TRUMAN had been buffeted around so much, sent from place to place and pushed and pulled by so many different people, that until the first year of his teens, his own character was somewhat unfocused. The various pieces were there, but they did not form a pattern. Rather than allowing his own nature to take form, he had, until then, been reacting to what those around him, most particularly his mother, thought he should be. After that dreadful year at St. John’s, he seemed to have hardened himself and to have begun, perhaps unconsciously, to come to terms with himself. He had attempted to become what his mother had wanted, and he had failed. Now, at the age of thirteen, he seemed to have given up trying, and his personality began to take the shape it was to keep through all the years thereafter.
He was no less anxious to be liked than he had been, but he was now old enough and experienced enough to seek favor on his own terms, deliberately and with design. The pocket Merlin who had enthralled Harper Lee with his fantastical tales was becoming a polished storyteller who promised entertainment every time he opened his mouth. The ordinary accomplishments of ordinary boys were beyond his reach, but he had an ability few of them could ever hope to match: if he wanted, he could charm almost anyone.
“It was fascinating to watch him,” said Howard Weber, Jr., who was his closest friend at the time. “There would be very social pre-deb dances during the Christmas holidays. My aunt would give dinners beforehand for my cousin Louise, who was our age, and I would take Truman and three or four other friends along in tuxedos. My aunt never forgot Truman, because when he walked in the door, all the boys would go over and sit around him in a circle, knowing that he would tell stories and entertain them. The girls would become wallflowers, all by themselves on the other side of the room. My aunt was fascinated to see the way it happened, but it did happen, it absolutely did! The explanation was that, unlike the girls at that age, Truman read everything and could talk about everything; he had a wonderful wit, and he had a biting sarcasm, which all of his friends thought was very funny.”
Many adults were beguiled by him as well, and, overlooking his miserable grades, several of his teachers at Trinity made him a special favorite. “Mr. Putney, who taught dramatics, had a spot for Truman in every play we did,” said Weber. “Since both Truman and I were rather good-looking, we were always girls, and in one play we joined with another boy to be three princesses sitting on a wall. Truman would get everybody into costume, and then he would tell Mr. Putney who should wear the red wig, who should wear the black wig, and so on. He was in his glory!”
At home he was still a disturbed child, however, and once again Nina was calling the school for advice. Although he was fourteen and in the eighth grade, he was still lying on the floor and kicking his legs in the air when he did not get his way. What should she do? No one at Trinity knew, or had ever before encountered such behavior in a boy his age. His teachers saw only a hint of his obstreperousness. “The biology teacher nearly went frantic over Truman, because he would sit in class and comb his hair all the time,” Weber recalled. “‘Please put that comb away!’ he would say. Truman couldn’t have cared less. He would just go right on combing his hair.” His grades reflected his cavalier attitude; he did poorly in all of his courses during his second stay at Trinity, barely passing several, including biology, and failing one, algebra, by a very wide margin. None of his courses, he had concluded, would help prepare him for his life’s role. He had already decided what he wanted to do: he was going to be a writer.
He had arrived at that decision several years before. “For some reason I began to read in Alabama and discovered I loved it,” he said. “Then one day, when I was nine or ten, I was walking along the road, kicking stones, and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, an artist. How did it happen? That’s what I ask myself. My relatives were nothin’, dirt-poor farmers. I don’t believe in possession, but something took over inside me, some little demon that made me a writer. How else can it be explained?”
The same question might be asked, of course, about most writers who do not grow up amidst books or in the company of those who love them, and the answer is never satisfactory. Although the Faulks were neither poor, as Truman claimed, nor illiterate, as he implied, it is true that they were not readers. Except for the Bible, there was little to read in the house on Alabama Avenue.
To drop the question there would be misleading, however. Truman’s background was not literary in a conventional sense, but more than he liked to acknowledge, it did provide a literary viewpoint, a way of looking at people as characters in a drama and a way of viewing life itself as a tale to be unfolded. His relatives did not read stories; they told them or listened to their neighbors telling them in the normal course of conversation. Plots, centering on family feuds, were close at hand, and on a hot summer night dozens of tales would be recounted on the front porches of Monroeville. Truman could not find many books in the Faulk house, but he heard the equivalent of hundreds in the soft, dusky hours between dinner and bed.
His father’s side of the family was not bookish either, but in their own way the Persons clan were extremely literary. For years not a week passed without an exchange of letters between Arch’s mother, Mabel, and her three boys, and a further exchange among the sons themselves. Mother and sons felt compelled to lay out their lives on paper, and taken together, their letters, which number in the hundreds, paint a multihued picture of both their family and the South itself during the Depression. Almost all are well written; many bear the imprint of true writers: they are vivid, uninhibited, and pungently phrased, with sudden and surprising flashes of insight. Truman inherited both their compulsion and their talent. He could read before he set foot inside a schoolroom, and when he was still in short pants, no more than five or six years old, he was carrying a tiny dictionary wherever he went, along with a pencil and paper on which he could scribble notes. He later set up a little office in a corner of his room on Alabama Avenue, and there he sat for hours tapping out stories on his own typewriter. By the time he entered Trinity, his choice of career was fixed and unshakable. “He’s the only one I ever knew who at age twelve knew exactly what he wanted to do and discarded everything else,” said his friend Howard. “He did not care about anything but writing.”
There are few surviving examples of his early expeditions into the craft, and those few—sixteen themes, stories, and poems—were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford. Twelve were written in the sixth grade and four in the eighth, after he returned from St. John’s. The sixth-grade efforts seem unremarkable for the most part, about what could be expected from a boy of that age, with many obvious grammatical errors and many more misspellings. The four later pieces, those from the eighth grade, are still the work of a boy, but now a boy with talent. Truman is self-consciously reaching for literary effects—a woman does not say something, she ejaculates; a man does not smile, he smirks in delight—but they move swiftly, with a small measure of grace, and so far as can be judged on such slim evidence, he is trying to give his work shape as well as size.
The most interesting story from those Trinity years, however, is one that exists only in memory. His ninth-grade English teacher, John Lasher, handed it one day to a colleague, C. Bruner-Smith, without saying who had written it. The story described, in a dream-like way, the sensation of rolling down a hill and tumbling into unconsciousness. “It was a rather lengthy manuscript,” recalled Bruner-Smith, “and I was struck and impressed by it. It had to do with children, and it had a feeling that I found very remarkable. Very few writers, even great writers, are able to get inside the mind of a child. Mark Twain could do it, and so could Booth Tarkington. But Shakespeare couldn’t. The story that Lasher handed me showed that facility. The spelling was bad, but I still couldn’t believe that a boy of thirteen or fourteen could have produced it. ‘Who wrote this?’ I asked Lasher, and he answered, ‘Truman Capote said he did.’ And so he had.”
Not long after that, Truman’s life once again abruptly changed course, and in June, 1939, the Capotes left New York for Greenwich, Connecticut. They rented a house on Orchard Drive in the Millbrook section, a small upper-middle-class enclave that maintained a careful, if friendly, distance from the rest of the town. Stone columns marked its entrance from the main road, a private policeman patrolled its pretty, winding streets, and its ninety or so houses were, like the Capotes’, all built in traditional Tudor styles. To give it a rural appearance, the people who laid it out in the twenties had left reminders of the country: hills, trees, streams, and two large lakes, which were used for boating in the summer and skating in the winter. Small as it was, the community had its own country club, to which only residents could belong. Millbrook was not the richest part of Greenwich, nor was it the most prestigious, but those who lived there usually stayed there; people from Millbrook tended to spend their time with other people from Millbrook.
Joe and Nina, gregarious both, soon felt at home. They brought with them their maid and her husband, whom they employed as chauffeur, and Nina was free to spend her afternoons shopping, playing bridge, or gossiping with other wives at the country club. Then, nearly every night, shortly after the commuting husbands returned from Manhattan, there would be a larger gathering. Liquor flowed freely in Greenwich, and the Capotes’ new acquaintances enjoyed a good time as much as they did. For Joe and Nina, who had been enjoying themselves in such ways and with such friends for the better part of a decade, the party had merely changed addresses.
Surprisingly, considering the pain previous disruptions had caused him, the move to Greenwich was just as easy for Truman, who entered Greenwich High School as a tenth-grader in September. A few hostile remarks were directed his way, of course. By the standards of the time, he did not look right, sound right, or dress right; while the other boys wore slacks and shoes, he came to class, a generation too early, in sloppy-looking blue jeans and sneakers. But it was mild disapproval, all in all, and if Truman cared what was said about him, he did not show it. “Those who knew him accepted him as an equal,” said one of his classmates, Crawford Hart, Jr. “He looked down his nose at the others.”
Indeed, he probably welcomed the attention. At Trinity he had learned how to set himself apart from everyone else; at Greenwich he went a step further: he discovered how to turn the spotlight on himself and himself alone. “Truman was vividly nonconventional,” said Thomas Flanagan, a classmate who later became a historical novelist of considerable renown. “He was full of energy and self-confidence, and quite flamboyant, a show-off. He had a sense of himself as a special person, a fact he was under no impulse to conceal from other people. For Truman to like you you had to have something special, like wit or social status. That was not a characteristic that was likely to win friends, and those who didn’t like him—and they were a sizable group—would have described him as affected and precious. But he was not crushed by the harsh opinions of others.”
What did crush him was to be ignored. Even to receive second billing in something as unimportant as a school play was hurtful to his ego, and he was keenly disappointed, Flanagan recalled, when he was assigned a bit part in an historical epic, If I Were King.While the rest of the cast swept across the stage in colorful costumes, he and Flanagan, who played executioners, were little more than props. It was obviously not a large enough role for a fourteen-year-old show-off, and Truman was determined to make it bigger. If he could not play François Villon, the man who saved France, he could at least be the most loquacious hangman in the history of the theater, and on opening night he used the script merely as a starting point for his own soliloquy on hanging: “Not every day of a hanging is like this. Do you remember four years ago when we hanged…” It was as if one of the spear carriers in Hamlet had pushed the lead aside to recite “To be or not to be,” and even before the curtain was down, the furious drama teacher was chasing him across the stage—a scene that was doubtless more interesting, and certainly more amusing, than any that had preceded it. “At the end of the play Villon is almost hanged,” said Flanagan, “and I thought to myself: ‘If Truman really wants to star, next time he’ll hang the son-of-a-bitch for real.’”
Such a display of ego did not make him popular, but Truman’s real problem at Greenwich was not his fellow students; it was the school administration, which did not view kindly his poor attendance record, his refusal to work at anything that bored him, and his loud and adamant boycott of gym classes. “His attendance was very irregular, and he demonstrated his creativity with his excuses for his tardiness and absentee record,” recalled Andrew Bella, the school principal. “His downfall was Physical Education. He was the despair of the coaches, and I remember one of his numerous visits to my office. Standing at the tall office counter, he spread his elbows like wings, his chin barely above the top, and announced defiantly: ‘I will not take gym.’ Our explanation that gym was required by state laws and that a doctor’s excuse was necessary to get him out of it was of no avail. He thought it was not necessary for him.”
Bad marks and failures—he flunked algebra, French, and Spanish—did not deter him from concentrating, doggedly and single-mindedly, on the only thing that mattered to him: his writing. Given his fierce determination, he doubtless would have persisted despite every discouragement, but every young writer, however confident, needs encouragement, someone older to assure him that his scribblings are not just adolescent doodles. Truman was no exception, and he had the extreme good fortune to come under the wing of an English teacher, Catherine Wood, who not only shared his faith in himself, but believed that it was her duty, her mission and sacred obligation, to help bring his talents to blossom.
He came to her attention as aggressively as he could manage. She was taking her students on a tour of the school library and had just picked out a book by Sigrid Undset to give to one of the girls. “Suddenly,” she said, “this little fellow, who was not in my group, turned around from where he was sitting and interrupted me. ‘Must be wonderful to read her in the original,’ he said. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of anything else!’ I replied, although of course I didn’t know a word of Norwegian. From that time on I saw Truman, and when he came into my class the next year, in the eleventh grade, I saw him all the time.”
A tall, gray-haired spinster who shared a house with another English teacher off the Post Road, Miss Wood invited him often to dinner, read his stories, catered to him in class, and encouraged her colleagues to do the same. “I made out a schedule for him,” she said, “and tried to make the other teachers understand him, so that they would not expect a great deal from him. Some people objected to my doing that, and the principal, who did not appreciate him, wouldn’t make any exception for him. So I told him: ‘I know that the time will come when you would like to say that Truman Capote graduated from Greenwich High School!’” Even Nina could not escape the empassioned advocacy of this resolute woman with the long, sheeplike face. “His mother couldn’t understand this boy who liked such different things,” she said. “I remember sitting in my little dining room and saying to her that it was hard for me to tell his own mother this, but that in years to come the other, regular boys, who do the usual things in the usual way, would still be doing those things while Truman would be famous.”
Truman himself was convinced of it, and the hours he spent practicing his craft at last started to show results. At Trinity the best evidence of his ability had been his persistence; with a few exceptions, like his stream-of-consciousness description of rolling down a hill, his writing itself had not been unusual. At Greenwich his talent began to bud, if not flower, and it was soon displayed in the pages of the school literary magazine, which published several pieces of prose that were, considering his age, remarkably good.
Written when he was sixteen, the best of the lot is “Lucy,” a beautifully painted portrait of Lucy Brown, the black maid who brought him north from Monroeville in 1932: her thrill at coming north, her eventual homesickness, and finally, her return South. “New York was just vast loneliness,” Truman wrote. “The Hudson River kept whispering ‘Alabama River,’ yes, Alabama River, with its red, muddy water flowing high to the bank and with all its swampy little tributaries.” The other pieces are equally proficient in terms of style, but are marred by contrived plotting and an obvious and self-conscious literary tone. Yet all his Greenwich works are highly polished, products of a surprisingly sure and confident hand. More important than technical competence, which many diligent students can acquire, they show a genuine and unmistakable gift for the creation of real and vital characters, which is, after all, the primary duty of any writer of fiction.