In fact, Capote was his own best critic, as perceptive about his own writing as he was about other people’s. Writing to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, he said that he had finished a piece, “A Daughter of the Russian Revolution,” but had belatedly realized that “it did not accelerate with the right rhythm” and would have to be reworked. Later he abandoned it entirely. “I seem to have lost faith in the piece, or at least in my ability to do it,” he told Shawn. For any writer, novice or seasoned professional, his letters should be instructive, as well as inspirational. But nonwriters, I suspect, will find in them equal rewards.
“No good letter was ever written to convey information or to please the recipient,” Lytton Strachey wrote. “It may achieve both these results incidentally; but its fundamental purpose is to express the personality of the writer.” The letters that follow prove the justness of Strachey’s observation. They convey information—and plenty of it—and they often aim to please. But, more than anything else, they express what otherwise would be inexpressible, a personality so buoyant and expansive that it defied the accepted laws of human gravity.
Gerald Clarke
Bridgehampton, N.Y.
April 1, 2004
An Editorial Note
These are Truman Capote’s letters, not mine, and I have made only minor changes to make them readable. Capote wrote most of his letters by hand, but in the dozen or so he typed he followed the bad habit of many typists: he ignored the capitalization key and typed everything, including names, in lowercase. Since a letter without capitals is awkward to read, I have silently added the necessary capitals. In all his letters, including those written by hand, he also rarely bothered with apostrophes—he seemed to have an aversion to them. He usually rendered a contraction like “it’s” as “its,” as if it were a possessive pronoun. And he almost never bothered with apostrophes to indicate possession; “Jack’s book,” for instance, might be written “Jacks book.” If I were to flag all such omissions, his letters would be a jungle of “[sic]” marks. To avoid that, I have placed the apostrophe where it is warranted.
I have also corrected mistakes obviously made in haste, which I regard as the equivalent of typographical errors. On several occasions, for instance, Capote wrote two words, such as “the the” or “be be,” when he clearly meant to use one. I have left out one of them. Or he might have left out an “o” in “Phoebe,” the name of one of his best friends and a word he had spelled correctly many times. In such a case I have added the obvious “o.”
In no sense have I attempted to sanitize the letters, however, and when Capote made a mistake that really was a mistake, I have left it in and followed it with the obligatory “[sic].” For the most part, Capote was a good speller, but there were certain words, such as “receive,” “genius” and “disappoint,” he could never get right, and I have retained his misspellings—“recieve,” “genuis” and “dissapoint.” Nor could he remember how many “n’s” and “s’s” there are in “Tennessee”—Tennessee Williams’s name occurs frequently. I have left in his misspelling, but put the correct spelling in adjoining brackets, as I have done with all other names he has misspelled. I have ignored occasional errors of grammar, such as “she has not written either Jack or I.” Too many “[sics]” I find obnoxious.
With the minor exceptions I have noted, I have presented his letters just as Capote wrote them. I have not altered or shortened them—I believe a letter should be included in full or not at all—and the occasional ellipsis or parenthesis is his, not mine. Aside from footnotes, my editorial additions are always enclosed in brackets. Though I can make the small boast that I am an expert at reading Capote’s handwriting, there are a few places where his penmanship baffled me or where I could not make out the word in a bad photocopy. Rather than guess what he meant, I have put “unclear” in brackets. He frequently neglected to write the date. When envelopes with postmarks are also missing, I have relied on internal evidence to determine, as best I could, when a letter was written.
At the bottom of each letter I have indicated where the original resides, whether with a person or a library. Several times, however, I have included a letter of whose whereabouts I am ignorant. Some I came across when I was researching my biography of Capote a decade and more ago. In the years since then the person who gave me the copy may have died or may have handed it on to someone else. In such cases I have had to write “Collection Unknown.” I have also obtained copies of some letters that were later sold at auction. If I have no knowledge of the purchaser, I have also marked them “Collection Unknown.”
1924–1948
The Exuberant Years: A Merlin in Alabama and a Puck in New York
TRUMAN CAPOTE BEGAN LIFE under a cloud. By the time he was born, in New Orleans on September 30, 1924, his parents’ marriage was over in all but name. His mother, Lillie Mae, a small-town beauty, went her way, and his father, Arch Persons, a charming but irresponsible schemer, went his. For much of his childhood, Truman was thus raised by the same middle-aged cousins who had raised his orphaned mother: three old maid cousins and their bachelor brother in the little town of Monroeville, Alabama. Though he never lacked for care, that early abandonment by his parents left an emotional wound that remained open until the day he died.
Small—“I’m about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy,” was how he later described himself—Truman was spirited and inventive enough to make himself the center of any gathering. “A pocket Merlin” was how Harper Lee, his best friend during those early years, later described him in her semiautobiographical novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1932 his mother, who had dropped her back-country name, Lillie Mae, in favor of the more sophisticated Nina, brought him north to live with her and her new husband, a Cuban named Joe Capote, in New York. An indulgent stepfather with a good job on Wall Street, Joe Capote legally adopted him in 1935, and Truman Persons became Truman Capote.
In 1939 the Capotes left Manhattan for the upscale bedroom community of Greenwich, Connecticut. There they settled into a handsome enclave of Tudor houses and tree-shaded streets. When he was still in Alabama, Capote had announced his ambition to become a writer, and at Greenwich High School, he found what every aspiring writer needs, a sympathetic and encouraging teacher—Catherine Wood was her name. In Greenwich, Truman also found a soul mate in Phoebe Pierce, a pretty, sophisticated girl whose own ambition was to be a poet. Although there is only one letter to her—“Phoebe devil” was how he affectionately addressed her—her name often comes up in his correspondence with others.
Three years after leaving, the Capotes returned to New York, to an apartment at 1060 Park Avenue. After belatedly graduating from high school, a private school on Manhattan’s West Side, Capote landed a job at The New Yorker—but only as a copyboy. That magazine thought his stories too unconventional for its staid, Scarsdale tastes. In those days the women’s fashion magazines published the most innovative fiction in America, and the talent The New Yorker sneered at was quickly embraced by two remarkable fiction editors, Mary Louise Aswell at Harper’s Bazaar and George Davis at Mademoiselle. They vied for his stories, and in the months after World War II, Capote, still in his early twenties, became a hot commodity in the literary marketplace.
All was not going well at home, however. Nina Capote had become an alcoholic, and when she was not raging at Joe for his infidelities, she was attacking Truman for his homosexuality. Finding it harder and harder to work on Park Avenue, in 1946 Truman sought temporary refuge at Yaddo, a writers’ and artists’ colony on a bucolic estate in upstate New York. One writer who was there that summer compared him to Shakespeare’s Ariel; but he was also Puck, the one who set the agenda for fun and adventure. Yaddo was famous for its romances, and Capote engaged in two, the first with Howard Doughty, a handsome married historian, the second with Newton Arvin, one of Doughty’s best friends and sometime lover. For Truman, Doughty, who remained a friend, was just a fling. But Arvin, a professor of literature at Smith, a women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts, was real love.
They were an unlikely couple. At twenty-two, Capote looked several years younger; at forty-six, Arvin looked several years older, in appearance a mousy
