One of the leading characters in the novel, Jack Lovett, is in love with Inez Victor, who is married to Harry Victor, a member of the United States Senate and a onetime candidate for president, easy to believe since it is the dream of everyone who has ever had a term in the state legislature of whatever state. Lovett is perhaps CIA but not a villain, instead a realist who can say, “A Laotian village indicated on one map and omitted on another suggested not a reconnaissance oversight but a population annihilated. Asia was ten thousand tanks here, three hundred Phantoms there. The heart of Africa was an enrichment facility.” In these novels, you do not just take an airplane from Florida to Costa Rica, you board a Lockheed L-100; and in another aside, if such it is, you learn how to lay down the AM-2 aluminum matting for a runway and whether “an eight-thousand foot runway requires sixty thousand square yards of operational apron or only forty thousand.”
This author is a martyr of facticity, and indeed such has its place in the fearless architecture of her fictions. You have a dogged concreteness of detail in an often capricious mode of presentation. The detail works upon the mind of the reader, gives an assurance, or at least a feeling, that somewhere, somehow all of this is true, fictional truth, or possibility. It could have happened, and Inez Victor did in fact go off to Kuala Lumpur to work in the refugee camps. And that is where we leave her after her love for Jack Lovett and after her escape from a somnambulistic time as a politician’s wife who must say over and over, “Marvelous to be here,” and be “smiling at a lunch counter in Manchester, New Hampshire, her fork poised over a plate of scrambled eggs and toast.” That is, you may accept or allow for the aesthetically doubtful because of the interesting force of the factual in which it is dressed.
In any case, every page of the books is hers in its peculiarities and particulars: All is handmade, or should we say, hand cut, as by the knife of a lathe. Some unfriendly reviewers, knowing Didion has written screenplays, will call the frame or action cinematic. But the fictions, as she has composed them, are the opposite of the communal cathedrals, or little brown churches in the vale, built by so many willing slaves in Hollywood. The first cry of exasperation from the producers, script doctors, watchful money crunchers with memories of hits and flops would be, What’s going on here? What’s it about?
If you can believe that Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagan’s national-security adviser, could fly off to Iran, carrying with him a cake and a Bible in order to make a deal for the shipment of arms to the Contras, you can believe the less bizarre happenings in The Last Thing He Wanted. In this novel, Joan Didion has placed a woman, Elena McMahon, on a plane filled with illegal arms bound for Costa Rica, or the off-the-map border installations set up by the Americans, the Freedom Fighters. At the end of the flight, she is to collect the million dollars owed her dying father, a man who does “deals.” Collect the money and fly back, or so she has been led to imagine. In the usual percussive Didion dialogue, Elena says, “Actually I’m going right back. . . . I left my car at the airport.” The pilot says, “Long time parking I hope.” She doesn’t return and at the end of an elaborate plot is assassinated by “the man on the bluff with the pony tail”—the same sinister man who had met her at the landing strip in Costa Rica.
And there is Treat Morrison, the romantic lead you might say, who first sees Elena McMahon in the coffee shop of the Intercontinental Hotel, where she was “eating, very slowly and methodically, first a bite of one then a bite of the other, a chocolate parfait and bacon.” The odd menu is mentioned several times but does not give up its meaning beyond the fact that the parfait and bacon had bothered him, Treat Morrison. Morrison is an “ambassador at large” for the Department of State, a troubleshooter, a fixer. Like Jack Lovett in Democracy, this is another love-at-first-sight matter, and, odd as it might be, not necessarily as hard to imagine as some of the more portentous occasions. The attractions are ballads: I saw her standing there and my heart stood still—something like that. Treat Morrison and Jack Lovett are attractive men of the world, at work, as the collision of romance leads them to the forlorn, needy women standing there, waiting.
In The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion appears on the page directing, filling in, being, often, a friend from the past or a journalist on the case. “For the record this is me talking. You know me, or think you do.” Here she is a moralist, a student of the Contra hearings. “There are documents, more than you might think. Depositions, testimony, cable traffic, some of it not yet declassified, but much in the public record.” Of course, Elena McMahon is a fiction, but we are to remember the actual people “all swimming together in the glare off the C-123 that fell from the sky into Nicaragua.” Among those caught in the glare was “the blond, the shredder, the one who transposed the numbers of the account at the Credit Suisse (the account at the Credit Suisse into which the Sultan of Brunei was to transfer the ten million dollars, in case you have forgotten the minor plays).”
The Last Thing He Wanted is a creation of high seriousness, a thriller composed with all the resources of a unique gift for imaginative literature, American literature. There remains in Didion’s far-flung landscapes a mind still rooted in the American West from which she comes. When in Slouching Towards Bethlehem she visits the venerable piles in Newport, Rhode Island, she remembers the men who built the railroad, dug the Comstock Lode for gold and silver in Virginia City, Nevada, and made a fortune in copper.
More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which . . . led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living. In that way the lesson of Bellevue Avenue is more seriously radical than the idea of Brook Farm. . . . Who could think that the building of a railroad could guarantee salvation, when there on the lawns of the men who built the railroad nothing is left but the shadow of the migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children?
She is saying that Bellevue Avenue in Newport is not what the West was won for.
1997
TRU CONFESSIONS
Truman Capote
CHATTY, gossipy remembrances of the deplorable history of Truman Capote’s last years may be read, in some instances, as revenge or payment-due for the dead author’s assaultive portraits of friends and enemies, although few of the interlocutors can command Capote’s talent for the vicious, villainous, vituperative adjective. George Plimpton has spent some years tracking down and taking down the remarks of those who crossed Truman’s journey to literary fame and to his unique crocodilian celebrity. The remarks are deftly arranged to avoid lumps of monologue piling up one after another like wood stacked for the winter. Instead the voices having their say about the charms and deficits of the absent one find Plimpton at the console professionally mixing the sound, as it were. His phrase for the effect is the unrehearsed, companionable exchange at a cocktail party. This is a large accommodation to raw opinion, to mincing literary judgments of hapless inappropriateness, to character analysis sweet as peaches or impugning as a jail-house witness for the prosecution. It must be said that method and result have a suitability to the subject, since Capote himself, when not writing, was party-going, forever receiving and producing banter about feckless stumblings and torrid indiscretions.
He was born in 1924 in New Orleans and spent his early years in Monroeville, Alabama. His mother, Lillie Mae Faulk, married at seventeen a man named Arch Persons by whom she had the child, Truman. He was left in the care of relatives, maiden ladies of an eccentric turn useful to the Southern literature of Capote’s period. After a time his mother divorced and the son was brought to New York and to Connecticut, where Lillie Mae, name now changed to Nina, married Joseph Capote, who adopted the child under the name of Truman Garcia Capote. Other Voices, Other Rooms was published when Truman was twenty-four years old, and this happy beginning of his creative life was in pitiable contrast to his family life. His mother committed suicide five years later, and two
years after that Mr. Capote was sent to Sing Sing prison for forgery and grand larceny.
So Truman was on his own and on his way. He was an early master of camp flamboyance and defiance. He was short, effeminate, with a very noticeable, high-pitched, whining voice. And pretty enough, if never quite as fetching as the photograph that enhanced the cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms. It appears that with his curious voice, his ways, he decided to brazen it out, to be himself with an ornamental courage and an impressive conceit. He was a figure, what old ladies used to call a “sketch,” and smart and amusing, ambitious as a writer and as a society darling, a coquette of wit at the great tables, on the yachts, in the splendid houses in Italy, France, and Mexico. Southern accent, cascades of anecdote, boy genius, as all including himself conceded, and productive in the hours of the afternoon when the hostess was napping.
Other Voices, Other Rooms: the best of his down-home fictions, confidently written, picturing a small-town world in the South. Moth-eaten grandeur, garrulous ne’er-do-wells, colored-folk exchanges in the kitchen with the only souls who lift a hand and here named Missouri, called Zoo, and her Papadaddy, Jesus Fever, and others who enter the action with drag-queen names like Miss Wisteria and the hermit, Little Sunshine. It is a coming-of-age story for young Joel Knox, as the fictions of his closest Southern contemporaries are likely to be: Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. We might note that in these books the girls are as tomboyish as Capote’s Joel is girlish. Reading over these writers brings to mind the triumph of their contemporary Flannery O’Connor, painting a similar landscape and filling it not with cute hunchbacks and dwarfs but with predatory swamp rats, literally God-forsaken Bible salesmen intoning their handy lies in magical speech rhythms, all transcending the fictional clichés in the dramaturgy of the generation after Faulkner.
In Capote’s novel, Joel Knox, age twelve, has been left in the care of his relations after the death of his mother and the flight of his father. At last he is summoned by the father, now married to Miss Amy, to join him at Skully’s Landing, a run-down estate that will have no modern plumbing facilities or electricity, but the boy will discover that once in the parlor there were gold draperies, a gilded sofa of lilac velvet, and so on—all now covered with dust. Both the present decay and the parlor trumpery of a more glamorous past are not unexpected when the domestic scenery is to be assembled for a place called Skully’s Landing and in a Southern state.
The father does not appear, nor is information given about him until later in the novel, and then we learn that he is upstairs, paralyzed, and communicating his needs by throwing tennis balls down the stairs. The plot is complicated by ghostly appearances, crazy down-South ways of passing the time, but we can find it held together by the sweetness of the boy’s nature and a lyrical generosity about the follies of grownups. And by the kindness of the black cook, Zoo, a sort of kissing cousin to Ethel Waters in the staging of The Member of the Wedding.
The most interesting of the “characters” living in Skully’s Landing is Cousin Randolph, a connection of the stepmother, Miss Amy. Randolph, a painter and sherry-drinking idler, has a history; he’s been around, studied abroad, and while in Madrid copying the old masters in the Prado he meets Dolores, a cold but somehow overwhelming beauty, and they become lovers. The two of them abandon Europe and land in Florida, where Dolores takes up with Pepe, an impressively muscled boxer, mean, handsome, potent and violent. Randolph, in a ferocious epiphany, discovers himself in love with Pepe and filled with a devastating longing.
I could not endure to see him suffer; it was agony to watch him fight. . . . I gave him money, brought him cream-colored hats, gold bracelets (which he adored, and wore like a woman), shoes in bright Negro colors, candy silk shirts. . . .
The end of it was Pepe, drunk, destroying Randolph’s paintings, calling him “terrible names” and breaking his nose. And then Pepe is off with Dolores, off no one knows where, but Randolph sends letters to random post offices here and there. “Oh, I know that I shall never have an answer. But it gives me something to believe in. And that is peace.”
Randolph is a nice, rather lachrymose fellow, a well-born “queer” of some cultivation and too many afternoon sips from the bottle, altogether a configuration at home in the little towns, and no doubt still there. Joel, the boy, is moved by Randolph’s confession and also moved to an awakening of his own nature. In a final scene they go to an old abandoned hotel, once a brothel, and in a somewhat murky rendering spend the night together.
Plimpton has printed a review of Other Voices, Other Rooms by the majorful Diana Trilling, which was published in The Nation, January 31, 1948. Despite the “claptrap” she praises the compositional virtuosity of the novel and finds that such skill in one so young “represents a kind of genius.” However, she is morally distressed about Cousin Randolph, “a middle-aged degenerate aesthete,” and more dismayed by what she reads as the lesson of the plot.
At the end of the book the young Joel turns to homosexual love offered him by Randolph, and we realize that in his slow piling up of nightmare details Mr. Capote has been attempting to recreate the emotional background to sexual inversion. What his book is saying is that a boy becomes a homosexual when the circumstances of his life deny him the other, more normal gratifications of his need for affection.
The devil made me do it. A shirking of moral responsibility, as she sees it, and in no way faithful to the text and to Joel’s relation with Randolph. One thing you can say about Capote is that the “closet” was never, never anything to him except a place to find bits of silver cloth, old faded snapshots, love letters, and trinkets.
The Grass Harp is blown about by the winds of whimsy, here, rocking the cradle in the treetop. The narrator, again a young boy once more sent to live with relations, two unmarried ladies who are sisters. They and others spend a good deal of time picnicking and chatting in a house high up in a chinaberry tree. The tree house was fifteen or twenty years old, “spacious, sturdy, a model of a tree house, it was like a raft floating in a sea of leaves . . . to sail along the cloudy coastline of every dream.” Up in the tree you can hear the grass harp “always telling a story—it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who have ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.” The novel was composed while Capote was living in an “absolutely marvelous” villa in Sicily, named La Fontana Vecchia. It was, astonishingly, turned into a grandiose Broadway production, music by Virgil Thomson and sets by Cecil Beaton. Thomson describes the debacle:
The set which Cecil designed, particularly the one with the big tree, was so large and heavy that nobody ever saw it until the opening in Boston. There was no point in setting it up in New York for rehearsals. . . . On the Sunday afternoon before we left for Boston, there was a professional matinee. . . . Everybody wept buckets. Then we moved up to Boston, and once we got into the set, nobody out there in the seats ever wept anymore. The set was too large and complicated—very grand, something for the Metropolitan Opera.
Well, no matter. Such was Capote’s celebrity that “House of Flowers,” a scrawny short story set in Haiti, was mounted as a Broadway musical with music by Harold Arlen, set by Oliver Messel, choreography by George Balanchine and direction by Peter Brook. The A list for little Tru.
The South, the days of youth gone by, the downtown with its shops and taverns and their funny names, the collection of harmlessly deranged kinfolk, were there to be called on by the writer as a sort of spécialité, like Key lime pie and conch fritters, to be exploited again and again in holiday postcards such as “A Christmas Memory,” “One Christmas,” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor.”
Cousin Randolph, the tree house, and the rest of it will serve the muse for a time, and then Capote will bring his fiction to New York City, that place Marianne Moore, in a poem, found “starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes.” In his portmanteau, Capote will be carrying,
like some revivifying patent medicine, a very useful stimulant in the composition of the successful Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that is, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.
Into Plimpton’s time capsule we have the wish of several young, or once young, ladies to be the inspiration for the beguiling Holly Go-lightly, the center of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Doris Lilly, identified as a gossip columnist and author, is as insistent as if she were the claimant in an inheritance battle.
There is an awful lot of me in Holly Golightly. There’s much more of me than there is of Carol Marcus (who is now Carol Marcus Matthau) and a girl called Bee Dabney, a painter. More of me than either of these two ladies. I know.
Primogeniture does not adhere to any of the pals circling around the house in New York. Fortunately for the attractiveness of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), the model is the “Sally Bowles” section in Isherwood’s book of 1938. In both novellas, the first-person narrator is a young writer who finds himself living next door to an interesting young woman, Sally Bowles in a Berlin pension and Holly Golightly in a shabby New York town house broken up into small apartments.
Both girls are beautiful, each afloat and searching for a place to land with a man if not rich at least giving evidence of being in touch with money. They attach themselves to one after another, only to find themselves abruptly dropped, an annoyance from which they bounce back in a way that reminds one of professional boxers, on the mat one minute and up the next, a little unsteady, but with fist in a salute. Among the many correspondences between Isherwood and Capote we have the fleeing man’s tendency to leave a letter.
Klaus to Sally Bowles:
My dear little girl, you have adored me too much. . . . You must be brave, Sally, my poor darling child. . . . I was invited a few nights ago to a party at the house of Lady Klein, a leader of the British aristocracy. I met there a beautiful and intelligent young English girl named Miss Gore-Eckersley. . . .
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 60