The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  And so it goes.

  José, a Brazilian diplomat making his escape from Holly Golightly’s radar:

  My dearest little girl, I have loved you knowing that you were not as others. But conceive of my despair upon discovering . . . how very different you are from the manner of woman a man of my faith and career could hope to make his wife. . . . I am gone home.

  Sally Bowles gives herself a faux “country” background in a very amusing imitation:

  Daddy’s a terrible snob, although he pretends not to be. . . . He’s the most marvellous business man. And about once a month he gets absolutely dead tight and horrifies all Mummy’s smart friends.

  Holly Golightly, from Tulip, Texas, real name Lulamae Barnes, was a runaway starving orphan picked up by a country horse doctor whom she married at age fourteen, and ran away from to New York. The horse doctor turns up in New York hoping to reclaim his wife and providing one of Capote’s most inventive comic interludes. However, Tulip, Texas, does not always inhabit Holly Golightly’s conversational style—the rhythms of Sally Bowles perhaps overwhelming national boundaries. (There is a mention of French lessons given to smother Holly’s Texas defect in preparation for a film career.) Nevertheless here she is in a typical locution: “But, after all, he knows I’m preggers. Well, I am, darling. Six weeks gone. I don’t see why that should surprise you. It didn’t me. Not un peu bit.” At times her diction crosses to the Rhine. “I suppose I’ll sleep until Saturday, really get a good schluffen.”

  The two stories come to an end on a postcard. Sally Bowles, off on her amorous journey, sends a card from Paris, another from Rome with no address.

  That was six years ago. So now I am writing her. When you read this, Sally, if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard.

  Holly in a postcard goodbye from South America: “Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany’s, but almost . . . Will let you know address when I know it myself.” And the narrator reflects: “But the address, if it ever existed, never was sent, which made me sad, there was so much I wanted to write her.”

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s has its own charms, and if the astute Capote has done a transatlantic rearrangement perhaps we can think of it in musical terms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Something like that.

  Christopher Isherwood, resident of Los Angeles, was present at Capote’s funeral, and Plimpton publishes what the novelist John Gregory Dunne remembered about the moment. “And Chris did the most graceful thing of all. He said, ‘There was one wonderful thing about Truman. He always made me laugh.’ He started to laugh, turned around, and sat down. Perfectly graceful and gracious.” And then Carol Marcus Matthau, who in Doris Lilly’s deposition is definitely not the model for Holly Golightly, has some unpleasant things to say about Isherwood. (Unpleasantness about persons not the object of the enterprise in “oral biography” is a treacherous fallout of the indiscriminate form.) Truman Capote in his fiction never achieved anything as rich and beautiful as the stories in Goodbye to Berlin, of which “Sally Bowles” is only one, or as brilliant as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Prater Violet. Not to the point here, since with a few exceptions, it appears that the only “brilliant writer” and “genius” the assembly is aware of is Truman Capote. No, mournful as it is to remember, there is another writer mentioned again and again in Plimpton’s pages, a writer who, like Capote, knew a lot of rich people and who wrote something herein called “Proustian.”

  In November 1966 Capote gave in the Plaza Hotel in New York what you might call his “in-cold-blood party” for five hundred guests. As a sort of provenance for the fête, the calendar moves backward. The murder of the Clutter family, husband and wife and two teenage children, occurred in November 1959, in the town of Holcomb, Kansas. After reading an account in the press, Capote soon took off for the site of the crime. Two young men were arrested a month later and in March 1960 convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. On April 14, 1965, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the convicted murderers of the Clutter family, were hanged in the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Lansing, Kansas. Six years had passed after the conviction, by way of legal appeals and stays of execution, before the author, Truman Capote, could write finis to In Cold Blood, his account of the killers, the detectives, the town, the trial. Six months after the hanging, the serialization in The New Yorker began, and publication in book form soon followed.

  At last it was Carnival time, with beads, masks, spikes of feathers in voodoo headdresses, bunny fur, witch wigs, and a band playing show tunes. The party at the Plaza acquired the fame of a coronation for the very successful book, still a work of riveting interest for its portrait of the misshapen bodies, language, highway felonies, and idiotic plans and dreams of two savage, talkative, rawhide murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

  After the publication of the book, Capote spends a good deal of his time and thought on nomenclature, that is, his naming of the work a “nonfiction novel” and claiming to be the only begetter of the form. Sometimes in the discussion one might be reading about an eagle-eyed blind man, but that would have a greater philosophical interest. In most works of any length about crimes there is much that is not mere documentation; there is the setting of the scene: the neat little trailer before the blood-splattered walls, the dog at the garbage can with an arm in it, the handsome house, usually called a mansion, where the deceased was just putting night cream on her face when . . . There are scenes in Capote that appear to be “fiction”; one early chapter has Nancy Clutter, the daughter, at home on the day of her death, chatting on the phone about a lesson in pie-baking or about her boyfriend, Bobby. This is followed by Mrs. Clutter in a conversation with Jolene, the thirteen-year-old for whom Nancy was to give the lesson in pie-baking. The Clutters are dead, and the reader supposes the quite banal chapter to be what the author would imagine to be the actions of a “normal” family living out their last hours in Kansas farm country. Not easy to enliven since the family is denied the bizarrerie of Alabama homesteads. However, in an interview, Capote seems to disclaim imagination and to place the origin of everything in the testimony of the living who overheard or took part in the conversations.

  Perry Smith, thirty-one years old, and Dick Hickock, twenty-eight years old, are on parole from prison and, at the beginning of the composition, are making their journey to commit a robbery and kill whoever will frustrate their plan. They made their way to the house in Kansas and in the interest of “leaving no witnesses” slaughtered the four family members. The case was solved when the police were told by a cellmate who had once worked for Mr. Clutter that he had given information about a safe in the house containing ten thousand dollars—given the information to Smith and Hickock as they gathered their meager belongings and abilities and were set free. There was no safe in the house, and the cons came away with forty dollars, a radio, and a pair of binoculars.

  On the way from birth to death, as it were, there is an appallingly rich lode of archival gold for Capote to shape and polish and send to market, all of which he does with a skillful hand. The detectives on their way to pawnshops and motels and the very striking confession of the killers about their wanderings before and after, their description of their gruesome destruction of each single Clutter; accounts of the early life of the killers by their relatives and their own summations given at the request of a court psychiatrist; Capote’s interviews, his visit to the holding cells where the two awaited execution, his claim of having corresponded with each twice a week for the five years between conviction and execution.

  While both the condemned and the author were waiting out the stays, Capote made no secret of his qué sera, sera impatience to get it over with. Quite a few remembered this curious bit of literary oral history. When the book was published, it did occasion jokes and some serious memories which the pugnacious and vindictive Capote did not find amusing. On a TV show, William Buckley, Jr., said, “Well, we’
ve only had a certain number of executions in the last few years—whatever it was—and two of them were for the personal convenience of Truman Capote.” The composer Ned Rorem at a party heard Truman say about his book, “But it can’t be published until they’re executed, so I can hardly wait.” Rorem, when the book came out, sent a letter to be published in a magazine, which said, among other things: “Capote got two million and his heroes got the rope.” (Needless to say, Rorem got his in Capote’s later book Answered Prayers.)

  Party-going with its temptation to social misdemeanors was also the ground of a confrontation between Capote and the English critic Kenneth Tynan. After hearing that the execution date had been irrevocably set, Capote, according to Tynan’s wife’s interview with Plimpton, said: “I’m beside myself! Beside myself! Beside myself with joy!” Tynan reviewed In Cold Blood for The Observer in London:

  For the first time, an influential writer of the front rank has been placed in a position of privileged intimacy with criminals about to die and, in my view, done less than he might have to save them. . . . No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life.

  Truman, in his reply to the paper, wrote that Tynan had “the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly.”

  Capote never showed an interest in political or moral debate, and perhaps that was prudent since ideas, to some degree, may define one’s social life and could just be excess baggage he didn’t need to bring aboard; and, worse, boring, like the ruins and works of art he declined to get off the yacht to see. In any case, he could not have “saved” Smith and Hickock, who had confessed; the appeals rested upon legal matters such as the competence of the state-appointed defense attorneys, whose summation took only ninety minutes—the jury before returning the death sentence “deliberated” only forty minutes.

  Still, one might reflect about the book and wonder what a sentence of life without possibility of parole might have been for the execution of the nonfiction novel. Two alive central characters with plenty of time to become jailhouse lawyers would not have been useful to the author, publisher, or movie-maker. These are troublesome men. And then there is the actual hanging in the dreadful Kansas shed, “a cavernous storage room, where on the warmest day the air is moist and chilly”; and: “The hangman coughed—impatiently lifted his cowboy hat and settled it again, a gesture somehow reminiscent of a turkey buzzard huffing, then smoothing its neck feathers—and Hickock, nudged by an attendant, mounted the scaffold steps.” Wouldn’t that have been missed?

  There is a moment in In Cold Blood when Perry Smith says to his partner in the murders: “I just don’t believe anyone could get away with a thing like that.” In Answered Prayers, the unfinished nonfiction novel, using the actual names of a transcontinental cast of mostly well-known persons or, if disguised by a fictitious name, carefully designed to be identifiable, Capote made his own shackled step to the social gallows. The first of the scatalogical offenses to be published was “La Côte Basque,” a story or something, taking place in the fashionable restaurant of the same name. It is lunchtime and the proprietor is seating or not seating according to the heraldic rankings of the metropolitan scene. Capote, under his nom de plume of P. B. Jones, or “Jonesy,” is lunching with “Lady Coolbirth” in the absence of the Duchess of Windsor, she having canceled because of a bout of hives.

  Champagne is ordered, which somehow promotes a scurrilous bit of anecdote about the composer Cole Porter. On and on to the supposedly overheard conversation of two identified nymphs about town. Across the way in the restaurant, dining with a priest, is the wife who in a famous court case was acquitted of having shot her well-born, rich husband. But she is not to escape the dossier proposed by Jonesy and Lady Coolbirth detailing her rise from a “country-slum” in West Virginia, real trash with a pretty face, who went on to a whirl on the continental carousel where she was known as “Madame Marmalade—her favorite petit déjeuner being hot cock butter with Dundee’s best.” The woman in fact committed suicide a few days before “La Côte” appeared in Esquire magazine. Whether she knew the unveiling in store for her is not certain, but at least she was out of the way.

  Others were still around to meet themselves in degrading tableaux, sometimes performing under an alias which was a pasted-on Wool-worth’s mustache that failed to fool any tots in the playground. The chitchat proceeds: “Why would an educated, dynamic, very rich and well-hung Jew go bonkers for a cretinous Protestant size forty who wears low-heeled shoes and lavender water?” It seems the “porcine sow” was the governor’s wife, and in a grotesque seduction on the Pierre Hotel sheets the gentleman was proving something, avenging the old days when even the most established Jews weren’t welcome in WASP country clubs, boarding schools, and so on. The gentleman in this unaccountably destructive and self-destructive portrait was everywhere quickly identified as the husband of the most elegant woman in the city. From what we read she had been for some years a true friend, the most valuable and perhaps most surprising trophy, solid silver, Truman had won, scored in the field.

  Capote had, like a leper with a bell announcing his presence, horrified those he most treasured, and with many he was marked with the leper’s visible deformities, a creature arousing fear of infection. There is much ado about this in Plimpton: calls unanswered, intervention by friends unavailing. “Unspoiled Monsters,” another section of Answered Prayers, concerns itself with the chic homosexual world and what used to be called the stars of stage, screen, and radio. P. B. Jones is again the narrator, about thirty-five, a writer, sponger, and wit: “Starting at an early age, seven or eight or thereabouts, I’d run the gamut with many an older boy and several priests and also a handsome Negro gardener. In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore—”

  Jonesy gets around, to a room in the YMCA, “work” as a prostitute masseur, and off to every grand spot in Europe. It’s not quite clear just how a back rub could get the little charmer from the Y to the Ritz in Paris, Harry’s Bar in Venice, everywhere. But he must move about in order to reveal all the habits, hang-ups, perversions, fears, unpaid bills of the slit-savoring bitches, muff-divers, whining masochists, drug addicts, patrons of Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café. Woe to all who passed his way, with Capote toting their names, occupations, contorted faces, the passports of their public identities, material that makes Answered Prayers resemble the files of J. Edgar Hoover.

  What was Capote thinking of? At times one is led to imagine him afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, a disease described in recent years with much sympathy by Oliver Sacks. It brings on facial tics, not unusual in other physical misfortunes; the true peculiarity of the symptoms is echolalia, endless talking characterized by an uncontrollable flow of obscenities. Still, Capote knew all there was to know about gossip and understood that in a gifted form it will not be about imagined persons but about real people, not about John Doe but about Cecil Beaton, to name one of his many punitive divertissements.

  In his own love life, about which he never wrote, the record seems to ally Truman with Cousin Randolph and his sudden devastating passion for the boxer Pepe. First, the man who came to fix the air conditioner and was snatched away from his wife and children, spiffed up with new clothes, dental rehabilitation, and taken along to the great palazzos in Venice, to the yachts sailing in blue summer waters. The poor fellow gets very bad reviews at every port and perhaps to his credit returned them by taking off, leaving Truman “devastated,” in a “big collapse.”

  And there was John O’Shea, a sort of financial adviser, with wife and four children, and ready to abandon all for a luxe life with Truman. Vodka, gunplay, theft, and disappearance of O’Shea; heartbreak and atonement by Truman, who helped the O’Shea family and brought the attractive, honest daughter to stay in the flat in New York.

  Capote himself wasn’t a pleasant vision in his last years of drugs and drink, but he collected new friends who cared for him up until his death in Los Angeles, out West where new life, if you can hang on, begins. An unexp
ected fact from his last will and testament: In honor of Newton Arvin, a critic and professor of literature and an early friend of Truman and his writing, Capote endowed two handsome yearly prizes, one for fifty thousand dollars and the other for one hundred thousand dollars. They were to be given to writers of imaginative criticism.

  1998

  LOCATIONS

  The Landscapes of Fiction

  THE LANDSCAPES of fiction: houses and the things therein, nation-states and States of the Union, oceans, backland; winter nights and the old horse pulling the sledge through a driving snow, summer heat and the arrival of smothering love affairs. For the human drama, the surrounding landscape is not only field and sky but inhabits character and hangs its shadows over destiny. “Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling”: one of the most striking placements in fiction. The foretelling resonance of Wuthering and Heathcliff, the solemn musicality of the word dwelling could hardly be surpassed as mere sound. Neither name of place nor family name is consoling: a hard, dull wind, a wasteland, a slope of rock. The dramatically opposed names, Thrushcross Grange and Mr. Linton, are useful designations of a more pleasing pastoral world and might belong to anyone in the countryside.

  In most fictions, the interiors of a household are the defining landscape of pride, lack, hope, negligence, pretension—to leave aside the powerful moral and personal shape of rural life with horses, cows, and the drama of the seasons setting the scene.

  “A rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.” Hawthorne built his house and furnished it with all the things of the past and of the present, the time of the fiction. It is a crowded jumble of artifacts and ancestral treasures under a layer of dust: The House of the Seven Gables. The house begins and ends the novel and dominates the scene with historical curses of such malignant power that the original builder, Colonel Pyncheon, lies dead in an upstairs bed even as the town arrives for the housewarming celebration. It’s a feudal castle placed on Main Street, where such important statements of display like to be. Inside, old mirrors, maps, a dark antique canopy bed with “ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich, and even magnificent, in its time.”; a harpsichord which “looked more like a coffin than anything else.” Infinite solicitude by the author for every nook and cranny and, as fortunes decline over the years, a notions shop, socially regressive, faces the street at the front. A feeble commerce it is to be, but everything on the shelves is noted: buttons, a pickle jar “filled with fragments of Gibraltar Rock”; a gingerbread concoction that is a little black boy going by the name of Jim Crow, a handful of marbles; on and on it goes. A curious accounting of domestic detail, rather wifely, to furnish the fictional world of old Salem. The House is a popular story, not quite one of Hawthorne’s finest inspirations, but there he is in the midst of it. In the economy of an artist’s life, furniture, spools of thread, barrels of flour, gingersnaps may not serve as moral or social clues but as—just stuff, the bits and pieces of imagined life.