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[Collection Beinecke Library, Yale University]
1 Thomas Flanagan was one year ahead of Capote at Greenwich High School. When Capote spread some rumor about him, Flanagan wrote out this retraction and had Capote sign it. Flanagan, who became a scholar and historical novelist (The Year of the French), then kept the slip of paper for nearly fifty years before affixing it inside his copy of Gerald Clarke’s biography, Capote (1988).
2 Catherine Wood was one of Capotes English teachers at Greenwich High School and perhaps the first one to encourage his writing.
3 Along with Phoebe Pierce, Ted Walworth was one of Capotes best friends in Greenwich.
4 This is the second page only of a longer letter—the first page was unobtainable—written during a visit to Capote’s father, Arch Persons, in Monroe, Louisiana.
5 Wood’s friend Marjorie Pierce.
6 One of Arch Persons’s nicknames was “Ned.”
7 His father was living at the Hotel Roosevelt in New Orleans.
8 Myrtle was his father’s second wife. It is unclear why he speaks of her in the past tense when later in the letter he asks his father to give her a kiss.
9 In the Yaddo notes attached to the letter, Ames wrote: “Truman Capote—Let’s consider him seriously.” Someone else, remembered only by initials, added: “I certainly think so.” A third person concluded: “Great talent here.”
10 Smedley was a writer and radical thinker; Carson McCullers was Capote’s close friend and sometime rival; Howard Doughty was Francis Parkman’s biographer; Bates and Young were writers; and St. Katharine was Katherine Anne Porter, whose short stories had already made her famous.
11 He is referring to an eerie tale by Rudyard Kipling, “The Phantom Rickshaw.”
12 Barbara Lawrence had been a second-level editor at The New Yorker when Capote was a copyboy, and she offered helpful critical advice on the short stories he was beginning to write; she later became features editor of Junior Bazaar, sister magazine of Harper’s Bazaar.
13 Other Voices, Other Rooms was to be his first novel; it was published on January 19, 1948.
14 Elizabeth Ames was Yaddo’s matriarchal director.
15 Although some of the writers and artists lived in Yaddo’s main house, others were given private studios on its spacious grounds. Capote had moved from the main house to a cottage. He subsequently returned to the house.
16 Murray was a friend of Carson McCullers who manufactured men’s toiletries.
17 Marguerite Young was a poet, essayist and novelist, whose major work, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was published in 1965.
18 Porter was, in fact, fifty-six.
19 Smedley was a writer and radical thinker.
20 He had good reason. He was having an affair with Doughty, a tall, lanky man with exquisite manners, as befitted a descendant of Cotton Mather.
21 Yaddo was founded in 1900 by Katrina Trask, who wrote poetry, and her husband, Spencer, who was a financier.
22 Hunter, an artist, had been Lerman’s companion for approximately ten years.
23 Published by Mademoiselle in June 1945, “Miriam” is the story of a sinister little girl who moves in with a middle-aged widow and gradually takes over her life. Left unanswered is the question: is she real, or a product of the widow’s imagination? The story brought Capote attention in literary circles and prompted Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, to ask to see more of his stories.
24 Leo Lerman was a New York cultural maven. He was features editor of Mademoiselle and Vogue and also authored books on Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lerman’s Sunday-night parties in the 1940s and 1950s were legendary. He met Capote in 1945 and remained a lifelong friend; it was at his house that Capote met Jack Dunphy in 1948.
25 Lerman had accompanied Capote to Yaddo at the beginning of May. This note was probably written when Lerman returned to New York after his stay at Yaddo; he lived at 20 East 88th Street, just around the corner from Capote’s mother’s apartment at 1060 Park Avenue.
26 The article “Life Visits Yaddo” (Life magazine, July 15, 1946) showed Capote at work on Other Voices, Other Rooms and in conversation with Marguerite Young.
27 Six miles off the coast and straddling the border of Maine and New Hampshire, the Isles of Shoals are nine small islands. Capote and Arvin did not, in the end, go there.
28 Rolick was an artist.
29 Mangione was a writer.
30 Capote is referring to a trip to New Orleans to research a travel article for Harper’s Bazaar. Cartier-Bresson took the photographs.
31 “The Headless Hawk,” published in Harper’s Bazaar, November 1946.
32 Pearl Kazin was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar.
33 Aswell and her two children were vacationing on Maine’s Bear Island.
34 Harper’s Bazaar was owned by the Hearst Corporation, which was notoriously stingy with its writers.
35 The story was “The Headless Hawk.”
36 A poet and critic, Howard Moss was later poetry editor of The New Yorker, a position he held for almost forty years; Anky Larrabee was a young woman about town whom Capote used as one of his models for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
37 Capote is referring to his old room at Yaddo.
38 Clinton County is in the northeast corner of New York State, bordering on Lake Champlain.
39 She was in the process of divorcing her husband, Edward Aswell, an editor at Harper & Brothers who was best known for bringing order to the sprawling manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe’s three posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond.
40 Aswell’s children were Duncan and Mary.
41 Arvin had married one of his students, Mary Garrison, in 1932; they divorced in 1940. Capote is unfair in his characterization, however, and only when she was well into her marriage did Garrison discover that her husband’s interests were concentrated on his own sex, not hers.
42 Her brother was Alfred Kazin, who had won instant recognition as a critic with his first book, On Native Grounds (1942).
43 McFadden was the managing editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Carmel Snow’s deputy.
44 Arvin was teaching summer classes at Wesleyan College in Middletown, Connecticut, then an all-male institution.
45 Brinnin was teaching at Vassar College.
46 “Notes on N.O.” was published in the October 1946 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Frances McFadden was the magazine’s managing editor, second only to the top editor, Carmel Snow.
47 Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding was published in 1946.
48 Helen Eustis was yet another editor at Harper’s Bazaar.
49 Lionel and Diana Trilling were both eminent literary critics.
50 Lerman had reviewed Asylum Piece, a collection of short stories by the British author Anna Kavan, in The Saturday Review of Literature, August 10, 1946.
51 Critics Diana and Lionel Trilling.
52 Arvin was beginning a biography of Herman Melville.
53 Capote was staying in his mother’s and stepfather’s apartment at 1060 Park Avenue.
54 Joe Capote, Capote’s stepfather, was also Cuban.
55 Maya Deren was an avant-garde filmmaker and film critic.
56 Despite her French name, Jean Garrigue was born in Evansville, Indiana.
57 Nathanael West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts, published in 1933.
58 He was to have his tonsils removed.
59 Mary McCarthy, the novelist and acerbic social critic, and her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, who was on the staff of The New Yorker.
60 He was recovering from the removal of his tonsils.
61 Howard Doughty was writing a biography of Francis Parkman, the nineteenth-century American historian.
62 Anaïs Nin’s book was Ladders to Fire.
63 Read was or soon became Brinnin’s lifelong companion.
64 Walter Gieseking was a German pianist, renowned for his interpretations of Debussy and Ravel.
65 Granville Hicks was a critic—he examined American literature from a Marxist point of view—and a friend of Arvin’s.
66 The “nerve-wracking influences” were his mother’s alcoholic rages.
67 “The Headless Hawk.”
68 “Shut a Final Door,” The Atlantic Monthly (August 1947).
69 Howard Moss’s volume of poetry, The Wound and the Weather, had just been published.
70 Maggie Teyte was a renowned English soprano.
71 Cyril Connolly was a well-known English literary critic, as well as the co-founder, along with Stephen Spender, of Horizon, a small but influential English literary magazine.
72 Trilling’s novel was The Middle of the Journey (1947).
73 Edita Morris was a writer.
74 “Shut a Final Door” appeared in The Atlantic, August 1947.
75 Mlle. was Mademoiselle magazine
76 Valerie Bettis was an actress and choreographer.
77 A takeoff on “Bowden Broadwater.”
78 The Harper’s Bazaar offices were at 572 Madison Avenue.
79 Charles Olson was an avant-garde critic and poet. The book, Call Me Ishmael, was a study of the literary influences on Melville’s Moby-Dick. Capote’s opinion may have been influenced by Arvin, who was writing a biography of Melville.
80 A writer, Bates was at Yaddo with Capote and Young.
81 Iris Barry was the first curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s film collection.
82 It is not clear which story he is referring to.
83 George Davis was the fiction editor of Mademoiselle; Betsy Talbot Blackwell was his boss, the magazine’s editor.
84 Rita Smith was George Davis’s assistant at Mademoiselle, and she was the first to bring Capote to Davis’s attention; she was also Carson McCullers’s sister.
85 The book was Other Voices, Other Rooms.
86 Life magazine (June 2, 1947) featured a long article entitled “Young U.S. Writers.” Several were mentioned, but it was “esoteric, New Orleans–born Truman Capote” who was pictured alone, somber and unsmiling, on the opening page. He was dressed in coat, tie,
