THEIR scheme was to head toward the sun, meaning Sicily, where they could work for a few months. After a rough voyage that left them both with colds and raw tempers, they briefly stopped in Paris, then traveled to Venice and Rome, where they joined Tennessee and his new lover, Frank Merlo, on an excursion to the island of Ischia, offshore from Naples.
Truman and Tennessee were fated to be quarrelsome friends, and stopping in Naples, they had not one, but two disagreements. The first, which was relatively minor, came when they checked into their hotel. Truman, who was prey to any number of superstitions, looked at his room number and was horrified to discover that, added together, its digits made thirteen, which was a portent of disaster. Tennessee, who was no less superstitious, agreed to switch, but instantly demanded his key back when he learned the reason. “You’re not doing that to me!” he declared. “Get back in the other room!”
The second dispute was more serious. At dinner the night before they were to leave for Ischia, Truman told what he thought was a funny story: how Margo Jones, the director of Tennessee’s newest play, Summer and Smoke, had called the cast together during rehearsals and, in a macabre pep talk, announced. “This is the play of a dying man. We’ve got to give it all we’ve got.” Tennessee, whose exaggerated hypochondria had provoked her dire pronouncement, had not heard the story and did not find it amusing. He was, in his own words, almost hysterical with hurt and anger—Vesuvius could not have exploded with greater fury. “He suddenly picked up the entire table and turned it on top of me,” Truman recalled. “Then he ran out of the room and disappeared. Frankie was terribly concerned, and for some reason Jack was also annoyed that I had told the story. Well, I certainly didn’t tell it out of malice. I didn’t realize that I was touching the nerve nearest Tennessee’s heart. He claimed he was dying every other day. It was his favorite gambit for getting sympathy. ‘You don’t know it, my dear,’ he would say, ‘but Ah’m a dyin’ man!’”
While Tennessee sulked, Truman and Jack left the next day for Ischia. Frankie and Tennessee followed twenty-four hours later; but Tennessee had not forgotten. “I think you judge Truman a bit too charitably when you call him a child,” he wrote Donald Windham. “He is more like a sweetly vicious old lady.” He admitted, however, that part of the reason for his eruption was his jealous suspicion that Frankie preferred Truman’s company to his own, which may at times have been true. “Frankie was a terrific person,” Truman said, “very smart, very special. He was the best person Tennessee ever took up with.” Yet Truman, ironically, also kept a close eye on Frankie, convinced that he was attracted to Jack. “Frankie had a great crush on Jack—there was a whole group of people that had a great crush on Jack. So I said to him, ‘Try it on for size, Frankie, and if it fits, wear it.’ At the same time I said to Jack, ‘You’d better not do it!’ I didn’t take him away from everybody else to lose him to Frankie!” Frankie’s childlike candor and unassailable integrity appealed to most people. When Jack Warner, who was entertaining Tennessee in his private dining room on the Warner Brothers lot, asked him what he did for a living, Frankie looked at him evenly and replied, “I sleep with Mr. Williams.”
Once settled, in a pension in the tiny village of Forio, Truman and Jack forgot about Sicily: Ischia’s eighteen square miles of volcanic rock, bathed by sea and sun, had everything they had been looking for. “What a strange, and strangely enchanted, place this is: an encantada in the Mediterranean,” Truman wrote Bob Linscott. “It is an island off the coast from Naples, very primitive, populated mostly by winegrowers, goatherders, W. H. Auden and the Mussolini family.” To Cecil Beaton, with whom, during his days in England, he had formed a close attachment, he observed: “It is really very beautiful and strange: we have almost a whole floor on the waterfront overlooking the sea, the sun is diamond-hard and everywhere there is the pleasant southern smell of wisteria and lemon leaves.” Auden, who had rented a house nearby, extolled its blessings in verse.
… my thanks arc for you,
Ischia, to whom a fair wind has
brought me rejoicing with dear friends
from soiled productive cities. How well you correct
our injured eyes, how gently you train us to see
things and men in perspective
underneath your uniform light.
But Auden confined his rejoicing within the boundaries of that poem, and his prickly and tyrannical personality did not win him many dear friends on Ischia. “What a bore Auden was!” complained Truman. “He had not a spark of humor or wit. He was all intellect. I gave a party on the roof of our pension. I decorated it with Japanese lanterns, and about fifty people came, including the most beautiful fishermen on the island. Everybody had a good time. Everybody, that is, except Wystan, who wouldn’t dance or talk to anyone and sat all by himself in a corner, looking as glum as he could. That’s my image of Auden: sitting all by himself in a corner, looking glum.” Auden and his companion, Chester Kallman, were agreeable, after their fashion, to Truman and Jack, but for mysterious and inexplicable reasons, they went out of their way to snub Tennessee and Frankie. “What Wystan saw in Chester, who was one of the meanest men I’ve ever known, I’ll never understand,” Truman added. “Auden was already pretty well known as a poet, but the way Chester acted you would have thought that behind the scenes he was the important one. Chester was extremely rude to Tennessee and Frankie, and he made it a point not to invite them to their house. Tennessee was very hurt.”
Truman and Jack had come to Ischia to work, not to dance on the roof or feud with their neighbors, and that they did. Although their pension, the Lustro, had no running water, it did provide, for only two hundred dollars a month, two pleasant rooms, breakfast, and two five-course meals a day, along with good Ischian wine with which to wash them down. Truman’s routine was a familiar one: work in the morning, usually in bed; lunch and a swim; more work in the afternoon; and an evening of society, if any was to be found. If not, he read; he was belatedly discovering the sly pleasures of Jane Austen. Most of his working time was occupied by his second novel, Summer Crossing, the book about a Manhattan society girl he had put aside to write Other Voices. “I have fine hopes for Summer Crossing,” Truman wrote Linscott on April 1, “and I feel alive and justified in doing it, but it makes me nervous all the time, which is probably a good sign, and I do not feel like talking about it, which is another.”
Linscott, who was wise and experienced enough to discern the worry peering through that underbrush of optimism—nervousness is never conducive to good writing—responded with properly soothing and encouraging words. “I am happy that Summer Crossinggoes so well. I have thought of it again and again since that day in your apartment when you unveiled the story—and each time with contentment for the theme and desire to read it.” Perhaps thus encouraged, Truman wrote swiftly, and early in May he was pleased to report that he had finished the first third, “which is making very good time, don’t you think? If I can finish a draft of it before going home, then I probably will have it all polished by the first of the year, which means you could publish it the following June—that is, if you have a mind to. But we will see what happens—it is by so far the most difficult thing I have ever tried to do.”
“Silly goose that I am, I seem to think myself very happy—so perhaps I am,” Truman told Cecil a few days after arriving, and Ischia remained a happy place for him. Its chief enchantment was neither the sun nor the water, Auden, or the Mussolini family; it was Jack. “Truman was wrapped around him like a boa practically every minute,” Tennessee tartly told Donald, “except when he was making invisible little pencil scratches in a notebook that was supposed to be his next novel.” Truman had known from the start that he loved Jack; now he believed that Jack was also beginning to love him. One of the reasons he had wanted to rush off to Europe with him was his fear that Jack might somehow reconcile with Joan. That now seemed unlikely. Their weeks together in the Pensione di Lustro had pushed her into the background and had made Truman feel that his own position was secure. “I am attending to my work with a fair degree of concentration,” he wrote Cecil. “That makes me content, and so does Jack, who has proved to be a really extraordinary person—of a perceptivity too rarely encountered and a strength almost never.”
By June the charms of Ischia had begun to fade, for them and many others, and by a peculiar coincidence, half of the island seemed to decamp at the same time. In a letter to Carson, Tennessee described the arrival of the Ischia crowd in Rome. “Truman and Auden and Chester Kallman and various other of the spiteful sisterhood were all clustered on the little island of Ischia for several months, but all at once there was some convulsion among them and they all came off at once. Truman and his paramour passed through town for a few days last week. Auden and Chester also at the same time. There was a great collision in the public rooms of the Hotel Inghilterra, all hissing and flapping like geese, and there are rumors that the island of Ischia has dropped back into the sea.”
A curious pair from Tangier, a countess of undetermined nationality and her American boyfriend, had passed through Ischia one day. They traveled in an exuberant and expansive style—along with a Great Dane, an Afghan, two dachshunds, two Chihuahuas, and a tiny mutt called Mr. Brown—and to Truman, who by then was becoming bored with the island’s familiar faces, they seemed to carry with them the glamour and mystery of the Casbah. Tangier, which happened to be on the itinerary of several of his friends, including Cecil and Paul and Jane Bowles, suddenly presented itself as an ideal successor to Ischia, an inexpensive place to relax and work through the summer and fall. Thus it was that after a quick visit to Paris and a long, dusty train ride through Spain, he and Jack crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and landed in Tangier on July 2.
Yet even before they set foot there, that “ragamuffin city,” as Truman was to call it, was a disappointment. Knowing how galling his own presence would be to Truman, Gore, who was not one of the friends Truman had expected to see, had flown from Paris and prepared a small surprise. “Come to the dock with me,” he told Paul Bowles. “Watch his face when he catches sight of me.” As the boat from Spain nudged the pier, Truman first spotted Bowles, who was tall and stood out from the crowd. He leaned over the railing, grinning broadly and waving the inevitable Bronzini scarf. Then he saw Gore, who was smugly grinning back at him, and, in a kind of slapstick routine, both he and his smile abruptly vanished. “His face fell like a soufflé placed in the ice compartment,” said Bowles, “and he disappeared entirely below the level of the railing for several seconds. When he had assumed a standing position again, he was no longer grinning or waving.” His comical expression of dismay was all that Gore could have hoped for, and after staying only long enough to make Truman think that his entire summer would be ruined, Gore triumphantly departed.
A more enduring irritant was the hotel, the El Farhar. “Rhymes with horror,” said Tennessee, who had stayed there earlier; “spectacular view: every possible discomfort!” Located on what Tangerines call the Mountain, about twenty minutes away from the center of town, it consisted of a Victorian house and several ramshackle bungalows, one of which Truman and Jack unhappily occupied. Bad as it may have been in January, when Tennessee was there, it was worse in July and far worse in the broil of August: with their corrugated-iron roofs, the bungalows might just as well have been ovens, so efficiently did they retain the heat of the North African sun. “I don’t care how hot it’s been in New York,” Truman complained to Linscott in August, “it’s been just twice as hot [here].” To add to their misery, what sounded like a regiment of British soldiers, on holiday from their posts in Gibraltar, had made themselves at home in neighboring quarters, in which they chattered, sang, and caroused from eight in the morning until ten at night. The Farhar, in short, was not a congenial place in which to work or relax. Cecil Beaton, who arrived in August to stay in a rich friend’s comfortable house in town, commiserated in his diary: “[The hotel] is hellishly hot and altogether unattractive, but Truman cannot afford to move and he is good at making the best of a bad job.”
The only thing that made living there bearable at all was the presence of the Bowleses, who were one of the most interesting couples in American literary history: the fact that their marriage was without sex in no way diminished their obvious devotion. He was both a composer and a writer; she was a writer and playwright, whose hallucinatory, surrealistic style had already won her a small but fanatical following. A leader of her claque was Tennessee, who proclaimed her to be the finest writer of fiction the United States had ever produced. “You will probably think this a wild opinion,” he admitted in his memoirs, “but I must stick to it.” Truman did not go that far, but he nevertheless placed her near the top of his own list of favorite American women writers, right behind Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. “There was nobody else like Jane Bowles,” he said. “She had an odd turn of mind, both in her writing and her person.”
That may have been because she was mad, in the philosophical, if not the clinical, sense, driven by obsessions so ludicrous that even she could find them amusing. Like a demon-possessed character in one of her own books, she had developed a bizarre attachment to an abnormally tall, slightly moustached and altogether unattractive peasant woman who wore blue jeans and brown golf shoes under her Berber robe. Every day that summer Jane would walk to the grain market, where the woman had a stand, to offer gifts and pay obsequious court. She was always back in time for dinner, when she would report, in a torrent of laughter, how her campaign was going. But Truman entertained her as much as she entertained him. “Everything,” she wrote a friend, “has changed since Truman Capote arrived.”
The best picture of Tangier at that time, the feeling of the place rather than a factual description, can be found not in histories or guidebooks, but in Hollywood films like Tangier and Casablanca. For foreigners residing there, daily life had the melodramatic quality of a glossy B movie: a highly charged mixture of the romantic, decadent, and dangerous. Smuggling was a major industry, and fortunes were made within hours—and spent almost as quickly. French designers flew mannequins from Paris to show their latest collections, the newest American cars crowded the narrow streets, and almost anything, from drugs to flesh, could be bought or sold in the open-air cafés that dotted the Little Market.
Alongside that city of frenzied and sometimes sinister activity existed an older, lazier Tangier, where, as Truman phrased it, the days slid by “less noticed than foam in a waterfall.” As before, he and Jack usually worked in the morning, swam in the afternoon, then, after dinner at the El Farhar, attended one of the many parties given that summer in Tangier, which, though no one knew it, had reached the pinnacle of its brief and unnatural prosperity.
The most pleasurable such event was a midnight beach party Cecil gave for Jack’s thirty-fifth birthday in the beachfront Caves of Hercules. One of the grottoes was decorated with flowers, lanterns, and colorful hangings; Arab musicians played unseen in another; and champagne, cooled in ocean water, washed down the marshmallows that Cecil’s sybaritic Boy Scouts toasted by the fire. The only thing Cecil could not do was banish the scorpions that infested the cliffs above. Protesting terror, Truman refused to walk down, and Moroccan peasants had to be summoned to carry him, like Nero, to the revels below.
Despite that adolescent display, both Cecil and Paul Bowles were impressed by the serious side of his character, the hitherto unsuspected scope and clarity of his ambition. “One day Truman outlined for us his literary plans for the next two decades,” said Paul. “It was all in such detail that naturally I discounted it as fantasy. It seemed impossible that anyone could ‘know’ so far ahead what he was going to write. However, the works he described in 1949 appeared, one after the other, over the years that followed. They were all there in his head, like baby crocodiles, waiting to be hatched.”
The crocodile being hatched that summer was still Summer Crossing. He worked steadily, and by August 30 Truman was able to inform Linscott that he was two-thirds through the first draft. “Some of it I’m pleased with, some of it not, naturally. I think it will run to about 80,000 words, rather longer than I expected—but then it has turned into quite a different, infinitely more complex novel than I originally proposed, and to pull it into shape will take a monumental effort.” Two weeks later he confirmed that “if all goes well, you will have a book to read by the first of the year, or somewhere around there.” Thoroughly weary of Tangier by then, he plaintively added: “Is it autumn in New York? I like it best then, and long to be there.”
At the end of September, after nearly three months in that ragamuffin city, he and Jack finally did leave, carrying with them a beautiful white Pekingese puppy—Manchester he was called—that Jane Bowles had given them. Accompanied by Cecil, they sailed across the Mediterranean to Marseille. It was not New York, but after Tangier, it looked immensely appealing to Truman nonetheless. “Well, at any rate,” he said, “Marseille is a real town, and the shops are real shops.”
While Cecil hurried north, Truman and Jack savored Provence, arriving in Paris the first week in October. Their funds were lower than they had been when they were there in March, and after a few days at the Pont Royal, they settled nearby, in the less expensive and more relaxed Hotel de l’Université. Jane, who had temporarily abandoned her pursuit of the moustached Berber woman, took up residence a few weeks later, and the raffish amiability of the El Farhar was reestablished in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Because Frank Price, the Paris editor of Doubleday, had the only private telephone in the hotel, Truman, still in his pajamas or bathrobe, would come padding in every morning to make calls, ask the time—he never wore a watch—and check his appearance in the mirror. He reminded Price’s secretary, Judith Jones, of a sleepy little boy, always bubbling with laughter as he described the supposedly wicked events of the night before. Interviewing him then, a French reporter described him thus: “Small, bordering on the fragile, precious, he’s a literary seraph with heavy-lidded eyes, decked out for the Rue Jacob: the inevitable blue jeans which are the trademark today of intellectuals from across the Atlantic, a gray tweed raglan covering an argyle sweater, a raspberry scarf which accentuates his pale complexion. Disheveled blond locks cover, or uncover, the forehead of a thinker.” The author who had informed American readers that he had danced on a riverboat could not resist giving his biography a still further fictional twist for the French: his ancestors were Spanish, he said, and he had been born into a family of Louisiana weavers.
In March he and Jack had passed through Paris so quickly that he had had little time to renew old acquaintances. Now he made his rounds, taking Jack and Jane Bowles to Natalie Barney’s Friday afternoons and paying his respects to Jenny Bradley and Alice B. Toklas, among others. He was also a frequent guest at the house of Marie-Laure de Noailles, one of Paris’s most celebrated hostesses and a woman who enjoyed adding talented newcomers like Truman to her circle. “All day Truman would be living in our cheap little hotel,” said Price, who watched with near-amazement his comings and goings. “Then in the evening he would come in and say, ‘Well, I’m going to have dinner with Marie-Laure. How do I look?’ And off he’d go. He knew everyone in Paris! He was a young literary lion, invited everywhere.”
Denham Fouts was dead, and gone were Tennessee, Gore, Waldemar Hansen, and most of the other Americans he had spent time with in 1948. But a new group had arrived, including Ned Rorem, who was beginning his career as a composer, and James Baldwin, who was trying to make his way as a writer. Baldwin was working on two novels simultaneously, the autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room. “One thing I want to be sure of is that it is not going to be one of those problem novels,” he earnestly said, speaking of the latter. “Jimmy,” replied Truman sweetly, “your novel is about a Negro homosexual who is in love with a Jew. Wouldn’t you describe that as a problem?” Baldwin was “absolutely flattened,” according to Price. “Truman’s remark changed the course of Baldwin’s life. He went right back to Go Tell It on the Mountain, which got magnificent reviews and established his career.”
Since he had last seen Truman, John Malcolm Brinnin had become director of the Poetry Center at the Ninety-second Street Y.M.H.A. in Manhattan, where he was responsible for arranging readings by poets and writers. Months before, Truman had agreed to read from his own works, but as the date, December 8, approached, he seemed to have second thoughts. He had not made much progress on Summer Crossing in Paris, and, with Jack’s customary acquiescence, he was considering postponing their return to America and proceeding directly to Sicily, where he believed he could work undisturbed. Yet he was also bored with traveling, “tired of sparking up the foreign scene,” as he jokingly told Brinnin. He procrastinated so long that to make the reading, he finally had to fly, leaving Jack to return with their luggage a week later on the Queen Mary. Brinnin met him at the airport in New York and watched as he emerged from the Air France Constellation. “When the ramp was settled into place and the door wrenched open, out he stepped, bareheaded, with a little dog [Manchester] squashed in his left arm. When I waved, he picked me out and waved back, then lifted the dog’s paw and waved it in my direction before he disappeared into the customs shed.”
The day of the reading found him in poorer spirits, however, racked by nervousness. Brinnin gave him a steadying brandy, helped him on with his black velvet suit, ushered him through the overflow crowd in the lobby of the Y.M.H.A., and led him out onto the stage. As Truman sat on a high stool, waiting to begin and clutching the copy of A Tree of Night from which he was to read, Brinnin had a small attack of nerves himself, wondering how the mostly conservative audience would react to that odd-looking little figure and that “baby seal’s voice.” His question was soon answered. When Truman finished reading, there was a blast of applause and the loud shouts of “Bravo!” and “Encore!” usually heard only in opera houses. “Bowing low,” Brinnin wrote, “blowing kisses with both hands, he returned again and again and, with a hop and a skip, left for good only when the stage manager had started the house lights blinking.” New York had welcomed him home.