Capote (31 page)

Since he had last seen Truman, John Malcolm Brinnin had become director of the Poetry Center at the Ninety-second Street Y.M.H.A. in Manhattan, where he was responsible for arranging readings by poets and writers. Months before, Truman had agreed to read from his own works, but as the date, December 8, approached, he seemed to have second thoughts. He had not made much progress on
Summer Crossing
in Paris, and, with Jack’s customary acquiescence, he was considering postponing their return to America and proceeding directly to Sicily, where he believed he could work undisturbed. Yet he was also bored with traveling, “tired of sparking up the foreign scene,” as he jokingly told Brinnin. He procrastinated so long that to make the reading, he finally had to fly, leaving Jack to return with their luggage a week later on the
Queen Mary.
Brinnin met him at the airport in New York and watched as he emerged from the Air France Constellation. “When the ramp was settled into place and the door wrenched open, out he stepped, bareheaded, with a little dog [Manchester] squashed in his left arm. When I waved, he picked me out and waved back, then lifted the dog’s paw and waved it in my direction before he disappeared into the customs shed.”

The day of the reading found him in poorer spirits, however, racked by nervousness. Brinnin gave him a steadying brandy, helped him on with his black velvet suit, ushered him through the overflow crowd in the lobby of the Y.M.H.A., and led him out onto the stage. As Truman sat on a high stool, waiting to begin and clutching the copy of
A Tree of Night
from which he was to read, Brinnin had a small attack of nerves himself, wondering how the mostly conservative audience would react to that odd-looking little figure and that “baby seal’s voice.” His question was soon answered. When Truman finished reading, there was a blast of applause and the loud shouts of “Bravo!” and “Encore!” usually heard only in opera houses. “Bowing low,” Brinnin wrote, “blowing kisses with both hands, he returned again and again and, with a hop and a skip, left for good only when the stage manager had started the house lights blinking.” New York had welcomed him home.

N
EW
York, Truman had told a French reporter, is “the most stimulating of all the cities in the world. It’s like living inside an electric light bulb.” And incandescent it was in the weeks following his return. His absence had not dimmed people’s memories; it had made him more than ever an object of curiosity. His name was in gossip columns and cartoons—even a crossword puzzle—and no one seemed to tire of Truman tales. In an article on younger artists and writers,
Flair
magazine described, with some amusement, the stir he was creating two years after the publication of
Other Voices.
“The most richly embroidered legend, of course, is that of Mr. Truman Capote. It has been reported that on one of his trips across the Atlantic, Mr. Capote hired the bridal suite on the
Queen Mary
; that in Italy he was taken for the President’s son and, stepping into the role of goodwill ambassador, did a power of damage to the Communist party; that after traveling through Spain, he landed in North Africa partially accoutered as a bullfighter (and so on in this vein).”

Without a second’s hesitation, Truman picked up where he had left off in February. Two days after his triumph at the Y.M.H.A., he traveled to Northampton to see Newton. “Truman, the little monkey, arrives at the old time in the afternoon,” Newton wrote in his diary. “Poor child! There is something intolerably touching about him just now.” He returned in January and again in March and sneaked more furtive looks into that blabbermouth diary. “Many thoughts of Morton,” Newton had written at the end of one entry, and Truman felt jealousy stab him once again, like an old war wound. He asked Brinnin if he knew who Morton was—Brinnin did not—and the phrase became a familiar joke between them. The embers of his romance with Newton remained warm—on all three visits he and Newton had sex together—but except for those few hours, he was content to let the mysterious Morton occupy Newton’s bed as well as his thoughts.

Jack, not Newton, was now Truman’s concern, and Truman wanted to make permanent a relationship that, in Jack’s mind at least, had not been formally sealed. The only way to do it was to do it, and, uninvited, he moved into Jack’s tenement walk-up on East Seventy-sixth Street, a habitation so primitive that it did not have its own bathroom; the tub was in the kitchen, the toilet in the hall outside, shared with the neighbor next door. Overlooking those inconveniences, Truman carried his own furniture up several flights of stairs, and invited his friends, including Charlie and Oona Chaplin, to make that arduous journey as well. Manchester, the little Pekingese, was given to Jack’s family—Jack refused to walk a dog that looked like a powder puff—and gained a devoted protector in Jack’s father. Proudly pointing him out to taxi drivers when he came home from a night on the town, James Dunphy would say, “See that dog? It came all the way from Africa.” To take its place, Truman gave Jack a Kerry blue, a breed renowned for its pugnacity.

Leo was still holding open house on Sunday nights, and Truman showed up to see old friends and to try to make a new one: William Faulkner. Then as now, Faulkner’s giant talent loomed over other Southern writers, all of whom sometimes felt that they were merely scribbling in his margins. “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the [Southern] writer can and cannot permit himself to do,” said one of them, Flannery O’Connor. “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Although Truman had already met him—Faulkner also was a Random House author, as well as a good friend of Bennett Cerf and Bob Linscott—he was not long in joining the crowd that hovered around when Faulkner made a surprise visit to Leo’s.

Knowing how such attention alarmed Faulkner, Ruth Ford, who had brought him, quickly tugged at his sleeve. “We have to go home now,” she declared. “I wanna go! I wanna come along!” said Truman, jumping into a taxi with them. Faulkner was one of the few who did not succumb to his charms. “Truman never stopped talking and Faulkner never talked at all,” Ford recalled. “The more Truman talked, the more nervous Faulkner became—which speeded Truman up all the more.” Assuming, probably correctly, that Faulkner did not admire the work of Ernest Hemingway, Truman gleefully recounted the many failings of Hemingway’s newest novel,
Across the River and into the Trees.
Not above criticizing Hemingway himself, Faulkner did not grant such rights to Truman, and he finally broke his silence long enough to say: “Young man, I haven’t read this new one. And though it may not be the best thing Hemingway ever wrote, I know it will be carefully done and it will have quality.” Truman probably still felt the sting of that spanking when he wrote Bill Goyen several months later, following Faulkner’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: “I am pleased that Faulkner got the Nobel Prize—but am far from pleased with his
Collected Stories.
With three exceptions they seem to me unwritten, unreadable, absolute frauds. Did you read that, when he arrived in Sweden, he listed his profession as farmer? I’m not so sure he was wrong.”

Truman had what was probably his last encounter with the Dixie Limited in the mid-fifties, at the end of Faulkner’s romance with Jean Stein, who was a daughter of the Hollywood movie tycoon Jules Stein. “I didn’t know it, but Faulkner had a Lolita complex—he was a Humbert Humbert. Jean knew it instantaneously, and made herself look like fourteen. Faulkner fell madly in love with her, and he was going to divorce his wife so they could marry. But her parents said they would never speak to her again if she did, and she had to stop seeing him. She told him one day over lunch at the Algonquin. When I stopped in at Random House that evening—I had a key and used to go there sometimes—I heard this terrible sobbing from the little room they gave him. The room was dark, and he was lying on the couch, completely drunk; a bottle of bourbon was sitting on the floor. ‘It’s all over,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s finished. It’s ended.’ I sat down beside him and took his hand and said, ‘It’s just Truman.’ I stayed there for a couple of hours, until he fell asleep. He went back to his wife in Mississippi, and Jean married Bill vanden Heuvel. When Faulkner died a few years later, it was really of a broken heart.”

Although he was not able to give Linscott
Summer Crossing
, as he had pledged from Tangier, Truman did give him the makings of a book nonetheless: all the travel articles, nine in all, that he had written since “Notes on N.O.” in 1946. Now he busied himself bringing them together for September publication. As a result of working so long with the fashion magazines, where looks are paramount, he was more concerned than most other writers with the physical appearance of his books—such things as the color of dust jackets and the layouts inside. For this, his third book—
Local Color
he titled it—he made all the major decisions, doing everything but don a printer’s green eyeshade and set the type. “Maybe it seems strange that anyone should put such stress on the ‘physical’ appearance of a book,” he was later to write Linscott. “But there you are, I can’t help it.” Far from finding it strange, Linscott was enormously impressed. “You see, Bill, you would never do this,” he cheerfully told Goyen, prompted perhaps by a mischievous desire to feed Goyen’s obvious envy of Truman. “You would never have enough chutzpah to say what you really wanted with your book. Truman won’t listen to anybody but himself, and he knows exactly what he wants. And we do it.”

When it came to his own life, Truman did not always know exactly what he wanted, however: in Europe he had longed to be in New York; now, in New York, he longed to be back in Europe. The inside of a light bulb is an exciting place to live, he was discovering, but it is not a tranquil and productive place to work. Manhattan was expensive, moreover; being in the gossip columns nearly every day had not even secured him an apartment with a private toilet. To add to his depression, he contracted a case of viral pneumonia, which sent him to the hospital for several days. Sunny Sicily beckoned once again. In early April, 1950, he and Jack finally heeded its call and boarded a Norwegian freighter bound for Italy.

After three weeks at sea and a long train ride from Palermo, they at last reached their destination, Taormina, a picturesque hill town near Mount Etna that had provided a haven for foreigners since the time of Euclid. One side was dominated by an ancient Greek theater, the other by the ruins of a medieval castle; in between was the piazza, with its baroque church, fountain, and cooling oleander trees. Before World War II, German and English tourists had crowded its bars and cafés; in 1950, currency restrictions kept most of them at home, and besides the natives, there were only a few outsiders around to savor that postcard-pretty scene.

It was in that square that Donald Windham, who had arranged to meet them, heard Truman’s familiar shriek on the morning of May 3: Truman, Jack, and Kelly, their Kerry blue terrier, had finally come, days after they were expected. Donald had dinner with them that night, and the next day he helped them find a house. Hung on the side of a hill and approachable only by foot, over a rocky goat path, the Fontana Vecchia, as it was called, seemed to offer everything they wanted at an affordable price. Indeed, it all but carried a guarantee of good writing to come: D.H. Lawrence had lived and enjoyed two of his most creative years there in the twenties. “We have had luck, at least I hope it is luck, in finding a place to live,” Truman reported to Linscott. “It is the top two floors of a little villa about twenty minutes walk from Taormina, very isolated, but plenty of room and a wonderful view. It costs $50 a month, which is rather a lot, at least by Italian standards, but I like it tremendously.”

The top floor had two bedrooms and a bath; the living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the floor below; a partially detached tower contained a small room for guests; and the ground level was occupied by the owner. Plenty of space it had, but the Fontana Vecchia was far from luxurious. There was no phone or refrigerator; the two-burner stove always seemed to run out of fuel at dinnertime; hot water was dispensed by a wood-burning heater; and the only space heating came from fireplaces. Not much of a drawback in May, that was a considerable hardship during the winter, which was short but so cold that Truman sometimes wore gloves to write. A stone shack was what Cecil, who usually was entertained by grander hosts, was to call the house, and he was not altogether wrong. “With any one else [but Truman] the discomfort would have been unbearable,” he would complain. “As it was, the daily trek to buy provisions in town, and lugging the heavy packages back in the heat of the day, was quite an ordeal. My bedroom possessed no furniture except a pallet on which to sleep and it was best never to use the bathroom.”

The view from the huge windows and broad terraces was as wonderful as Truman said, however, a more than adequate reward for the hike up that steep and stony path: down below, a valley of olive and almond trees, the blue Ionian Sea beyond, and, in the distance, the miragelike outline of the Italian mainland. “It is very like living in an airplane, or a ship trembling on the peak of a tidal wave,” said Truman. “There is a momentous feeling each time one looks from the windows, steps onto the terrace, a feeling of being suspended, like the white reeling doves, between the mountains and above the sea.”

A girl in her late teens, Graziella, was paid seven dollars a month to clean and cook lunch, usually minestrone, and the new tenants happily returned to the productive schedule of Ischia and Tangier: work in the morning, lunch and a swim, and often more work in the afternoon. Toward evening, Truman walked into Taormina to buy meat for dinner. The undernourished brats who lived in caves on the outskirts of town invariably screamed at him as he walked by. He learned just enough Italian to reply that he planned to boil them alive if they did not shut up, and the exchange of insults became as much a part of his daily routine as the stops at the post office for mail, the
tabacchi
for newspapers and magazines, and the Americana Bar for a martini.