his education, his far more assured reputation as a coming young fellow, and his superior success at playing Living Dildo to Old Hides, as we gigolos call our female checkbooks. If the subject interests you, you might try reading Ned’s own confessional Paris Diary: it is well-written and cruel as only an outlaw Quaker bent on candor could be. I wonder what Marie-Laure thought when she read that book. Of course, she has weathered harsher pains than Ned’s sniveling revelations could inflict.
My first reflex was to dissolve in disbelief. My second was to retaliate, not so much in my own defense as in Marie-Laure’s—she was dead and couldn’t fight back, but I was alive and could. Still, fight back I didn’t—not because as a Quaker I was wont to turn the other cheek, but because my lawyer, Arnold Weissberger, explained that his business was to keep clients out of court; also, that the Pulitzer Prize (which came to me the following week) would deflect public focus from Truman’s bitchery.
Between 1977 and 1982 I kept a column in Christopher Street wherein the next paragraphs, separated by years and lodged in apposite contexts, glimmered.
I’ve occasionally admired the Coctelian rightness of Truman Capote’s off-the-cuff repartee, and for years have retained in my treasure chest of wish-I’d-said-thats the following from one of his long-ago interviews: “When I throw words in the air I can
be sure they’ll land right side up.” This noon, thumbing the Goncourt journals, I come across this from Gauthier: “I throw my sentences into the air and I can be sure that they will come down on their feet, like cats.”
Suicide as an art form. Mishima at his peak dies publicly for what he feels to be truth. Truman Capote at the ebb of his power kills himself publicly for what he knows to be non-truth. Whereas Mishima grows ennobled, Capote shrivels (if a toad puffed up with hot air can be said to shrivel). His sketches of others are ultimately harmless, but the unwitting self-portrait is putrid as Dorian Gray’s. All that Truman touches turns to fool’s gold. A book may or may not be a work of art, but it’s not for the writer to say so, or even to know so. An artist doesn’t “do art,” he does work. If the work turns out as art, that’s determined by others after the fact. Art and morality aside, Truman’s work can’t work. A work which names real names but whose author is fictitious? An author must be true, his characters fictitious.
Today Truman’s is a name uttered in hushed tones by the likes of Cher and Johnny Carson: he’s the poor man’s thinker, le savant des pauvres who are mostly quite rich. Not that the real intelligentsia is contemptuous, they just have nothing left to say. Truman sold his talent for a mess of potage.
On Dick Cavett’s show Truman Capote, looking like that extraterrestrial embryo from the end of Close Encounters, posits the same defense of his upcoming nonbook as he posited last year and the year before: “Well, Marcel Proust did the very same thing.” One might quickly reply: Yes, and so did Hedda Hopper. Every writer—or interpreter or conversationalist or archeologue (to avoid the word “artist”)—depicts reaction to milieu; there is literally no other material to work with, on or off the earth.
Those extracts are as much as I’ve ever said in print about Truman Capote. However pertinent, they grieve me today. Were we kindergartners flinging mudpies? Is there a special ethics to friendship with public figures? Truman was confected of three disparate characters: private person, public person, writer. Are friends still friends when they publish what they feel about each other’s professional claims or social fame? Truman hurt me, I did the same to him. Now it seems silly, benign, reparable, and it’s too late. Last summer when his picture appeared on the front page of the Times, “Truman Capote Is Dead at 59; Novelist of Style and Clarity,” I felt a sense of pride and of loss. Pride, because America cared to mourn a poet as it celebrated politicians. Loss, because, like Marie-Laure, Truman could no longer fight back.
After his death I reread most of his published work. He often speaks of the datedness of others, making his own datedness loom larger still. Of course, everything dates: Bach and Tolstoy date no less than jitterbugs and hula hoops—or you and I. Our exquisite viewpoint toward love and death this morning is, by virtue of afternoon trials, reslanted and thus dated—though maybe more intense—this evening. All things date: they date well or they date badly. I went through the early stories with the hoped-for exhilaration of finding long-lost friends. They’re very 1940s, all about coy adolescents, doppelgängers and little else. Split personality was the rage after the war. Technically though (especially the remarkable “Children on Their Birthdays”) the tales are flawlessly professional in that they’re neither too short nor too long, the sentences sound inevitable, the images apposite. The Grass Harp cloys. Other Voices holds up (maybe because it’s about queers? and they were the long-lost friends), although Gore V. contends that the most ravishing vision therein—the little country train being so slow that butterflies float dreamily in and out of the windows—is swiped from McCullers. But I never saw it in McCullers. The Muses Are Heard remains original, informative, funny. So does the 1956 etching of Brando. The rest seems dispensable. Still, what remains is his alone, an oeuvre tinier than his reputation, about the size of Duparc’s in song, Beardsley’s in pictures, Jane Bowles’s in fiction.
Jane Bowles is nowhere mentioned in the printed interviews (although Truman contributed a preface to her Collected Works); nor is Bill Archibald, who wrote the film script for The Turn of the Screw, which Truman signed for his “name” value and then took credit for; nor is Harold Arlen who, as composer, was solely responsible for House of Flowers. Like most American literary types Truman knew and cared nothing about classical music (though his instincts are elsewhere sound: “Streisand’s great fault as a singer, as far as I’m concerned, is that she takes every ballad and turns it into a three-act opera. She simply cannot leave a song alone”). As for his last projects, notably the snippets from Answered Prayers, he forever reviewed them, instead of writing them—telling us what to think instead of letting us decide. The fault with Answered Prayers is not that it’s gossip, but that it’s cheap gossip, and Truman must have known this on some level of his consciousness. We learn nothing potent about the world’s most interesting hearts and minds to which Truman alone had access, only their dirty little secrets. We never are told how the rich tick.
I weary of my efforts here. We are forever wishing our artists were something else, rather than what they are. It is too easy to say that Truman frittered his gifts away. The very frittering was his gift. The very fact of him, even in those first bright years, was never what our academics deem “serious,” but who cares for them. Like Sibelius, like Rossini, Truman ceased composing long before he died, and was what he was.
He might not be quite out of my heart, but Truman is off my chest.
Shirley Gabis, Cap Ferrat, 1948.
28. 1950: Morocco • Italy • France • Morocco
New structures can be made from the same blocks, but the blocks are all ready from childhood on. Only in childhood are we destined to collect them and pick them up.
—Mahler
Ses emprunts? Igor [Stravinsky] ne songe pas à les nier. Il est architecte de la musique; les architectes n’ont pas à inventer les pierres dont ils se servent. Ils les prennent là oû elles se trouvent.
—Paris-Match
… the power of invention seems rarely to accompany great … genius; it is the minor [workers] who conceive the brilliant ideas which they drop carelessly by the wayside for the greater [artists] to pick up.
—Enid Starkie, Rimbaud
The first month of the new decade was spent knowing I would be visiting Italy in February. Italy was the standard goal, after France, for every American on the grand tour; my route had simply deviated more than most. The purpose in heading specifically for Torino seems to have been Nell Tangeman; she was stationed there, incongruously for a singer, on a Fulbright fellowship, and longed for us to meet again.
On New Year’s day I read Corydon. On 2 January was the dancing Fête de Jésu in Meknès, after which the Royers came to dine. On the 4th, Jeannine’s birthday, with lunch at the Renaissance. Haircut on the 5th. On the 6th, Lévesque at his Hôtel de la Paix beneath the arcades, his mischievous smile and high education which he never took seriously. (He treated us all like his semiliterate Arab pupils.) Then a familial celebration of Epiphany, when Madame Royer made the traditional Galette des Rois, a Twelfth Night cake, rather dry, containing one gold ring. From the 7th to the 9th a tour with Guy of the south, the paradise again of Tinerhir at dawn with sacred fish in the Blue Spring’s source, the cliffs and gorges and the crazy café at Midelt, the trustful smiling Berber children, and the long lunch at Boul Malne with François and Hélène Rémy—he a bearded doctor, she a pregnant painter—who would become our friends. Frequently a certain Madame D’Ernancourt is noted in the agenda, but who was she? The 12th, party for the pianist Flavigny. Meetings with Lévesque’s English friends; visit to the barracks of Michel; attendance of Jean Gabin’s new film, Au-delà des grilles, pretty strong, with Isa Miranda as a French-speaking Italian waitress who serves him marc. The 17th, finished symphony. The 19th, proofread the symphony, then saw Garbo in a dubbed Ninotchka. The 20th, saw Manon again, then bought more eau oxygenée so as to bleach my locks prior to invading the Italy of black-haired males. (For years, off and on, I dyed my hair, to a point whe
re, in 1957, I wrote: “My latest affectation is to leave my hair its natural color.” That color, observed Nora Auric, was like the better Swiss chocolate.) The 21st, town of Bahlil, and cold! The 22nd, Ifrane and Azrou with the young Royers. The 23rd, “arose at 10:30, as usual.” The 24th, made a broadcast interview on Radio-diffusion Marocaine, with one Christian Houillon, handsome, of the Courier du Maroc, my first-ever live interview in French which, in a land where English is unknown, seemed less disturbing than had it been in France. On the 26th, dined in the Médina with Lévesque’s well-off bourgeois friend Jean Bertrand, very effete, whom we picked up at the Hôtel Jamai. He had visited Chicago. The incongruity of evoking Oak Street beach, so far and so long removed, did not escape us, an incongruity which today seems negligible. The 27th, Guy in Taza, listened to broadcast of my Tuesday interview on Radio Maroc at 19 hours, then to a concert of native music at the palace. The 29th, press clothes, visit to Immouzer and again to Azrou. Apértifs with music lovers, M. et Mme. Bachelet, later the strange Madame D’Ernancourt again. Ticket to Oran.