“IT is beautiful here, the weather, crystal” was Truman’s rhapsodic report from Northampton in October, 1946, to which, in a letter to Mary Louise, he added: “The mountains rimming the town are burning green and blue and there is the cold brown touch of Autumn everywhere. An enormous apple tree, very heavy with fruit, grows under the window; aside from burning leaves, is there anything more nostalgic than the odor of ripening October apples? I am working hard, and thinking clearly, and am so very happy here with Newton: he is so good to me, and for me.” To Howard he wistfully observed: “I love October so much I wish it could always be.” Most of his problems had disappeared with the hot weather, his career was back on schedule with the publication of his two pieces in Bazaar, and, most important, he was in love. All would have been as idyllic as that scene he pictured for Mary Lou if it had not been for one seemingly insoluble concern: Nina.
Her drinking had grown steadily worse in the previous months, and the ugly scenes that forced him to fly around the corner for refuge at Leo Lerman’s were becoming increasingly common. Most of her alcoholic rage was directed at Joe, whose infidelity was a constant and unslackening torment. They still loved each other—that much was obvious—but that did not prevent him from making a habit of stopping off to visit other women on his way home from Wall Street, or prevent her from inspecting his underwear for semen stains while he was taking his evening shower. “He’s so stupid, Lyn!” she would say to her friend Lyn White. “There were pecker tracks all over his shorts!”
To some outsiders, the resulting battles, which usually ended in embraces and kisses, seemed to be a part of their marriage, a necessary Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton kind of ritual that demonstrated the depth of their passion. “I thought that they had a wild and romantic relationship,” said Nina’s friend Eleanor Friede. “She always used to threaten him. ‘I’ll take a butcher knife to you!’ she would say. ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’ But that was just their way. I thought they were a glamorous, flamboyant, marvelous couple.” More and more, however, particularly when the Scotch bottle was nearing empty, their fights were becoming squalid brawls. She slapped his face during a dinner party; in retaliation, he pushed her out of her chair, causing her to cut her lip so badly that a doctor had to be called. Another time, while they were fighting in their bedroom, she grabbed his testicles so hard that they bled, sending him to the hospital in his bathrobe. The months after that marked the lowest point in their marriage: he moved out and embarked on a romance with another woman, and she engaged in affairs of her own—her only way of revenging herself against his philandering, she said.
Joe’s infidelity was perhaps even more wounding to her than it would have been to many other women, who did not take such almost insolent pride in their ability to attract men. Now in her early forties, Nina was still vivacious and attractive, still slim, chic, and stylish. Carefully dressed and meticulously groomed, with frequent visits to a beauty parlor that kept her hair a continuous blond, she seemed, to a younger woman like Friede, to be the embodiment of sophistication. But now for the first time she appeared a little lost, like one of the women in a Tennessee Williams play who nurses some vague hurt or disappointment from the past. “There was a tragic aura about Nina,” said Michael Brown, a songwriter who observed her at many late-night parties. “There was something almost hysterical in her fluttering, in her incessant flow of words, in her Southernness.”
She was more destructive to herself than she was to Truman or Joe, and sometime during that troubled period she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills; but like Newton, she was saved when a friend summoned help. “A day or so after she did it, Truman called me and asked me to come over,” said Andrew. “We knew by then that she was all right, but through some mixup he had just received the note she had left him. She had written the usual farewells, then added: ‘I am putting my jewelry in a box under the radiator in the dining room. I don’t want that woman to have my things. They’re for you. Love, Mother.’ It was a very dignified letter except for the P.S., which went something like this: ‘On second thought, you had better rent a safety deposit box for my jewelry at the Chase Manhattan Bank. You’re rather careless sometimes, and I will want to know where my things are when I need them.’ I think she really intended to kill herself, though; she was still a Southern belle, and she didn’t like her man doing anything wrong.”
Her alcoholic anger was not directed at Joe alone, and when Joe was away, Truman was her target—for all the old reasons. Truman had not wound up on the streets or in jail, as she had predicted, but she rarely hid from him the fact that despite everything he had accomplished, he had let her down: he had not been the boy she had hoped for, and he was not now the man she wanted her son to be either. “She was a wonderful person when she was not drinking, impossible when she was,” he said. “She was a Jekyll and Hyde, much more neurotic and difficult than anybody realized.”
She might have overlooked his behavior herself—she became very chummy with some of his homosexual friends—but she could not ignore the judgments of others. No one hears so many whispers, real or imagined, as someone who has been brought up in a small town, and talk about Arch’s embarrassing escapades and scrapes with the law, along perhaps with questions about her own fast life, may have left her unusually sensitive. She was worried to a morbid degree about what people would say about her and hers, and she was always watching for a sign of disapproval, straining to hear derogatory remarks in conversations across a room. “She was the most uptight person I’ve ever met,” said Harper Lee, “pulled taut just like a violin string.”
When she discussed Truman’s homosexuality with Lyn White, she clenched her hands so tightly in anger and frustration that her knuckles blanched. “Nina, would you rather have a football player or a genius for a son?” asked White, an ebullient, free-spirited young Texan. “Oh, Lyn,” she would reply. “You just don’t know what it’s like!” What it was like for her was almost unceasing humiliation, and she almost certainly would have wished her son to be a linebacker rather than a genius, or, more particularly, a homosexual genius. She could have looked at Truman in many ways, but sadly for her, as well as for him, she most often saw him not as an almost spectacularly successful young writer, but as an oddity who generated looks and snickers and prompted a delivery boy to scrawl on the wall outside her own apartment: “CAPOTE THE FAG.”
She was a woman of stark contradictions—still the good Nina and the bad Nina—and she seemed destined to carry her ambivalence about him to her grave. She was too intelligent, drunk or sober, not to appreciate his achievements, and there were moments when she even seemed resigned, however reluctantly and with however much exasperation, to who and what he was. Both the resignation and the exasperation were evident in an amusing exchange that Truman and his friends quickly turned into legend. Cheryl Crawford, who was an important Broadway producer, telephoned one day, and not finding Truman at home, asked Nina to tell him that “Miss Crawford” had called. Confused by Crawford’s voice, which was unusually low for a woman, closer to bass than that of many men, Nina answered: “You know, whatever you boys do is perfectly all right with me. But I do think it’s going a little far when you start calling yourself Miss!” And she hung up the phone.
There were periods, too, when, like one of Williams’ self-deceiving, aging Southern belles, she would simply brush away the disagreeable truth and pretend, even with close friends like White and Friede, that Truman was just an ordinary young man with ordinary inclinations. She was puzzled, she said, why he could not meet a nice girl and settle down. “Lyn, would you marry my son?” she asked White. “Nina,” answered White, who did not want to play her game of make-believe, “I don’t think your son would be any more interested than I am.” To Friede her display of feigned ignorance was almost embarrassing. “We were so intimate that she would even tell me what she and Joe did in bed,” said Friede. “But here she was indulging in this fantasy about Truman. Of course she knew about him, but she wouldn’t know about him. He was her brilliant son who one of these days was going to knock off playing around with the boys and raise a family. What was I going to say to that? I didn’t say anything. I just looked the other way.”
There were few hours of peace at 1060 Park Avenue during the fall of 1946, and the never-ending turmoil was exacting its price on Truman. “T.C.—pale and tired-looking, poor child, after a horrible scene with Nina,” Newton noted in his diary early in September. Recurring tonsillitis forced him to have his tonsils removed at the end of October, but there was another horrible scene even while he was in bed recuperating. That night Newton outlined in his diary what had happened: “Two calls from T.C.—one from 1060 Park Avenue in the morning (when he seemed well) and one early in the evening from Leo’s—whither, it appeared, he had been driven from a sick-bed by his mother’s insane behavior. The poor poor child.” What led to his flight into the chilly night, a reason that the poor child probably kept to himself, was his discovery that she had been reading the dozens of letters Newton had written him since June. “I had put them into a drawer,” he said. “One day they weren’t there, and when I found her reading them, I went into a rage! A fury!” He had forgiven much, but she had finally done something unforgivable, and he decided at long last to move as far away from her as he could get—to Brooklyn.
He made the decision after a visit to Andrew Lyndon, who was living there in a rooming house owned by two elderly ladies who ran a telephone-answering service in the basement. Spying his salvation, Truman soon joined him. “I have changed addresses, have moved to a little lost mews in darkest Brooklyn,” he told Brinnin, making the mud towers of Timbuktu sound less distant and mysterious than the borough across the Bridge. “I wanted most to get away from hectic, nerve-racking influences, to escape and get on with my work. I had reached a point where I was so nervous I could hardly hold a cigarette, and my work was not going too well.” For the sum of ten dollars a week, an astonishingly low figure even in 1946, he was able to rent two sunny rooms. Filled with enough Victoriana to make even George Davis envious, the house, at 17 Clifton Place, in the Clinton Hill section, was clean, well heated, and as quiet as a church. Aside from the owners, who only occasionally ascended for air, he and Andrew were the only occupants.
Sometimes he did not leave his new neighborhood for three or four days in a row, traveling into Manhattan only for lunches or parties or to catch the train to Northampton. Invariably, he would try to persuade Andrew, who was attending the New School in Manhattan, to skip his classes and keep him company. Andrew, who was also attempting to become a writer, would often oblige. For a few weeks Truman enjoyed believing he had found a secret haven, and he would not give Nina, or many others, his telephone number. “Under no circumstances are you to tell it to anyone, neither family nor friends,” he sternly admonished Brinnin. It did not take long for him to miss Manhattan, however, and the forty-minute subway journey into midtown came to seem like a journey of a thousand miles. “Truman regards the trip to Brooklyn about as Livingstone must have his trip to Africa” was the wry comment of one of his friends. The location of his Brooklyn hideout was a short-lived secret; soon he was begging people to visit him.
By December he and his mother had reconciled. He took her to the theater as part of a peace settlement, and although he kept his rooms at Clifton Place for most of the winter, he also spent many nights at 1060 Park, where a measure of quiet had returned. Mother and son still walked warily around each other, but they seemed to have come to an understanding, a modus vivendi that satisfied, if it did not entirely please, both of them. Their tacit truce was illustrated by a scene Friede witnessed. On his way to a dinner party, Truman emerged from his room in his most stylish dinner clothes: a black velvet suit, a red velvet vest, a ruffled white shirt, and shiny patent leather pumps. “It was a bizarre outfit then,” said Friede, “and he looked a little bit as if he were going to a costume ball. Nina took one glance and said, ‘Truman, you come over here! What are you wearing? You go right back in there and put on your gray flannel suit from Brooks Brothers. I don’t want you going out dressed like that.’ He kind of pouted, but he went back into his room anyway. When he came out again, he had on his gray Brooks Brothers suit. He hadn’t given in entirely, however. He was still wearing his red velvet vest and his patent leather pumps.”
For months after they met, Newton continued his highbrow gushing. “As Thoreau would say, we live not in harmony, but in melody also; and it was an exquisite melody this weekend,” he told Truman in October. “You aren’t a human being; not a mere human being, I mean,” he later added. “I’ve been sure of that all along. You only have all the conceivable charm of a human being, but in fact you are a Supernatural Helper, as the folklorists say, and if I’m not as good as I’m supposed to be, you’ll just vanish on me someday, in a puff of fragrant colored vapor—and where will I be?” His comments in his diary were briefer than those in his letters, without all that intellectual filigree, but they sounded no less heartfelt. “Wonderful to see him,” he said at the beginning of one of their weekends in Northampton. “T.C. leaves again for New York—painful as always to have him go,” he said at the end of another.
Wonderful as it was for him to see him, Newton did not want to see him very often, however. He could enjoy that exquisite melody for only short periods before being afflicted by a feeling of claustrophobia and a need to be quiet and alone. More than once he said that he was truly alive only when they were together; but the fact remained, towering over both of them, as stubborn and irrefutable as Gibraltar, that he wanted to be truly alive in that way only once or twice a month. The rest of the time he preferred the less demanding companionship of the authors on his bookshelves. “Sweetened my mouth with a little Montaigne” was how he described his bedtime reading in his diary; he would not have written about the act of sex with greater or more sensual pleasure.
Truman, by contrast, could engage only in intimate relationships. He did not know how to be cool or standoffish, and he retained his boyhood habit of hugging, kissing, and opening his arms even to comparative strangers. That puppylike warmth was basic to his personality. He could not switch it on and off, and if he loved someone, as he did Newton, he assumed that he would be with that person as much as possible. Newton’s friends made the same assumption. Hearing him babble about his T.C., Howard and Brinnin had feared that he had fallen so completely under Truman’s spell that he would throw away his life for him. The truth was the opposite: Newton only talked like a man obsessed; his feet were as firmly planted in Northampton as the ancient maples that shaded the Smith campus, and he did not plan to have his life disrupted. When he did not want to see Truman, he told him so, causing Truman no end of pain and confusion.
More than once, as he was preparing to leave for Northampton, Truman would receive a last-minute call from Newton, asking if he would mind not coming that weekend. “One time, when we were living in Brooklyn, Truman was all ready to go,” recalled Andrew. “At the last second Newton rang up and said, in that rather cautious way of his: ‘You perhaps best not come up this weekend, Truman, because I believe that some friends are motoring in the vicinity, and it might be embarrassing if they chanced to stop by.’ When he hung up, Truman started to cry, and he asked me to get into bed with him and cuddle—nothing sexual ever went on between us; he just wanted to be held and told that everything would be all right. After a few minutes, he got up and shrugged his shoulders, as if he were shaking off something physical. Then he returned to his room and went back to writing his book. Later in the day he came to my door and said, ‘Take my advice. Never be without a novel. There are moments when you need one.’”
All that fall Newton tried to explain away what seemed like inexcusable callousness, attempting to make comprehensible a state of mind that even he admitted was incomprehensible. “It distresses me unspeakably that things should be such hell for you there in the city, and that you should be so far from well, in the midst of everything else,” he wrote in late October, when Nina’s drunken rages were reaching their crescendo. “The impulse is almost overwhelming to call you on the phone or wire you, and insist on your coming back to Northampton and staying with me indefinitely. I have just barely courage enough to tell myself No—courage enough and perhaps cruelty enough. But, dearest Truman, for the time being I cannot conceal from myself that this might be a terrible disappointment to both of us, and if it were, might do something to our happiness in each other that I cannot bear to have done. I have never felt such grief over my own limitations as I do this fall. But self-knowledge can be flouted only at deadly peril, and though I cannot explain it even to myself, still less to you (and therefore not at all to anyone else), I know too well what this primordial, unanswerable hunger for a certain number of hours or days of solitude means, or is—I know it too well to be willing to lie to you. It is as if something physical like blood were ebbing out of me—not always, but much of the time—when I am not alone; and the point comes when my identity begins to slip away from me, and I cease to be a whole person even for someone I love….”
That was as clear and comprehensive a statement of his feelings as he was to give, his apologia pro vita sua, and it was honest enough, as far as it went: his needs for privacy were enormous, yet he did love Truman all the same. What he did not say was that his guilt about being homosexual was the central fact of his life—and that Truman often embarrassed him around other people. “I feel as if I were, indeed I am, going about in disguise, though luckily it is a disguise I have worn so long that no doubt it looks as if it fitted me,” he had written Truman not long after they met. “I am an impostor. Won’t I some time be caught and exposed…? But you know, my dear, I seriously believe that we must learn to live part of our lives in enemy country: the penalty for doing the other is even more terrible.” Given such fears, it was more than a little ironic, then, that he fell in love with someone who had never tried to disguise himself, who had no such fears, and who, holding his hand as they strolled around campus, gave him away every time they were together. “When I first met him, Truman kissed me!” said Newton’s colleague Daniel Aaron. “It was the only time that a man had ever kissed me. I was absolutely mortified! I was stunned! It was as if he had given me a blow in the face. It seemed to me as if he were camping rather dreadfully, with a certain kind of malice, that first time. I think he sensed that Newton was ashamed and ought not to be—that he ought to be much more open than he was. And he wanted to get back at him a little bit.”
Still, hard as it may have been for him, Newton now took off his disguise with a few of his friends at least, and over the next year or so he introduced his young lover to several of those who resided in the highest reaches of the literary establishment: Lionel and Diana Trilling, that intimidating pair from Columbia; Harvard’s Harry Levin and F. O. Matthiessen; Granville Hicks, the radical critic and writer; Louis Kronenberger, the drama critic of Time magazine; and Edmund Wilson himself. The reaction, however, was not what Newton had hoped for. Indeed, when he said he wanted to take Truman to a dinner at the Trillings’, the hostess, a formidable woman by any measure, gave him a firm no. “When I want anybody to come to my house to dinner, I invite them,” she indignantly answered. “You were invited to dinner; you were not asked to bring your friends.” Newton angrily showed her reply to Truman, who tore it up. “Of course you have to go anyway,” Truman told him, and Newton did. “The academic community was very chilly to me, and it must have been very hard for him,” Truman said. “As I think back on it, I must have looked like a male Lolita to those people.”
Most of the time he and Newton were happiest alone, and that is how they ended 1946. “A rather quiet, solitary day for the two of us” was the way Newton described their New Year’s celebration in his diary. “Champagne. Records. The slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto. To bed rather early, but we woke at midnight (on hearing the chimes) & welcomed in the New Year in each other’s arms.”