Capote (24 page)

Other Voices
almost immediately jumped onto the
New York Times
best-seller list, where it remained for nine weeks. It sold more than 26,000 copies, a figure which, if not sensational, was considered extremely good, particularly given the subject matter and the lack of a conventional plot. Sales, however, were only one measure of its success. Although many other novels of 1948, including Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
and Irwin Shaw’s
The Young Lions
, outsold it several times over, no other was so much discussed, or became so controversial. Truman’s reputation, which had been building among literary people since “Miriam,” exploded in all directions. People who had never walked into a bookstore suddenly knew the name and, most certainly, the face of Truman Capote.

Indeed, his photograph on the back cover probably caused more comment than his prose. Several papers and magazines reprinted it alongside their reviews, Random House used it in ads—“This is Truman Capote”—and huge blowups were sent to the shops. One night while Truman was visiting Andrew, Harold Halma went for a walk and overheard the conversation of two middle-aged women who were studying one of the blowups in a Fifth Avenue bookstore window. “I’m telling you, he’s just young,” said one. “And I’m telling you, if he isn’t young, he’s dangerous!” replied the other. Harold sprinted back to the apartment to tell Truman, who growled and pretended to be angry, but repeated the exchange to anyone who would listen.

Some were offended and even outraged by that suggestive, insinuating pose. Merle Miller, whose own novel
That Winter
had also just come out, rose to denounce it at a publishing forum. If it was Truman’s idea, he said, it was deplorable; if it was his publisher’s, it was disgraceful. Someone who signed himself simply “A Critic” sent a postcard to Random House: “Sirs: Anent your newly found marvel, ‘Truman Capote,’ sic, it is downright foolish for you to believe this nincompoop is going anywhere, especially by his stupid poses…. Your ad depicts this unsuspecting fool as an inmate of the Buchenwald Camp, just released in a starving condition or a flophouse bum reclining on a Bowery chair after an all-night bout with a bottle of ‘smoke.’”

Others were amused, and the book had scarcely reached the stores before columnist William Targ inserted the following bit of doggerel into his
Manhattan Letter.

If Truman thought the picture would bring him publicity, humorist Max Shulman believed a funny imitation would do the same for him, and combing his dark hair over his forehead, he struck an identical pose in an identical outfit for the dust jacket of his own book, a collection titled
Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size.
“Although these three books were written by Shulman at the age of eight,” slyly observed the author’s biography inside, “critics have pointed out that they show the insight and penetration of a man of nine.”

Truman had wanted attention, not brickbats and laughter. He had not foreseen that the picture would overshadow and in some ways trivialize the work it was promoting, transforming the real right thing into something that many dismissed as the product of a brilliant publicity campaign. When he realized what damage the picture had done, he tried to disclaim responsibility for it, maintaining, first of all, that Harold had caught him unawares when he took it, and, second of all, that he had been away when Linscott had picked it for the dust jacket. Neither claim was true. He had asked Harold to take it, telling him exactly how he wanted to look. Although putting it on the back cover was in fact Linscott’s idea, Truman obligingly, probably enthusiastically, went along, disregarding the wiser counsel of Mary Louise, who warned him that it was not for public consumption. Thus, in the end, he had only himself to blame for the uproar it created. Photographs had always served him well, however, and if that one made him both a target and a figure of fun, it did at least achieve its primary purpose: it gave him not only the literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted.

Book pages throughout the country, and occasionally gossip columns as well, were soon printing items about him, often repeating that spurious biography word for word. “Truman Capote has the critics in a dither, as they try to decide whether he’s a genius,” said a paper in as unlikely a place as Beaumont, Texas. On February 8 the
Times Book Review
said that sales of
Other Voices
were “stepping along at the rate of 700 copies a day, and already a Capote legend is in the making.” During the following weeks the
Book Review
almost gave him a permanent spot in its pages, in what it called the “Capote Corner” or “this week’s note on Truman Capote.” When it had nothing new to say on February 29, it saved its expectant readers a fruitless search by observing: “Capote Note: Nothing new this week.”

All that winter and through the spring, Truman and his book were favorite topics among noncritics as well. “You can’t go to any party these days but what people will line up pro and con on the subject of Truman Capote,” a young Manhattan woman told Selma Robinson, a reporter for the tabloid
PM
, who was writing a Truman profile. “Some take one side, some the other, and not necessarily those who have read his book.” Random House had put a blurb from his old friend Marguerite Young on that famous dust jacket, and for a year afterward, she said, “I couldn’t go to a literary cocktail party without people jumping at me, screaming and practically cursing me because I had praised ‘that thing’! The book aroused absolute hysteria. Truman received suitcases of letters from people all over the United States, which he would read to me every night over the telephone.”

For every attacker there was a defender. On many college campuses “that thing” was held high by student esthetes, rebelling against the more practical prose and more practical minds then prevailing. “In 1948, cruising the lunchbag-odorous Commons of Washington Square College, I used to keep an eye out for
Other Voices, Other Rooms
,” wrote Cynthia Ozick. “That place and that time were turbulent with mainly dumb, mainly truculent veterans in their thirties arrived under the open enrollment of the GI Bill, and the handful of young esthetes, still dewy with high school Virgil (
O infelix Dido!
), whose doom it was to wander through that poverty-muttering postwar mob in hapless search of Beauty, found one another through Truman Capote…. [He] was the banner against this blight. To walk with Capote in your grasp was as distinctive, and as dissenting from the world’s values, as a monk’s habit.”

When they look back on their careers, few writers can recall their good notices. But the bad ones are tattooed on their hearts. Truman was no exception. He forgot the good words from the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Indianapolis Times
, and all the other publications that had praised him, but the unfavorable ones he could recite almost from memory. “Except for the
Herald Tribune
, my novel got nothing but bad reviews,” he said. “All the rest were terrible. I can’t remember another good one.”

The all but universal acclaim heaped upon his short stories had spoiled him and left him unprepared for serious disapproval. By any realistic standard, he had achieved a triumph. But his standard was not realistic, and his success was smaller than he had dreamed. “Truman thought that
Other Voices
would be the biggest thing since
Gone with the Wind
,” said Andrew. “If it hadn’t been a success at all, I don’t think he could have survived.” Partly because of the furor aroused by that languid photo, his triumph was, in his mind, tarnished. “I was so shocked and hurt that I never got any pleasure out of it at all,” he said. “Everything was different than I had always thought or hoped it would be.” Depressed and confused, he believed that he was the object of a conspiracy of abuse and ridicule.

Interviewing him in late January at 1060 Park, Selma Robinson of
PM
learned how little happiness it had given him to be, in her words, “the most discussed writer in New York literary circles.” He was not the same person Doris Lilly had seen running down Madison Avenue a few months before. How did he feel about the reaction to his novel? she asked. “The smile left his face abruptly,” she wrote, “and he looked a hurt, puzzled boy: ‘I did not expect it to be the way it was. Some of the reviews seemed to be so blind. They call it a fantasy—decadent—they say I’ve written a book about homosexuality. I did not, nor did I intend to and I ought to know what I wanted it to be—I wrote the book.’ Some of the reviews (he rose to get a handful) had a quality of personal attack that surprised him. He fingered them with an expression that was almost fear and for a swift moment his eyes were helpless, disturbed, bright, like the eyes of some small creature—a jack-rabbit, or a chipmunk, darting into a hedge.”

Robinson then asked how he himself would characterize
Other Voices
, and he replied with a kind of emotional stutter: “It’s this bright moment, this ghostly moment of a completely lost child. A moment in his life, the moment when he gives up his boyhood. I can see a certain pattern to Joel’s summer at Skully’s Landing, though I don’t know what his life will be when he grows up.”

H
IS
natural resilience soon prevailed, and as the hubbub subsided, Truman turned to the question that weighs on any young novelist who has had a resounding success: what next? A book is a major investment for a serious writer, and the wrong choice of a theme or plot, particularly at the beginning, not only wastes his time and dampens his enthusiasm, but also casts a blight on his still tender reputation. It was an occupational hazard Truman was aware of and planned to avoid; having made a name for himself, he knew that to keep it he would not only have to work, but to work on something that was right for him. “Publishing is the toughest racket in the world to stay on top of,” he later said. “To be a good writer and stay on top is one of the most difficult balancing acts ever. Talent isn’t enough. You’ve got to have tremendous staying power. Out of all those people who began publishing when I did, there are only three left that anybody knows about—Gore, Norman, and me. There has to be some ‘X’ factor, some extra dimension, that has kept us going. Really successful people are like vampires: you can’t kill them unless you drive a stake through their hearts. The only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself.”

Fortunately, he had time to ponder his future. On the strength of
Other Voices
, Random House was putting a collection of his short stories on its list for the following winter, which presumably would bring him attention through 1949. If anyone pressed him about what would follow that, he would also talk, albeit in a vague way, about a second novel, which he had tentatively titled
Monday’s Folly.
It would be set in Manhattan, he said, and it would be about a woman who becomes a catalytic agent for four people trying to find freedom. But he did not sound excited by it, and he appeared in no rush to sit down once again with a notebook and his favorite soft-leaded pencils, in no hurry to be possessed once more by the creative fever that had produced
Other Voices.
Like anyone else who has completed a large and taxing job, he needed a break and a change of scenery before starting off again.

The prospect of lying in a hammock on Nantucket all summer, trying to cope with Newton’s almost existential pouts, did not stir him, and his search for a change of scenery took him to a different locale altogether: Europe. For the first time since the war, ordinary Americans could travel across the Atlantic, and thousands of them—perhaps as many as 100,000, according to one estimate—were booking reservations. Tennessee and Gore had sailed earlier, and several of his other friends, such as Gian-Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber, were busy packing. By April, Truman knew that he could not face the fall in Manhattan unless he too had joined the throng that was making the Grand Tour of 1948. So it was that on the morning of Friday, May 14, after five days of saying goodbye to Newton in Northampton and several emotional phone calls to him afterward, he found himself standing in a tiny cabin on the
Queen Elizabeth
, surrounded by his new tan leather suitcases and saying farewell to a scattering of his friends. “You take good care of Newton!” he told Andrew.

His fame preceded him. Although European editions of
Other Voices
were months away, copies of the American edition, as well as of the magazines that had featured him so prominently, had made their way across the Atlantic, and many people in Britain and France were eager to meet the seductive young genius on the Victorian sofa. “Truman Capote is all the rage here,” a young American living in London wrote a friend at home—a week before Truman even stepped onto the gangplank of the
Queen Elizabeth.
In Paris, the young American added, Denham Fouts, the glamorous lover of princes, lords, and millionaires, and a figure of myth and legend in international homosexual circles, was rumored to have become so infatuated with Truman’s picture that he had sent him a blank check on which he had written only one word: Come. “So now,” confidently predicted Waldemar Hansen, the aforementioned young American, “Capote will be turning up in Paris soon.”

Truman’s first stop, however, was London. Tasting one of the rewards of a best-selling author, he stayed at Claridge’s, from which, following up on invitations and introductions he had received from Englishmen in New York, he sallied forth to meet a good part of the English literary and social establishment. He visited Cecil Beaton at Reddish House, Beaton’s country home near Salisbury; he traveled up to Oxford for lunch with a literary don, Lord David Cecil; and he dined, or at least exchanged words, with everyone from Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh to Noël Coward and Harold Nicolson, who attempted to take him to bed. Even the English, who were accustomed to eccentric characters, were surprised by him. “He looked like a child, and talked like a very sophisticated, agreeable grown-up person,” recalled Lord Cecil. “He said that Evelyn Waugh’s
The Loved One
was not as good as it seemed since it lacked all tenderness,” Nicolson wrote in his diary. “This was said so simply that I found it attractive.”