Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Scandal or not, Truman doubtless was hurt by such persistent rejection from a magazine he had once revered. Although he was always to retain an admiration for The New Yorker, he was no longer awed by it, or the people who worked for it. “Nobody cared what happened outside that office. They were very strange, secretive people, like bears that hide themselves away in caves at the zoo. Shawn never came out of his cave, and E. B. White wouldn’t come out even when the keeper rapped on his door. Everyone—literally everyone—was scared to death of Ross. He looked ferocious, and he was ferocious. Even I was frightened, and I don’t scare easily. There has never been such a collection of bitchy people. They were all obsessive gossips, and they were absolutely consumed with one another. I was never gangy or very chummy with any of them. I guess one of the real reasons was that I knew they were going to stay there, and I wasn’t. It was like being in a school where you knew certain people were going to graduate and certain people weren’t. But I’m glad I was there. At that time it was probably the best magazine in the world, and working there was a hell of a lot better than going to college.”

  He thought that he was ready to graduate from The New Yorker in the fall of 1943, when he quit so that he could write full time. Manhattan was not the place to do that, however, and the Capote apartment provided neither peace nor privacy. Nina, who was still drinking, was disruptive and often hostile, moreover, and objected, even when she was sober, to the noise his little portable made when he typed on the kitchen table. Inevitably, his eyes looked south, and he returned to the home in which he had spent most of his childhood, to Monroeville and Jennie’s house on Alabama Avenue. But he could not write there either. The comfortable old house he had known had burned down in 1937, and the new one was as inhospitable as the Capote apartment. “This is certainly not the place,” he wrote Arch on December 2, in one of his rare letters to his father. “I have a cold and feel rotten, it’s so damned uncomfortable here. I think I will be going back to New York soon as Alabama is definitely not a writer’s haven.”

  Within weeks he was back in Manhattan, sorting cartoons at The New Yorker. His final exit from the magazine, in the summer of 1944, was both more sudden and more unpleasant than he could have wanted. Despite the lack of encouragement, he had been writing all along, and in August he used his vacation to attend Vermont’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Mentioning his connection to The New Yorker when he arrived, he probably gave the impression that he wrote copy rather than delivered it. That was what Robert Frost, who had reached the craggy peak of his eminence, believed, anyway, and when Truman walked out of one of his readings, the old poet took it as a deliberate insult from both Truman and the magazine that employed him.

  The insult, if insult it was, was not intentional. “It just so happened,” Truman said, “that I was recovering from the flu and still had a very stiff neck. I was sitting in the front row. I bent down to rub my ankle and found I couldn’t straighten up again because of my neck. There I was, bent away over, with my hand on my ankle. It must have looked as though I had fallen asleep. And there he was up there on the platform, reading. Being unable to straighten up, I worked my way out of my seat and began to hobble as quietly as I could up the aisle—still bent away over. That was when he decided I was sneaking out. I heard him slam the book. Then he said: ‘Well, if that’s what the representative of The New Yorker thinks of my reading, I shall stop.’ Then he threw the book.”

  Word of the incident flew to New York and to The New Yorker. Some of the women who had attended the reading, and probably Frost himself, wrote angry letters to Ross, and Ross, who apparently believed, perhaps correctly, that Truman had misrepresented himself as a New Yorker writer, demanded an accounting. That Truman refused to provide, giving the editor of The New Yorker the same stubborn no he used to give the principal of Greenwich High School. “I told him that I wouldn’t give an explanation, that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that I hadn’t been there on New Yorker business anyway.” Whether he quit before he was fired even he could not remember. Whichever it was, he left that day, and Ross gave orders that he not be allowed back on the nineteenth floor. “Truman came home crying,” Joe Capote recalled. “He was so disappointed. But I told him not to let it bother him, there was nothing to worry about. Then he said, ‘I want to finish the book I’m working on. Will you take care of me while I write it?’ I said I would.”

  12

  ALTHOUGH Truman could not have known it that day, Ross had done him a favor, an unintentional kindness, in firing him. Indeed, if the reverse had happened, if by some bureaucratic aberration he had been made a writer at The New Yorker, the result might well have been disastrous for both his writing and his career. He was only just beginning to find his true voice, his distinctive style as a writer, and if he had stayed and moved up, he might have been tempted, perhaps without even knowing it, to trim his increasingly luxuriant prose to the more muted, understated pattern favored by the magazine. Such a mutation, a kind of protective coloration, has been the fate of other spirited young talents, certainly, at The New Yorker and elsewhere; an embrace, if it comes with strings and conditions, can be more damaging than a rejection, and at that age even Truman might have been flattered into The New Yorker’s genteel conformity. As it was, Ross gave him no choice: he had to be himself, and as he turned twenty that fall of 1944, he at last began the life of a full-time writer, whose only concern, from morning to night, was to put words onto a page.

  Once again, and for the same reasons—his mother’s drinking and the need for solitude in which to work—he looked south. There was little inducement to stay in New York anyway; he had lost not only his job, but for the moment, most of his friends as well. Phoebe had transferred from Barnard to Bennington College in Vermont, and Carol Marcus and Oona O’Neill had gone to California and married famous men—Carol had married William Saroyan; Oona, the great Charlie Chaplin. Alabama may not have been a writer’s haven, but it was at least quiet and, as long as he stayed with his relatives, cheap.

  This time, fortunately, he was happier and more comfortable than he had been the previous year. “It was early winter when I arrived there,” he later wrote, “and the atmosphere of the roomy farmhouse, entirely heated by stoves and fireplaces, was well suited to a fledgling novelist wanting quiet isolation. The household rose at four-thirty, breakfasted by electric light, and was off about its business as the sun ascended.” That house belonged to his Aunt Lucille, but dividing his time, he also stayed with Jennie and with his other Monroeville aunt, Mary Ida. “He seemed happy-happy,” recalled Mary Ida. “He would sit down and talk just as fast as he could, just as I did. I wasn’t listening to him, and he wasn’t listening to me. But when he worked, he really worked.”

  The uncompleted book he had brought down from New York, the one he had asked Joe’s help to let him finish, was called Summer Crossing. It was a social comedy, revolving around a Fifth Avenue debutante and the parties she gave one summer while her parents were in Europe—the summer crossing of the title. In Alabama, however, that subject seemed less compelling than it had in New York. Seeing the stretched-out branches of the chinaberry tree, where he and Harper Lee had traded secrets in their tree house, walking the dusty-red streets of Monroeville, through which Arch had once paraded the Great Pasha, and tramping through the swampy woods around town, where he and Sook had hunted for the ingredients of her dropsy medicine, he found that Fifth Avenue was very far away and his own childhood very close, everywhere he looked, everywhere he walked, in the air itself. “More and more,” he wrote, “Summer Crossing seemed to me thin, clever, unfelt. Another language, a secret spiritual geography, was burgeoning inside me, taking hold of my nightdream hours as well as my wakeful daydreams.”

  The accumulations of the past suddenly overwhelmed him, he said, one frosty December afternoon when he wandered out to Hatter’s Mill, where he had learned to swim and where, one terrible day, he had been bitten by a cottonmouth moccasin. Deserted and forlorn under the thin
and milky winter sun, the still waters of the pond seemed like his own subconscious, holding within their gloomy depths all the days and weeks of his boyhood. Gazing beneath the surface of that moody pond, he saw the outlines of an entirely new book, a book not about the sleek and smooth world of Fifth Avenue society, which he scarcely knew at all, but about a boy growing up, lost, lonely, starving for love, in a backwoods town in Alabama. Memory crowded upon memory, and “excitement—a variety of creative coma—overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole book.

  “It was dark when I got home, and cold, but I didn’t feel the cold because of the fire inside me. My Aunt Lucille said she had been worried about me, and was disappointed because I didn’t want any supper. She wanted to know if I was sick; I said no. She said, ‘Well, you look sick. You’re white as a ghost.’ I said good night, locked myself in my room, tossed the manuscript of Summer Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, got into bed fully clothed, and with pathetic optimism, wrote: ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms—a novel by Truman Capote.’”

  Very likely, that description is a shorthand version of what took place over a period of days or weeks. No matter. The result was the same. Summer Crossing was put aside, and the new novel with its evocative and haunting title, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was begun. “It is unusual, but occasionally it happens to almost every writer that the writing of some particular story seems outer-willed and effortless,” Truman said. “It is as though one were a secretary transcribing the words of a voice from a cloud. The difficulty is maintaining contact with this spectral dictator. Eventually it developed that communication ran highest at night, as fevers are known to do after dusk. So I took to working all night and sleeping all day, a routine that distressed the household and caused constant disapproving comment: ‘But you’ve got everything turned upside down. You’re ruining your health.’ That is why I thanked my exasperated relatives for their generosity, their burdened patience, and bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans.”

  There, probably in January, 1945, he rented a room—“noisy as a steel mill,” he said—at 711 Royal Street, in the heart of the French Quarter. Streetcars clattered and tourists chattered outside during the day; at night soldiers and sailors turned the street into a raucous party. Still, maintaining the same nocturnal schedule that had worried his relatives, he worked steadily, finishing several short stories as well as the first part of his new novel. Joe Capote apparently sent him some money, but it was not enough to live on, and in an attempt to earn more, Truman turned out some quick paintings, which he, like many others, tried to sell to the tourists in Jackson Square. “He couldn’t paint worth a damn,” said Patsy Streckfus, one of his New Orleans friends. “He brought a couple of his paintings out to the house, and even he agreed that they were terrible.” Despite the hardships, he looked back on his months in the French Quarter as “the freest time of my life. I had no commitments to anyone or anybody.”

  That time did not last long. With his suitcase full of work completed or well under way, he longed once again for that diamond iceberg floating between the Hudson and the East River. Throwing away his paintbrushes, he headed north once again for the place he now realized was home, New York City.

  Several times Truman had tried to get his prose into The New Yorker, thinking it the only home for a gifted young writer, and several times he had been politely rebuffed. What he did not know was that he was knocking on the wrong door. The place he was looking for, the place where new writers were not only accepted but welcomed, was not Harold Ross’s sometimes stuffy establishment on West Forty-third Street, but a less famous, less likely address altogether: that of the women’s fashion magazines, particularly Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, which for upwards of two decades, from the mid-thirties through the mid-fifties, published the most interesting and original short fiction in the United States.

  That remarkable, but little-remembered, moment in American literary history, when fine fiction found a nest in a forest of lingerie ads, was largely the work of a man who is also little remembered, a fat, lazy, but always brilliant editor by the name of George Davis. At one time a talented young writer himself, Davis developed a terminal case of writer’s block. But the words he could not coerce from his own head he teased, cajoled, and yanked from the heads of others, as fiction editor first, from 1936 to 1941, of Harper’s Bazaar, then, for the following eight years, of Mademoiselle.

  Though the business offices of those magazines grumbled about the highbrow and often startling stories he chose, such as a Ray Bradbury fantasy about a vampires’ Thanksgiving, his top editors, two extremely formidable women, Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar and Betsy Talbot Blackwell at Mademoiselle, were resolute in their support. The publishers, who looked upon fiction and poetry as nothing more than padding for the pictures and ads in any event, shrugged their shoulders and gave in, assuming, perhaps correctly, that their readers were wise enough to avoid large and offensive blocks of type. As a result, Davis had far more freedom working for the fashion glossies than he would have had at The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or any other magazine whose primary concern was words. He was allowed to publish pieces by Virginia Woolf, the Sitwells, and Colette, to commission Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden to report on their trip to China at war, and to devote much of two issues to Carson McCullers’ stark and, at that time, shocking novella Reflections in a Golden Eye.

  When Truman started to write for them, at the end of World War II, the fashion magazines, and Harper’s Bazaar most particularly, were among the liveliest publications in America. During the thirteen years of her tenure, the remarkable Mrs. Snow, Dublin-born and endowed with an Irishwoman’s tenacity, had transformed the Bazaar from a simple fashion magazine into a haven for the new and daring, in photography and design as well as fiction. Diana Vreeland, who brought the conviction of a John Calvin to questions of hemlines and hairstyles, was her fashion editor; Alexey Brodovitch, who had designed sets for Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, was her art director; and Mary Louise Aswell, who combined a warm manner with cold and rigorous standards, was her fiction editor, as good in her way as Davis had been in his. “There were extraordinary people editing Harper’s Bazaar,” said Richard Avedon, who was just starting his career as a photographer. “There was no question in my mind that that was the magazine I wanted to work for. It stood for the things I cared about, and those editors got the best out of everybody. You would do anything for them! And because Hearst, which owned the Bazaar, was such a chintzy operation, you not only did anything for them, but you paid for it as well.”

  In some ways, Carmel Snow depended on Aswell the most. Although she knew everything about fashion and photography, Mrs. Snow knew very little about words and relied on her fiction editor to provide the best. Even so, as a devout Catholic, she was always worried about the propriety of the works she published, and she was mortified when the Post Office, complaining about a racy poem, threatened not to deliver the offending issue. “This is too dreadful,” she said to one of her editors. “I can’t hold my head up walking down Fifth Avenue.” Then, selecting the most innocuous passage from the poem—“he kissed her on the nape”—she said, “Now tell me. Just what is the nape?” After that brush with the law, whenever she was puzzled by a story that was about to appear in print, she would nervously approach Aswell. “Now, Mary Louise, I know you are a lady to your fingertips and have beautiful judgment,” she would say. “But are you sure this story is all right?” “Yes, Carmel,” Mary Louise would reply, and Mrs. Snow would be satisfied.

  For all their faults, their silliness and frivolity, the fashion magazines were lively places to work, and the contrast with Truman’s former employer was striking. If the writers and editors at The New Yorker were bears who scurried into their caves whenever anyone approached, their counterparts at Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle were energetic cubs, oft
en egotistical, frequently vain, but also intensely curious and, above all, open to new ideas and new people. “We were always complaining,” said Avedon. “But we knew that those were the golden years.”

  It was that vibrant and expansive world Truman entered when he came back to New York from New Orleans. Sometime in the spring of 1945, he walked into the offices of Mademoiselle on East Forty-second Street and told the receptionist that he had a short story he wanted to submit. “That’s fine, little boy,” she said. “Have you got your name and address on it?” His answer, delivered with serene self-assurance, was a reply she had probably never heard before—“I’ll wait while they read it”—and she immediately called George Davis, who dispatched his assistant, Rita Smith, to “see what sort of nut is outside.” Smith, who was only two years older than Truman, shyly peeked into the waiting room and tiptoed back to report that there was in fact no one there but a little boy. Davis sent her back again, and she finally approached that precocious boy and was handed his manuscript, which was most likely “The Walls Are Cold,” a short, bitter story about a spoiled rich girl who gets her comeuppance from an ignorant sailor. Smith liked it and wanted to buy it, but Davis, quite rightly, overruled her: the story was imitation New Yorker fiction without any distinctive voice, something that could have been produced by any good writer.