BIOGRAPHIES II: Truman Capote / The boy who came from Alabama

American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Capote gained international fame with his "nonfiction novel" IN COLD BLOOD (1966), an account of a real life crime in which an entire family was murdered by two sociopaths. The Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama area provided the setting for much of Capote's fiction.

Truman Capote
Photo by Richard Avedon

"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans - in fact, few Kansans - had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." (from In Cold Blood)

Truman Streckfus Persons (afterwards Truman Capote) was born in New Orleans, as the son of a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen, Lillie Mae Faulk. His father, Archulus "Arch" Persons, worked as a clerk for a steamboat company. Persons never stuck at any job for long, and was always leaving home in search for new opportunities. The unhappy marriage gradually disintegrated. When Truman was four, his parents eventually divorced.

The young Truman was brought up in Monroeville, Alabama. He lived some years with his relatives, one of whom became the model for the loving, elderly spinster of the author's novels, stories, and plays. "Her face is remarkable - not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind," described Truman Capote in A CHRISTMAS MEMORY (1966) his distant relative Sook, Nanny Rumbley Faulk. Sook was sixty-something, "small and sprightly, like a bantam hen..." Capote's mother, Lillie Mae, wrote letters and telephoned to her son, often crying that she had no money and no husband.

In his childhood Capote made friends with Harper Lee, who portrayed him as Dill in her world famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. "Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead."

After Capote's mother married again, this time a well-to-do businessman, Capote moved to New York, and adopted his stepfather's surname. He attended the Trinity School and St. John's Academy in New York, and the public schools of Greenwich, Connecticut. At the age of seventeen, Capote ended his formal schooling. He found work at the New Yorker, where he attracted attention with his eccentric style of dress. "... I recall him sweeping through the corridors of the magazine in a black opera cape, his long golden hair falling to his shoulders: an apparition that put one in mind of Oscar Wilde in Nevada, in his velvets and lilies." (Brendan Gill in Here at The New Yorker, 1975)

Capote's early stories were published in quality magazines and in 1946 he won the O.Henry award. His first novel, OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS (1948), depicted a boy, Joel Knox, growing up in the Deep South. Joel is "too pretty, too delicate and fair skinned". He seeks his father but falls into a relationship with a decadent transvestite. The book gained a wide success and created controversy because of its treatment of homosexuality. During this time Capote had already established his fame among the cultural circles as the thin voiced, promising young writer, who could brighten up parties with his sharp and clever remarks.

Next year Capote went to Europe, where he wrote fiction and non-fiction. Among his major works was a profile of Marlon Brando. Capote's travels accompanying a tour of Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union produced THE MUSES ARE HEARD. These European years marked the beginning of Capote's work for the theatre and films. In 1949 appeared A TREE OF NIGHT, which gathered together short stories published in Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and other magazines. When the director John Huston was making The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Capote met Marilyn Monroe, who acted in the film. "With her tresses invisible, and her complexion cleared of all cosmetics, she looked twelve years old, a pubescent virgin who had just been admitted to an orphanage and is grieving her plight." (from Marilyn Monroe: Photographs 1945-1962 by Truman Capote)

In the 1950s Capote wrote THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS, a musical set in a West Indies bordello. Capote's lyrical style and melancholy marked his novel THE GRASS HARP (1951). In the story an orphaned boy and two old ladies observe life from a china tree. Eventually they come down from their temporary retreat, unlike Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò in Italo Calvino's novel The Baron in the Trees (1957). The book was adapted into screen in 1996, starring Piper Laurie, Sissy Spacek, and Walter Matthau. Capote's first important film work was collaboration with John Huston on Beat the Devil (1954), based on Claud Cockburn's bestseller about a band of international crooks. For the David O. Selznick production of Indiscreation of an American Wife (1953), directed by Vittorio De Sica and starring Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift, Capote had written dialogue. Nearly penniless Capote lived in Rome in an expensive penthouse on the Via Margutta. Huston offered him a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a week. Capote, who wrote the scenes only two or three days ahead of the shooting schedule, changed the whole concept of the film. For Peter Lorre he gave some of the best lines: "Time, time, what is time? The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. The Italians squander it. The Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is a crook."

Following return to the United States, Capote wrote BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (1958). Its central character, Holly Golightly, is a young woman, who comes to New York seeking for happiness. She has a nameless cat and a brother named Fred. The narrator, an aspiring writer who has the same birthday as Capote (September 30), follows Holly's life, filled with colorful characters. "What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there..." The novel is constructed as a memory of events, that happened about 15 years earlier. Holly has left the country before the end of the war, and the narrator has not seen her since. Breakfast at Tiffany's was made into a successful film, directed by Blake Edwards and starring Audrey Hepburn. George Axelrod updated the story to the 1960s and later told: "Nothing really happened in the book. All we had was this glorious girl –a perfect part for Audrie Hepburn. What we had to do was devise a story, get a central romantic relationship, and make the hero a red-blooded heterosexual." Most of the film was shot in California, not in New York City.

Increasing preoccupation with journalism formed the basis for the bestseller In Cold Blood, a pioneering work of documentary novel or "nonfiction novel". The work started from an article in The New York Times. It dealt with the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas. Sponsored by the magazine, Capote interviewed with Harper Lee local people to recreate the lives of both the murderers and their victims. During the process he became emotionally attached to both killers. However, this did not prevent him from telling the story with utmost objectivity.

The research work and writing took six years to finish. Capote used neither a tape recorder nor note pad, but emptied his interviews and impressions in notebooks at the end of the day. He also recorded last days of the death-obsessed criminals. (See Norman Mailer's journalistic works The Armies of the Nigh, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of Fire on the Moon.) Richard Brooks' screen adaptation of the book, with its black-and-white photography, avoided all sensationalism. The trial scene was re-enacted at the Finney County Court House in the Garden City, where the actual trial had taken place. Brooks also used the real jury who had convicted Perry Smith and Dick Hicock.

Among Capote's other works from the 1960s is the classic A Christmas Memory, a story about a seven-year-old boy, Buddy, his cousin, an eccentric old lady, and a tough little orange and white rat terrier called Queenie. Buddy and his cousin are each other's best friends, whose special relationship is symbolized by baking of fruitcakes, a kind of a Proustian Madeleine remembrance. The story gained a huge success as a television play. After the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote planned to write a Proustian novel to be called "Answered Prayers". This plan never materialized. Problems with drink and drugs, and disputes with other writers, such as Gore Vidal, exhausted Capote's creative energies.

In interviews, Capote negative anecdotes about the people he knew distanced him from his friends. "I had a big discussion with Saul Bellow about Richard Wright," Capote said in 1974. "I said, Richard Wright was a good friend of mine and do you know what Saul Bellow said? He said, "Huh! Well, Wright just became a victim of these heavyweight intellectuals. I used to see him carting around books on Wittgenstein. He was convinced he was an intellectual." I thought that was very sad and pathetic." (The Critical Response to Truman Capote by Joseph J. Waldmeir, 1999)

Answered Prayers remained unfinished, but three stories from the novel appeared in Esquire in the 1970s. The surviving portions were republished in 1986. Capote's autobiographical book presented such real-life as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead, but its depiction of the smart set was characterized in The New York Times as "a socio-pornographic ''Ragtime'' rife with the low cackle of camp." MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS (1981) was a collection of short pieces, stories, interviews, and conversations published in various magazines. Truman Capote died in Los Angeles, California, on August 26, 1984, of liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication. His life and work inspired Bennett Miller's film Capote (2005), based on the Gerald Clarke biography from 1988, and Have You Heard? (2006), based on George Plimpton's interviews.

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/capote.htm

Truman Capote
Photo by Richard Avedon
Poster by T.A.

Truman Capote Is Dead at 59;

Novelist of Style and Clarity

By ALBIN KREBS

August 28, 1984

ruman Capote, one of the postwar era's leading American writers, whose prose shimmered with clarity and quality, died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 59.

Mr. Capote died at the home of Joanna Carson, former wife of the entertainer Johnny Carson, in the Bel-Air section, according to Comdr. William Booth of the Los Angeles Police Department. ''There is no indication of foul play,'' he said, adding that the county coroner's office would investigate the cause of death.

The novelist, short story writer and literary celebrity pioneered a genre he called ''the nonfiction novel,'' exemplified by his immensely popular ''In Cold Blood.'' He died apparently without having completed his long- promised ''masterwork,'' an extensive novel called ''Answered Prayers.''

Mr. Capote's first story was published while he was still in his teens, but his work totaled only 13 volumes, most of them slim collections, and in the view of many of his critics, notably his old friend John Malcolm Brinnin, he failed to join the ranks of the truly great American writers because he squandered his time, talent and health on the pursuit of celebrity, riches and pleasure.

''I had to be successful, and I had to be successful early,'' Mr. Capote said in 1978. ''The thing about people like me is that we always knew what we were going to do. Many people spend half their lives not knowing. But I was a very special person, and I had to have a very special life. I was not meant to work in an office or something, though I would have been successful at whatever I did. But I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and famous.'' Success, both as a writer and as a celebrity, came early, when he was 23 years old and published his first novel, ''Other Voices, Other Rooms.'' It was a critical and financial success, and so were most of the volumes of short stories, reportage and novellas that followed, including ''Breakfast at Tiffany's,'' ''The Muses Are Heard,'' ''The Grass Harp,'' ''Local Color,'' ''The Dogs Bark'' and ''Music for Chameleons.''

Claim to Literary Fame

But the book that perhaps solidified his claim to literary fame was ''In Cold Blood,'' his detailed, painstakingly researched and chilling account of the 1959 slaying of a Kansas farm family and the capture, trial and execution of the two killers.

Published serially in The New Yorker and then as a book in 1965, ''In Cold Blood'' consumed more than six years of his life. But it won him enthusiastic praise, mountains of publicity, millions of dollars and the luxury of time to work on ''Answered Prayers.''

But he accelerated the speed of his journey to celebrity, appearing on television talk shows and, in his languid accent, which retained its Southern intonation, indulged a gift for purveying viperish wit and scandalous gossip. He continued to cultivate scores of the famous as his friends and confidants, all the while publishing little and, he said later, developing a formidable ''writer's block'' that delayed completion of ''Answered Prayers.''

To keep alive the public's interest in the promised work, in 1975 he decided to allow the magazine Esquire to print portions of the unfinished novel. The decision was catastrophic to the grand social life he had cultivated because, in one of the excerpts, ''La C~te Basque,'' Mr. Capote told apparently true and mostly scandalous stories about his famous friends, naming names, and in so doing forever lost their friendship and many other friendships as well.

Alcohol and Drug Problems

Soon his long-simmering problems with alcohol and drugs grew into addictions, and his general health deteriorated alarmingly. The once sylphlike and youthful Mr. Capote grew paunchy and bald, and in the late 1970's he underwent treatment for alcoholism and drug abuse, had prostate surgery and suffered from a painful facial nerve condition, a tic doloreux.

In ''Music for Chameleons,'' a collection of short nonfiction pieces published in 1980, Mr. Capote, in a ''self-interview,'' asked himself whether, at that point in his life, God had helped him. His answer: ''Yes. More and more. But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint.''

Named Truman Streckfus Persons after his birth in New Orleans on Sept. 30, 1924, he was the son of Archulus Persons, a nonpracticing lawyer and member of an old Alabama family, and of the former Lillie Mae Faulk, of Monroeville, Ala. Years later he adopted the surname of his stepfather, Joe Capote, a Cuban-born New York businessman.

Mr. Capote's mother, who eventually committed suicide, liked to be called Nina and was not, according to her own testimony as well as her son's, temperamentally suited to motherhood. Living with her husband in a New Orleans hotel, she sent Truman to live with relatives in Monroeville when he was barely able to walk, and for the first nine years of his life he lived mostly in Alabama under the supervision of female cousins and aunts.

Truman Capote
Photo de Irving Penn
New York, 1948

'A Spiritual Orphan'

In that period, he said years later, he felt like ''a spiritual orphan, like a turtle on its back.''

''You see,'' he said, ''I was so different from everyone, so much more intelligent and sensitive and perceptive. I was having fifty perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.''

Most summers the boy returned to New Orleans for a month or so, and accompanied his father on trips up and down the Mississippi aboard the riverboat on which Mr. Persons worked as a purser. Truman learned to tap dance, he said, and was proud of the fact that he once danced for the passengers accompanied by Louis Armstrong, whose band was playing on the steamboat.

Many of his stories, notably ''A Christmas Memory,'' which paid loving tribute to his old cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who succored him in his childhood loneliness, were based on his recollections of life in and around Monroeville. So were his first published novel, ''Other Voices, Other Rooms,'' his second, ''The Grass Harp,'' and the collection of stories, ''A Tree of Night.''

Truman Capote and Harper Lee

Character in 'Mockingbird'

The young Truman's best friend in Monroeville was the little girl next door, Nelle Harper Lee, who many years later put him into her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ''To Kill a Mockingbird,'' in the character of the precocious Dill Harris. (He had earlier used Miss Lee as the prototype for the character of Idabel Tompkins in ''Other Voices, Other Rooms.'')

After his mother's divorce from Mr. Persons and her marriage to Joe Capote, she brought her son to live with them in New York. He was sent to several private schools, including Trinity School and St. John's Academy in New York, but he disliked schools and did poorly in his courses, including English, although he had taught himself to read and write when he was 5 years old.

Having been told by many teachers that the precocious child was probably mentally backward, the Capotes sent him to a psychiatrist who, Truman Capote said triumphantly some years later, ''naturally classified me as a genius.''

He later credited Catherine Woods, an English teacher at Greenwich High School in Connecticut, with being the first person to recognize his writing talent and to give him guidance. With her encouragement he wrote poems and stories for the school paper, The Green Witch. He did not complete high school and had no further formal education.

At the age of 17, Mr. Capote wangled a job at The New Yorker. ''Not a very grand job, for all it really involved was sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers,'' he wrote years later. ''Still, I was fortunate to have it, especially since I was determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom. I felt that either one was or wasn't a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case.''

First Stories and Novel

In a two-year stay at The New Yorker, Mr. Capote had several short stories published in minor magazines. ''Several of them were submitted to my employers, and none accepted,'' he wrote later. In the same period, he wrote his first, never-published novel, ''Summer Crossing.''

Mr. Capote made his first major magazine sale, of the haunting short story ''Miriam,'' to Mademoiselle in 1945, and in 1946 it won an O. Henry Memorial Award. (There were to be three more O. Henry awards.)

The award led to a contract and a $1,500 advance from Random House to write a novel. Mr. Capote returned to Monroeville and began ''Other Voices, Other Rooms,'' and he worked on the slim volume in New Orleans, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and in North Carolina, finally completing it on Nantucket. It was published in 1948.

The novel, a sensitively written account of a teen-age boy's coming to grips with maturity and accepting his world as it is, achieved wide popularity and critical acclaim and was hailed as a remarkable achievement for a writer only 23 years old.

In 1969, when ''Other Voices, Other Rooms'' was reprinted, Mr. Capote said the novel was ''an attempt to exorcise demons: an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.''

Famous Dust-Cover Photograph

The book's back dust cover received almost as much comment as the novel itself, and for years was the talk of the literary set. The jacket was a photogragh of an androgynously pretty Mr. Capote, big eyes looking up from under blond bangs, and wearing a tattersall vest, reclining sensually on a sofa. The striking, now-famous dust-jacket photograph may have been prophetic, because Mr. Capote, for the remainder of his life, assiduously sought personal publicity and celebrity and said he had ''a love affair with cameras - all cameras.''

In the pursuit of literary celebrity in succeeding years, the writer was photographed in his homes in the Hamptons on Long Island, in Switzerland and at United Nations Plaza. He was photographed escorting well- dressed society women who seemed always to tower over Mr. Capote, who was only 5 feet 4 inches tall. He was also photographed, for dozens of magazines and newspapers, when he gave a much-publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966 for some 500 of his ''very closest friends.''

For many of the postwar years Mr. Capote traveled widely and lived abroad much of the time with Jack Dunphy, his companion of more than a quarter-century. He turned out short- story collections and nonfiction for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Esquire and The New Yorker, which first published ''The Muses Are Heard,'' a 1956 book chronicling a tour of the Soviet Union by a company of black Americans in ''Porgy and Bess.''

''I conceived the whole adventure as a short comic 'nonfiction novel,' the first,'' Mr. Capote said. ''That book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.''

Praise for 'In Cold Blood'

The result of Mr. Capote's discovery was ''In Cold Blood,'' which was almost universally praised. John Hersey called it ''a remarkable book,'' for example, but there were dissenters. Stanley Kauffmann, in The New Republic, sniped at ''In Cold Blood,'' saying ''this isn't writing, it's research'' - a sly borrowing from Mr. Capote's witty thumbnail critique, years earlier, of the rambling books of the late Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac: ''This isn't writing, it's typing.''

The critic Kenneth Tynan took Mr. Capote to task for being too strictly a reporter and not making an effort to have the killers' lives spared.

Many readers were struck by Mr. Capote's verbatim quotations of long, involved conversations and incidents in his book. He explained that this came from ''a talent for mentally recording lengthy conversations, an ability I had worked to achieve while researching 'The Muses Are Heard,' for I devoutly believe that the taking of notes, much less the use of a tape recorder, creates artifice and distorts or even destroys any naturalness that might exist between the observer and the observed, the nervous hummingbird and its would-be captor.'' He said his trick was to rush away from an interview and immmediately write down everything he had been told.

Mr. Capote was co-author of the movie ''Beat the Devil'' with John Huston and wrote the screenplay for a film of Henry James's ''The Innocents.'' Mr. Capote turned his second novel, ''The Grass Harp,'' into an unsuccessful Broadway play and, with Harold Arlen, wrote the 1954 musical, also unsuccessful, ''House of Flowers.'' Mr. Capote also adapted a number of his stories, including ''A Christmas Memory'' and ''The Thanksgiving Visitor,'' for television.

Critics noted his deft handling of children as characters in his work, his ability to move from the real to the surreal, and his use of lush words and images. In 1963, the critic Mark Schorer wrote of Mr. Capote: ''Perhaps the single constant in his prose is style, and the emphasis he himself places upon the importance of style.''

THE NEW YORK TIMES

For further reading

Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood": A Critical Handbook, ed. by Irving Malin (1968); The Worlds of Truman Capote by William L. Nance (1970); Sextet: T.S. Eliot and Truman Capote and Others by J. M. Brinnin (1982); Truman Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (1988); Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction by H. Garson (1992); Truman Capote's Southern Years by Marianne M. Moates & Jennings Faulk Carter (1996); Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton (1997); Critical Essays on Truman Capote, ed. by Joseph J. Waldmeir (1999); The Critical Response to Truman Capote ed. by Joseph J. Waldmeir (1999); The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote by Marie Rudisill, James C. Simmons (2000) - Quote: "In California everyone goes to therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist." - See also: Harper Lee (Capote's childhood friend); Carson McCullers

Selected work

OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS, 1948

A TREE OF NIGHT AND OTHER STORIES, 1949

LOCAL COLOR, 1950

THE GRASS HARP, 1951 - film 1996, dir. by Charles Matthau, starring Piper Laurie, Sissy Spacek, Walter Matthau, Edward Furlong, Jack Lemmon, Nell Carter

THE GRASS HARP, 1952 (play)

BEAT THE DEVIL, 1954 (screenplay, with John Huston) - film dir. by J.H., starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley

THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS, 1954 (play, with Harold Arlen)

THE MUSES HAVE HEARD, 1956

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, 1958.film 1961, dir. by Blake Edwards, starring Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen

THE INNOCENTS, 1961 (screenplay, with William Archibald and John Mortimer) - film dir. by Jack Clayton, starring Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkis

OBSERVATIONS, 1959 (with R. Avedon)

SELECTED WRITINGS, 1963

IN COLD BLOOD, 1966. Film 1967, written and directed by Richard Brooks, starring Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, Paul Stewart; television film 1996

A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, 1966

A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, 1966 (television play)

THE THANKSGIVING VISITOR, 1967

AMONG THE PATHS TO EDEN, 1967 (television play)

LAURA, 1968 (television play)

HOUSE OF FLOWERS, 1968

THE THANKSGIVING VISITOR, 1968 (television play)

TRILOGY, 1969 (screenplay, with Eleanor Perry)

EXPERIMENT IN MULTIMEDIA, 1969 (with E. and F. Perry)

BEHIND PRISON WALLS, 1972 (television play)

THE GLASS HOUSE, 1972 (television play, with Tracy Keenan Wynn and Wyatt Cooper)

THE DOGS BARK, 1973

CRIMEWATCH, 1973 (television play)

THEN IT ALL CAME DOWN, 1976

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS, 1980

ONE CHRISTMAS, 1982

CONVERSATIONS WITH CAPOTE, 1985

ANSWERED PRAYERS, 1986 (unfinished)

A CAPOTE READER, 1987

MARILYN MONROE: PHOTOGRAPHS 1945-1962, 1994

SUMMER'S CROSSING, 2005

PORTRAITS AND OBSERVATIONS: THE ESSAYS OF TRUMAN CAPOTE, 2007

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/capote.htm

martes, 27 de septiembre de 2016

Truman Capote / The boy who came from Alabama

By ALBIN KREBS

August 28, 1984

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