Authors: Gerald Clarke
Furnished at last with an endless supply of greenbacks, Mona sculpted a life of sublime and sumptuous beauty. She had the usual accouterments of the very rich: a yacht, a thirty-room house on Fifth Avenue, a mansion in Palm Beach, a hundred-acre estate on Long Island’s Gold Coast, an apartment in Paris, and (not so usual) the Emperor Tiberius’ cliff-top villa on the isle of Capri. But she also possessed a subtle taste and imaginative style, in dress, design and gardening, that very few rich people could comprehend, let alone imitate. Her all-white drawing room on Fifth Avenue was celebrated—she went so far as to place only white flowers in her white Chinese vases—and so were her gardens on Long Island, through which coursed rivers of irises, winding floral streams that gradually changed color, from a deep purple to a light violet, as they flowed toward her doorstep.
How well Truman knew her it is hard to say. He had dinner at her Fifth Avenue house at least once in the forties, and he probably saw her on other occasions. Not that it much mattered: what he did not observe for himself he could have read in newspaper or magazine accounts; and what the reporters had not ferreted out he undoubtedly heard from Cecil, who had stayed with her many times. However he learned about it, her history had the storybook quality that excited Truman—she was
his
kind of scheming Cinderella—and with her image before him, along with isolated features of Cappy Badrutt and other women he had known, he constructed Kate McCloud.
He gave his Kate a similar background. Kate’s father was the head groom of a horse farm in Virginia, and when she was a child, she was taken up by the owners, the McClouds, who tutored her in the ways of rich folk. Then, when she was only sixteen, they married her to one of their sons, who was, like Mona’s first husband, named Harry. But even at sweet sixteen, Kate was thinking far ahead, beyond the McClouds, beyond Virginia, beyond even her native shores. After divorcing Harry, she moved to France and became a decorative fixture of the international set. No one could withstand her charms; at parties in St. Moritz, the Shah of Iran always asked to have her seated at his table. But Truman’s Kate was not an angel. “Christ,” says P.B., “if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she’s had stuck in her, she’d look like a porcupine.” When she married again, it was to Axel Jaeger, the richest man in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe.
Something went awry in her second marriage too—Truman does not say what—and less than a year after she gave birth to a son, her new husband booted her out of their Swiss château, keeping their child for himself: her Croesus was not as amiable as Mona’s had been. As Truman’s plot starts to unravel, she is thinking about kidnaping the boy, Herr Jaeger is planning her murder, and P.B., the Hershey Bar whore, is about to become her paladin. At that pregnant moment, “Kate McCloud” concludes.
The reaction to those first two chapters in no way matched the fire storm that had been ignited by “La Côte Basque,” of which, six months after its publication,
Esquire
was still receiving forty requests a day for copies. “Gossip-mongers may be a little disappointed in this latest offering,” reported
Women’s Wear Daily
after “Unspoiled Monsters” appeared. Most of the talk centered on Kate McCloud: who was Truman’s heroine supposed to be? The names thrown out included Lee Radziwill; Babe Paley; Denise Hale; Gloria Guinness; Pamela Harriman; Fiona Thyssen, the New Zealand—born, titian-haired ex-wife of a German steel tycoon; and even Lally Weymouth, Kay Graham’s tall and spindly daughter. No one mentioned Mona Williams, who was now the Countess Bismarck and who, at the age of seventy-nine, was happily tending her gardens on Capri; no one talked of Cappy Badrutt, who was still busily collecting diamonds and similar expressions of affection from Continental sugar daddies.
The few critical press comments were divided along surprising lines. In the resolutely radical
Village Voice
, James Wolcott accused Truman of “pornographic obsessiveness”; on the other side, columnist Max Lerner was full of admiration. “The narrative flows like a swift stream after a hurricane and flood,” Lerner wrote in the
New York Post
, “and you are swept along with it and with all the detritus of life—the cruel, the funny, the mock tragic, the merely decadent. It is a garish world he displays to us, as if he were the Saint-Simon of our times, writing the annals not of the Court of the Sun God at Versailles, but of New York and Paris, of the salons and hotels and the Left Bank. ‘This is how it was,’ he seems to be saying to later generations.”
Although gossip-mongers may have been disappointed by the absence of society names, the
Esquire
headline for “Unspoiled Monsters” was not wrong: Truman had struck again, albeit at different and, from the viewpoint of
Women’s Wear Daily
, less interesting targets, writers and artists like Tennessee Williams, Katherine Anne Porter and Ned Rorem.
Most furious was Tennessee, who was the unmistakable model for the hilarious Mr. Wallace, one of the clients of P.B.’s call-boy service, who is not so much interested in sex as he is in hiring someone to walk his English bulldog; the floor of his Plaza suite is so littered with dog feces that P.B. slips on one deposit and slides, headfirst, into a second. “This thing Capote has written is shockingly repugnant and thoroughly libelous,” declared Tennessee. “Capote’s a monster of the first order, a cold-blooded murderer at heart. He is a liar and everybody knows he is.” Then, with the loony logic that endeared him to so many, Tennessee added the detail which, to his way of thinking, proved that Truman had fabricated the whole episode: “I never had an English bulldog, or any other kind of dog, in the Plaza Hotel.”
Porter, who was now in her mid-eighties, was just as displeased at finding herself disguised as Alice Lee Langman, the sex-hungry “grande mademoiselle” of the cultural journals. “I didn’t read his piece,” she said, “but I read little scraps here and there, and they were all so unspeakably hideous and really low and base! Now he has attacked his artist friends. Apparently his life has turned to a kind of poison that he’s spitting out over the world. I don’t know why. He’s had a pretty lucky time, and I think he’s had what he wanted. I don’t really like to think about him, or talk about him, because it’s as if he belongs to another world, another planet.”
Tennessee and Katherine Anne at least had the flimsy protection of pseudonyms. Rorem was pilloried by name. “A Quaker queer,” Truman calls him, “which is to say, a queer Quaker—an intolerable combination of brimstone behavior and self-righteous piety.” Rorem’s response showed a little bit of both. “The more I think about it, the more offended I am,” he said. “Truman takes very important people and can only say how ugly they are. All these extraordinary people and all he can talk about is sex! I don’t really know what he’s aiming at. I’m dismayed for him. He’s on a merry-go-round and he can’t get off. He’s destroying himself. Where can he go from here?”
That no one can ever know: no more of his novel was ever found, and unless unknown manuscripts are one day discovered, all that the world will ever see of Truman’s magnum opus is the one hundred and eighty pages that Random House published in 1987 as
Answered Prayers, The Unfinished Novel.
If they do not make up the book he had planned, however, those pages, which contain some of the best writing he ever produced, do at least comprise its foundation and give a few clues to the shape of the rest of the structure. Like other unfinished novels—Dickens’
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, for example, or Fitzgerald’s
The Last Tycoon
—the abbreviated
Answered Prayers
is tantalizingly incomplete. Yet, like them, it is substantial enough to be read, enjoyed and, to a limited degree, judged on its own merits.
Even in its imperfect state—to paraphrase Edmund Wilson’s comments about
The Last Tycoon
—it is Truman’s most mature piece of fiction. In
Other Voices, The Grass Harp
and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, he had manipulated small casts on small stages; with few exceptions, his major protagonists were adolescents, either in fact or in spirit. In
Answered Prayers
, by contrast, he was telling a large, sprawling story that spanned thirty years, moved between two continents, and included a vast and influential company of players. He was writing not only about the great world, but also about the people who sat regally atop it. He
was
, in short, attempting to do what Proust had done. “I want to say, ‘Here. This is American high society in the second half of the twentieth century. This book is about you, it’s about me, it’s about them, it’s about everybody.’
“I am not Proust. I am not as intelligent or as educated as he was. I am not as sensitive in various ways. But my eye is every bit as good as his. Every bit! I see everything! I don’t miss nothin’! What I’m writing is true, it’s real and it’s done in the very best prose style that I think any American writer could possibly achieve. That’s all my claim is, but it’s a pretty high claim. If Proust were an American living now in New York, this is what he would be doing.”
Such a boast, widely and imprudently broadcast, was widely ridiculed, both by those who had read Proust—a thin minority, it seems safe to suggest—and by those who had not. But his claim had some merit, and what the skeptics overlooked was that his twenty years of hobnobbing with the rich had in fact given him unique credentials. No other major American writer since Edith Wharton had been so well positioned, and he was no more than telling the truth when he asserted: “I am the only person in this country who could write this book—the only person. Nobody else knows the people, nobody else has the experience and the knowledge, and nobody else has the gall. My whole life has been spent developing the technique, the style and the nerve to write this thing. It is the
raison d’ětre
of my entire life.”
That he had done the kind of reporting Proust had done no one can legitimately dispute. Whether he could have turned that knowledge into a novel of comparable stature is the question. The likely, though not final, answer is that of course he could not have—no one could have. Proust was a genius, and
Remembrance of Things Past
is the twentieth century’s supreme work of fiction (and probably its longest as well: 1,240,000 words and seven fat volumes in the English translation). It is and doubtless will remain an unscalable monument. The more appropriate answer is that it was a ridiculous contest to enter and that it had been foolish of him to so much as whisper Proust’s name. He had gifts and skills of his own, and even if he failed to write a novel of Proustian dimensions, he nonetheless could have written a book of great power and vitality: that much was within his grasp. But he wrote neither, and
Answered Prayers
, his
Remembrance
, can never be more than a fascinating fragment of real but uncertain promise.
If their achievements were not equal, their attitude toward their privileged subjects was, and it is easy to understand why Truman considered Proust to be his secret friend. Both had started out with their noses pressed against the glass, watching with lovesick wonder the radiant creatures who paraded through the golden rooms within. Overcoming severe handicaps, both had been welcomed inside. And like all those who cherish impossible illusions, both had become disillusioned; they felt that they had been robbed of their dreams. Proust’s titled aristocrats and Truman’s swans and peacocks were, on close examination, no better than their servants. To the contrary, they were often far worse; bound by neither ordinary financial nor moral restraints, they were denied no sin. Theirs was the “kingdom of nothingness,” Proust eventually decided, and in the final volume of
Remembrance of Things Past
he conducted what one scholar terms a “ruthless judicial inquiry,” convicting them all for being mean, base and boring.
Answered Prayers
is a similar inquest, which would have resulted—so much seems apparent—in similar indictments. With one eye Truman had worshiped his rich friends; with the other, the eye of P. B. Jones, he had coolly recorded their shortcomings. Long before they rejected him, he, or at least one part of him, had rejected most of them. As early as 1965, after spending a few days in St. Moritz with the Agnellis and their friends, he had written Cecil, “It was kinda fun. But what a silly lot they are really.” Those who believed themselves betrayed by “La Côte Basque” had not been wrong: he had been a fifth columnist. “They assumed that I was living by their values. Which I never was. It’s as though, by writing that, I was saying to them: ‘Everything you lived for, everything you did, is a lot of shit!’ Which is true! I
was
saying that!”
What the completed
Answered Prayers
would have been like can only be surmised. Still, the first two chapters, combined with his own comments, give some indication of what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. His narrative structure was to be cinematic, shifting back and forth between present and past, with many digressions. “It doesn’t occur to you until halfway through where the book is really going,” he said. “The second half just goes z-o-o-o-m, which may be a fault: the acceleration is almost too severe. That’s why I’m doing all of these little diversionary things.”
“Mojave” turned out to be too much of a diversion, and he removed it, as, in the end, he probably would have dropped “La Côte Basque.” Some of the chapters that were to be added included “A Severe Insult to the Brain,” “And Audrey Wilder Sang,” and “Yachts and Things.” Comparing the key chapters to a gun, he wrote, in a note to himself, that “Unspoiled Monsters” was to be the handle that held his plot, “A Severe Insult to the Brain” was to be the trigger that set it off, “Yachts and Things” was to be the barrel through which the bullet traveled, and “The Nigger Queen Kosher Café”—the final chapter—was to be the bullet itself.
Denham Fouts tells P.B. about the Nigger Queen Kosher Café in “Unspoiled Monsters.” It is, in Denny’s dope-induced reverie, a kind of Shangri-la for those who, like him, have lost all hope. “There it is,” he tells P.B., “right where they throw you off at the end of the line. Just beyond the garbage dump… The Nigger Queen Kosher Café! The cool green, restful as the grave, rock bottom!” Consciously or not, Truman was returning to the site of
Other Voices
and the molding, swamp-enclosed Cloud Hotel, the “place folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead.”
Answered Prayers
was to conclude and P.B. was to find his own cool green in Azurest, a real black beach community not far from Truman’s own house in Sagaponack. Alone among his books, he promised,
Answered Prayers
would have a happy ending.