TRUMAN CAPOTE – a presentation

On September 30, 1924, Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in

the Touro Infirmary of New Orleans, to the sixteen-year-old former Miss
Alabama, Lillie Mae Faulk and Joseph Arch Persons, a salesman; the couple
divorced when their only son was four years old. After this separation, the
young boy’s mother left for New York, where she would later remarry, - this
time to Joseph Garcia Capote, a Spanish Cuban businessman -, gain custody of
Truman and change her name to the more fashionable Nina.
Before being sent for to join his new family and adopting his stepfather’s
surname, Capote spent his childhood years in the homes of various relatives
from Louisiana, Mississippi and Monroeville, Alabama, where he was
practically raised by three elderly cousins and an uncle of the Faulk family.
Miss Sook Faulk was a simple woman, who remained close to the boy’s heart:
she was to inspire the prototype for a series of loving female characters in
Truman’s works such as A Christmas Memory or The Thanksgiving Visitor. It
was also during this period that the future writer met and befriended Nelle
Harper Lee, his next door neighbor at the time, who later on made him a
character [Dill] in her famous novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
After his arrival in New York, the adolescent attended Trinity School and
St. John’s Academy; afterwards, he was sent off to the Greenwich High School,
Connecticut, where he met Catharine Wood, the English teacher whom he
credited as the first person to have acknowledged his talent and supported his
writing ambitions. The 1966 edition of A Christmas Memory was dedicated to
her. Nevertheless, Capote found little satisfaction in formal education and at the
age of seventeen chose to drop out of school and start work for The New Yorker.
During the two-year stay at this magazine, he passed through several
departments; at the same time, he cultivated his habit of writing stories. In 1942,
when he was nineteen years old, he made his literary breakthrough with
Miriam, a short-story published in Mademoiselle, which brought its author the
first of his four O. Henry Memorial Awards. The distinction triggered a contract
for a novel with Random House: the writer returned to his relatives in
Monroeville. It was there that he abandoned his initial project, Summer
Crossing, and began Other Voices, Other Rooms.
The process of creation fueled Capote’s restlessness: he successively
moved to New Orleans, North Carolina, Saratoga Springs, New York and
eventually settled in Nantucket, where he put an end to his search for an
essentially imaginary person. The outcome was Other Voices, Other Rooms, the
1948 remarkable first novel of a twenty-three-year-old author. The now famous
cover photograph of a sensual Capote, provocatively hypnotizing his readers
from an elegant sofa, stirred a wave of critical reactions, along with massive
publicity for the book and controversy related to its homosexual undertones.
As a reaction, the artist set off for Europe, where he continued to write
and travel together with his long-term partner, Jack Dunphy. In February 1949,
Random House published Tree of Night and Other Stories, a selection of
Capote’s previous successes issued in magazines like Mademoiselle, Harper’s
Bazaar a.o. This volume was followed shortly by Local Color (1950) and The
Grass Harp (1951). The 1952 stage-version of The Grass Harp, The House of
Flowers, his 1953 musical and the 1954 Beat the Devil film script for director
John Huston stand proof of the writer’s increasing interest in theater and film-
production.
His preoccupation with non-fiction developed along with the series of
articles for The New Yorker, which were collected in 1956 under the title The
Muses Are Heard – a jocular travel-report on a tour of the Soviet Union
undertaken by the enormous troupe of “Porgy and Bess”. The same year
brought about A Christmas Memory, an autobiographical childhood
recollection; in the field of journalism, Capote turned to another type of
experiment -–he undertook the task of drawing Marlon Brando’s portrait in The
Duke in His Domain biography, printed by The New Yorker in 1957.
The year 1958 represented a change of direction for Capote; he himself
viewed Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the work that marked his return to the United
States, as the beginning of a new, a second literary career. Holiday [Holly]
Golightly, the main character of this novella, contributed to the leaving behind
of the fantastic countryside; her New York adventures in search for a
satisfactory identity won both public acclaim and a creative writing award for
Capote, from the part of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The 1961
film version, starring Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard and Patricia Neal was
to become an all-time-favorite movie classic, although the writer would have
initially opted for Marilyn Monroe in the lead part.
On November 16, 1959, Capote came across Wealthy farmer, 3 of Family
Slain, the newspaper report of the Clutter murder in Kansas that changed his
life. From that moment until April 1965, his unadulterated attention and
energies focused on the case of the two assassins, Perry Smith and Richard
Hickock. The writer had found the incentive for his long-planned initiative: the
non-fiction novel. “I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a
large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the
depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry”, the author said. For
six years he gathered material for his documentary work: interviews with local
people, personal encounters with the murderers, letters, notes were all part of a
most impressive research.
The final product was In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple
Murder and Its Consequences (1965). This uncommon piece of narrative
journalism cost its author, who became dependent on tranquilizers, a great deal
of his emotional and psychological balance, rewarding his, though, with
exceptional success and appreciation. Capote remained, however, bitter, as to
his novel receiving neither any of the major literary prizes, nor the full critical
recognition for its innovative nature and structure that he had expected.
Columbia Pictures compensated for his regrets with the release of the screen
version of the book, directed by Richard Brook, as early as 1967.
The triumph of In Cold Blood was redoubled by a gradual personal
transformation to take place in the writer himself. The past began to haunt him:
his abandoned childhood, the suicide of his mother in 1953, when he was only
twenty-nine, his early discovered homosexuality and the subsequent series of
affairs must have contributed to a perpetually aggravating state of depression.
One means to fight the progression of personal decay was what became 1966’s
Party of the Decade, the famous black-and-white dress ball he gave at the Plaza
Hotel in New York, for Katherine Graham and five hundred close friends. This
overwhelming fantasy represented a major social event, where the most
illustrious personalities of the moment made glamorous appearances, to the
host’s sheer delight.
After the party, capote’s presence in the limelight became more discreet.
A 1969 car accident, his increasing drink and drugs problems, quarrels with the
authorities and fellow-writers progressively affected his health and general
disposition. At a loss for personal and professional resources, the disturbed
writer planned a lengthy novel, following a Proustian pattern: Answered
Prayers. Segments of this ambitious project appeared in Esquire in 1975 and
1976 and caused scandal and disapproval from both the critics and the public
opinion. The stories used gossip as their starting point, showing no concern for
disclosing the characters’ names or distinctive features; Capote found himself
not only ill and embittered, but also deserted by the friends he had carelessly
disregarded.
By exposing the private lives of public persons, Capote exceeded both
the fictional and the journalistic means of expression used before: he manifested
a nastiness and a shallowness that could barely mask the deeper inner torment
of a man who fell prey to complexes and emotional traumas. In 1981, he
published Music for Chameleons, one last collection of short stories,
conversations and interviews previously featured in several magazines. The
stories issued in Esquire were republished posthumously as Answered Prayers:
The Untitled Novel. This 1986 unfinished autobiographical work met the same
unfavorable response as it had at the time of its first apparition.
The painful incapability of writing this novel accompanied Capote’s last
swirling years of dried inspiration, drug abuse and alcoholic drives. The failure
of his carefully designed masterwork, combined with a disastrous personal life
made the formerly brilliant author hardly recognizable. His extraordinary
existence was drawing towards an end. Immersed in unhappiness, feeling
estranged and betrayed, Truman Capote craved for the affection he had been
deprived of from his early days and could not recuperate ever since. He died on
August 26, 1986 in Los Angeles, California: the causes of death were liver
disease, phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication.
The definition Truman Capote found for his own personality in the 1980
self-interview from Music for Chameleons is highly suggestive: “…I'm not a
saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius. Of
course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint.”
Although controversial as a public figure, the author left behind writings that
stand proof of the indisputable complexity of his creative abilities, a complexity
illustrated by several landmarks in fiction. During his restless lifetime, he
produced one of the most varied and original series of works in 20 th century
American literature.
(Cristina Cheveresan)

PUBLICATIONS

Fiction
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)
A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949)
The Grass Harp (1951)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958 (1961-film)
A Christmas Memory (1966)
The Thanksgiving Visitor (1967)
One Christmas (1982)
Conversations with Capote (1985)
Answered Prayers (unfinished – 1986)

Plays
The Grass Harp (1952)
 The House of Flowers (produced 1954; 1968)
Experiment in Multimedia (1969 - with E. and F. Perry)

TV Plays
A Christmas Memory (1966)
The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968)
Among the Paths to Eden (1967)
Laura (1968)
Behind Prison Walls (1972)
The Glass House, with Tracy Keenan Wynn and Wyatt Cooper (1972)
Crimewatch (1973)

Screenplays
Beat the Devil, with John Huston – 1953
Indiscretions of an American Wife, with others (1954)
The Innocents, with William Archibald and John Mortimer (1961)
Trilogy, with Eleanor Perry (1969)

Other
Local Color (1950)
The Muses Are Heard: An Account (1956)
Observations, with Richard Avedon (1959)
Selected Writings, edited by Mark Schorer (1963)
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its
Consequences (1966; 1967 - film; 1996- television film)
The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places (1973)
Then It All Came Down: Criminal Justice Today discussed by Police,
Criminals, and Correction Officers, with comments by Capote (1976)
Music for Chameleons (1980)
A Capote Reader (1987) - Marilyn Monroe: Photographs 1945-1962