Answered Prayers

by Truman Capote

  TRUMAN CAPOTE

  Answered Prayers

  Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America’s postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (A Tree of Night, among others), novels and novellas (The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany’s), some of the best travel writing of our time (Local Color), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in The New Yorker (The Duke in His Domain and The Muses Are Heard), a true crime masterpiece (In Cold Blood), several short memoirs about his childhood in the South (A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor, and One Christmas), two plays (The Grass Harp and House of Flowers), and two films (Beat the Devil and The Innocents).

  Mr. Capote twice won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in August 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.

  SECOND VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2012

  Copyright © 1987 by Alan U. Schwartz

  Introduction copyright © 1987 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Unspoiled Monsters,” “Kate McCloud” and “La Côte Basque” were originally published in Esquire. Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Truman Capote.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Capote, Truman, 1924–1984

  Answered prayers: the unfinished novel/Truman Capote.

  p. cm.

  Previously published: New York: Random House, 1987

  I. Title.

  PS3505.A59A83 1994

  813.’54—dc20 93-43496

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80304-7

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Megan Wilson

  Cover image © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

  v3.1_r1

  “More tears are shed over answered prayers

  than unanswered ones.”

  SAINT TERESA

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  I Unspoiled Monsters

  II Kate McCloud

  III La Côte Basque

  Other Books by This Author

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  ON JANUARY 5, 1966, TRUMAN Capote signed a contract with Random House for a new book to be called Answered Prayers. The advance against royalties was $25,000, and the delivery date was January 1, 1968. The novel, Truman maintained, would be a contemporary equivalent of Proust’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, and would examine the small world of the very rich—part aristocratic, part café society—of Europe and the east coast of the United States.

  1966 was a wonderful year for Truman. Two weeks after he signed the contract for Answered Prayers, In Cold Blood was published in book form with enormous fanfare and to general acclaim. During the subsequent week the author’s picture appeared on the cover of several national magazines, and his new work was given the lead review in virtually every Sunday book section. In the course of the year, In Cold Blood sold more than 300,000 copies and was on The New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks. (Eventually it outsold every other nonfiction book in 1966 save for two self-help books; since then it has been published in some two dozen foreign editions and has sold almost five million copies in the United States alone.)

  During this year Truman was everywhere at once, granting interviews by the score, appearing on television talk shows a number of times, vacationing on yachts and in grand country houses, and delighting in his fame and fortune. The culmination of this heady period was his still-remembered “Black and White Ball” given in late November 1966 at the Plaza in honor of Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, a party that received as much coverage in the national press as an East-West summit meeting.

  Truman felt he deserved this respite, and most of his friends did too; the research and writing of In Cold Blood had taken almost six years, and had been a traumatic experience for him. Nevertheless, despite the distractions, he talked constantly about Answered Prayers in this interval. But though he wrote a number of short stories and magazine pieces in the next few years, he did not address himself to the novel; as a result, in May 1969 the original contract was superseded by a three-book agreement changing the delivery date to January 1973 and substantially increasing the advance. In mid-1973 the deadline was advanced to January 1974, and six months later it was changed again to September 1977. (Subsequently, in the spring of 1980, one last amendment specified a delivery date of March 1, 1981, and further raised the advance to $1 million, to be paid only on delivery of the work.)

  Still, Truman published several books in these years, though the contents of most of them had been written in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In 1966 Random House issued A Christmas Memory, written originally in 1958; in 1968 The Thanksgiving Visitor, a short story published in a magazine in 1967; in 1969 a twentieth-anniversary edition, with a graceful, newly written introduction, of Other Voices, Other Rooms, his first novel, which had electrified the literary establishment in 1948; in 1973 a collection called The Dogs Bark, all but three pieces of which had been written many years before. Only Music for Chameleons—which was to be published in 1980, and which some people, friends as well as critics, felt was not up to his earlier works—contained new material, both fiction and nonfiction.

  Let Truman speak for himself about this period. In the preface to Music for Chameleons he wrote:

  For four years, roughly from 1968 through 1972, I spent most of my time reading and selecting, rewriting and indexing my own letters, other people’s letters, my diaries and journals (which contain detailed accounts of hundreds of scenes and conversations) for the years 1943 through 1965. I intended to use much of this material in a book I had long been planning: a variation on the nonfiction novel. I called the book Answered Prayers, which is a quote from Saint Thérèse,* who said: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” In 1972 I began work on this book by writing the last chapter first (it’s always good to know where one’s going). Then I wrote the first chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters.” Then the fifth, “A Severe Insult to the Brain.” Then the seventh, “La Côte Basque.” I went on in this manner, writing different chapters out of sequence. I was able to do this only because the plot—or rather plots—was true, and all the characters were real: it wasn’t difficult to keep it all in mind, for I hadn’t invented anything.

  Finally, over a period of a few months in late 1974 and early 1975, Truman showed me four chapters from Answered Prayers—“Mojave,”† “La Côte Basque,” “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud”—and announced that he was going to publish them in Esquire. I was against this plan, feeling that he was revealing too much of the book too soon, and said so, but Truman, who considered himself a master publicist, was not to be deterred. (If Bennett Cerf, who was also a close friend and confidant of the author, had been alive—he had died in 1971—perhaps our combined disapproval would have di
ssuaded Truman, but I doubt it; he felt he knew exactly what he was doing.)

  As it turned out, he didn’t know what he was doing. “Mojave” was the first chapter to appear and caused some talk, but the next, “La Côte Basque,” produced an explosion which rocked that small society which Truman had set out to describe. Virtually every friend he had in this world ostracized him for telling thinly disguised tales out of school, and many of them never spoke to him again.

  Truman defiantly professed to be undismayed by the furor (“What did they expect?” he was quoted as saying. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”), but there is no doubt that he was shaken by the reaction, and I am convinced it was one of the reasons why he apparently stopped working, at least temporarily, on Answered Prayers after the publication of “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” in Esquire in 1976.

  FROM 1960, WHEN WE FIRST met, to 1977 Truman and I saw each other frequently, both in and out of the office, traveling twice to Kansas together while he was working on In Cold Blood, and once spending a week together in Santa Fe. I also visited him during the winters three or four times in Palm Springs, where he had a house for a few years; in addition, by coincidence he owned a house and I rented one in Sagaponack, a small farming community near the sea on eastern Long Island.

  Professionally my work for Truman during this period was undemanding. (For example, virtually all of the editorial work on In Cold Blood was done by Mr. Shawn and others at The New Yorker, where it first appeared in four installments in October and November 1965.) Still, our working relationship was immensely rewarding. I recall with particular pleasure Truman giving me the chapter of “Unspoiled Monsters” to read one afternoon in 1975. I did so overnight, and found it almost flawless save for one small false note. When he called me the next morning for my reaction, I was full of enthusiasm, but did mention my cavil, a word used by Miss Victoria Self in dialogue only half a page after the reader first meets her. “She wouldn’t have used that word,” I said to Truman; “she would have said——.” (I can’t remember my suggested substitute.) Truman laughed with delight. “I reread the chapter last night,” he said. “There was only one change I wanted to make, and I was calling now to tell you to change that word to exactly what you just suggested.” It was an all-too-rare moment of mutual congratulation in the peculiar relationship between authors and editors. It was not self-congratulation; rather, each of us was pleased by the other.

  I quote again from Truman’s preface to Music for Chameleons, a few lines farther on:

  … I did stop working on Answered Prayers in September 1977, a fact that had nothing to do with any public reaction to those parts of the book already published. The halt happened because I was in a helluva lot of trouble: I was suffering a creative crisis and a personal one at the same time. As the latter was unrelated, or very little related, to the former, it is only necessary to remark on the creative chaos.

  Now, torment though it was, I’m glad it happened; after all, it altered my entire comprehension of writing, my attitude toward art and life and the balance between the two, and my understanding of the difference between what is true and what is really true.

  To begin with, I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek. But I felt my writing was becoming too dense, that I was taking three pages to arrive at effects I ought to be able to achieve in a single paragraph. Again and again I read all that I had written on Answered Prayers, and I began to have doubts—not about the material or my approach, but about the texture of the writing itself. I reread In Cold Blood and had the same reaction: there were too many areas where I was not writing as well as I could, where I was not delivering the total potential. Slowly, but with accelerating alarm, I read every word I’d ever published, and decided that never, not once in my writing life, had I completely exploded all the energy and esthetic excitements that material contained. Even when it was good, I could see that I was never working with more than half, sometimes only a third, of the powers at my command. Why?

  The answer, revealed to me after months of meditation, was simple but not very satisfying. Certainly it did nothing to lessen my depression; indeed, it thickened it. For the answer created an apparently unsolvable problem, and if I couldn’t solve it, I might as well quit writing. The problem was: how can a writer successfully combine within a single form—say the short story—all he knows about every other form of writing? For this was why my work was often insufficiently illuminated; the voltage was there, but by restricting myself to the techniques of whatever form I was working in, I was not using everything I knew about writing—all I’d learned from film scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the short story, novellas, the novel. A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling (and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application). But how?

  I returned to Answered Prayers. I removed one chapter* and rewrote two others.† An improvement, definitely an improvement. But the truth was, I had to go back to kindergarten. Here I was—off again on one of those grim gambles! But I was excited; I felt an invisible sun shining on me. Still, my first experiments were awkward. I truly felt like a child with a box of crayons.

  Unfortunately, some of what Truman writes in the two excerpts quoted above can’t be taken at face value. For example, though a thorough search was made of all the author’s effects after his death by Alan Schwartz, his lawyer and literary executor, Gerald Clarke, his biographer, and myself, almost none of the letters, diaries or journals he mentions has ever been found.‡ (This is particularly damning, since Truman was a pack rat; he kept virtually everything, and there was no reason to destroy such papers.) Moreover, there was no evidence of “A Severe Insult to the Brain” or of that last chapter which he claimed in his preface to have written first. (It was to be called “Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger-Queen Kosher Café”; other chapters that he mentioned in conversations with me and others from time to time were “Yachts and Things” and “And Audrey Wilder Sang,” a chapter about Hollywood.)

  After 1976, Truman’s and my relationship slowly deteriorated. My hunch is that it began when he realized that I had been right about publishing the installments in Esquire, though of course I never taxed him about this. He may also have realized that his writing powers were waning, and feared that I would be too stern a judge. Further, he must have felt both guilt and panic about his lack of progress on Answered Prayers. In the last few years he seemed intent on fooling not only me and other close friends about his work on it, but even the public at large; at least twice he announced to interviewers that he had just completed the book, had handed it in to Random House and that it would be published within six months. Thereafter our publicity department and I would be inundated with a flurry of calls, to which we could only reply that we hadn’t seen the manuscript. Clearly Truman must have been desperate.

  The last factor in the erosion of our relationship was Truman’s mounting dependence on alcohol and drugs from 1977 on. I now realize that I was not as sympathetic about his plight as I should have been; instead I focused on the waste of talent, on his self-deceptions, on his endless ramblings, on the unintelligible 1:00 A.M. phone calls—and above all on the loss of my delightful, witty and mischievous companion of those first sixteen years whom I selfishly mourned more than I did his increasing pain.

  THERE ARE THREE THEORIES ABOUT the missing chapters of Answered Prayers. The first has it that the manuscript was completed and is either stashed in a safe-deposit box somewhere, was seized by an ex-lover for malice or for profit, or even—the latest rumor—that Truman kept it in a locker in the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Depot. But with every passing day these scenarios seem less plausible.

  The second theory is that after the publication of “Kate McCloud” in 1976 Truman never wrote another line of the book, perhaps partly because he was devastated by the public—and private—reac
tion to those chapters, perhaps partly because he came to realize that it would never achieve those Proustian standards he had set for himself. This theory is compelling for at least one reason: Jack Dunphy, Truman’s closest friend and companion for over thirty years, believes it. Still, Truman rarely discussed his work with Jack, and in the last years they were apart more often than they were together.

  A third theory, to which I hesitantly subscribe, is that Truman did indeed write at least some of the above-mentioned chapters (probably “A Severe Insult to the Brain” and “Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger-Queen Kosher Café”), but at some point in the early 1980’s deliberately destroyed them. In favor of this theory, at least four friends of Truman claim to have read (or had had read aloud to them by the author) one or two chapters besides the three that appear here. Certainly he convinced me that more of the manuscript existed; over and over again at lunch during the last six years of his life, when he was often almost incoherent because of drugs or alcohol or both, he discussed the four missing titled chapters with me in great detail, even to the point of quoting lines of dialogue which were always identical even when he recited them months or even years apart. The pattern was always the same: when I asked to see the chapter in question he would promise to send it around the next day. At the end of that day I would call and Truman would say he was having it retyped and would send it over on Monday; on the Monday afternoon his phone would not answer and he would disappear for a week or more.

  I subscribe to this third theory not so much out of a reluctance to admit my gullibility, but because Truman was so convincing in his description of those chapters. Of course it is possible that those lines existed only in his head, but it is hard to believe that at some point he did not put them down on paper. He had great pride in his work, but also an unusual objectivity about it, and my suspicion is that at some point he destroyed every vestige of whatever chapters he’d written other than the three in this volume.