Authors: Truman Capote
Answered Prayers (2 page)
Truman defiantly professed to be undismayed by the furor (“What did they expect?” he was quoted as saying. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”), but there is no doubt that he was shaken by the reaction, and I am convinced it was one of the reasons why he apparently stopped working, at least temporarily, on
Answered Prayers
after the publication of “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” in
Esquire
in 1976.
FROM 1960, WHEN WE FIRST
met, to 1977 Truman and I saw each other frequently, both in and out of the office, traveling twice to Kansas together while he was working on
In Cold Blood
, and once spending a week together in Santa Fe. I also visited him during the winters three or four times in Palm Springs, where he had a house for a few years; in addition, by coincidence he owned a house and I rented one in Sagaponack, a small farming community near the sea on eastern Long Island.
Professionally my work for Truman during this period was undemanding. (For example, virtually all of the editorial work on
In Cold Blood
was done by Mr. Shawn and others at
The New Yorker
, where it first appeared in four installments in October and November 1965.) Still, our working relationship was immensely rewarding. I recall with particular pleasure Truman giving me the chapter of “Unspoiled Monsters” to read one afternoon in 1975. I did so overnight, and found it almost flawless save for one small false note. When he called me the next morning for my reaction, I was full of enthusiasm, but did mention my cavil, a word used by Miss Victoria Self in dialogue only half a page after the reader first meets her. “She wouldn’t have used that word,” I said to Truman; “she would have said——.” (I can’t remember my suggested substitute.) Truman laughed with delight. “I reread the chapter last night,” he said. “There was only one change I wanted to make, and I was calling now to tell you to change that word to exactly what you just suggested.” It was an all-too-rare moment of mutual congratulation in the peculiar relationship between authors and editors. It was not
self
-congratulation; rather, each of us was pleased by the
other.
I quote again from Truman’s preface to
Music for Chameleons
, a few lines farther on:
… I did stop working on
Answered Prayers
in September 1977, a fact that had nothing to do with any public reaction to those parts of the book already published. The halt happened because I was in a helluva lot of trouble: I was suffering a creative crisis and a personal one at the same time. As the latter was unrelated, or very little related, to the former, it is only necessary to remark on the creative chaos.
Now, torment though it was, I’m glad it happened; after all, it altered my entire comprehension of writing,
my attitude toward art and life and the balance between the two, and my understanding of the difference between what is true and what is
really
true.
To begin with, I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek. But I felt my writing was becoming too dense, that I was taking three pages to arrive at effects I ought to be able to achieve in a single paragraph. Again and again I read all that I had written on
Answered Prayers
, and I began to have doubts—not about the material or my approach, but about the texture of the writing itself. I reread
In Cold Blood
and had the same reaction: there were too many areas where I was not writing as well as I could, where I was not delivering the total potential. Slowly, but with accelerating alarm, I read every word I’d ever published, and decided that never, not once in my writing life, had I completely exploded all the energy and esthetic excitements that material contained. Even when it was good, I could see that I was never working with more than half, sometimes only a third, of the powers at my command. Why?
The answer, revealed to me after months of meditation, was simple but not very satisfying. Certainly it did nothing to lessen my depression; indeed, it thickened it. For the answer created an apparently unsolvable problem, and if I couldn’t solve it, I might as well quit writing. The problem was: how can a writer successfully combine within a single form—say the short story—all he knows about every other form of writing? For this was why my work was often insufficiently illuminated; the voltage was there, but by restricting myself to the techniques of whatever form I was working in, I was not using everything I knew about writing—all I’d learned from film
scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the short story, novellas, the novel. A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling (and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application). But how?
I returned to
Answered Prayers
. I removed one chapter
*
and rewrote two others.
†
An improvement, definitely an improvement. But the truth was, I had to go back to kindergarten. Here I was—off again on one of those grim gambles! But I was excited; I felt an invisible sun shining on me. Still, my first experiments were awkward. I truly felt like a child with a box of crayons.
Unfortunately, some of what Truman writes in the two excerpts quoted above can’t be taken at face value. For example, though a thorough search was made of all the author’s effects after his death by Alan Schwartz, his lawyer and literary executor, Gerald Clarke, his biographer, and myself, almost none of the letters, diaries or journals he mentions has ever been found.
‡
(This is particularly damning, since Truman was a pack rat; he kept virtually everything, and there was no reason to destroy such papers.) Moreover, there was no evidence of “A Severe Insult to the Brain” or of that last chapter which he claimed
in his preface to have written first. (It was to be called “Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger-Queen Kosher Café”; other chapters that he mentioned in conversations with me and others from time to time were “Yachts and Things” and “And Audrey Wilder Sang,” a chapter about Hollywood.)
After 1976, Truman’s and my relationship slowly deteriorated. My hunch is that it began when he realized that I had been right about publishing the installments in
Esquire
, though of course I never taxed him about this. He may also have realized that his writing powers were waning, and feared that I would be too stern a judge. Further, he must have felt both guilt and panic about his lack of progress on
Answered Prayers
. In the last few years he seemed intent on fooling not only me and other close friends about his work on it, but even the public at large; at least twice he announced to interviewers that he had just completed the book, had handed it in to Random House and that it would be published within six months. Thereafter our publicity department and I would be inundated with a flurry of calls, to which we could only reply that we hadn’t seen the manuscript. Clearly Truman must have been desperate.
The last factor in the erosion of our relationship was Truman’s mounting dependence on alcohol and drugs from 1977 on. I now realize that I was not as sympathetic about his plight as I should have been; instead I focused on the waste of talent, on his self-deceptions, on his endless ramblings, on the unintelligible 1:00
A.M
. phone calls—and above all on the loss of my delightful, witty and mischievous companion of those first sixteen years whom I selfishly mourned more than I did his increasing pain.
THERE ARE THREE THEORIES ABOUT
the missing chapters of
Answered Prayers
. The first has it that the manuscript was
completed and is either stashed in a safe-deposit box somewhere, was seized by an ex-lover for malice or for profit, or even—the latest rumor—that Truman kept it in a locker in the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Depot. But with every passing day these scenarios seem less plausible.
The second theory is that after the publication of “Kate McCloud” in 1976 Truman never wrote another line of the book, perhaps partly because he was devastated by the public—and private—reaction to those chapters, perhaps partly because he came to realize that it would never achieve those Proustian standards he had set for himself. This theory is compelling for at least one reason: Jack Dunphy, Truman’s closest friend and companion for over thirty years, believes it. Still, Truman rarely discussed his work with Jack, and in the last years they were apart more often than they were together.
A third theory, to which I hesitantly subscribe, is that Truman did indeed write at least some of the above-mentioned chapters (probably “A Severe Insult to the Brain” and “Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger-Queen Kosher Café”), but at some point in the early 1980’s deliberately destroyed them. In favor of this theory, at least four friends of Truman claim to have read (or had had read aloud to them by the author) one or two chapters besides the three that appear here. Certainly he convinced me that more of the manuscript existed; over and over again at lunch during the last six years of his life, when he was often almost incoherent because of drugs or alcohol or both, he discussed the four missing titled chapters with me in great detail, even to the point of quoting lines of dialogue which were always identical even when he recited them months or even years apart. The pattern was always the same: when I asked to see the chapter in question he would promise to send it around the next day. At the end of that day I would call and Truman would say he was having it retyped and would send it over on Monday; on the
Monday afternoon his phone would not answer and he would disappear for a week or more.
I subscribe to this third theory not so much out of a reluctance to admit my gullibility, but because Truman was so convincing in his description of those chapters. Of course it is possible that those lines existed only in his head, but it is hard to believe that at some point he did not put them down on paper. He had great pride in his work, but also an unusual objectivity about it, and my suspicion is that at some point he destroyed every vestige of whatever chapters he’d written other than the three in this volume.
There is only one person who knows the truth, and he is dead. God bless him.
—JOSEPH M. FOX
, 1987
*
A mistake, probably on the part of Random House; it was actually St. Teresa of Avila.
†
Originally “Mojave” was to have been the second chapter of the novel and was ostensibly an attempt by its protagonist, P. B. Jones (a sort of dark Doppelgänger of the author himself), to write a short story. But some years later Truman decided that it didn’t belong in the book, and it was published in
Music for Chameleons
as a short story.
*
“Mojave.”
†
Only the
Esquire
versions of the three chapters in this book have been found.
‡
What
was
found—enough to fill eight large cartons—was sifted through, page by page, and roughly catalogued by Gerald Clarke and the editor in 1984 and 1985. The material consisted of holograph originals and typed first, second and third drafts of several stories and novels;
The New Yorker
galleys of
In Cold Blood
corrected by the author; a few pictures; many newspaper clippings; notebooks containing interviews of the characters in
In Cold Blood;
copies or galleys of other magazines (
Esquire, Redbook, Mademoiselle, McCall’s
) in which his articles or stories had appeared; half a dozen letters—and a few pages of early notes about
Answered Prayers
. In 1985 all of this was donated to the New York Public Library by the Capote estate, and today it can be seen by scholars in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division at the Central Research Library at 42nd Street.
Unspoiled Monsters
SOMEWHERE IN THIS WORLD THERE
exists an exceptional philosopher named Florie Rotondo.
The other day I came across one of her ruminations printed in a magazine devoted to the writings of schoolchildren. It said:
If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet, Earth, and seek uranium, rubies, and gold. I’d look for Unspoiled Monsters. Then I’d move to the country. Florie Rotondo, age eight.
Florie, honey, I know just what you mean—even if you don’t: how could you, age eight?
Because I have
been
to the middle of our planet; at any rate, have suffered the tribulations such a journey might inflict. I have searched for uranium, rubies, gold, and, en route, have observed others in these pursuits. And listen, Florie—I have met Unspoiled Monsters! Spoiled ones, too. But the unspoiled variety is the rara avis: white truffles compared to black; bitter wild asparagus as opposed to garden-grown. The one thing I haven’t done is move to the country.
As a matter of fact, I am writing this on Y.M.C.A. stationery in a Manhattan Y.M.C.A., where I have been existing the last month in a viewless second-floor cell. I’d prefer the sixth
floor—so if I decided to climb out the window, it would make a vital difference. Perhaps I’ll change rooms. Ascend. Probably not. I’m a coward. But not cowardly enough to take the plunge.