Capote (15 page)

His dilemma was that he could not afford to leave, but it was impossible to stay, and once again Carson came to his aid, suggesting that he join her in the spring at Yaddo, the writers’ and artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, where she herself had often found a restful haven. There would be no expenses, she told him—Yaddo provided everything but transportation—and to be accepted he had only to ask: she would pull the necessary strings; Newton Arvin, one of the trustees, was one of her best friends, and Elizabeth Ames, the matriarchal director, would do almost anything for her. Truman did agree, of course, and on May 1, 1946, he and Leo Lerman, another prospective inmate, traveled by train to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, about four hours from Manhattan.

Surrounded by gentle hills, shady woods, and inviting lakes, Yaddo did indeed provide him the quiet Carson had said it would—and a great deal more. The guest list was small, never more than fifteen or twenty, and the spaces were large. Some guests were housed in cottages and studios on the grounds; others lived in the stone mansion, which was the center of social activity. Tranquility was not only promised; it was enforced, and any violation of the rules resulted in a sternly worded note from the vigilant Mrs. Ames. “She was a strange, creepy sort of woman,” said Truman, “silent and sinister like Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca.
She was always going around spying, seeing who was working and not working and what everybody was up to.” Yaddo was a working community, the rules emphasized, and from nine to four guests were expected to be by themselves, doing whatever they had come there to do; the kitchen even provided box lunches so that they would not be interrupted by a formal midday meal. So much labor brought its reward, however, and after four, the silence was broken. Doors banged open, invitations were issued, and most years the visitors played as hard as they worked. Each summer ended with stories of drinking and dancing, games on the lawn, romances begun and ended under the northern stars.

Carson had already been in residence more than a month when Truman arrived, and during the eleven weeks he was there—he left July 17—a score of others came or went, including several who became his particular favorites: Marguerite Young and John Malcolm Brinnin represented the younger generation of writers and poets; Newton Arvin and another of Carson’s friends, Howard Doughty, were the middle-aged academics; and Katherine Anne Porter, still beautiful at fifty-six, was the glamorous and much-admired older writer.

Adhering to Yaddo’s schedule with as much determination as everyone else, Truman worked on
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, wrote a short story, “The Headless Hawk,” and prepared to return, when his stay was up, to New Orleans for
Harper’s Bazaar
, which wanted him to do an impressionistic travel article. During the other hours, playtime, he was, as might have been expected, the center of attention. With the tail of his shirt flapping outside his trousers, “he always seemed to be stepping right out of a cloud,” said Marguerite Young. “He walked as if every step were choreographed to some music that he alone heard. You would see him—or just the tail of that white shirt—for an instant and then he would be gone. I remember him as being absolutely enthralling that summer, high-spirited, generous, loving. We all thought he was a genius.”

That was the Ariel side, but there was also Puck, who was the instigator of most of the amusements that year. “Spontaneous when others are cautious, he has a child’s directness, a child’s indifference to propriety,” Brinnin wrote in his diary, “and so gets to the heart of matters with an audacity strangers find outrageous, then delightful. Yet nothing he says or does accounts for the magnet somewhere in his makeup that exerts itself like a force beyond logic; he’s responsible for turning the summer into a dance of bees. His slightest movements throughout the mansion, about the grounds, or on the side streets of Saratoga are charted and signaled by sentries visible only to one another. Schemes to share his table at dinner are laid at breakfast, sometimes by single plotters, sometimes by teams united in shamelessness. There’s always laughter at his table, echoing across the moat of silence in which the tables around it are sunk.”

Although Carson, an accomplished attention-getter herself, remained only through May, they behaved like brother and sister while she was there. Whatever he had she wanted; she wore his clothes, even his shoes, and snatched his long-tailed white shirts whenever she could. Rummaging through his chest of drawers one day, she discovered a paper that carried his original name and threatened to inform everyone that he was an impostor, not Truman Capote at all but someone with the leaden name of Truman Streckfus Persons. “You just go right ahead, honey chile,” he coolly told her, “and I’ll tell them your real name is Lula Smith.” Even Porter was fascinated by the surprising spectacle they made dancing together in the huge kitchen: the tall partner, Carson, awkwardly jiggling up and down while the short one, Truman, was doing graceful little pirouettes of his own devising. In all her wanderings she had probably never seen anyone like Truman before, and turning to Mrs. Ames, who was hard of hearing, she asked, in a voice so loud that her Southern accent could be heard across the room, “From where did he come, dear?” “From
Harper’s Bazaar
,” was Mrs. Ames’s unperturbed if nonsensical reply.

Katherine Anne, who danced with him too, later averred that he was a career climber who had latched on to her because of her literary fame, but in a letter to Mary Louise he seemed notably unimpressed and, indeed, rather cheeky in his description of her. “She must be about sixty,” he said, “but oh how she can do the hootchy-cootchy. She tries to act like a Southern belle of sixteen or so. She is so unserious it is hard to believe she can write at all. She thinks I am a wonderful dancer, and makes me dance with her all the time: it is simply awful, because she hasn’t the faintest notion of how to do the simplest steps.”

Something similar could have been said about poor Leo, who, out in the country, away from the friendly pavements he was used to, exhibited a whole new array of curious frights and phobias. Assigned to a studio away from the mansion, as Truman was, he kept a light burning all night to ward off ghosts, and once begged Truman to let him stay the night in his studio, where he then huddled in an old wicker chair until the sun came up. Sending a dispatch from the front to Mary Louise, Truman bravely reported that he himself was not afraid—except, of course, when bats flew into his room. “I simply can’t stand that cheap cheap crying as they circle in the dark,” he told her.

The existence of spirits was a matter of speculation; the presence of snakes was not and led, indirectly but very quickly, to Truman’s receiving a severe reprimand from the ever-watchful Mrs. Ames. In another letter to Mary Louise—at the top of which he commanded “
Destroy!!!
”—he explained what had happened. “Well, I knew it was too good to last: I’m in trouble, and it’s all Leo’s fault. According to Mrs. Ames, Howard Doughty and I are ‘insistently persecuting’ him. See, Leo has a real aberration about snakes: he makes me escort him every day from the mansion to his studio; but he has dramatized the whole thing to such a ridiculous extent that everybody here thought he was half-way joking. So yesterday Howard came to my studio for lunch. When he left he stepped on a snake in my yard, and picked it up. Leo, who was standing in his doorway across the road, saw it, and began to scream: ‘You’re mean, you’re cruel!’ then slammed his door, pulled down all his shades, and curled up under his desk, and stayed there the whole afternoon, in a real fit of terror: no one, of course, had any intention of frightening him. But two workmen who were putting firewood in our studios saw the whole thing and reported it to Mrs. A., who promptly sent a little ‘blue note’ (all communication is carried on through these blue notes) saying that Mr. Lerman had been made ill by our (Howard’s and mine) insistent persecution. I suppose it will blow over, but it’s all too absurd for words. Leo, of course, feels very badly that he got us in so much trouble. Howard wrote a wonderful reply explaining everything (we felt like little naughty schoolboys, which annoyed Howard, for he is a professor at Harvard, and 42 years old).”

In one of his letters to Mary Louise, Truman listed the friends he had made at Yaddo, then added, “Of all the people here I like Howard Doughty best.” He neglected only to give the reason: he and Howard had become the latest chapter in Yaddo’s long history of summer romances, and it was to their affair Truman was probably alluding when he wrote Mary Louise that “the strangest thing is going on, I’m dying to tell you, but am so afraid of putting it in a letter.” To the consternation of Howard, who maintained a public facade of heterosexuality, Truman told nearly everyone else, however. “The little one has been talking again,” Howard would grimly inform a friend who was in on his secret. Years later Truman succinctly summarized their relationship. “Howard and I just got together for sex,” he said. “He was very attractive, but I wasn’t in love with him.”

Both statements seem to have been true. By all accounts Doughty
was
an attractive man, lean and lanky, about six feet tall, with dark hair, a craggy face and the aristocratic manners befitting a descendant of Cotton Mather. “He had a marvelous voice,” recalled Brinnin, “with all those echoes that take ten generations to produce.” Much of his adult life, upwards of twenty years, was devoted to a biography of Francis Parkman, the great nineteenth-century historian. Finally published in 1962, too late in his life to be of much help to him in the academic job market, his book, beyond its other merits, showed his spiritual affinity with Parkman. “Howard was prone to very depressed spells,” said his wife, Frances, who was aware of his homosexuality even before they married. “He had some breakdowns, and he had many spells of just wanting to turn his head to the wall. Ours was not an easy marriage, and I contemplated getting a divorce. But we liked so many of the same things, and for the most part we had a very good life together, except sexually.”

If Howard had been born a generation later, he probably would not have married at all, but would have become instead, insofar as either of them was capable of such involvement, the lifelong companion of Newton Arvin, a professor of literature at Smith College and almost certainly the strongest influence on his adult life. Even without a formal relationship, the bond between them was indissoluble. They saw each other frequently for thirty years or more and, according to Arvin’s diaries, made love almost every time they met. Though each had separate affairs, in their hearts they were never far apart. “You know how much I love you,” Arvin wrote Howard on May 14, even as Howard may have been making love to Truman. “It is a luxury only to allow oneself to
say
it from time to time. I am still, after all these years, incredulous that I should have come upon you. Is a completer mutual sympathy conceivable between fallible human beings? I should certainly not expect it.”

It was at that point that Truman, without hint or warning, entered their lives, hurtling toward them like a shooting star, stunning them, dazing them, dazzling them altogether. “Have you happened to run across any of Truman Capote’s stories?” Howard wrote Newton on June 2. “The child really has an uncanny talent—almost frightening. He seems to have had practically no education except the back-files of the little magazines and is almost entirely unencumbered with ideas except on the practice of his art, but a mediumistic voice speaks through him in the most impeccable of accents. It’s a long time since I’ve read anybody with such a specific gift for writing—like a musician’s for music.”

Arvin himself arrived on June 12 for his annual summer visit. Within hours that shooting star had struck him, and he professed himself instantly smitten, encircled by what he called the “magic ring” of love. Howard immediately decamped for Boston—whether by prearrangement or sudden inspiration, it is hard to say—and as he departed, he took with him the singular picture of his past and present lovers walking hand in hand into nirvana.

The date that magic ring closed, which probably meant the first time Truman and Newton made love, was Friday, June 14. “I can’t down the desire to tell you, and only you,” Newton wrote Howard a few days later, “how magically the powers of nature, beginning last Friday (June 14, 1946, as I am not likely to forget), and outward circumstances generally connived to furnish the kind of medium or ambiente for this Thing that one can surely expect but once or twice in a lifetime. The weather was supernatural on Friday, and then again on Sunday, and on Tuesday too; and maybe some time I can tell you what the cool blue air, and the green light, and then a certain wash of moonlight falling into this room of mine as the twilight fused imperceptibly into it—what things of this sort did to my eyes and my command of speech and my senses, and my whole nature.”

For Truman, June 14 was also a supernatural day. In a moment he had forgotten Howard’s aristocratic voice and his Jimmy Stewart looks and had fallen in love with Newton, the least likely candidate for his affections: forty-five, bald, bespectacled, slight, shy, anemic, a victim of depression, vertigo, and a score of other psychological ailments—almost a parody, in short, of the popular image of the mousy college professor. “Newton looked like a clerk, and his attraction was a puzzle to me,” said Brinnin, who was expressing a common opinion. Truman viewed him with different eyes, and saw virtues that probably even Howard had missed. “Newton was a charming person,” he said, “cultivated in every way, with the most wonderfully subtle mind. He was like a lozenge that you could keep turning to the light, one way or another, and the most beautiful colors would come out.”

Given such feelings on both sides, there was no need for courtship, and during the next month the new lovers enjoyed the equivalent of a honeymoon, a honeymoon made more delicious still because of its surprise: it was as if they had walked from Yaddo’s broad, sunlit public lawns into the woods beyond and discovered a hidden glade carpeted with bluebonnets and perfumed by wild wisteria. They had lunch and dinner together, alone or with others, went into town to the movies, and at the end of the evening took long walks around the grounds.