FOUR
THE day In Cold Blood was published, Jack attached a piece of paper to the screen door of Truman’s house in Sagaponack. “Le Beau Jour,” he had scrawled on it—“The Good Day.” But he was only half right; it was a day that was both good and bad. In some lives there are moments which, looked at later, can be seen as the lines that define the beginning of a dramatic rise or decline. It was Truman’s misfortune that for him the same day marked both. Even as he was reaching the summit, he was starting his descent. For years he had pondered the aphorism attributed to Saint Teresa—more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers—and had collected illustrious examples for his projected novel. Now he too was destined to join that unhappy list. His life began to slip out of control, and slowly at first, then with terrible speed, it careered ever downward.
The proximate cause of his tragic fall—for that is what it was—was In Cold Blood itself. “He never really recovered from that book,” said Phyllis Cerf. “Until then he had been able to cope with all of his problems extremely well. But it was very destructive for him, especially when those boys wanted him to witness their hanging. I don’t know why he put himself through that, but he did. He thought that he was tougher than he was and that he could take it. But he couldn’t. That book started the unsettling of his life. He began to live—I don’t know—recklessly.”
He had mined his subject, but his subject had also mined him, exhausting his nerves, his reservoir of patience, and his powers of concentration; depleting, in short, his capital as both a man and a writer. “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” he said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me. Before I began it, I was a stable person, comparatively speaking. Afterward, something happened to me. I just can’t forget it, particularly the hangings at the end. Horrible!” The memory of all he had gone through continued to reverberate in his head, he said, like the echo in the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. And it delivered the same dark message: life is meaningless; or, as Forster phrased it, “everything exists, nothing has value.”
Deepening his despair was his doubt that the book had been worth the sacrifice. He had been accorded money and acclaim in abundance, but he had been denied what he perhaps had yearned for most, the respect of the literary establishment—“how he longed for praise from the right people,” he had once confessed to Cecil. But that respect and praise were withheld. In Cold Blood did not receive either of what he believed, somewhat ingenuously, to be the establishment’s official seals of approval, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the latter of which Newton had won a quarter of a century before for his Melville biography. Displaying what in retrospect seems like a willful blindness, the judges for both awards passed over the most talked-about book of the year in favor of worthy but less important contenders.6
Truman felt like a war hero who has hobbled home, expecting a parade, only to discover that others, who have never even seen the enemy up close, have picked up all the medals. His triumph was incomplete and therefore not a triumph at all: the right people, the ones who had snubbed him when he was Newton’s boyfriend with the blond bangs, were still looking down their snooty noses at him.
His belief that he had been robbed of his just reward was confirmed when a spy informed him that one of the judges for the National Book Awards, Newsweek’s Saul Maloff, had persuaded his colleagues that the honor should go to a work less commercial than In Cold Blood. Truman never forgave an insult, and his revenge came a year and a half later when The Washington Post’s Sunday supplement, Book World, asked him what volumes he would like to give for Christmas. Maloff’s novel Happy Families would be just what Frank Sinatra needed, he said. With a pleasure that can be felt in every word, he explained why: Sinatra suffered from a bad case of insomnia, and “this numbing little novel, an anthology of every chichi literary cliché extant, would tranquilize a kangaroo revved to the rafters on speed.”7
Truman’s conviction that he was the victim of a conspiracy was reinforced two years later when Norman Mailer was given both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, his story of his participation in protests against the war in Viet Nam. There were significant differences between Mailer’s book and In Cold Blood (the most important was that Mailer made himself the main protagonist, while Truman never mentioned himself), but there was, as far as Truman was concerned, an even more significant similarity. Mailer also wrote nonfiction as if it were fiction, something he had never done before, and like Truman, he affixed a fancy but nonsensical label to his work: “History as a Novel, the Novel as History.” Whatever he called it, Truman was convinced that Mailer would not have thought of doing it but for the example of In Cold Blood and that if his old friend and rival had been honest, he would have added: “Variations on a Theme by Capote.”
“I do something truly innovative, and who gets the prizes? Norman Mailer, who told me that what I was doing with In Cold Blood was stupid and who then sits down and does a complete ripoff. There has never been a greater literary ripoff in the twentieth century. He took everything that I had done, all of my hard work and experimental technique, and ripped it off. But I resent only one thing, and that is that neither Mr. Mailer nor all the others who copied me, like Mr. [Bob] Woodward and Mr. [Carl] Bernstein, ever said, ‘We owe Truman Capote something; he really invented this form.’ They got all the prizes and I got nothing! And I felt I deserved them. The decisions not to give them to me were truly, totally unjust. So at that point I said: ‘Fuck you! All of you! If you are so unjust and don’t know when something is unique and original and great, then fuck you! I don’t care about you anymore, or want to have anything to do with you. If you can’t appreciate something really extraordinary like In Cold Blood and the five-and-a-half years I put into it, and all of the artistry and the style and the skill, then fuck you!’”
Yet it is doubtful that he would have been satisfied even if he had swept the honors. Sooner or later, some professor at Yale or Harvard would have written a disparaging article that would have persuaded him that the right people were still against him. His need for admiration had become insatiable; all the prizes in the world could not have filled it. In Cold Blood may have started his slide, but if it had not, something else almost certainly would have. As he entered middle age, the demons he thought he had exorcised long ago, the desperate fears of his lonely childhood, returned to tug at his elbow and whisper in his ear. “No words can express the secret agony of my soul,” said Dickens, describing the torments inflicted by the unyielding fears of his own childhood. “Even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time in my life.” So, in nearly the same words, might Truman have spoken. “Something in my life has done a terrible hurt to me,” he did in fact say, “and it seems to be irrevocable.”
That hurt—so he believed, and so was probably the case—was caused by his mother’s unending rejection, and it was symbolized by the sound of a key turning in a door: the young Lillie Mae locking him in a hotel room as she left for an evening on the town. “I remember it all in such detail,” he said, his mind wandering back, as it did, more and more, to that time. “At this very moment I can see those rooms in St. Louis and New Orleans. That’s when my claustrophobia and fear of abandonment began. She locked me in and I still can’t get out. She was the cause of all my anxiety—‘free-floating anxiety’ is what all the psychiatrists say I have. If you’ve never had it, you don’t know what it’s like. It has the same relationship to ordinary anxiety as a migraine has to an ordinary headache. I live with it constantly. I’m never ever free from it.” Holly Golightly had given a name, “the mean reds,” to that hyperanxiety. “You’re afraid and you sweat like hell” was how she described it. “But you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”
“All our acts are acts of fear,” Truman had written in one of his early stories, “Shut a Final Door.” For a long time thereafter his own fears had been largely disguised by his high spirits; they may even have contributed to that puckish, clownish side of him. A frightened child has a choice of either hiding in a corner or showing off, demanding the spotlight that will drive away the darkness. Truman instinctively chose the latter course, and for years that immature side of him had served him well. One of the secrets of his appeal was his infectious exuberance and his refusal to be bound by grown-up conventions, his willingness, so rare in adults, to show affection and dislike and to say exactly what he was thinking. He could brag, lie and behave outrageously, but his friends, recognizing the excesses of a child, adored him anyway. Even his anger at Maloff and the National Book Award committee was evidence of a refreshing candor. All good writers want recognition and feel wounded and resentful when their best work is rejected; few are willing to expose and perhaps embarrass themselves by saying so. But the rebellious child within him had usually been kept in check by an adult of exceptionally clear vision and sound judgment. A remarkably sensitive gyroscope had prevented him from leaning too far in one direction or another.
In the years after In Cold Blood, that gyroscope became less dependable and at last broke down altogether. “It’s as if two different people were inside of me,” he said. “One is highly intelligent, imaginative and mature, and the other is a fourteen-year-old. Sometimes one is in control, sometimes the other.” Flexing his muscles, the pugnacious adolescent more often pushed aside the increasingly weary adult, and the man in the middle, the Truman Capote the world saw, found it harder and harder to distinguish between the possible and the impossible, between reality and unreality. It is unlikely, for example, that the Truman of a decade before would have embarked on such a feckless enterprise as trying to make Lee Radziwill into a movie star; or that he would have responded with quite such self-lacerating bitterness to the slights by the award givers.
Contributing to the cloudiness of his judgment was an increasing dependence on pills and alcohol. Both had been part of his life since he was a teenager in Greenwich, stealing sleeping pills from his mother’s bedroom and sweet fruit brandies from Joe Capote’s bar. By the sixties, he had become addicted to tranquilizers and various other mood-altering pills, and alcohol, that old and trusty ally, had turned against him. “When I first knew him, we would have a little wine with lunch, then a martini,” said Phyllis Cerf. “But during the writing of In Cold Blood his drinking grew, grew, grew, grew. He would start with a double martini, have another with lunch, then a stinger afterward. That kind of heavy drinking was new with him.” By the early seventies, it had become obvious to him, as well as to everyone else, that he could no longer exist without the bottles in either his medicine chest or his liquor cabinet.
“This phenomenon” Cecil had once christened him, worrying that someone who lived so intensely might someday burn himself out, might be too astonishingly incandescent to last. For a decade and more Truman had proved him wrong, moving more feverishly than ever. But in the months that followed publication of In Cold Blood, Cecil’s prediction at last came true: the phenomenon of the forties and fifties was no more. “I secretly feel T. is in a bad state and may not last long,” Cecil wrote in the spring of 1966. “He has become a real neurotic case.”
From the first, Truman’s writing had been tinged with nostalgia, a yearning for a serene and smiling past that he himself had not known, nor given to his fictional characters. “Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky” was the song Holly had sung as she sat on her fire escape, plaintively strumming her guitar. But nostalgia did not provide him the bittersweet pleasure it offers many others. It was, rather, the manifestation of a pessimism so profound that it darkened every waking moment. “People think I do frivolous things, and I do,” he said, “but it’s in defiance of this feeling of mutability and death being the central factor of life.”
Since his childhood had not provided him with the parental love that usually brings later contentment, he had manufactured his happiness, conjuring it out of his imagination as he had his fiction. After In Cold Blood he was no longer able to summon the energy to perform that magic act. Nostalgia descended into sorrow, and to those who knew him well he seemed to be in perpetual mourning, overwhelmed by a sense of loss that was no less keen because he could not say precisely what it was that had been taken from him.
There were even signs that he was growing disenchanted with the very rich and that, on occasion, he was bored by the swans. He had walked on Olympus and had discovered that those who resided there were not heaven’s anointed after all. It was a shock—not to his intellect, which had always known better, but to his emotions, which had not. The myth by which he had lived was starting to crumble. He floundered like a man who has lost his religion, and his confidence ebbed with his faith. The sunshine of prior years shone less and less frequently, the clouds gathering so swiftly that it seemed as if they had come from nowhere. That was not the case: they had been there, circling the horizon, all along.
The theme that ran through his life—a ceaseless but unsuccessful search for love—can be likened to a leitmotif in certain symphonies and operas. Surrounded by strings and trumpets at the beginning, the chord sparkles with optimism and laughter; all is possible, it seems to say. Then the tempo of the music slows, and mellow oboes and deep-voiced horns crowd out the lighter instruments that had danced around that melodic line; the best is over, the chord now seems to say, it is past and done. The same notes that once had sung with the high spirits of spring begin to speak of melancholy autumn and the winter that will come after. To the audience that still hears the exuberant echo of their earlier incarnation, they sound, indeed, heartrendingly sad.