Authors: Gerald Clarke
The blame belonged to Truman, who, without consulting him, had impulsively issued the invitation in May. An expatriate Englishman who lived in California, Isherwood was visiting Random House when his friends there, invoking the hallowed name of Proust, bragged about “this remarkable young writer” they wanted him to meet. “I thought, ‘Ha! Just another young writer,’” said Isherwood, “when this extraordinary little figure came into the room with his hand raised rather high, possibly indicating that one should kiss it. My first reaction was ‘My God! He’s not kidding!’ But then I realized that though he was putting on an act, it was an act that represented something very deliberate and quite genuine. Something happened which one wishes occurred far more often in life: I loved him immediately. We hadn’t been talking for more than a few minutes when he invited me to spend some weeks on Nantucket. I went back to Bill Caskey and said: ‘The most astounding thing has happened. I’ve done something I never, never have done before. I’ve accepted an invitation from a complete stranger for both of us to stay with him. When you see him, I think you’ll know why.’ Bill met him and had exactly the same reaction. We were both delighted with him. He was perfectly cool-headed, but at the same time he was a sort of cuddly little koala bear.”
Truman was no less delighted with Isherwood, the author of
Goodbye to Berlin
, the creator of the irrepressible Sally Bowles, and the storyteller who, in Somerset Maugham’s opinion, held “the future of the English novel in his hands.” His company was much sought after by younger writers, who hoped that he might confide in them some of the secrets of their craft, and who breathlessly quizzed him, as Truman did, about the English literary world and the famous writers he had known. Truman was undoubtedly thrilled at the prospect of having such a literary celebrity as his guest, but knowing Newton, he must also have known that he would cause him pain and anxiety when he issued the invitation that brought Isherwood and his friend to ‘Sconset on July 13.
Although the mornings were still dedicated to work, the afternoons and evenings were suddenly alive with the activity Truman thrived on—and Newton so profoundly detested. Looking much younger than forty-two, Isherwood was still the “appreciative merry little bird” that Virginia Woolf had called him ten years earlier. Caskey, a good-looking American in his mid-twenties, was just as merry, with an uninhibited, loose-tongued sense of humor that often shocked staider folk. When the three happy spirits of the Capote household combined with those in Leo’s house, the adult world was banished, and Nantucket became a boys’ camp from which all the counselors had mysteriously disappeared. As always, Truman was the ringleader, the one who decided what they should do, and at his direction they made daily trips to the beach, took bicycle tours around the island, and played hide-and-seek and various other childhood games.
Nearly everything they did was too silly for Newton, certainly, who remained “very much in the background, rather like a tutor,” said Caskey. He never accompanied them to the beach, and he hid in the house more and more, sometimes scrambling eggs for himself so that he did not have to take part in their long, laugh-filled dinners. Yet, ironically, he too reverted to childhood, which for him had meant only misery and humiliation: locking himself inside the house with his books while everyone else was outside having fun was exactly what he had done as that misbegotten boy in Indiana. “I stay here & mope,” he disconsolately told his diary on July 15. Even after Isherwood and Caskey had gone, he was jumpy, counting the hours until he would be once again safely encased behind his bookcases at Smith. “I am uncontrollably eager to get back to Hamp this week and dig my way in at the office for a long, steady, uninterrupted spell of work on the [Melville] book, such as I can only do there at home, and must do, if the goblins are not to get me,” he wrote Mary Louise just before he departed the island. “It’s been a wonderful outing down here,” he added politely, “but I don’t want to spend ages in Purgatory on the ledge of Sloth.”
Truman returned to New York four days after completing
Other Voices
, and a few days later he also traveled to Northampton, where he helped Newton celebrate his forty-seventh birthday. “Very happy owing to T.C.’s being here” was how Newton recorded the date. “Supper here—with cake and candles.” A month later another candle-studded cake was placed on that table for Truman’s birthday, his twenty-third. So went the autumn, with the two of them quietly resuming their New York–Northampton shuttle after their long and, for Newton anyway, not altogether successful summer on Nantucket.
The only real excitement that fall was an impromptu evening of farce in late November, when Truman took a small party, including Andrew, Newton, and Phoebe, up to Harlem for the Celebrity Club’s annual drag dance. It was always one of the best shows of the year, and things proceeded in their usual amusing fashion—“The queens all flamed like Marie Antoinette,” said Andrew—when another uniformed contingent, dressed in policeman’s blue, burst through the doors. “A raid! A raid!” screamed the drag queens, lifting their gowns as they sprinted toward the exits. “Oh, my reputation, my reputation,” moaned Newton, who imagined his name spelled out in the next morning’s headlines. “Your reputation isn’t worth a damn if you’re caught up here, honey,” Phoebe said to herself as Truman’s band of revelers fought their way to the door. Only when they were safely outside did they learn that it had not been a raid at all and that the police were merely checking for violations of the fire code. But when they regrouped to head back downtown, they could not find Newton, who had disappeared in the panic—some suspected that his fright had already driven him halfway to Northampton. Going back inside to search for him, Truman discovered him hiding in a telephone booth. “Do you think it’s all right to come out?” he fearfully asked as Truman pulled him out. Even by his standards, Newton’s account of the night was a masterpiece of understatement. “To Blackie’s (the Celebrity Club) in Harlem, which we have to leave in a hurry at midnight,” he wrote in his diary.
Relieved of the burden of working on his book, Truman accepted an assignment that fulfilled at least one of the ambitions he had harbored in Greenwich:
Vogue
asked him to fly to California to take a fresh look at an old subject, Hollywood, and write the same kind of nonfactual, impressionistic piece he had written about New Orleans for
Harper’s Bazaar.
He made his pilgrimage to the Hollywood shrine in early December and was pleased to discover that at least in some ways it was just as he had imagined. “I’m the only person of any sex whatever who’s not being kept in this place,” he breezily wrote Andrew. “And you wouldn’t believe what they think worth keeping in Southern California!”
Oona O’Neill, who was now Mrs. Charlie Chaplin, gave a party for him, and Joan Crawford, “the fabled Miss C.,” as he discreetly disguised her in print, invited him to lunch. Dressed in a housecoat, with no makeup and her hairpins dangling loosely, Crawford “skipped like a schoolgirl across the room,” apologizing for keeping him waiting—she had been upstairs making the beds. Katherine Anne Porter, who was moonlighting as a screenwriter, cooked dinner for him at her apartment in Santa Monica. “Still on the prowl for celebrities, he couldn’t have been in a more promising ambience,” Porter sourly recalled, forgetting all their good times at Yaddo. “He was surrounded by famous people he had always wanted to know. And he was determined to meet them.” Meet them he did during his two busy weeks, and Porter offered an equally acerb, but probably accurate account of one of their conversations:
“Guess who I had lunch with yesterday?” Truman asked. “In the star’s dining room, I’ll have you know.”
“I can’t possibly imagine, Truman, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“Well, it was Greta Garbo herself, and she was perfectly delightful.”
“How wonderful. But how did you manage this magnificent coup?”
“Well, I’ve got my ways, Katherine Anne. I’ve got my ways.”
That encounter with the great Garbo had magically lengthened into seven full days when it came time to describe it to his New York friends. “I spent the first week with Greta Garbo and the second week with Charlie Chaplin,” he informed Cerf, who, star-struck himself, believed every word.
Nineteen forty-seven ended for him, as it began, in Northampton, and on Christmas Eve, just two days after his return from Hollywood, he yet again made that familiar journey north from Grand Central. Unlike the previous New Year’s, the beginning of 1948 truly marked a turning in his life. Random House had begun shipping
Other Voices
to the stores while he was in California, and reviewers were at last able to read and judge the first book of the most famous unpublished novelist in America. “[Truman’s] novel comes out in mid-January,” Newton wrote Granville Hicks. “Something of an Event, inevitably, and one hopes that the publishers and others have not Built it Up to a dangerous hubristic extent. All those New York gents (and ladies) will destroy him if they can—destroy him as a writer, I mean—but my impression is that they will have real difficulty in doing so. He has a kind of toughness they may not suspect.”
“
O
ther Voices, Other Rooms
was an attempt to exorcise demons,” Truman wrote a quarter of a century later, “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.” Self-deception perhaps, unpardonable no, and the middle-aged man who pronounced that judgment was too severe on the young author who produced a work of such extraordinary power and intensity. Indeed, it was his good fortune that he was blind, at least on the conscious level, to what he was doing. Self-consciousness would have stilled his hand helplessly above the page if he had realized that he was in fact writing not just a novel, but his psychological autobiography: charting, under the guise of fiction, the anguished journey that ended in his discovery of his identity as a man, as a homosexual, and as an artist.
His self-deception is understandable, because on the surface there are only a few similarities between the course of his own life and the gothic plot of his book. His hero is thirteen-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, who, after his mother dies, is sent from New Orleans, where he has grown up, to live in an isolated plantation house with his father, whom he has never seen and whose last name, Sansom, he does not even bear. As the book begins, he makes his way to Noon City, the town nearest the plantation. There he is met by an ancient black retainer, Jesus Fever, whose mule-drawn wagon carries him, as if in a dream, along dark and lonely country roads to Skully’s Landing, the house in which his father resides.
The remnant of what once was a great mansion, Skully’s Landing is a place outside time, ruled by decadence and decay. There is neither electricity nor running water, and five white columns, the only reminders of a burned-down wing, give the garden “the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin.” The only occupants are Joel’s sharp-tongued stepmother, Miss Amy; her effeminate, narcissistic cousin, Randolph; and Joel’s father, who, despite Joel’s inquiries, remains mysteriously out of sight. All those who live in and near the Landing are in some way abnormal and even grotesque: the twins from a neighboring farm, feminine but prissy Florabel and her wild tomboy sister, Idabel; dwarfish Jesus Fever, who has a touch of the wizard in his century-old eyes; his granddaughter, Zoo, whose giraffelike neck displays the knife scar her bridegroom gave her on their wedding night; and Little Sunshine, a black hermit who makes his home in the swamp-shrouded remains of a once fashionable resort, the Cloud Hotel. Most disturbing of all to Joel is the apparition of a spectral face he sees peering at him from a top-floor window, a “queer lady” wearing a towering white wig with “fat dribbling curls,” like a countess at the court of Louis XVI.
Randolph, who is in his mid-thirties, puzzles Joel with his odd behavior, his peculiar appearance—he dresses in silk pajamas and kimonos—and his ironic, Oscar Wilde-like way of speaking. “All children are morbid; it’s their one saving grace” is one of his epigrams. Joel is flattered by his attention, however, and as Randolph tells the story of his thwarted passion for a Mexican boxer, Pepe Alvarez, Joel begins to understand and sympathize with him. “The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries,” Randolph explains. “Weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.” In this and other passages, Randolph becomes the spokesman for the novel’s major themes—and the themes that dominate all of Truman’s writing: the loneliness that afflicts all but the stupid or insensitive; the sacredness of love, whatever its form; the disappointment that invariably follows high expectation; and the perversion of innocence.
When Joel is finally allowed to see his father, he finds not the handsome, dashing man around whom he has built his fantasies, but an almost speechless paralytic who demands help by bouncing red tennis balls onto the floor from his bed. It was not his father’s, but Randolph’s spidery handwriting, in red ink on water-green paper, that had been on the letter bringing him to the Landing. Feeling both cheated and trapped, Joel runs away with Idabel, only to catch pneumonia from the rain and to be returned to the Landing. He is nursed back to health by Randolph, and in the end he realizes that there is no running away: the Landing is now his home, the place where he belongs. The queer lady with fat dribbling curls was Randolph, nostalgically dressed in the costume that had once attracted Pepe Alvarez at a Mardi Gras ball. When her ghostly face beckons from the window a second time, Joel obeys, pausing only, in the book’s last words, to look back at “the boy he had left behind.”