A Lad of the World

Truman Capote was of course gayer than a leap year Mardi Gras. Small, delicately featured, with a famously high and piping voice, he would have had a tough time passing, to use the old-fashioned phrase. Not that it often occurred to him to do so. He appears to have been perfectly at ease with his homosexuality. He played it, too, for charm.

Charm is the desire to delight, light-handedly executed. In most definitions of charm the word “magic” turns up, and there is, in fact, somethingmagical about the gift of charm, for it reminds us that the world, for all its dreariness and depression, suffering and sadness, is still a highly amusing place. When he was up to it, which he was most of the time, Truman Capote could almost unfailingly provide such reminders.

The standard–and rather boring–line on Capote’s charm is that it was a dodge through which he hoped to attain the love he had missed as a child. In a letter to Perry Smith, one of the two killers who are at the center of his immensely successful work of reportage In Cold Blood, Capote provided a quick sketch of his childhood:

Not enough love in the home, the verdict is, and so poor little Truman sought it everywhere else. (“Too much love in the home,” I long to write on papers by many undeservedly confident students.)

To obtain that love, the argument runs, Capote’s craving for fame, his desire to produce beautiful prose, were all so much sublimation. But to hold such a view is to dishonor the complexities of human character. Life is not, after all, a Barbra Streisand song. People who need people, I have discovered, are not usually the luckiest people at all. And the world–please believe me on this one–needs a hell of a lot more than love, sweet love.

Too Brief a Treat, the title chosen by Gerald Clarke for his edition of Truman Capote’s letters, comes from a phrase Capote used to complain of the shortness of a letter sent him by a friend. These letters, scrupulously edited, with exactly the right degree of annotation, are themselves too brief a treat, ending roughly in 1966, though Capote lived on to 1984. The reason they end so early in their author’s life is that he no longer needed to write his friends as often, having returned to the United States after living abroad (chiefly in Switzerland, Sicily, Italy, and France). What is more, the success of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood made him a wealthy man and, consequently, one who wrote less and less and drank and doped himself with pills more and more. Success killed Truman Capote, who is thought to have died of a drug overdose, just short of the age of sixty.

THE LETTERS begin with young Truman living in New York, publishing stories in the popular women’s magazines: “a lad of the world,” as he declared himself. Like many good American writers–H.L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway notable among them–he had taken a pass on college. The literary historian Newton Arvin, biographer of Melville, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, was an early lover, and Capote referred to Arvin, who was twenty-four years older, as his own personal Harvard. But then Capote had one of those quick, osmotic minds, able to pick up, sort out, and make use of everything of interest that came his way. He was smart right out of the gate and, until the end, did not grow dumber.

Today one thinks of Truman Capote, if one thinks of him at all, as the gay consort to the rich women of New York’s designer East Side, a party-giver of high power in his own right (the party he gave for Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966 was referred to at the time in the press as “the party of the decade”), and a spewer of vicious gossip on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show (where among other insults he said that Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann looked “like a truck driver in drag”).

IN FACT, until his devastating success Capote was a writer devoted to his craft and astute in his literary judgment. Before James Jones’s From Here to Eternity was published, he called the book a bad combination of Thomas Wolfe and Norman Mailer yet still predicted its commercial success. To his editor at Random House he knocked Bud Schulberg (“such a small sensibility”) and suggested that the firm’s Modern Library would do much better to reprint Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. He much admired Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. He spotted the thinness of Stephen Spender. He called James Baldwin’s fiction “crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom,” while remarking of Baldwin generally that “he is a mysterious mixture of real talent and real fraud,” which is, by my reckoning, a perfect judgment.

A savvy man, Truman Capote, and about nothing was he more savvy than his own career. He cultivated editors and publishers with great care. Applying for a Guggenheim, he arranged for Edith Sitwell and E.M. Forster to write recommendations for him. Once his career was launched, he dropped his agent and handled all business matters–and very cleverly too–on his own. As a craftsman, a pro, he seemed able to toss off work in many modes. He wrote two excellent screenplays: Beat the Devil, a brilliant spoof of international gangster flicks; and The Innocents, a striking adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. “I loathe writing for films,” he later wrote to his friend Mary Louise Aswell. “I think the bit I’ve done so far has done me a certain amount of good, . . . but that is as far as it should go.” He was offered the opportunity to write a libretto for an opera by Aaron Copland, but claimed he “couldn’t work up the right kind of interest: vanity, I suppose–I kept thinking how Aaron would get all the credit.” Quite right, too.

The gossip quotient in Too Brief a Treat is splendidly high, and the names pour out at firehose intensity. Through charm Capote insinuated himself with many of the ostensibly most elegant types of his day. If a clanging bell went off every time one of these names were mentioned in these letters, the book would read like a nineteenth-century fire engine. He claims to have given a party to introduce André Gide to Christian Dior; also to have had a dalliance with Montgomery Clift. He knew Humphrey Bogart and John Huston from his work on Beat the Devil. Audrey Hepburn, who played Holly Golighty in the movie version of his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a name that comes a-clanging with a fair frequency. “Jackie [Kennedy] et moi spent the whole night talking about sex” isn’t a bad little specimen. The Chaplins and Orson Welles get mentioned as do the Agnellis and Niarchoses and W.H. Auden (“such a tiresome old Aunty”).

HERE IS A LETTER written from Portofino to a friend named Andrew Lyndon, as rich a plumb of name-dropping, with incisive criticisms thrown in at no extra charge, as one is likely to find anywhere:

He used to like to play a game he invented called International Daisy Chain, best attempted, he felt, when drunk. The chain was formed through the connection of people who had had affairs with people who then went on to have affairs with other people: He claimed to have been able to construct one such chain from Cab Calloway to Adolf Hitler.

Referring to a visit from John Gielgud and Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward, Capote writes, “in other words, the whole Lavender Hill mob.” The Lavender Hill, or gay, element in Too Brief a Treat is strong and generally adds to the amusement of the proceedings. His most candid letters are written to gay friends from his early days in New York. Capote himself preferred living in a homosexual partnership, which he did for much of his life: first with Newton Arvin and then, for more than thirty years, with a novelist named Jack Dunphy. The end of his life was made even more wretched by a violent relationship with a bisexual alcoholic named John O’Shea. He was alert to the comedy, but also the horrors, of the gay cruising life.

One piece of sad news on this front is when Capote’s former lover, Newton Arvin, a longtime teacher at Smith College, was caught and exposed as a recipient of homosexual pornography through the mails. He was sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence, had a nervous breakdown, and was removed from his teaching position at Smith. As Gerald Clarke notes, Arvin was only spared serving a prison sentence because of “ratting on two younger gay faculty colleagues . . . who were untenured; both were fired by Smith in 1961.”

Capote stood by his old friend, bucking him up, offering him help of every kind: “Well, what’s happened has happened; and it has happened to many others–who, like Gielgud, took it in stride and did not let it be the end of the world. All your friends are with you, of that you can be sure; and among them please do not count me least: aside from my affection, which you already have, I will be glad to supply you with money should the need arise. This is a tough experience, to be met with toughness, a calm head, a good lawyer.”

ONE MIGHT call the author of the letters in Too Brief a Treat Janus-faced, except that in them he wasn’t merely two- but really three-faced. There was the face for gay friends, the face for non-gay friends, and the face for the friends he made in Kansas while writing In Cold Blood. As often as not, he is working his non-gay correspondents–the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and others–for his own ends.

Especially does this apply to the Dewey family, whose father, Alvin Dewey, was the Kansas Bureau of Investigation officer assigned to the murder of the Cutter family that was the subject of In Cold Blood. Capote cultivated this conservative middle-western family in the most sedulous way. He warned friends not to make remarks suggesting the reality of his considerably less than bourgeois life. In an early letter to the Deweys he refers to Jack Dunphy as “a friend who is here living with me,” thus disguising his homosexuality. When the Deweys go off to Los Angeles on a holiday, he arranges for David O. Selznick and his wife, the actress Jennifer Jones, to show them around Hollywood.

WHATEVER HIS MOTIVES, there cannot be much doubt that Capote came genuinely to like the Deweys of Garden City, Kansas, and they him. Psychologists of the Barbra Streisand school have argued that in the Deweys he found the solid family of which he had always been deprived. But in his many letters to them, Capote alternates charm with requests for documents and other information about the Cutter murders and the fate of the murderers. One of the Dewey sons wishes to become a writer, and Capote agrees to read his manuscripts, comments carefully on them, and gives the boy perfectly sound advice on how to go about it. Always a generous gift-giver, he sent the family pleasing presents at every opportunity. He arranged trips for them for which he paid the expenses. But they had more to give him than he could possibly repay: They put him in possession of material for the book that would be the making of him.

Without In Cold Blood, Capote’s name would probably be forgotten today. Although his fiction is never less than skillful, with the element of charm bordering on sentimentality frequently coming into play in such stories as “The House of Flowers” and “A Christmas Memory,” it often feels a touch insubstantial, derivative, fragile, and too brightly colored. When Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), George Davis, an editor of Mademoiselle magazine known for his lacerating remarks, said: “I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn.”

In Cold Blood took six years to finish. Capote first heard of the murder of the Cutter family when he noticed a story in the New York Times of November 16, 1959, with the headline, “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain,” and he contracted with William Shawn to write about it for the New Yorker. From the outset, Capote felt he was sitting on a masterpiece. Complications of various kinds arose, chief among them lengthy appeals that delayed the execution of the two killers for years. A striking piece of hypocrisy in this correspondence is Capote’s letters of friendship with the two killers, whom he also pumped for information–set beside letters to others expressing his impatience for their execution, so that he could complete his book at last. Writers, let us make no mistake, are swine.

Several letters in Too Brief a Treat make plain Capote’s agonizing over the composition of In Cold Blood. This is unusual coming from a writer who heretofore made all his writing seem so much skateboarding down a gently descending incline. With this book, though, large nails, potholes, and flaming hurdles are everywhere in his path: “No, I’m finishing the last pages of my book,” he writes to Cecil Beaton, “I must get rid of it regardless of what happens. . . . My sanity is at stake–and this is no mere idle phrase. Oh, the hell with it. I shouldn’t write such gloomy crap–even to someone as close to me as you are.”

WHEN IN THE AUTUMN of 1965 the first of four installments of In Cold Blood began running in the New Yorker, its success was greater than even its highly imaginative author could have imagined. The work was one in which no one was permitted not to have an opinion: about its accuracy, its form (which he called “a non-fiction novel”), its power. The book also showed its author’s impressive range. Born into southern squalor, hanging out with the vacuous wealthy in Manhattan, Capote could also understand the lives of a strongly Protestant middlewestern farm family as well as those of the two monsters who murdered them. When he was on his game, this little man with the fruity voice didn’t miss much.

With book publication, the money came cascading in. Capote was forty. He acquired something close to movie-star fame. His face was on the cover of magazines. He was a great draw for the talk shows, not least the Tonight Show (Johnny Carson’s soon to be ex-wife Joanne was a close friend), where he could be depended upon to say scandalous things about famous contemporaries. As Herbert von Karajan is once supposed to have said when a Parisian cab driver asked him where he wished to go, so now could Truman Capote say: “It doesn’t matter. They want me everywhere.”

With the success of In Cold Blood, the letters in Too Brief a Treat begin to peter out, though Capote had nearly twenty years to live. But nothing would ever again excite his literary passion with the same force as In Cold Blood. So much that he would publish afterward felt more like make-work than writing in which he was fully engaged. The decline had begun, the fall was fast approaching.

Capote planned, for a final act, to go out as the American Proust with a novel called “Answered Prayers” about the lives of the rich Manhattan women into whose confidence, through his charm, he had insinuated himself. When he published a chapter of the novel with the title “La Côte Basque” in Esquire in 1975, so damaging (if perhaps also true) was it to the people who had befriended him that he was ever afterward non grata in the chic social circles upon which he had come to depend.

THE FINAL DECADE of Capote’s life, as one learns from Gerald Clarke’s excellent biography of the writer, was a shambles of drugs and booze and law suits and ugly gossip and betrayals perpetrated both upon him and by him. This once delicately beautiful and richly talented young man became a talk-show buffoon, a booze-bloated bag of neediness, the subject of New York Post gossip headlines, and one of the first victims of the celebrity culture he had helped to create. It’s a sad story–made sadder by the fact that he did not retain the lucidity to write it himself. Its theme might have been that charm is a gift that, when abused, can bring a man down hard.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.