ALTHOUGH Truman could not have known it that day, Ross had done him a favor, an unintentional kindness, in firing him. Indeed, if the reverse had happened, if by some bureaucratic aberration he had been made a writer at The New Yorker, the result might well have been disastrous for both his writing and his career. He was only just beginning to find his true voice, his distinctive style as a writer, and if he had stayed and moved up, he might have been tempted, perhaps without even knowing it, to trim his increasingly luxuriant prose to the more muted, understated pattern favored by the magazine. Such a mutation, a kind of protective coloration, has been the fate of other spirited young talents, certainly, at The New Yorker and elsewhere; an embrace, if it comes with strings and conditions, can be more damaging than a rejection, and at that age even Truman might have been flattered into The New Yorker’s genteel conformity. As it was, Ross gave him no choice: he had to be himself, and as he turned twenty that fall of 1944, he at last began the life of a full-time writer, whose only concern, from morning to night, was to put words onto a page.
Once again, and for the same reasons—his mother’s drinking and the need for solitude in which to work—he looked south. There was little inducement to stay in New York anyway; he had lost not only his job, but for the moment, most of his friends as well. Phoebe had transferred from Barnard to Bennington College in Vermont, and Carol Marcus and Oona O’Neill had gone to California and married famous men—Carol had married William Saroyan; Oona, the great Charlie Chaplin. Alabama may not have been a writer’s haven, but it was at least quiet and, as long as he stayed with his relatives, cheap.
This time, fortunately, he was happier and more comfortable than he had been the previous year. “It was early winter when I arrived there,” he later wrote, “and the atmosphere of the roomy farmhouse, entirely heated by stoves and fireplaces, was well suited to a fledgling novelist wanting quiet isolation. The household rose at four-thirty, breakfasted by electric light, and was off about its business as the sun ascended.” That house belonged to his Aunt Lucille, but dividing his time, he also stayed with Jennie and with his other Monroeville aunt, Mary Ida. “He seemed happy-happy,” recalled Mary Ida. “He would sit down and talk just as fast as he could, just as I did. I wasn’t listening to him, and he wasn’t listening to me. But when he worked, he really worked.”
The uncompleted book he had brought down from New York, the one he had asked Joe’s help to let him finish, was called Summer Crossing. It was a social comedy, revolving around a Fifth Avenue debutante and the parties she gave one summer while her parents were in Europe—the summer crossing of the title. In Alabama, however, that subject seemed less compelling than it had in New York. Seeing the stretched-out branches of the chinaberry tree, where he and Harper Lee had traded secrets in their tree house, walking the dusty-red streets of Monroeville, through which Arch had once paraded the Great Pasha, and tramping through the swampy woods around town, where he and Sook had hunted for the ingredients of her dropsy medicine, he found that Fifth Avenue was very far away and his own childhood very close, everywhere he looked, everywhere he walked, in the air itself. “More and more,” he wrote, “Summer Crossing seemed to me thin, clever, unfelt. Another language, a secret spiritual geography, was burgeoning inside me, taking hold of my nightdream hours as well as my wakeful daydreams.”
The accumulations of the past suddenly overwhelmed him, he said, one frosty December afternoon when he wandered out to Hatter’s Mill, where he had learned to swim and where, one terrible day, he had been bitten by a cottonmouth moccasin. Deserted and forlorn under the thin and milky winter sun, the still waters of the pond seemed like his own subconscious, holding within their gloomy depths all the days and weeks of his boyhood. Gazing beneath the surface of that moody pond, he saw the outlines of an entirely new book, a book not about the sleek and smooth world of Fifth Avenue society, which he scarcely knew at all, but about a boy growing up, lost, lonely, starving for love, in a backwoods town in Alabama. Memory crowded upon memory, and “excitement—a variety of creative coma—overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole book.
“It was dark when I got home, and cold, but I didn’t feel the cold because of the fire inside me. My Aunt Lucille said she had been worried about me, and was disappointed because I didn’t want any supper. She wanted to know if I was sick; I said no. She said, ‘Well, you look sick. You’re white as a ghost.’ I said good night, locked myself in my room, tossed the manuscript of Summer Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, got into bed fully clothed, and with pathetic optimism, wrote: ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms—a novel by Truman Capote.’”
Very likely, that description is a shorthand version of what took place over a period of days or weeks. No matter. The result was the same. Summer Crossing was put aside, and the new novel with its evocative and haunting title, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was begun. “It is unusual, but occasionally it happens to almost every writer that the writing of some particular story seems outer-willed and effortless,” Truman said. “It is as though one were a secretary transcribing the words of a voice from a cloud. The difficulty is maintaining contact with this spectral dictator. Eventually it developed that communication ran highest at night, as fevers are known to do after dusk. So I took to working all night and sleeping all day, a routine that distressed the household and caused constant disapproving comment: ‘But you’ve got everything turned upside down. You’re ruining your health.’ That is why I thanked my exasperated relatives for their generosity, their burdened patience, and bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans.”
There, probably in January, 1945, he rented a room—“noisy as a steel mill,” he said—at 711 Royal Street, in the heart of the French Quarter. Streetcars clattered and tourists chattered outside during the day; at night soldiers and sailors turned the street into a raucous party. Still, maintaining the same nocturnal schedule that had worried his relatives, he worked steadily, finishing several short stories as well as the first part of his new novel. Joe Capote apparently sent him some money, but it was not enough to live on, and in an attempt to earn more, Truman turned out some quick paintings, which he, like many others, tried to sell to the tourists in Jackson Square. “He couldn’t paint worth a damn,” said Patsy Streckfus, one of his New Orleans friends. “He brought a couple of his paintings out to the house, and even he agreed that they were terrible.” Despite the hardships, he looked back on his months in the French Quarter as “the freest time of my life. I had no commitments to anyone or anybody.”
That time did not last long. With his suitcase full of work completed or well under way, he longed once again for that diamond iceberg floating between the Hudson and the East River. Throwing away his paintbrushes, he headed north once again for the place he now realized was home, New York City.
Several times Truman had tried to get his prose into The New Yorker, thinking it the only home for a gifted young writer, and several times he had been politely rebuffed. What he did not know was that he was knocking on the wrong door. The place he was looking for, the place where new writers were not only accepted but welcomed, was not Harold Ross’s sometimes stuffy establishment on West Forty-third Street, but a less famous, less likely address altogether: that of the women’s fashion magazines, particularly Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, which for upwards of two decades, from the mid-thirties through the mid-fifties, published the most interesting and original short fiction in the United States.
That remarkable, but little-remembered, moment in American literary history, when fine fiction found a nest in a forest of lingerie ads, was largely the work of a man who is also little remembered, a fat, lazy, but always brilliant editor by the name of George Davis. At one time a talented young writer himself, Davis developed a terminal case of writer’s block. But the words he could not coerce from his own head he teased, cajoled, and yanked from the heads of others, as fiction editor first, from 1936 to 1941, of Harper’s Bazaar, then, for the following eight years, of Mademoiselle.
Though the business offices of those magazines grumbled about the highbrow and often startling stories he chose, such as a Ray Bradbury fantasy about a vampires’ Thanksgiving, his top editors, two extremely formidable women, Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar and Betsy Talbot Blackwell at Mademoiselle, were resolute in their support. The publishers, who looked upon fiction and poetry as nothing more than padding for the pictures and ads in any event, shrugged their shoulders and gave in, assuming, perhaps correctly, that their readers were wise enough to avoid large and offensive blocks of type. As a result, Davis had far more freedom working for the fashion glossies than he would have had at The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or any other magazine whose primary concern was words. He was allowed to publish pieces by Virginia Woolf, the Sitwells, and Colette, to commission Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden to report on their trip to China at war, and to devote much of two issues to Carson McCullers’ stark and, at that time, shocking novella Reflections in a Golden Eye.
When Truman started to write for them, at the end of World War II, the fashion magazines, and Harper’s Bazaar most particularly, were among the liveliest publications in America. During the thirteen years of her tenure, the remarkable Mrs. Snow, Dublin-born and endowed with an Irishwoman’s tenacity, had transformed the Bazaar from a simple fashion magazine into a haven for the new and daring, in photography and design as well as fiction. Diana Vreeland, who brought the conviction of a John Calvin to questions of hemlines and hairstyles, was her fashion editor; Alexey Brodovitch, who had designed sets for Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, was her art director; and Mary Louise Aswell, who combined a warm manner with cold and rigorous standards, was her fiction editor, as good in her way as Davis had been in his. “There were extraordinary people editing Harper’s Bazaar,” said Richard Avedon, who was just starting his career as a photographer. “There was no question in my mind that that was the magazine I wanted to work for. It stood for the things I cared about, and those editors got the best out of everybody. You would do anything for them! And because Hearst, which owned the Bazaar, was such a chintzy operation, you not only did anything for them, but you paid for it as well.”
In some ways, Carmel Snow depended on Aswell the most. Although she knew everything about fashion and photography, Mrs. Snow knew very little about words and relied on her fiction editor to provide the best. Even so, as a devout Catholic, she was always worried about the propriety of the works she published, and she was mortified when the Post Office, complaining about a racy poem, threatened not to deliver the offending issue. “This is too dreadful,” she said to one of her editors. “I can’t hold my head up walking down Fifth Avenue.” Then, selecting the most innocuous passage from the poem—“he kissed her on the nape”—she said, “Now tell me. Just what is the nape?” After that brush with the law, whenever she was puzzled by a story that was about to appear in print, she would nervously approach Aswell. “Now, Mary Louise, I know you are a lady to your fingertips and have beautiful judgment,” she would say. “But are you sure this story is all right?” “Yes, Carmel,” Mary Louise would reply, and Mrs. Snow would be satisfied.
For all their faults, their silliness and frivolity, the fashion magazines were lively places to work, and the contrast with Truman’s former employer was striking. If the writers and editors at The New Yorker were bears who scurried into their caves whenever anyone approached, their counterparts at Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle were energetic cubs, often egotistical, frequently vain, but also intensely curious and, above all, open to new ideas and new people. “We were always complaining,” said Avedon. “But we knew that those were the golden years.”
It was that vibrant and expansive world Truman entered when he came back to New York from New Orleans. Sometime in the spring of 1945, he walked into the offices of Mademoiselle on East Forty-second Street and told the receptionist that he had a short story he wanted to submit. “That’s fine, little boy,” she said. “Have you got your name and address on it?” His answer, delivered with serene self-assurance, was a reply she had probably never heard before—“I’ll wait while they read it”—and she immediately called George Davis, who dispatched his assistant, Rita Smith, to “see what sort of nut is outside.” Smith, who was only two years older than Truman, shyly peeked into the waiting room and tiptoed back to report that there was in fact no one there but a little boy. Davis sent her back again, and she finally approached that precocious boy and was handed his manuscript, which was most likely “The Walls Are Cold,” a short, bitter story about a spoiled rich girl who gets her comeuppance from an ignorant sailor. Smith liked it and wanted to buy it, but Davis, quite rightly, overruled her: the story was imitation New Yorker fiction without any distinctive voice, something that could have been produced by any good writer.
To someone who had become accustomed to hearing the word no from The New Yorker, Smith’s enthusiasm was encouraging all the same, and Truman soon went back to show her a far better, wildly comic tale called “My Side of the Matter.” In that story, a teenage bridegroom from Mobile returns with his pregnant wife to her hometown in backwoods Alabama, deposits her like a bag of groceries, then, uninvited and unwelcome, moves in with her and her two aunts. There is a hint of Arch in that freeloading bridegroom, a trace of Lillie Mae in the young bride, and bits of Jennie and Callie in the two quarrelsome old-maid aunts; Truman had obviously absorbed much of his family’s history during those hot, gossipy nights on the front porch in Monroeville. Although the manner in which the story is told, as a whining monologue by the bridegroom, was almost certainly influenced by Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” the style—loose, hyperbolic, and extremely funny—can fairly be labeled Truman’s. Smith, who came from Georgia—she was, in fact, Carson McCullers’ younger sister—was delighted with the piece. Although Truman had already sold it to Story magazine, she asked to see more of what he had written.
The more was “Miriam,” an altogether different kind of tale, an eye-catching and arresting psychological mystery, which, once read, is hard to forget: Miriam is a sinister little girl with silver-white hair and unblinking adult eyes who attaches herself to a middle-aged widow, Mrs. Miller. At first Mrs. Miller, who lives by herself in a small apartment near the East River, is charmed by her pretty clothes and the coincidence that they both bear the same first name. Gradually, however, her tidy but solitary little world begins to disintegrate with each visit the girl makes; Miriam takes over her life and, as the story ends, moves in with her, to assume her identity as well. Truman skillfully maintains a tone of suspenseful ambiguity, and at the conclusion the reader is left with a tantalizing question: is Miriam real? is she supernatural? or is she—Truman’s own interpretation—a part of Mrs. Miller herself, the terrifying creation of a woman drifting into schizophrenia?
One is dark, one is sunny, but “Miriam” and “My Side of the Matter” have this in common: they are both far superior to anything that Truman had written before, so insightful about character and psychology, so rich in image and metaphor, that they might almost have been written by a different person. In a sense, they had been. Those hard and lonely months in the South had enabled him to throw off the yoke of what he thought was the acceptable way to write a story and to discard the graven image of The New Yorker.In what seemed like a moment, he had made a breakthrough, leaping from conventional subjects and conventional prose into a stylistic and fictional world of his own creation. He had not only found the idea for Other Voices, Other Rooms in those generous waters at Hatter’s Pond; he had discovered his authentic voice as a writer.
Prodded by Rita Smith, Davis was quick to respond to that voice, and shortly after Truman showed it to them, Mademoiselle published “Miriam” in its June, 1945, issue. Short stories attracted more attention in those days than they do now—people talked about them the way they might discuss a hit movie or a best-selling novel today—and the reaction was almost instantaneous, more satisfying than even Truman could have wished. That one story put him where he had always wanted to be: in the center of the literary spotlight, admired, appreciated, and sought after. “I saw ‘Miriam’ in Mademoiselle, and I said, ‘This is somebody we’ve got to get for Harper’s Bazaar,’” recalled Mary Louise Aswell. “When this little thing, this little sprite turned up, I told him, ‘I want to see anything you’ve got.’”
He gave her “A Tree of Night,” which is a story as chilling as “Miriam,” and in many ways better. A college girl, traveling late at night on a crowded train, finds a seat across from two grotesques, a zombielike man, deaf and dumb, and a freakish-looking little woman with an oversized head and a rouge-smeared face. The two travel from one Southern town to another and perform a kind of carnival show, in which the man, who goes by the name Lazarus, is buried alive and then resurrected. For the girl, traveling with this sinister pair becomes a journey into her subconscious, and it brings back “a childish memory of terrors that once, long ago, had hovered above her like haunted limbs on a tree of night. Aunts, cooks, strangers—each eager to spin a tale or teach a rhyme of spooks and death, omens, spirits, demons. And always there had been the unfailing threat of the wizard man: stay close to the house, child, else a wizard man’ll snatch you and eat you alive! He lived everywhere, the wizard man, and everywhere was danger.” More subtle in its use of symbolism than “Miriam,” “A Tree of Night” treats the same theme in a different way, as a supposedly rational woman succumbs to the terrors that lie hidden within her soul. For Truman, the story was also a visit to the past, a return to his childhood; the model for Lazarus is of course Arch’s trickster, the Great Pasha.
Harper’s Bazaar published that eerie story in October, 1945, and in December Mademoiselle came out with “Jug of Silver,” a warm, charming tale of a wish fulfilled. The juxtaposition of two such dissimilar works followed a pattern set earlier by “Miriam” and “My Side of the Matter,” and throughout the forties Truman’s short fiction alternated between the dark and the sunny, the terrifying and the amusing. The two magazines continued their tug-of-war over him for the rest of the decade. “Harper’s and Mademoiselleturned into temples which the cultist[s] entered every month with the seldom fulfilled hope that the little god would have published a new story there,” was the way one critic, Alfred Chester, described the interest he aroused.
In January, 1945, Truman was an ex–New Yorker copyboy, with a bleak and uncertain future. A few months later he was already being mentioned as a potential star of the postwar generation of writers. In the spring of 1946, Herschel Brickell, editor of the annual O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, assessed the year just past and ventured a prophecy: “The most remarkable new talent of the year was, in the opinion of the editor, that of Truman Capote, the e being accented, a young man from New Orleans just past his majority. It is safe to predict that Mr. Capote will take his place among the best short-story writers of the rising generation.” That sharp-eyed and tireless little condor had finally grabbed his prey, and as he turned twenty-one, he was on his way to becoming famous.