Soon he would announce his intention to publish a long novel that would examine the society of rich America as mercilessly as Marcel Proust had portrayed French high society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And he may well have gone to work on his plan. Yet one consideration that Capote never seemed to discuss, or even be questioned about in public, was crucial to the eventual collapse of his vision (if he ever had one). Proust’s society was one of blood, unshakably founded on positions of French social eminence that were reared upon centuries-old money, property and actual power over the lives of other human beings. Capote’s society merely teetered upon the unsubstantial and finally inconsequential grounds of financial wealth; fashionable clothes, houses and yachts and occasional physical beauty (the women were frequently beautiful, the men very seldom so). Any long fictional study of such a world was likely to implode upon the ultimate triviality of its subject.
When he surfaced from punishing rounds of frenetic social and sexual activity and began to publish excerpts from his novel—fewer than two hundred pages—Capote found himself abandoned overnight by virtually all his rich friends; and he fled into a nightmare tunnel of drugs, drink and sexual commitments of the most psychically damaging sort. Despite numerous attempts at recovery, his addictions only deepened; and when he died, a miserable soul well short of old age, he left behind only a few pages of the tall stack of manuscript he claimed to have written on his great novel. If more of the novel ever existed, he’d destroyed the pages before his death (and his closest friends disagreed on the likelihood of the existence of a significant amount of work).
Such a tragic arc tempts any observer to make some guess at its cause, and what we know of Capote’s early life provides us a near-perfect graph for any student of Freud who predicts that a disastrous adulthood is the all but inevitable result of a miserable childhood. And Gerald Clarke’s careful biography of Capote charts just such a dislocated, lonely and emotionally deprived childhood, youth and early manhood. Young Truman was, in essence, deserted by a too-young and sexually adventurous mother and a bounder of a father who left him in small-town Alabama with a houseful of unmarried cousins (cousins and neighbors who at least rewarded him with a useful supply of good tales).
When his mother eventually remarried and summoned the adolescent Truman to her homes in Connecticut and New York, she changed his legal surname from Persons to the name of her second husband, Joe Capote, a Cuban of considerable charm but slim fidelity. The physically odd boy—whose startlingly obvious effeminacy of voice and manner greatly distressed his mother—attended good Northern schools where he performed poorly in virtually all subjects but reading and writing. Then determined on a writer’s career, he decided against a college education, took a small job in the art department at The New Yorker, launched himself into a few of the mutually exclusive social circles of big-city writing and nighttime carousing and began serious work on the fiction that would bring him his premature fame.
The earliest stories gathered here clearly reflect his reading in the fiction of his contemporaries, especially in the quite recent stories of his fellow Southerners, Carson McCullers from Georgia and Eudora Welty from Mississippi. Capote’s “Miriam,” with its perhaps too-easy eeriness, and “Jug of Silver,” with its affectionate small-town wit, may suggest McCullers’s own early stories. And his “The Shape of Things,” “My Side of the Matter” and “Children on Their Birthdays” may be readily seen as not-quite-finished stories from Welty, especially “My Side of the Matter” with its close resemblance to Welty’s famous “Why I Live at the P.O.”
Yet Capote’s childhood, spent in a middle-class white world so close to Welty’s and McCullers’s own—and in a household uncannily like the one described in Welty’s comic monologues—might well have extracted such stories from a talented young writer, even if he had never encountered a Welty or McCullers story (Welty told me that when she was undergoing her Paris Review interview in 1972, George Plimpton suggested that the interviewer raise the question of her influence on Capote’s early work; and she declined to discuss the matter, having no desire to entertain any claim of another writer’s dependence upon her).
In general, however, by the late 1940s, Capote’s fictional voice was clearly his own. His weirdly potent first novel—Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948—erected as it is upon the conventional grounds of modern Southern Gothic ends as an unquestionably original structure that, even now, is a powerful assertion of the pain of his own early solitude and his bafflement in the face of the sexual and familial mysteries that had begun to impinge upon his confidence and would ultimately contribute heavily to his eventual collapse in agonized shame, even in the midst of so much later artistic, social and financial success. The same dilemmas are on partial display in short stories like “The Headless Hawk,” “Shut a Final Door” and “A Tree of Night.”
But given the fact that homosexuality was then a troubling daily reality for Capote, and given that American magazines were still averse to candid portrayals of the problem, perhaps we can comprehend now why such early stories lack a clear emotional center. Had he written short stories as candid in their views of homosexuality as his first novel managed to be, they would have almost certainly gone unpublished, certainly not in the widely read women’s magazines which were the centers of much of the best short fiction of the time. It was in his second novel—The Grass Harp of 1951—that he discovered a mature means of employing important areas of his own past to empower fiction that would ring with convincing personal truth. Those areas centered around, not sexuality but the deeply encouraging devotion he received in childhood from a particular cousin and from the places he and that friend frequented in their games and devotions. The cousin was Miss Sook Faulk, a woman so slender in her concerns and affections that many thought her simple-minded, though she was only (and admirably) simple; and in the years that she and the young Truman shared a home, she gave him the enormous gift of a dignified love—a gift he’d received from no closer kin.
Among these stories, that depth of feeling and its masterful delivery in the memorably clear prose which would mark the remainder of Capote’s work, is visible above all in his famous story “A Christmas Memory,” and in the less well-known “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “One Christmas,” the last of which may be a little sweet for contemporary tastes but, true as it is, is almost as moving in its revelation of yet another early wound—this one administered by a feckless and distant father. It’s likely that more Americans know “A Christmas Memory” through an excellent television film, with an extraordinary performance by Geraldine Page; but anyone who reads the actual tale has encountered a feat rarer than any screen performance. By the sheer clarity of his prose and a brilliant economy of ongoing narrative rhythm, Capote cleanses of any possible sentimentality a small array of characters, actions and emotions that might have gone foully sweet in less watchful and skillful hands. Only Chekhov comes to mind as sufficiently gifted in the treatment of similar matter.
But once possessed of the skills to deliver the width of emotion he wished for, Capote was not limited to the recounting of childhood memory, more or less real or entirely invented. Like many fiction writers, he wrote fewer and fewer short stories as he grew—life often becomes more intricate than brief forms can easily contain. But one story, “Mojave” from 1975, embodies brilliantly and terribly the insights acquired in his years among the rich. Had he lived to write more such angled quick glimpses of their hateful world, he would never have left us with the sense of incompletion that the baffled rumors of a long novel have done.