White Girls (11 page)

Truman Capote lied about this photograph in which he appears to be a woman. He lied about the photograph’s intent, claiming in some instances that it had been sent to his publishers upon request by a friend while he was away, or that he was unaware of what he projected in the image. This was the first instance of the disjunction between Capote’s image of himself and the meaning he ascribed to images of himself. It was also the first instance of Capote refusing to hear the weight of his affect as he effected it, a trope he would repeat within subsequent identities.

Perhaps he was aware of this: how images effect words in the contemporary world of publishing. “This subject [publishing] fascinates me, and I know so much about it I could talk for seven hours.
Nonstop. About how publishers work and why you should do this and why you should do that.”

As he wrote less and less from 1966 until his death, in 1984, women authors—images of the new feminism—began to be packaged as such and, as such, they became the publishing world’s new custodians of “other” language. (Elizabeth Hardwick “confirms her stature...[and] has as much to say about women in the world as...women on the page,” reads part of the jacket copy of her book
Seduction and Betrayal
[1974].) Capote was left no other recourse than to become a man.

He became a man with the publication of his “big” book,
In Cold Blood
(1966), a book that focuses on one man, Perry Smith, a murderer consumed by vanity like the woman Capote believed he had been once. Which is to say that
In Cold Blood
set out to prove, in part, that Truman Capote was no longer a lyrical authoress (of
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, he explained: “What [I] had done has the enigmatic shine of a strangely colored prism held to the light—that, and a certain anguished, pleading intensity like the message of a shipwrecked sailor stuffed into a bottle and thrown into the sea”), but a writer validated by his experience in the world of fact—
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
—a primarily male literary tradition.

In Cold Blood
means a number of things to any number of people; by adopting the non-fiction novel as a form, Capote also wanted to usurp male authority, or at least one man’s authority: non-fiction novelist Norman Mailer’s. In the nineteen fifties Mailer had called Capote “as tart as a grand aunt.” This statement, a caricature and a diminishment of Capote’s role as a powerful woman author, marked
how Capote’s self-perception, and hence the public perception of him, would have to change. While grand aunts can be powerful, they are not generally perceived as such in the world of publishing. And as women writers eventually became what publishers could sell, albeit with reservations and marginally, Capote could, if asked, advise them why they “should do this and why [they] should do that.” (Of course, Capote spent a great deal of his time advising significant women on how to become themselves, or his image of themselves. There was, for instance, Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
, in whose honor he threw his famous Black and White ball. And, to a greater degree, he advised, molded, resented and loved Barbara “Babe” Paley—“She was the most important person in my life and I the most important in hers”—a woman made powerful through her association with her husband, media chief and CBS chairman William S. Paley.)

The image (or reality) of the maiden aunt is one that male power revolts against or finds revolting. Masculinity defines itself against such images, let alone realities. Capote was not a maiden aunt in the presence of male power; he was, however, a fashionable person in his attraction to, and fear of it. In a letter to John Malcolm Brinnin, Capote wrote, as he started to try on the role of the male writer: “Maybe I ought to...get drunk and play Prometheus like Norman.” Which is to say that Truman Capote the woman realized that Truman Capote the man would eventually have to adhere to the publishing world’s perception of the male writer if he were to occupy a place in it and be of continued interest to the press.

Capote identified this apparatus—the cultural press, media power—as male and Jewish. “The truth of the matter about it is, the
entire cultural press, publishing...criticism...television...is almost ninety percent Jewish-oriented. I mean, I can’t even count on one hand five people of any importance—of real importance—in the media who aren’t Jewish.” Two Jews at whom he leveled his sentimental anti-Semitism were Norman Mailer and William S. Paley, men, who, by all accounts, did not want to be fucked by any idea of femininity that had fucked them up but to fuck their idea of femininity. The determination that Mailer and Pailey demonstrated in their work and lives, their absorption and accumulation of power, was in part to dispel the stereotypical image of the Jewish male, described again and again by Philip Roth and others—Yeshiva boys paralyzed by reflection, powerless to function, a Jewish mother’s stooge. But Mailer and Paley were, ultimately, far enough removed from Capote’s sexuality (whatever that was) to be sexual for him. In
Answered Prayers
(1986), his unfinished novel, the character widely believed to be based on Paley, Sidney Dillon, “Conglomateur, advisor to presidents,” is described by Capote’s fictitious alter ego, P.B. Jones, as a “wiry well-constructed man with a hairy chest and a twinkle-grinning tough-Jew face.” Looking at a Polaroid of Dillon, Jones recalls that Dillon’s trunks were “rolled to his knees, one hand rested sexily on a hip, and with the other hand he was pumping a dark fat mouth-watering dick.”

That dick—as strong as any symbol—stretched across Truman Capote’s consciousness less because he identified it as being attached to power than because he saw it as an object of desire for women. In
Answered Prayers
, the act of romantic love is always recounted in spoken language, not described as an act, let alone of love. P.B. Jones’s introduction to the formidable woman author Alice Lee Langman,
whom he sleeps with and whose protégé he subsequently becomes, is followed by: “Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn’t a sense of humor?—and she had none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist. But she was indeed a talker, a relentless bedroom back-seat driver: ...‘That’s better better and better Billy let me have billy now that’s uh uh uh it that’s
it
only slower slower and slower now hard hard hit it hard ay ay
los cojones
let me hear them ring now slower slower dradraaaaagdrag it out now hit hard hard ay ay daddy Jesus have mercy Jesus Jesus goddamdaddyamighty come with me Billy come! Come!’”

Capote wrote: “Norman Mailer described [
In Cold Blood
] as a ‘failure of the imagination’...Norman Mailer, who has made a lot of money and won a lot of prizes writing nonfiction novels...although he has always been careful never to describe them as ‘nonfiction novels.’ No matter, he is a good writer and a fine fellow and I’m grateful to have been of some small service to him.”

The operative words here are “small” and “service”—“small” Truman “servicing” Norman on the altar of the non-fiction novel. Even as he published
In Cold Blood
, Capote lost any claim to male authorship by presuming that his factual account of a multiple murder would create him too—in Mailer’s image. It is hard to garner privilege when you begin with none—for those who have to reach for it, it remains perpetually out of reach. Mailer would always have it and Capote would not, because Mailer assumed that he did and Capote, the perennial aunty-man no matter how hard he wrote, assumed he did not.

For several years before 1947 Capote had been a man (a state
defined by uninflected ambition) in his pursuit of authorship and his appropriation of the style, syntax, and voice of women authors generally perceived as maiden aunts (Eudora Welty) or maiden aunts in code (lesbian Carson McCullers)—women with careers less powerful than Capote’s would eventually be, but powerful in this: before Truman Capote became Truman Capote, they were themselves. Capote was not himself as a writer until
Answered Prayers
, a novel that grew out of his isolation and self-realization, a novel that remained unfinished.

As an ultimately fashionable author, which is to say a person who wrote but also felt uncomfortable with the responsibility of being only a writer, he rode the wave of fashion too, observing power and trends as established by others, change as established by others. Capote was a distinctly American author, one who spoke, read, thought in no other language than American and was, therefore, parochial in his knowledge. He could respond intellectually only to those things he responded to emotionally. There was no other referent for thought. What he responded to before 1947 and thereafter, in a different way, was himself (a man) in relationship to women. Since he spoke no other language than his own (“My voice had been described as high and childish,
among
other things”), he had to learn to become an American writer by appropriating the language of other American writers, and what he mostly responded to intellectually was written by women authors. But his reverence for them was always tempered. (On Flannery O’Connor: “She has some fine moments, that girl.” On Carson McCullers: “She was a devil, but I respected her.”) He strove to be the ultimate version of them that, as women, they would never be for themselves.

This was also true of Capote becoming a man. He could not simply admire William S. Paley, he had to surpass him in Babe’s affection. He had to become a more powerful media figure by becoming recognizably famous. What Truman Capote could not do was reorder Babe Paley’s ideas of her own femininity. He only did women on the page. And instead of attempting to reveal their secrets as women, he competed for an understanding of their identity as such. This was the only form of exchange he had with them, and it was different from the other exchanges these women had (or the only other exchanges Capote acknowledged them as having): being with “real” men who fucked them.

Capote’s resentment of what these women did without him was based, as was his education as a writer, on an emotional response to two things: the ultimate impossibility of knowing or understanding women’s sexual movements (up and down, in, out, around, what, when: the gossip’s grid of information versus the writer’s nongrid of reflection), and the heterosexual male’s desire for them. Capote could not forgive his writing for obfuscating this interest. “My effects prior to
Answered Prayers
seemed overdone,” he complained. The writing before
Answered Prayers
lied by taking the (public) fag’s easy way out. It was filtered through a skein of perplexity about male and female relations.

Truman Capote could not have become a woman without women authors and editors being interested in him. (Let us leave aside early biographical data for now—how he was abandoned by his alcoholic mother, how he was taken in by maiden aunts and cousins, etc. These facts, while interesting, have more to do with his process of self-creation than with the moment he created himself as Truman Capote, the writer and the photograph).

The women Capote interested and those in whom he was interested were women who were interested in language. Perhaps he saw women as a form of language. Certainly those he was interested in before he became one himself had faces like words. “Not plain, not pretty, arresting rather, with an expression deliberately haunted rather than haunting,” Capote wrote of portraits of two women published in Richard Avedon’s
Observations
in 1959, a sentence interesting in its insistence on the word
deliberately
. Perhaps, even as he used the language of separation to describe them, Capote resented women separating from him.

One of the first women to be interested in Capote was Rita Smith, a fiction editor at
Mademoiselle
, who, in 1945, published “Miriam,” the story, ostensibly, of a girl who can’t grow up because she exists only in the mind of an old woman who has not. This fiction can be read as a foreshadowing of Capote’s knowledge that he would become a woman, the floor plan, in a sense, of the image Truman Capote would eventually project on the dust jacket for
Other Voices, Other Rooms:

[Miriam] was thin and fragilely constructed. There was a simple, special elegance in the way she stood...Mrs. Miller decided the truly distinctive feature was not her hair, but her eyes; they were hazel, steady, lacking any childlike quality whatsoever.

“Miriam” was the story that garnered Truman Capote—then twenty years old—a great deal of attention; after it appeared, the publisher Bennett Cerf signed Capote up at Random house; Random House published
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, and most of his subsequent work.

It was Rita Smith who introduced Capote to her famous sibling, Carson McCullers. McCullers’s biographer states, “Never before had Carson been so enthusiastic about promoting another young writer...who many people thought served as a model for her final concept of John Henry West,” a character in her novel
The Member of the Wedding
. In writing about Capote, Rita Smith all but disappears after he became friends with McCullers. In order to become a woman more famous than the older, established author, Capote needed to build himself on her model and then destroy that model to prevent any subsequent excavation of the genesis of Truman Capote.

While McCullers remained steeped in regionalism (the American South, of which Capote was a native, too), Capote went on to become a woman of the world, or enough of one to describe, in 1959, McCullers, once more famous than he, rather condescendingly as “not plain, not pretty, arresting rather”—words that also describe the exact effect of McCullers’s writing on Capote, whom McCullers eventually suspected of having “poached on my literary preserves.”

Once certain women artists became interested in Capote, he understood how to take from their work. What he stole was more syntax than complete style. Take, for instance, the the tone of Eudora Welty’s 1941 “Why I Live at the P.O.” (a story written during her literary apprenticeship to another woman author, Katherine Anne Porter):