Capote (11 page)

After the editors had made their decisions, Truman would pass them along to the artists, commiserate with those whose drawings had been rejected, and generally hold their hands. For Thurber, who was almost blind, he had to do a good bit more. It was his onerous duty to lead Thurber around, convey him to his assignations with one of the magazine’s secretaries, and even wait in her living room while the two of them consummated their loud passion in the bedroom. Their lovemaking, he later complained, sounded as romantic as the squeals of hogs being butchered. When the noise had stopped, he would help Thurber on with his clothes. Once he put Thurber’s socks on wrong side out, and a sharp-eyed Mrs. Thurber, who had put them on correctly that morning, noticed the difference. The next morning the artist accused him of having made the mistake on purpose. “Thurber was the rudest, meanest man I’ve ever seen,” Truman said. “He was terrifically hostile—maybe because he was blind—and everybody hated him but that one secretary he was going to bed with. She was the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen, but he didn’t care because he couldn’t see her.”

For a humor magazine,
The New Yorker
was a serious, somber place to work, and Truman, who could not suppress his high spirits, betrayed a noticeably cavalier attitude as he went about his humble duties. In a playful parody of his job, he found a big feather duster and made a great show of dusting desks. “Everybody was being drafted at that time,” said Hubbell, “and one night he came to me and said, ‘I’ve got my greetings. I’ve got to go to Grand Central Station tomorrow for my examination, and they may ship me out right after that.’ So we gave him a little party just in case they did. But when I walked in the next morning, there he was, with a cloth around his waist and the feather duster in his hand. ‘I’ve been turned down for everything,’ he told me, ‘including the WACs.’” Truman later explained why he was not sent off to war: “They thought I was quite neurotic. I wasn’t at the examination center even fifteen minutes before they said, ‘We will postpone this.’ And I never heard from them again.”

Everybody at the magazine seemed to recognize that the art department’s copyboy was more than just unusual-looking, and he made no secret of his intention to be a writer. “He used to stand behind my desk,” said Barbara Lawrence, who had a second-level editorial job, “and one day he said, ‘You know, I write stories.’” He showed her some, and for the next few years she read them, giving support and suggestions, much as Miss Wood had done in Greenwich. “Most of Barbara’s ideas were about cutting things,” he said. “She was a very, very good cutter. At that time I had a tendency to not block my paragraphs properly, to let them run on too long. She was very helpful about breaking them up and that sort of thing.”

She was the only one who was helpful, or offered encouragement, and in the inexplicable ways of magazines, he was not even allowed a tryout as a writer. “There was a tendency—
New Yorker
snobbery—not to take office boys seriously,” said E. J. Kahn, a staff writer for many years. “And they thought that Truman was an effeminate, silly little boy.” One of his side duties, after sorting cartoons, was to scour the newspapers for ideas for “The Talk of the Town,” the section of anecdotal items about comings and goings in New York. But when he asked to report and write a few “Talk” pieces himself, he was refused. “Even though we thought that he could probably do it,” said Shawn, “we didn’t see how we could send anybody that young to report for us.” Truman also submitted some of his short stories to the fiction department, which gave them mild praise, but turned them down as well. “Very good. But romantic in a way this magazine is not” was Truman’s memory of one such remark. “It is a scandal that we didn’t publish any of Truman’s short stories,” said Brendan Gill,
The New Yorker
’s unofficial historian. “But it’s also a scandal that we didn’t publish anything by Hemingway or Faulkner and only one story by Fitzgerald.”

Scandal or not, Truman doubtless was hurt by such persistent rejection from a magazine he had once revered. Although he was always to retain an admiration for
The New Yorker
, he was no longer awed by it, or the people who worked for it. “Nobody cared what happened outside that office. They were very strange, secretive people, like bears that hide themselves away in caves at the zoo. Shawn never came out of his cave, and E. B. White wouldn’t come out even when the keeper rapped on his door. Everyone—literally everyone—was scared to death of Ross. He looked ferocious, and he was ferocious. Even I was frightened, and I don’t scare easily. There has never been such a collection of bitchy people. They were all obsessive gossips, and they were absolutely consumed with one another. I was never gangy or very chummy with any of them. I guess one of the real reasons was that I knew they were going to stay there, and I wasn’t. It was like being in a school where you knew certain people were going to graduate and certain people weren’t. But I’m glad I was there. At that time it was probably the best magazine in the world, and working there was a hell of a lot better than going to college.”

He thought that he was ready to graduate from
The New Yorker
in the fall of 1943, when he quit so that he could write full time. Manhattan was not the place to do that, however, and the Capote apartment provided neither peace nor privacy. Nina, who was still drinking, was disruptive and often hostile, moreover, and objected, even when she was sober, to the noise his little portable made when he typed on the kitchen table. Inevitably, his eyes looked south, and he returned to the home in which he had spent most of his childhood, to Monroeville and Jennie’s house on Alabama Avenue. But he could not write there either. The comfortable old house he had known had burned down in 1937, and the new one was as inhospitable as the Capote apartment. “This is
certainly
not the place,” he wrote Arch on December 2, in one of his rare letters to his father. “I have a cold and feel rotten, it’s so damned uncomfortable here. I think I will be going back to New York soon as Alabama is definitely not a writer’s haven.”

Within weeks he was back in Manhattan, sorting cartoons at
The New Yorker.
His final exit from the magazine, in the summer of 1944, was both more sudden and more unpleasant than he could have wanted. Despite the lack of encouragement, he had been writing all along, and in August he used his vacation to attend Vermont’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Mentioning his connection to
The New Yorker
when he arrived, he probably gave the impression that he wrote copy rather than delivered it. That was what Robert Frost, who had reached the craggy peak of his eminence, believed, anyway, and when Truman walked out of one of his readings, the old poet took it as a deliberate insult from both Truman and the magazine that employed him.

The insult, if insult it was, was not intentional. “It just so happened,” Truman said, “that I was recovering from the flu and still had a very stiff neck. I was sitting in the front row. I bent down to rub my ankle and found I couldn’t straighten up again because of my neck. There I was, bent away over, with my hand on my ankle. It must have looked as though I had fallen asleep. And there he was up there on the platform, reading. Being unable to straighten up, I worked my way out of my seat and began to hobble as quietly as I could up the aisle—still bent away over. That was when he decided I was sneaking out. I heard him slam the book. Then he said: ‘Well, if that’s what the representative of
The New Yorker
thinks of my reading, I shall stop.’ Then he threw the book.”

Word of the incident flew to New York and to
The New Yorker.
Some of the women who had attended the reading, and probably Frost himself, wrote angry letters to Ross, and Ross, who apparently believed, perhaps correctly, that Truman had misrepresented himself as a
New Yorker
writer, demanded an accounting. That Truman refused to provide, giving the editor of
The New Yorker
the same stubborn no he used to give the principal of Greenwich High School. “I told him that I wouldn’t give an explanation, that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that I hadn’t been there on
New Yorker
business anyway.” Whether he quit before he was fired even he could not remember. Whichever it was, he left that day, and Ross gave orders that he not be allowed back on the nineteenth floor. “Truman came home crying,” Joe Capote recalled. “He was so disappointed. But I told him not to let it bother him, there was nothing to worry about. Then he said, ‘I want to finish the book I’m working on. Will you take care of me while I write it?’ I said I would.”

A
LTHOUGH
Truman could not have known it that day, Ross had done him a favor, an unintentional kindness, in firing him. Indeed, if the reverse had happened, if by some bureaucratic aberration he had been made a writer at
The New Yorker
, the result might well have been disastrous for both his writing and his career. He was only just beginning to find his true voice, his distinctive style as a writer, and if he had stayed and moved up, he might have been tempted, perhaps without even knowing it, to trim his increasingly luxuriant prose to the more muted, understated pattern favored by the magazine. Such a mutation, a kind of protective coloration, has been the fate of other spirited young talents, certainly, at
The New Yorker
and elsewhere; an embrace, if it comes with strings and conditions, can be more damaging than a rejection, and at that age even Truman might have been flattered into
The New Yorker
’s genteel conformity. As it was, Ross gave him no choice: he had to be himself, and as he turned twenty that fall of 1944, he at last began the life of a full-time writer, whose only concern, from morning to night, was to put words onto a page.

Once again, and for the same reasons—his mother’s drinking and the need for solitude in which to work—he looked south. There was little inducement to stay in New York anyway; he had lost not only his job, but for the moment, most of his friends as well. Phoebe had transferred from Barnard to Bennington College in Vermont, and Carol Marcus and Oona O’Neill had gone to California and married famous men—Carol had married William Saroyan; Oona, the great Charlie Chaplin. Alabama may not have been a writer’s haven, but it was at least quiet and, as long as he stayed with his relatives, cheap.

This time, fortunately, he was happier and more comfortable than he had been the previous year. “It was early winter when I arrived there,” he later wrote, “and the atmosphere of the roomy farmhouse, entirely heated by stoves and fireplaces, was well suited to a fledgling novelist wanting quiet isolation. The household rose at four-thirty, breakfasted by electric light, and was off about its business as the sun ascended.” That house belonged to his Aunt Lucille, but dividing his time, he also stayed with Jennie and with his other Monroeville aunt, Mary Ida. “He seemed happy-happy,” recalled Mary Ida. “He would sit down and talk just as fast as he could, just as I did. I wasn’t listening to him, and he wasn’t listening to me. But when he worked, he really worked.”

The uncompleted book he had brought down from New York, the one he had asked Joe’s help to let him finish, was called
Summer Crossing.
It was a social comedy, revolving around a Fifth Avenue debutante and the parties she gave one summer while her parents were in Europe—the summer crossing of the title. In Alabama, however, that subject seemed less compelling than it had in New York. Seeing the stretched-out branches of the chinaberry tree, where he and Harper Lee had traded secrets in their tree house, walking the dusty-red streets of Monroeville, through which Arch had once paraded the Great Pasha, and tramping through the swampy woods around town, where he and Sook had hunted for the ingredients of her dropsy medicine, he found that Fifth Avenue was very far away and his own childhood very close, everywhere he looked, everywhere he walked, in the air itself. “More and more,” he wrote, “
Summer Crossing
seemed to me thin, clever, unfelt. Another language, a secret spiritual geography, was burgeoning inside me, taking hold of my nightdream hours as well as my wakeful daydreams.”

The accumulations of the past suddenly overwhelmed him, he said, one frosty December afternoon when he wandered out to Hatter’s Mill, where he had learned to swim and where, one terrible day, he had been bitten by a cottonmouth moccasin. Deserted and forlorn under the thin and milky winter sun, the still waters of the pond seemed like his own subconscious, holding within their gloomy depths all the days and weeks of his boyhood. Gazing beneath the surface of that moody pond, he saw the outlines of an entirely new book, a book not about the sleek and smooth world of Fifth Avenue society, which he scarcely knew at all, but about a boy growing up, lost, lonely, starving for love, in a backwoods town in Alabama. Memory crowded upon memory, and “excitement—a variety of creative coma—overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole book.

“It was dark when I got home, and cold, but I didn’t feel the cold because of the fire inside me. My Aunt Lucille said she had been worried about me, and was disappointed because I didn’t want any supper. She wanted to know if I was sick; I said no. She said, ‘Well, you
look
sick. You’re white as a ghost.’ I said good night, locked myself in my room, tossed the manuscript of
Summer Crossing
into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, got into bed fully clothed, and with pathetic optimism, wrote: ‘
Other Voices, Other Rooms
—a novel by Truman Capote.’”

Very likely, that description is a shorthand version of what took place over a period of days or weeks. No matter. The result was the same.
Summer Crossing
was put aside, and the new novel with its evocative and haunting title,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, was begun. “It is unusual, but occasionally it happens to almost every writer that the writing of some particular story seems outer-willed and effortless,” Truman said. “It is as though one were a secretary transcribing the words of a voice from a cloud. The difficulty is maintaining contact with this spectral dictator. Eventually it developed that communication ran highest at night, as fevers are known to do after dusk. So I took to working all night and sleeping all day, a routine that distressed the household and caused constant disapproving comment: ‘But you’ve got everything turned upside down. You’re ruining your health.’ That is why I thanked my exasperated relatives for their generosity, their burdened patience, and bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans.”