Answered Prayers

Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America’s postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (
A Tree of Night
, among others), novels and novellas (
The Grass Harp
and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
), some of the best travel writing of our time (
Local Color
), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in
The New Yorker
(
The Duke in His Domain
and
The Muses Are Heard
), a true crime masterpiece (
In Cold Blood
), several short memoirs about his childhood in the South (
A Christmas Memory
,
The Thanksgiving Visitor
, and
One Christmas
), two plays (
The Grass Harp
and
House of Flowers
), and two films (
Beat the Devil
and
The Innocents
).

Mr. Capote twice won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in August 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.

“More tears are shed over answered prayers
than unanswered ones.”

SAINT TERESA

ON JANUARY 5, 1966, TRUMAN
Capote signed a contract with Random House for a new book to be called
Answered Prayers
. The advance against royalties was $25,000, and the delivery date was January 1, 1968. The novel, Truman maintained, would be a contemporary equivalent of Proust’s masterpiece,
Remembrance of Things Past
, and would examine the small world of the very rich—part aristocratic, part café society—of Europe and the east coast of the United States.

1966 was a wonderful year for Truman. Two weeks after he signed the contract for
Answered Prayers, In Cold Blood
was published in book form with enormous fanfare and to general acclaim. During the subsequent week the author’s picture appeared on the cover of several national magazines, and his new work was given the lead review in virtually every Sunday book section. In the course of the year,
In Cold Blood
sold more than 300,000 copies and was on
The New York Times
best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks. (Eventually it outsold every other nonfiction book in 1966 save for two self-help books; since then it has been published in some two dozen foreign editions and has sold almost five million copies in the United States alone.)

During this year Truman was everywhere at once, granting interviews by the score, appearing on television talk shows a number of times, vacationing on yachts and in grand country
houses, and delighting in his fame and fortune. The culmination of this heady period was his still-remembered “Black and White Ball” given in late November 1966 at the Plaza in honor of Kay Graham, the publisher of the
Washington Post
, a party that received as much coverage in the national press as an East-West summit meeting.

Truman felt he deserved this respite, and most of his friends did too; the research and writing of
In Cold Blood
had taken almost six years, and had been a traumatic experience for him. Nevertheless, despite the distractions, he talked constantly about
Answered Prayers
in this interval. But though he wrote a number of short stories and magazine pieces in the next few years, he did not address himself to the novel; as a result, in May 1969 the original contract was superseded by a three-book agreement changing the delivery date to January 1973 and substantially increasing the advance. In mid-1973 the deadline was advanced to January 1974, and six months later it was changed again to September 1977. (Subsequently, in the spring of 1980, one last amendment specified a delivery date of March 1, 1981, and further raised the advance to $1 million, to be paid only on delivery of the work.)

Still, Truman published several books in these years, though the contents of most of them had been written in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In 1966 Random House issued
A Christmas Memory
, written originally in 1958; in 1968
The Thanksgiving Visitor
, a short story published in a magazine in 1967; in 1969 a twentieth-anniversary edition, with a graceful, newly written introduction, of
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, his first novel, which had electrified the literary establishment in 1948; in 1973 a collection called
The Dogs Bark
, all but three pieces of which had been written many years before. Only
Music for Chameleons
—which was to be published in 1980, and which some people, friends as well as critics, felt was not up to his earlier works—contained new material, both fiction and nonfiction.

Let Truman speak for himself about this period. In the preface to
Music for Chameleons
he wrote:

Finally, over a period of a few months in late 1974 and early 1975, Truman showed me four chapters from
Answered Prayers
—“Mojave,”
^†
“La Côte Basque,” “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud”—and announced that he was going to
publish them in
Esquire
. I was against this plan, feeling that he was revealing too much of the book too soon, and said so, but Truman, who considered himself a master publicist, was not to be deterred. (If Bennett Cerf, who was also a close friend and confidant of the author, had been alive—he had died in 1971—perhaps our combined disapproval would have dissuaded Truman, but I doubt it; he felt he knew exactly what he was doing.)

As it turned out, he
didn’t
know what he was doing. “Mojave” was the first chapter to appear and caused some talk, but the next, “La Côte Basque,” produced an explosion which rocked that small society which Truman had set out to describe. Virtually every friend he had in this world ostracized him for telling thinly disguised tales out of school, and many of them never spoke to him again.