ueer classics:

 

BY ERNIE MCLEOD .

from his 1970s television

appearances: a bloated old
queen gossiping with Johnny
Carson or Dick Cavett. I suppose I
vaguely understood that he was a
writer. But actual accomplishment
seemed beside the point, as itdid
with other talk show caricatures
like Liberace or Zsa Zsa Gabor. To
my youthful eyes, Capote — with

U remember Truman Capote

his famously high, fey voice — was.

a wholly alarming figure.

_ Because this boob-tube
image of Capote was indelibly
stamped on my mind, I’d always
dismissed him as an artist. “Real”
writers didn’t chew the fat with
Johnny and hang out at Studio 54,
right?

My narrow-minded per-
ception of Capote was finally
upended recently when I read The
Scarlet Professor, Barry Werth’s
sad, excellent biography of the lit-
erary critic Newton Arvin, whose
life was ruined by a bogus 1960
pornography bust. In the mid-
1940s, just before Capote preco-
ciously achieved notoriety with his
first novel Other Voices, Other
Rooms, he and the older (and clos-
eted) Arvin had a passionate two-
year affair. As personalities‘, the
two men couldn’t have been more
different, but the love between
them was genuine, and the young
Capote that emerges on Werth’s
pages is flamboyant, but also
notably tender and kind. Other
Voices, Other Rooms was dedicat-
ed to Arvin, and Capote remained
a supportive friend long after their
affair was over.

How to bridge the gap
between the compassionate wun-
derkind portrayed in The Scarlet
Professor and the bitchy, dissipat-
ed queen on 70s TV? And how to
fit Capote’s limited but varied oeu-
vre — which includes Breakfast at
Tiffany 3* and In Cold Blood — into
the overall celebrity portrait?

Truman Capote was born
in 1924 in New Orleans, an only
child whose parents divorced
when he was four. His childhood
was spent wandering among his
eccentric Southern relatives, a
lonely and unusual existence that
became the seed for his first fic-
tions. He never went to college,
but after moving north to attend
boarding school, at seventeen he
landed a lowly job at The New
Yorker. In the next few years he
began publishing short stories to
acclaim, and by the time he was
twenty-three, Other Voices, Other
Rooms had debuted, quickly estab-
lishing him as a writer and person-
ality to watch.

It might be easier to
understand Capote’s astonishing
ascent if Other Voices, Other
Rooms weren’t such a dense, curi-
ous little novel. Part of the atten-
tion was purely literary: people
who mattered recognized him as
the real thing. And though the
novel was odd, its oddness seemed

directly influenced by and not out
of place alongside the work of
other “Southern” writers, particu-
larly that of the equally precocious
Carson McCullers. The fact the
novel thematically addressed both
race and homosexuality — albeit in
a highly stylized fashion — also" got
people talking, though the lion’s
share of the controversy was
reserved for the author’s book-
jacket photograph. It looks fairly
innocuous today, but at the time
Capote’s sultry yet childlike pose
inspired a raft of scandalous pub-
licity, which didn’t hurt sales, even
as he was dubbed “the perverted
Huck Finn of American Letters.”
Other Voices, Other

Rooms tells the story of 13-year-
old Joel Harrison Knox, who, after
his mother dies, goes in search of
his long-lost father in a godforsak-
en place called the Landing. Once
Joel arrives at his destination, he

quickly learns that nothing there is
as he wanted or expected it to be.
His father is an invalid whose abil-
ity to communicate consists main-
ly of dropping a red tennis ball to
the floor, and the only other male
adult in the house is sickly cousin
Randolph, who wears a seersucker
kimono and a lady’s ringand who
holds Joel’s hand in a way that
Joel finds “obscurely disagree-
able.” Randolph’s voice, accent-

‘ less with “an emotional undercur-

rent,” also disturbs Joel, as do the
strange stories Randolph begins to
spin about his impossible love for
a scrappy little Mexican boxer
named Pepe Alvarez.

Joel develops relation-
ships with a variety of characters
he initially finds anxiety-provok-
ing, including a flame~headed
tomboy named Idabel Thompkins.
By novel’s end, Joel begins to
accept and understand many of the
things he once found unfath-
omable, including his own long-
ings. But don’t expect an unam-
biguous coming-of-age/coming-
out novel; Capote retrospectively
described Other Voices, Other
Rooms as “an unconscious, alto-
gether intuitive attempt” to “exor-
cise demons,” a prose poem trans-

forming emotional problems into
psychological symbols.

I most appreciated the
novel as an early glimpse into
Capote’s artistry; it touched me
more on a crafi level than on an
emotional one. Capote believed
that style more than content should
provide a “‘mirror of an artist’s
sensibility.’” He considered him-

I self a “‘fanatic on rhythm and Ian-

:97

guage, and his carefulness with
words is but one of the aspects of
his talent that got overshadowed
by his celebrity.
Capote’s celebrity

reached its zenith with the 1966
publication of In Cold Blood, the
“nonfiction novel” most consider
his masterpiece. The book’s sub-
ject matter — the real-life murder
of afamily in Kansas — seemed an
odd choice for Capote. He said he
wrote it “to get outside of my own
imagination,” adding that the jour-

nalistic parameters of the project
forced him to empathize with and
understand people who wouldn’t
naturally have fallen within his
“scope of interests.”

Capote devoted six years
to In Cold Blood, and its artistic
and commercial success cast his
career in a whole new light. Final
product momentarily aside, what’s
perhaps most amazing from a
queer perspective is that he was
brave enough to throw his flaming
homo selfinto a world not predis-
posed to look kindly upon his
kind. (Harper Lee, who initially
accompanied Capote to Kansas,
said his arrival was “like someone

coming off the moon — those peo-

ple had never seen anyone like
Truman.”) That he carried the
whole thing off with undeniable
aplomb silenced those who’d dis-
missed Capote as an “orchida-
ceous aesthete.”

Or, as Capote himself put
it in a Playboy interview in which
his fragile image was contrasted
with Ernest Hemingway’s macho
one: “I am secretly several of the
things the hairy one pretended to
be.”

Capote’s image and repu-
tation went through more meta-

morphoses in the aftermath of In
Cold Blood, beginning with the
infamous Black and White Ball he
threw at the Plaza Hotel in New
York not long after the book’s
publication. The party’s guest list
appeared in The New York Times
— who wasn’t on the list was the
only thing discussed more than
who was.

' Capote was scratched off
many invitation lists when
excerpts from his much bally-
hooed but never completed
Proustian roman a clef were pub-
lished in Esquire in the mid-19705.
Answered Prayers was supposed
to have been his crowning literary
achievement. Instead, the frag-
ments that appeared were labeled
vicious, and the resulting scandal
diminished both his social and
artistic standing, though evidence
of increasing substance abuse kept
his name alive in the gossip pages

until his death in 1984.

What never made news
was Capote’s thirty-five year rela-
tionship with the novelist Jack
Dunphy. Given that Capote’s sexu-
ality was always an open book, it’s
ironic (but not surprising) thatthe
media paid scant attention to the
central relationship of his adult
life.

lt’s likely that Truman
Capote’s work will outlast his role
— for better or worse — as a cultur-
al icon. Certainly his writings
should be appreciated on their own
terms, but to take Capote out of
his sometimes gaudy context is to
miss something essential about the
person even Norman Mailer had to
concede was one “ballsy little
guy.” V

Further Reading:

Truman Capote: In Which Various
Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances,
and Detractors Recall His
Turbulent Career by George
Plimpton.

  

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