Capote (21 page)

Perhaps being able to drop so many names was part of his armor, and he seemed to derive an almost palpable sense of power out of knowing such a wide variety of people: he liked to think that he alone knew all of them and was privy to their secrets. In his fondest fantasy, he was like a tourist in the Sahara, sneaking through the darkness from tent to tent, campfire to campfire, to spy on the natives. “He was everywhere, and on the phone all the time,” said Goyen. “My God, he was a busy little boy! He really wanted to think he was discovering love affairs and making matches.”

Of all the friendships he made during those years, no other was quite so unusual as the one with Gore Vidal. Younger than he was by almost exactly a year, Vidal had worked even more furiously for early success and had already finished two novels when they met in December, 1945, at the apartment of Anaís Nin, who was to become famous for her diaries. “When the bell rang I went to the door,” she wrote, describing Truman’s entrance. “I saw a small, slender young man, with hair over his eyes, extending the softest and most boneless hand I had ever held, like a baby’s nestling in mine.” A few minutes later that baby’s hand was also extended to Vidal for the first time. “Well, how does it feel to be an
enfant terrible
?” Truman asked him, giving that French phrase a mangled pronunciation all his own. However he pronounced it, he was aware what it meant and that there could be but one
enfant terrible
at a time. Even as he shook that little hand, Vidal knew the same, and from the beginning theirs was more a rivalry, a bloodthirsty match of wits, than an alliance of affection.

Aside from youth and promise, they appeared totally dissimilar. Vidal was tall, fair, and good-looking, with a pencil-sharp profile that was appropriate for his pugnacious personality; unlike Truman, he was masculine in appearance, dress and manner. Unlike Truman too, he had enjoyed a conventional, if highly privileged, boyhood. His grandfather was a senator from Oklahoma; his father had held a sub-Cabinet office in the Roosevelt Administration. His mother, after their divorce, had married an Auchincloss and provided Gore with an entrée into society; before entering the Army in 1943, he had graduated from one of the country’s best and oldest prep schools, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

In other, perhaps more profound ways, they were surprisingly alike, however: both felt that they had been emotionally abandoned by their mothers, both were attracted to members of their own sex, and both were possessed by the desire to achieve immortality through the written word. Gore later declared that he wanted to be remembered “as the person who wrote the best sentences in his time,” and that was Truman’s wish too. If Truman thought of himself as a condor waiting to pounce on literary fame, Gore believed that he was a golden eagle who, if he could not find fame first, would quickly snatch it away. “Gore was terribly anxious to be the number one young American writer,” said Truman, “and he was afraid that maybe I was going to do him out of it.” For a year or more, they were content nonetheless to soar together in relative harmony over the fields and canyons of Manhattan. Gore took Truman to the Everard Baths, a well-known homosexual bathhouse. Truman took Gore to Phil Black’s Celebrity Club, a vast, mostly homosexual dance hall in Harlem. Almost every week they met for lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza, where they nibbled at their friends during the first course, devoured their enemies during the second, and savored their own glorious futures over coffee and dessert. “It was deadly to get caught in the crossfire of their conversation,” recalled someone who once joined them. “They were a pair of gilded youths on top of the world.”

“I rather liked Gore,” Truman said. “He was amusing, bright, and always very vinegary, and we had a lot of things in common. His mother was an alcoholic, and my mother was an alcoholic. His mother’s name was Nina, and my mother’s name was Nina. Those things sound superficial, but they’re not. And we were both terribly young and at the same time very knowledgeable about what we were doing. We used to sit at those little lunches at the Plaza, and he would explain to me exactly, in the greatest detail—he was very methodical about it—how he was going to manage his life. He planned to become the grand old man of American letters, the American Somerset Maugham. He wanted to write popular books, make lots of money, and have a house on the Riviera, just as Maugham did. He always used to say, ‘Longevity’s the answer. If you live long enough, everything will turn your way.’ I would say, ‘Gore, you will do it all if you really want to.’ And he did, too. He got it all except for one thing: he will never be as popular as Maugham was, and none of his books will ever be as good or readable as the best of Maugham. He has no talent, except for writing essays. He has no interior sensitivity—he can’t put himself into someone else’s place—and except for
Myra Breckinridge
, he never really found his voice. Anybody could have written
Julian
or
Burr.
”

An eventual collision was all but ordained, and it finally came, perhaps as early as 1948, in the apartment of Tennessee Williams. “They began to criticize each other’s work,” said Williams. “Gore told Truman he got all of his plots out of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. Truman said: ‘Well, maybe you get all of yours from the
Daily News.
’ And so the fight was on. They never got over it.” Truman himself could not recall the origin of the dispute, but did remember that “it was very, very, very unpleasant, whatever it was about, and after that Gore and I were never friends. Tennessee just sat back and giggled.”

From then on it was open war, and their friends were soon entertaining one another with the latest reports from the battlefield. When one of them was praised for having achieved so much so early, the other (his identity varies according to who is telling the story) angrily exploded: “Why, he’s twenty-two if he’s a day!”—a comment so delightfully daffy that it soon acquired a small fame of its own. “The first time I ever saw Gore, I remarked how extremely talented Truman was,” said Glenway Wescott, an older writer who claimed neutrality. “Gore, who was lunatic competitive, blew up and said, ‘How can you call anybody talented who’s written only one book at twenty-three? I’ve written three books, and I’m only twenty-two!’” In like manner, Truman became furious whenever Gore’s name was mentioned, stamping his feet like Rumpelstiltskin. “He has no talent!” he would exclaim. “None, none, none!”

Much as he carried on about it—“Have you heard what Gore’s done now?” he would indignantly ask Phoebe Pierce—their feud was more of a game than a real war for Truman, and it seemed clear to those who knew them both that Truman was less concerned about Gore than Gore was about him. The reason was obvious to everyone but Gore: Truman had won; the title of reigning literary prodigy was his. Young as he was, he was a mature writer with a distinct and confident voice. Prolific as he was, Gore was still floundering for both a style and a subject, and few took his work very seriously. Williams privately complained that Gore’s third novel,
The City and the Pillar
, which gained a certain notoriety because of its homosexual theme, contained not one “really distinguished line,” and Anaïs Nin, to whom Gore was closely attached, found his work lifeless. “Action, no feeling,” she wrote in her diary. Truman’s stories, on the other hand, “entranced” her, and she admired “his power to dream, his subtlety of style, his imagination. Above all, his sensitivity.” Such sentiments, echoed nearly everywhere he went, were bitterly galling to Gore, who could not accept the image of that tiny figure standing on a pedestal he believed to be rightfully his. Traveling through Europe with Tennessee in 1948, he spent much of his time talking about Truman. “He’s infected with that awful competitive spirit and seems to be continually haunted over the successes or achievements of other writers, such as Truman Capote,” Tennessee wrote a friend. “He is positively obsessed with poor little Truman Capote. You would think they were running neck-and-neck for some fabulous gold prize.”

W
HEN
he was not jousting with Gore or adding new names to his address book, Truman continued in much the accustomed pattern. He still labored over
Other Voices
, still worried about Nina, who had finally turned to Alcoholics Anonymous for help with her drinking. After giving up his rooms in Brooklyn for a small flat on Second Avenue, he saw even more of such old friends as Mary Louise Aswell, Leo Lerman, Phoebe Pierce and Andrew Lyndon, who had moved to Manhattan to be with his new lover, a rising young photographer named Harold Halma. None of them had much money, and rather than go out, they frequently ate dinner at one or another’s apartment—at Andrew’s most often, in grateful deference to Harold’s culinary skills. “Well, is he taking all of his meals over there?” an exasperated Nina finally asked Andrew, after Truman had skipped several dinners at 1060. Truman had accepted, however reluctantly, Newton’s singular need for solitude, and approximately twice a month they joined each other for long and happy weekends. Come summer, they planned to spend several unbroken weeks together, as they had at Yaddo, and in March Truman signed a two-month lease on a house in Nantucket. “It sounds charming, and I can think of no more attractive scene or circumstance for our summer together,” wrote Newton. “How I long for June to come!”

Taking Andrew with him, Truman arrived on the island first, on Tuesday, June 10, and telephoned Newton with an enthusiastic description of the house, which was comfortable but otherwise nondescript, filled with the dilapidated wicker furniture peculiar to rented summer cottages. Newton came a week later, and almost a year to the day after they had met, they attempted once again to close that magic ring around them.

Mornings they all worked: Truman on
Other Voices
, which was nearing completion, Newton on his Melville biography, and Andrew on a short story. Afternoons, depending on the weather, Truman and Andrew sunbathed and swam; Newton sometimes joined them, but more often he stayed in the house and relaxed with what he considered light hammock reading: Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici, Don Quixote
, Pascal, Schopenhauer, and Shakespeare. Evenings they drank Manhattans or martinis before going off to dinner in Siasconset, the nearby town. After dinner they returned home, talked for an hour or two, then headed early to bed. Occasionally they went to the movies or exchanged visits with another group congregating around Leo, who had rented a converted Coast Guard station at Quidnet, a forty-five-minute walk down the beach. Over the Fourth of July holiday they entertained Barbara Lawrence and Mary Louise, who was preparing to return with her two children at the end of the month. Aside from those small diversions, nothing interrupted their placid routine, and their first few weeks on the island were both peaceful and productive. “We are keeping a regular schedule of work, and I am getting a tremendous lot done,” Truman told Mary Louise. “A few weeks more, and the book will be finished. Can you believe it?”

Living at 1060 had inured him to noise, and, unlike many writers who need a still, quiet place in which to work, or a special desk or particular chair, Truman could write almost anywhere, under almost any circumstances. On Nantucket he wrote in bed, which was his usual custom, allowing nothing to distract him during those sacred hours before noon. “‘To watch Truman concentrate is one of the most frightening sights of the twentieth century,’ Tennessee once remarked, and I could see what he meant,” said Andrew. “He would clench his hands, grit his teeth, and squint his eyes so hard that he would cause a muscle to flick on his cheekbone. He could concentrate through anything. A bomb going off in the next room wouldn’t have caused him to blink an eyelid.” Andrew and Newton received daily, sometimes hourly, reports on his book’s progress; eager for a response, he would often stop at the completion of a paragraph and read it aloud. Three days after Newton arrived, Truman finished his next-to-last chapter and read it to them; then, without pausing for a moment’s breath, he began his run to the finish line, starting the final chapter the following morning.

He knew how his book would end: indeed, one of his compulsions as a writer was his need to know how a book or a story would end before he could begin. Having a conclusion in mind was not the same as having it on paper, however, and the final chapter of
Other Voices
proved unexpectedly obstinate. The book that had leaped from a “creative coma” on a frosty December afternoon in Alabama two and a half years earlier slowed to a crawl during those warm summer mornings at ‘Sconset. “These last few pages! Every word takes blood,” Truman wrote Linscott. “I don’t know why this should be, especially since I know exactly what I’m doing.”

As he was agonizing over those last few pages—twenty-nine pages, ultimately—Newton, who had read the rest of the novel bit by bit over the preceding year, went back to the beginning and started all over again, so that he could view it as a whole, with the eye of a critic rather than a lover. He made “some small corrections,” he told his diary, probably in spelling and grammar, and methodically jotted down his observations. He apparently did not suggest major changes, but it is probable, given his acute literary intelligence, that he was helpful nonetheless, if only in pointing out the weak spots that bedevil almost any long piece of prose. Yet on July 30, the day Newton left and Mary Louise and her children arrived, Truman was still wrestling with that final obdurate chapter. Mary Louise was upstairs when he wrote the last words on August 11. “Truman’s little voice came floating up,” she recalled, “and he said, ‘I’ve finished!’” They danced a celebratory jig, and that night Newton was pleased to note: “T.C. called me just after lunch to tell me the great news that he had just finished his book.”

The magic ring closed only briefly around them that summer. Deprived of his baths of solitude and made nervous by unfamiliar faces, Newton suffered bouts of anxiety and depression. Andrew moved over to Leo’s establishment when Harold Halma came to the island July 9, but four days later Newton’s tranquility was shattered again when he and Truman welcomed two new and lively guests, Christopher Isherwood and his lover, Bill Caskey. Soon Newton was complaining to his diary: “A difficult day owing to my jitters—guest trouble.”