How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (31 page)

After seeing Stoppard's one-sided play about this fascinatingly two-sided figure, I was moved to ask a different question. Let's say that
Stoppard's Wilde is right—let's say he did invent the “new” twentieth century, mad as it is for everything new. And indeed, so much of what he was famous (and infamous) for inventing in the nineteenth century has become commonplace in the twentieth: media celebrity, and the celebrity trial; personality as a form of popular entertainment; glittering pronouncement as ideology; “image” culture; the adulation and tireless pursuit of idealized, rather than real, love objects. So let's say that Wilde (or at least the Wilde of Stoppard's play), the one who preferred silvery, seductive, vaporous images to unappealingly humdrum “facts” and unpleasant realities, invented that—gave us the world we now inhabit. And let's say that Housman, after failing—or refusing—to “invent” the one he loved, chose to be unglamorous, to devote himself to facts, to reality, to the dull task of bringing to light hard truths unlikely to endear him to a public hungry—as Stoppard's public is—for sentimental fantasies. Let's give Wilde that much, and Housman that little. Who is the greater hero?

—The New York Review of Books,
August 10, 2000

I
t comes as no surprise to learn, as you do in the preface to
Too Brief a Treat
, a new volume of Truman Capote's letters, that the author was as eccentric in his spelling as he was in pretty much everything else. Still, it's fascinating to find out that three words in particular gave him trouble—so much so that Gerald Clarke, Capote's biographer and the editor of the letters, decided in the end to let them stand uncorrected in the published text. One of the three trips up a lot of people (“receive”). But the other two are generally less troublesome—if only because one is a word that most of us dare not use of ourselves, and the other is a word we prefer not to use. Given all we know about Capote, his difficulties with both seem significant.

The first word was “genius”—or, as Capote sometimes spelled it, “genuis.” At the beginning of his life and career the word cropped up often. “We all thought he was a genius,” said the writer Marguerite Young, after the diminutive, flamboyant youth arrived at Yaddo, the artists' colony, in the spring of 1946. Capote was then only twenty-one, but had already attracted considerable attention. This was partly for his writing—a couple of macabre short stories, published in
Mademoiselle
and
Harper's Bazaar
—and perhaps more for his public antics.
He'd been fired from
The New Yorker
for impersonating an editor (he was a copyboy at the time) and was a regular at El Morocco and the Stork Club, swank nightspots where he would appear with fashionable young women like Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O'Neill. At Yaddo, though, he worked hard: he was writing a novel for which he'd received a contract from Robert Linscott, an editor at Random House, who like so many others found Capote's combination of elfin charm and childlike vulnerability irresistible. “Truman has all the stigmata of genius,” Linscott declared in 1948, after publishing the young author's first novel.

That novel was the career-making
Other Voices
,
Other Rooms
, an exercise in Southern Gothic that, as one newspaper put it, had “critics in a dither, as they try to decide whether he's a genius.” In fact, many if not most of the major critics dismissed the novel, an overspiced gumbo of rape, murder, homosexuality, disease, madness, and transvestism. (“A minor imitation of a very talented minor writer, Carson McCullers,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in
The Partisan Review
.) What made the book's reputation was the sensational publicity concerning the author's jacket photo, which showed the twenty-three-year-old Capote lying on a divan staring at the camera with the hungry look of a seasoned rent boy. Capote himself later acknowledged that it was the “exotic photograph” that marked “the start of a certain notoriety that has kept close step with me these many years.”

When you pick up
Other Voices
today and slog through the Spanish-mossy plot and the overinflated sentences (“he knew now, and it was not a giggle or a sudden white-hot word; only two people with each other in withness”), it can be hard to see what the fuss was all about. And yet a powerful presence is unmistakable—you can see how clearly the deliberate, almost Wildean aestheticism of Capote's prose stemmed from his outré pose. Both excited an entire generation. Cynthia Ozick would later recall how brandishing a copy of
Other Voices
was like waving a banner against the “blight” of the drabness of the postwar milieu; Capote himself would work at the exquisiteness of his sentences until it became a hallmark of his mature style. Norman Mailer summed up the consensus of that generation of writers when he declared that Capote wrote “the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm,” of any of them.

Remarkably, Capote's child-prodigy persona carried him nearly into his forties. “Yes, he's a genius, Ma'am,” his friend Cecil Beaton told the Queen Mother late in 1962, when Capote was thirty-eight. But again it was unclear what, precisely, “genius” referred to. In the fifteen years since
Other Voices, Other Rooms
had been published, he'd added to his oeuvre just two slight novellas (
The Grass Harp
and
Breakfast at Tiffany's
), a few stories and a short book,
The Muses Are Heard
, that grew out of a long
New Yorker
piece about touring the Soviet Union with the cast of
Porgy and Bess
. Still, the royal lady found him a genius, “quite wonderful, so intelligent, so wise, so funny,” over a lunch together at which Capote laughed and “whooped with joy when the summer pudding appeared,” as Beaton later recalled. That last detail suggests why it was so hard not to think of the author as remarkable. Throughout his life he loved to play the child, and people reacted accordingly—they kept treating him like a prodigy into his middle age. Again and again in the various biographies and memoirs of Capote, you're struck by how often and how naturally people comment on this particular aspect of his charm. “A precocious child, so cute and funny,” Eleanor Lambert declared at the beginning of his career; a “wonderful but bad little boy,” David Selznick remarked, when Capote was twenty-eight.

Capote was certainly a bad little boy in one respect: he was an inveterate liar. (He enhanced the story of his lunch with the Queen Mother in later retellings, shifting the venue to Buckingham Palace and enlarging the guest list to include the Queen herself.) But it was with a work ostensibly devoid of any invention at all that he secured what was to many his most plausible claim to being a genius. In 1965, when he was forty, he completed
In Cold Blood
, his harrowing, tautly written account of the murders of four members of a wealthy Kansas farm family by a pair of young drifters—a “nonfiction novel” that used the techniques of fiction to achieve a narrative power rare in reportage. After an electrifying debut as a four-part serial in
The New Yorker
, the book was published in January 1966 and became an enormous best seller, adding considerable wealth to solid literary acclaim. Capote sealed this artistic triumph later that year with his greatest social success: the legendary Black and White Ball he gave at the Plaza Hotel in honor of Katharine Graham, one of the many rich women whom Capote, who prided himself on his social as well as his literary genius, so assiduously cultivated.

 

The second word Capote could never get right was one he often spelled “dissapoint.” This, too, has a special resonance. For almost immediately after the double triumphs of 1966, something went catastrophically wrong. During the writing of
In Cold Blood
he'd begun to drink heavily; his friend Phyllis Cerf, wife of the Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, later claimed that writing the book had, essentially, made Capote an alcoholic. As the Sixties went on, and then the Seventies, he drank more and more, began taking pills, and wrote less and less. Increasingly, his public appearances became occasions for embarrassment. (In 1977 he had to be escorted off the stage at the beginning of a reading after he began to mumble incoherently.) There were halfhearted attempts to get back to work: Capote talked about doing a series of articles on a string of gay sex-torture killings for
The Washington Post
—all too clearly a reprise of
In Cold Blood
—and a magazine piece about touring with the Rolling Stones (just as clearly a ghost of
The Muses Are Heard
). But they never got written.

The one work he claimed to be seriously embarked on was a grand, “Proustian” novel that he had been contemplating for a long time—an epic work in which he planned to set down everything he knew about the very rich, whom he had been studying all these years. (The only standards he seems to have maintained, at the end of his life, concerned money: “In this day and age, you've got to have at least $500 million. Free. That you can pick up,” he told an interviewer who had asked him his definition of “rich.”) But the few chapters from this work in progress that appeared in
Esquire
in the mid-Seventies—like a naughty schoolboy, Capote kept claiming that he'd written much more but that it had been lost, or even stolen—suggested that he'd lost his touch. Amounting to little more than thinly disguised items of high society gossip, they were flatly, even slovenly, written and notable for a child's obsession with bodily functions and parts. One story concerns a sexual encounter between characters meant to be William Paley and the menstruating wife of the former governor of New York; another eavesdrops on Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo discussing their genitals.

For betraying the secrets of the ladies whose lapdog he'd been, Capote was exiled from the jet set. By that point, his private life was a mess anyway. Increasingly estranged from his longtime lover, Jack
Dunphy, and now in his forties—undoubtedly a traumatic milestone for anyone as invested as Capote was in both looking and acting boyish—he embarked on a string of affairs with ostentatiously ordinary, and ostensibly heterosexual, family men. These lovers were repairmen, bartenders, and midlevel bankers, men whom Wyatt Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt's husband, recalled as “men without faces”—chosen, many couldn't help thinking, to outrage his posh friends. (“Ooooh! I didn't want an air-conditioning man for a friend,” Mrs. Graham exclaimed.) By the end, those few of his former set who still spoke to him encountered what looked like a parody of the old Capote: a bloated, baby-faced man, who soiled himself during alcoholic stupors and whose former naughtiness had curdled into a viciousness that was not always merely verbal. (One entry in the index of Clarke's biography is “O'Shea, John, Capote's hit men and”: he twice had people vandalize the property of boyfriends who'd left him.) His boyish qualities had persisted, but less attractively. “I feel like a trust officer dealing with the senile and the infantile,” John O'Shea, one of the men without faces, griped when he tried to organize the alcoholic writer's business affairs. Capote died in August 1984, a month shy of sixty, after nearly two decades of decline.

In his inexorable disintegration, Capote represents a distinct type of American failure—the artist whose early success is so spectacular that both life and art are forever trapped by, and associated with, long-past triumphs. (Orson Welles and Marlon Brando, whom Capote famously profiled in
The New Yorker
, maliciously and brilliantly, come to mind.) It was precisely because he himself was so dazzled by his own early persona—the literary golden boy and enchanting, honey-tongued child of high society—that Capote clearly felt he had to cap his career with that Proustian masterpiece. But it was a work he all too clearly didn't have the resources to write—and not merely because by the time he set out to write it, he was a pill-popping alcoholic. After grilling him on the subject, Gore Vidal concluded that Capote had never actually read Proust, and shrewdly observed that “Truman thought Proust accumulated gossip about the aristocracy and made literature out of it.” Capote's problem was that he had the gossip, but didn't know how to make it mean anything to anyone not interested in the real-life figures behind it. He had, indeed, already written his great book; but because
In Cold Blood
was grittily realistic, Dreiserian rather than Proustian—
because it didn't fit his image of himself—Capote didn't know it. Thus seduced by his own reputation, he failed to pursue an artistic avenue that could well have led him to greater success.

As his life spun out of control, Capote had more and more opportunities to misspell “disappoint.” He became obsessed with the idea that his work had been inadequately recognized: he never got over being passed over for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for
In Cold Blood
. He grew bitterly jealous of the acclaim enjoyed by authors (Norman Mailer, for instance) who, he felt, had stolen his ideas and methods, particularly the technique of the nonfiction novel. In a letter to Bennett Cerf in the summer of 1964, Capote complained that Cerf had decided not to publish his
Selected Writings
under the “august imprint” of the Modern Library. “Can you imagine how very galling it is for me to see so many of my contemporaries…included in this series, while the publisher of same ignores its own writer? It's unjust—both humanly, and in terms of literary achievement.”

Since then, Capote has received the recognition he so eagerly sought: there are now four volumes in the Modern Library devoted to the author's work. To that continuing project of canonization his old publisher, Random House, is now adding two more volumes of Capotiana: Clarke's new volume of the letters, entitled
Too Brief a Treat
, and
The Complete Short Stories of Truman Capote
. And yet although both volumes are undoubtedly meant to shore up Capote's posthumous reputation as an American classic, they end up shedding as much light on his shortcomings as they do on any genius he might have had. Together, they provide intriguing insights into the nature both of his gift and of his terrible failure.

 

Despite its imposing title,
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote
is a slender affair, twenty pieces in all. It is a startlingly insubstantial output for a writer whose career lasted forty years, and who was most comfortable in the short form. Of the twenty stories, moreover, fourteen were written before Capote turned thirty (a dozen, indeed, before he was twenty-
five); another three were written during his thirties; and the final three during his forties.

Another way of putting this is that in the
Complete Stories
you're dealing, essentially, with a volume of juvenilia. What strikes you now is, in fact, how adolescently lurid and creepy the earliest stories are—and yet how earnestly “serious” and grown-up they're meant to be. At least half the new collection falls into this unfortunate class. There are hammy tales of erotic obsession (“The Headless Hawk,” 1946); heavy-handedly dark stories like “Shut a Final Door” (1947), in which the comeuppance of a ruthless social and professional climber arrives in the
Twilight Zone
–ish form of anonymous phone calls that follow him wherever he goes; and morality tales about doomed young innocents, like the college girl in “A Tree of Night” (1945) who falls victim to sinister freaks on a train, or the depressive young working woman in “Master Misery” (1949) who sells her dreams to a man who's known as Master Misery and who may well be…the Devil. (“I figure it this way, baby: dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us. Now Master Misery, maybe he hasn't got a soul, so bit by bit he borrows yours.”)