T
[Collection St. John’s College, Cambridge University]
TO RICHARD AVEDON
[Clarks Island]
[Duxbury, Mass.]
27 August 1959
Beloved Collaborator,391
You did handsomely with our little tale, and thanks for sending the pictures. They are fresh and amusing and God! how all of you must have slaved. I hope the trip, and the giro de [unclear] was a bit of recuperative fun, and that this finds you ready to tackle some chores as regards The Book.392
1) Get Simon & Schuster393 to try and arrange interviews for you with Maurice Dolbier, who writes a book column in the Sunday Tribune, and the Speaking of Books column in the Sunday Times. They have never interviewed a photographer, so far as I know, and for that reason I think they might. Also, arrange for an interview with Martha MacGregor, who runs the book page in the New York Post. Also, W.G. Rogers of [the] Associated Press. These things would be very helpful.
2) See that copies are sent to—
Irving Hoffman
(who feeds all book information to [Walter] Winchell)
Dorothy Killgallen [Kilgallen]
Ed Sullivan
Leonard Lyons and Richard Watts394
Be sure to include cards saying “with the compliments of the Authors.” This will pay off, take my word.
3) Arrange to appear on the Dave Garroway program. Jack Paar sells books, too; the rest, from our point of view, don’t matter too much.395
4) As we’ve said before, it would be pleasant if Time and Newsweek, but especially the former, would give the book some sort of spread. See if you can find out whether they are planning, too.
I know I don’t have to emphasize how important these matters are, so buckle down.
I am still leading my monastic and silent life, working on my novel and short story. I will be back Oct. 1st.
Love to Evey [Evie] et vous.396 Your friend
T
[Collection Richard Avedon]
TO DONALD WINDHAM
[Clarks Island]
[Duxbury, Mass.]
8 September 1959
Dearest Donny,
Sorry about the heat, and the burst water pipe; but all your other news was certainly good—really it is wonderful about Forster: an introduction by him is bound to impress reviewers and call particular attention to the book.397 You should feel very set up: I would, god knows.
Of course you may use me as a Guggenheim reference; I should be delighted to tell those boneheads how gifted you are in several hundred dazzling adjectives. But academicians, college professors, seem to be what they put their faith in. Do you know any you could ask? Well, there’s R. P. Warren (I’ve read, or tried to read, his new one, The Cave: oh it is so dull, dull, and so self-concious [sic]). And Glenway [Wescott]? The Baroness [Isak Dinesen]? Forster, of course. Carson [McCullers]? Get as many as you can.398
I have been very blue. Kay Kendall’s death truly shocked me.399 She was a fine, dear girl, and I was awfully fond of her. I’d been told over a year ago that she had leukemia, but I didn’t beleive [sic] it. Also, my friends the Haywards are getting a divorce, and I feel worried and sad for her. My work isn’t going too well, either; but then, it never does. If only I were a writer that could write, not just rewrite: self-criticism is good, but not when it reaches the proportions it has with me—then it is just a tumour draining away all one’s confidence. I’ve written fifteen pages in the past ten weeks, and I’ve worked every day.
We will be home Thursday, October 1st. I long to see you.
Hope you have luck with The New Yorker.
Love to Sandy,
et vous,
T
[Collection Beinecke Library, Yale University]
1 He did not actually go to Sicily at this time.
2 Merlo was Williams’s new lover.
3 The reviews were of his second book, A Tree of Night and Other Stories, published by Random House on February 28, 1949.
4 The Atlantic had apparently turned down one of Lyndon’s short stories.
5 After her divorce from Edward Aswell, Mary Louise had married Fritz Peters, a writer who had spent much of his boyhood with Gurdjieff, the Greco-Armenian mystic who led a quasi-religious movement. Claiming, almost certainly accurately, that Peters had tried to seduce him, Capote tried to prevent the marriage, an attempt that caused a temporary rift in his relations with a woman he so obviously adored.
6 Maria Britneva, later Maria St. Just, was one of Tennessee Williams’s closest friends, his literary executor, and the model for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
7 Lerman’s address was 1453 Lexington Avenue.
8 Belgian naturalistic novelist J.-K. Huysmans.
9 Critics Mary McCarthy and Diana Trilling.
10 Diana Trilling had written an article in which she complained about homosexuality in postwar writing.
11 Arvin was on Yaddo’s board.
12 The altercation came after Capote repeated a story that he had heard from friends in New York: that Margo Jones, the producer of Summer and Smoke, had gathered the cast together and said, “This is a play by a dying man.” Williams, a famous hypochondriac, took deep offense. He picked up a table in Naples’s Grand Hotel, where they were staying, turned it over on Capote and disappeared. “Tell me!” Williams wrote to Donald Windham on March 23. “What do you think Truman is, a bitch or not? I can never quite make up my mind about it.”
13 Summer Crossing, his first novel after Other Voices, was soon abandoned.
14 Aalto was a Communist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in the late thirties. Not long after the United States entered World War II he was recruited by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the precursor of the CIA. When they learned he was homosexual, both the OSS and the Communist Party expelled him from their ranks, proving that prejudice has no ideology. The younger Schuyler had had a less dramatic past; he was considered a member of the New York School of poets, along with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest.
15 According to Donald Windham in his memoir, Lost Friendships, Aalto had broken a bottle of grappa over Schuyler’s head.
16 A Streetcar Named Desire.
17 The Christmas Tree (1949), the second novel by Isabel Bolton (pseudonym of Mary Britton Miller).
18 From 1949 to 1956 Brinnin was the director of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center, or the “92nd Street Y,” as it was informally called.
19 Brinnin had apparently asked Capote to give a reading at the Poetry Center.
20 A note of congratulations on her marriage to Fritz Peters.
21 Robert Lowell had several nervous breakdowns.
22 Dodd, Mead, the publisher.
23 It is unclear who the George was who was refused a Guggenheim fellowship.
24 Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
25 Lee Wiley was a singer who recorded songs with such jazz giants as Eddie Condon and Bobby Hackett.
26 Beaton had recently moved into a new country house in Wiltshire, a county west of London.
27 Beaton had spent part of the winter at Maugham’s house, the Villa Mauresque, in the south of France. An enormously successful playwright as well as a novelist, Maugham had suggested changes to Beaton’s play The Gainsborough Girls. All for naught. The critics were merciless, and the play was a flop.
28 Lady Juliet Duff, daughter of the Fourth Earl of Lonsdale, was a friend to writers, politicians, and artists.
29 Richard Avedon was one of Harper’s Bazaar’s lead photographers.
30 Peter Watson was a British millionaire and patron of the arts; Waldemar Hansen, an American writer, Capote’s age exactly, was his lover.
31 Though both his parents were American, Brian Howard, a product of both Eton and Oxford, was quintessentially English. One of the flamboyant Oxford aesthetes of the twenties, he was the model for some of Evelyn Waugh’s characters, including Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Borrowing a phrase once applied to Lord Byron, Waugh described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
32 Massee was Carson McCullers’s cousin.
33 Summer Crossing.
34 Arvin dedicated his biography of Herman Melville to his old friend David E. Lilienthal, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1950. Capote, by contrast, had dedicated Other Voices, Other Rooms to Arvin.
35 Lucifer with a Book (1949), a novel about postwar life at a coed American private school.
36 The French film Le Diable au corps (1946) opened in the United States in 1949 as Devil in the Flesh.
37 Marion Ives, his literary agent. Linscott replied that sales were actually 6,500 and still moving.
38 Robert Haas, Bennett Cerf and Saxe Cummins, Linscott’s colleagues at Random House.
39 Chester Kallman, American poet and librettist, W. H. Auden’s longtime partner.
40 Buffie Johnson was an American artist.
41 Selznick was the producer of
