Capote (7 page)

Truman himself was excited, thinking more, no doubt, about the pleasures rather than the pains of such a place, about the opportunity he would have to ride horses rather than about the martial discipline. In a rare burst of enthusiasm, he wrote Arch that he would soon be attending a “wonderful Military school.” Once he was there, however, he quickly changed his mind, and it is impossible to imagine a boy who was less suited to a military education than Truman. He disliked wearing a uniform, and he was uncomfortable living in a dormitory. Although he made some friends, his fellow cadets were not so tolerant of him as the boys at Trinity had been, and they found a dozen ways to make his life miserable, including mocking his Southern accent and ridiculing his mannerisms. He was able to alter his accent; but his mannerisms neither he nor St. John’s could change.

If Nina had deliberately wanted to encourage his manifest homosexual tendencies, she could not, in fact, have chosen a better place than a military school. St. John’s did the exact opposite of what she thought it would do. The smallest and prettiest boy in his class, Truman was looked upon as sexual prey by several cadets—the tough, manly types he was supposed to emulate—and when the lights went out, he was occasionally forced into some stronger boy’s bed. As he recalled it, none of what took place beneath those sheets went beyond adolescent sex play—kissing, fondling, and “belly rubbing,” with him providing the belly and some bigger boy doing the rubbing. Still, the threat of coercion turned those relatively innocent sexual experiences into something ugly and unpleasant. “I was afraid of most of the boys at St. John’s,” he said. “They took sex very seriously. Instead of making me happy and secure, being chased after like that had the opposite effect. It was as if I were in prison. I’ve talked to a lot of prisoners and I know what it’s like. There is always some young pretty convict everybody is after.”

The end of the school year was the only escape from St. John’s, and Nina was not about to take him out before then. During the months he was there, she seems to have pushed him out of her mind, as well as her life. She was pregnant when he left home—probably another reason for her sending him away—and she had the shock and pain of another miscarriage while he was gone. Even so, she was inexcusably negligent. St. John’s was only an hour away from Manhattan, an easy journey by either car or train, but if Truman’s count was correct, she visited him only twice during the school year.

Once again he felt rejected by his mother, but this time he did not have Sook to turn to. He was isolated and intensely lonely in his expensive jail cell on the Hudson. The Alabama judge who had rejected Arch’s proposal to send him to military school was proved correct, and looking back, Truman’s chief memory was of the hours he spent crying. “I would have been much happier if my mother had just left me in Alabama,” he said. And very probably he was right. Even Nina must have realized that his year there had been a disaster, and in the fall of 1937 she sent him back to Trinity.

T
RUMAN
had been buffeted around so much, sent from place to place and pushed and pulled by so many different people, that until the first year of his teens, his own character was somewhat unfocused. The various pieces were there, but they did not form a pattern. Rather than allowing his own nature to take form, he had, until then, been reacting to what those around him, most particularly his mother, thought he should be. After that dreadful year at St. John’s, he seemed to have hardened himself and to have begun, perhaps unconsciously, to come to terms with himself. He had attempted to become what his mother had wanted, and he had failed. Now, at the age of thirteen, he seemed to have given up trying, and his personality began to take the shape it was to keep through all the years thereafter.

He was no less anxious to be liked than he had been, but he was now old enough and experienced enough to seek favor on his own terms, deliberately and with design. The pocket Merlin who had enthralled Harper Lee with his fantastical tales was becoming a polished storyteller who promised entertainment every time he opened his mouth. The ordinary accomplishments of ordinary boys were beyond his reach, but he had an ability few of them could ever hope to match: if he wanted, he could charm almost anyone.

“It was fascinating to watch him,” said Howard Weber, Jr., who was his closest friend at the time. “There would be very social pre-deb dances during the Christmas holidays. My aunt would give dinners beforehand for my cousin Louise, who was our age, and I would take Truman and three or four other friends along in tuxedos. My aunt never forgot Truman, because when he walked in the door, all the boys would go over and sit around him in a circle, knowing that he would tell stories and entertain them. The girls would become wallflowers, all by themselves on the other side of the room. My aunt was fascinated to see the way it happened, but it did happen, it absolutely did! The explanation was that, unlike the girls at that age, Truman read everything and could talk about everything; he had a wonderful wit, and he had a biting sarcasm, which all of his friends thought was very funny.”

Many adults were beguiled by him as well, and, overlooking his miserable grades, several of his teachers at Trinity made him a special favorite. “Mr. Putney, who taught dramatics, had a spot for Truman in every play we did,” said Weber. “Since both Truman and I were rather good-looking, we were always girls, and in one play we joined with another boy to be three princesses sitting on a wall. Truman would get everybody into costume, and then he would tell Mr. Putney who should wear the red wig, who should wear the black wig, and so on. He was in his glory!”

At home he was still a disturbed child, however, and once again Nina was calling the school for advice. Although he was fourteen and in the eighth grade, he was still lying on the floor and kicking his legs in the air when he did not get his way. What should she do? No one at Trinity knew, or had ever before encountered such behavior in a boy his age. His teachers saw only a hint of his obstreperousness. “The biology teacher nearly went frantic over Truman, because he would sit in class and comb his hair all the time,” Weber recalled. “‘Please put that comb away!’ he would say. Truman couldn’t have cared less. He would just go right on combing his hair.” His grades reflected his cavalier attitude; he did poorly in all of his courses during his second stay at Trinity, barely passing several, including biology, and failing one, algebra, by a very wide margin. None of his courses, he had concluded, would help prepare him for his life’s role. He had already decided what he wanted to do: he was going to be a writer.

He had arrived at that decision several years before. “For some reason I began to read in Alabama and discovered I loved it,” he said. “Then one day, when I was nine or ten, I was walking along the road, kicking stones, and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, an artist. How did it happen? That’s what I ask myself. My relatives were nothin’, dirt-poor farmers. I don’t believe in possession, but something took over inside me, some little demon that made me a writer. How else can it be explained?”

The same question might be asked, of course, about most writers who do not grow up amidst books or in the company of those who love them, and the answer is never satisfactory. Although the Faulks were neither poor, as Truman claimed, nor illiterate, as he implied, it is true that they were not readers. Except for the Bible, there was little to read in the house on Alabama Avenue.

To drop the question there would be misleading, however. Truman’s background was not literary in a conventional sense, but more than he liked to acknowledge, it did provide a literary viewpoint, a way of looking at people as characters in a drama and a way of viewing life itself as a tale to be unfolded. His relatives did not read stories; they told them or listened to their neighbors telling them in the normal course of conversation. Plots, centering on family feuds, were close at hand, and on a hot summer night dozens of tales would be recounted on the front porches of Monroeville. Truman could not find many books in the Faulk house, but he heard the equivalent of hundreds in the soft, dusky hours between dinner and bed.

His father’s side of the family was not bookish either, but in their own way the Persons clan were extremely literary. For years not a week passed without an exchange of letters between Arch’s mother, Mabel, and her three boys, and a further exchange among the sons themselves. Mother and sons felt compelled to lay out their lives on paper, and taken together, their letters, which number in the hundreds, paint a multihued picture of both their family and the South itself during the Depression. Almost all are well written; many bear the imprint of true writers: they are vivid, uninhibited, and pungently phrased, with sudden and surprising flashes of insight. Truman inherited both their compulsion and their talent. He could read before he set foot inside a schoolroom, and when he was still in short pants, no more than five or six years old, he was carrying a tiny dictionary wherever he went, along with a pencil and paper on which he could scribble notes. He later set up a little office in a corner of his room on Alabama Avenue, and there he sat for hours tapping out stories on his own typewriter. By the time he entered Trinity, his choice of career was fixed and unshakable. “He’s the only one I ever knew who at age twelve knew exactly what he wanted to do and discarded everything else,” said his friend Howard. “He did not care about anything but writing.”

There are few surviving examples of his early expeditions into the craft, and those few—sixteen themes, stories, and poems—were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford. Twelve were written in the sixth grade and four in the eighth, after he returned from St. John’s. The sixth-grade efforts seem unremarkable for the most part, about what could be expected from a boy of that age, with many obvious grammatical errors and many more misspellings. The four later pieces, those from the eighth grade, are still the work of a boy, but now a boy with talent. Truman is self-consciously reaching for literary effects—a woman does not say something, she ejaculates; a man does not smile, he smirks in delight—but they move swiftly, with a small measure of grace, and so far as can be judged on such slim evidence, he is trying to give his work shape as well as size.

The most interesting story from those Trinity years, however, is one that exists only in memory. His ninth-grade English teacher, John Lasher, handed it one day to a colleague, C. Bruner-Smith, without saying who had written it. The story described, in a dream-like way, the sensation of rolling down a hill and tumbling into unconsciousness. “It was a rather lengthy manuscript,” recalled Bruner-Smith, “and I was struck and impressed by it. It had to do with children, and it had a feeling that I found very remarkable. Very few writers, even great writers, are able to get inside the mind of a child. Mark Twain could do it, and so could Booth Tarkington. But Shakespeare couldn’t. The story that Lasher handed me showed that facility. The spelling was bad, but I still couldn’t believe that a boy of thirteen or fourteen could have produced it. ‘Who wrote this?’ I asked Lasher, and he answered, ‘Truman Capote said he did.’ And so he had.”

Not long after that, Truman’s life once again abruptly changed course, and in June, 1939, the Capotes left New York for Greenwich, Connecticut. They rented a house on Orchard Drive in the Millbrook section, a small upper-middle-class enclave that maintained a careful, if friendly, distance from the rest of the town. Stone columns marked its entrance from the main road, a private policeman patrolled its pretty, winding streets, and its ninety or so houses were, like the Capotes’, all built in traditional Tudor styles. To give it a rural appearance, the people who laid it out in the twenties had left reminders of the country: hills, trees, streams, and two large lakes, which were used for boating in the summer and skating in the winter. Small as it was, the community had its own country club, to which only residents could belong. Millbrook was not the richest part of Greenwich, nor was it the most prestigious, but those who lived there usually stayed there; people from Millbrook tended to spend their time with other people from Millbrook.

Joe and Nina, gregarious both, soon felt at home. They brought with them their maid and her husband, whom they employed as chauffeur, and Nina was free to spend her afternoons shopping, playing bridge, or gossiping with other wives at the country club. Then, nearly every night, shortly after the commuting husbands returned from Manhattan, there would be a larger gathering. Liquor flowed freely in Greenwich, and the Capotes’ new acquaintances enjoyed a good time as much as they did. For Joe and Nina, who had been enjoying themselves in such ways and with such friends for the better part of a decade, the party had merely changed addresses.

Surprisingly, considering the pain previous disruptions had caused him, the move to Greenwich was just as easy for Truman, who entered Greenwich High School as a tenth-grader in September. A few hostile remarks were directed his way, of course. By the standards of the time, he did not look right, sound right, or dress right; while the other boys wore slacks and shoes, he came to class, a generation too early, in sloppy-looking blue jeans and sneakers. But it was mild disapproval, all in all, and if Truman cared what was said about him, he did not show it. “Those who knew him accepted him as an equal,” said one of his classmates, Crawford Hart, Jr. “He looked down his nose at the others.”

Indeed, he probably welcomed the attention. At Trinity he had learned how to set himself apart from everyone else; at Greenwich he went a step further: he discovered how to turn the spotlight on himself and himself alone. “Truman was vividly nonconventional,” said Thomas Flanagan, a classmate who later became a historical novelist of considerable renown. “He was full of energy and self-confidence, and quite flamboyant, a show-off. He had a sense of himself as a special person, a fact he was under no impulse to conceal from other people. For Truman to like you you had to have something special, like wit or social status. That was not a characteristic that was likely to win friends, and those who didn’t like him—and they were a sizable group—would have described him as affected and precious. But he was not crushed by the harsh opinions of others.”