Truman Capote (1924-1984). Biography and Creativity

Novelist, short story writer, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, provocateur, and self- proclaimed father of the nonfiction novel, Truman Capote, originally Truman Streckfus Persons, was born on September 30, 1924, to Archulus (Arch) and Lillie Mae Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana. Arch, a 26-year-old drifter who periodically returned to their hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, sporting “an expensive LaSalle or Packard Phaeton when he had money, sponging off his friends when he was strapped,” married Lillie Mae when she was 17 (Clarke 5).

After running out of money on their honeymoon and living with Lillie Mae’s cousins for a time, Arch sent for his pregnant wife after securing a sales job with a steamship company in New Orleans, all the while trying to convince her not to have an abortion. After Truman was born, Arch tried to supplement his salesman’s salary with a variety of schemes: managing a prize fighter, promoting variety acts, publishing magazines and syndicated columns, among others (9).

Capote was never very close to Arch, despite his summertime steamboat adventures on the Mississippi with him. Capote later recalled tap-dancing for the passengers with noted jazz musician Louis Armstrong on one of these voyages. Despite these reunions, Capote described his father as untrustworthy, a man who made many promises but fulfilled few of them. None of Arch’s half-baked get-rich schemes paid off, and Lillie Mae became dissatisfied with their marriage almost immediately after Truman was born, and she began to see other men. With both parents chasing their desires, there was little time left for Truman, who, in his sixth year, was sent to live with Lillie Mae’s family in Monroeville.

The young Truman’s time in Monroeville was formative. Living with his aunts, Capote befriended his next door neighbor, future novelist Nelle Harper Lee, and became especially close to his cousin, Miss Sook Faulk. Both of these Monroeville friends appear in Capote’s early fiction. By age five, Capote had taught himself to read and write, and by age 11 he had written and submitted “Old Mr. Busybody”—which he has described as a scandalous roman a clef—in a children’s short story contest sponsored by the Mobile Press Register (Inge 21).

As Capote recounts, this was to be the first of many troubles caused by his blending of fact and fiction: “The first installment appeared one Sunday . . . Only somebody suddenly realized that I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second installment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing” (21). Despite this setback, Capote kept writing, and he started to send his stories to magazines and literary journals by the time he was 15. Already convinced that he would eventually become a famous writer, Capote’s persistence bore fruit two years later when he received acceptance letters for three of his short stories on the same day.

By this time, Lillie Mae, remarried to a well-off Cuban businessman, Joe Capote, changed her first name to Nina and moved with Truman to live in New York—only after finding out that she was no longer capable of bearing children. As biographer Gerald Clarke notes, her wayward affections were very traumatic for the young Truman: “. . . after all the years, and after her all her battles to gain custody from Arch . . . she loved him and she did not love him; she wanted him and she did not want him; she was proud to be his mother and she was ashamed of him. Her feelings toward him oscillated between polar extremes, in other words, and from one day to another, sometimes from one hour to another, he could not predict how she would greet him” (Clarke 42). Such abuse would fuel not only Capote’s insatiable desire for fame and acceptance but his fascination with the life of his most famous protagonist and mass murderer, In Cold Blood''s Perry Smith.

Truman’s unhappy home life affected his grades at the private schools his mother sent him to. After performing poorly at one school, Nina, who had always thought her son too effeminate, sent him to St. John’s Military Academy in Ossining, New York, where he was sexually abused by older, stronger boys (Clarke 45-46). When the Capotes relocated to Millbrook, Connecticut, Truman was then sent to Greenwich High School, where he was taken under the wing of his English teacher, Catherine Wood. With her guidance and advocacy, Truman began publishing stories in the school’s literary magazine.

Three years later, the Capotes moved back to New York, and Truman finished his remaining year of high school at a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A year later, with the World War II raging in the Pacific and across the Atlantic, Truman found work as a copyboy at the understaffed offices of the New Yorker. Though he did become friends with the office manager and was given a slight promotion to the art department, where he sorted cartoons, the atmosphere at the magazine was cold, secretive, and gossip-plagued. After a few years, Capote attended a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where he introduced himself to the poet Robert Frost as an employee of the magazine. Later, when Truman was perceived to be sneaking out of one of Frost’s poetry readings, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet took it as an insult from the magazine. The incident got Truman fired, and he proceeded to write full time with the financial support of his stepfather, Joe.

Comparatively free from financial burden and already intimate with wealthy and affluent New Yorkers, Capote began writing short stories for Story, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. These included “My Side of the Matter,” “A Tree of Night,” and “Miriam,” the last of which caught the attention of an editor at Random House, who expressed interest in whatever Capote wrote next. Although since he left the New Yorker he had been working on a novel, which was to be called Summer Crossing (posthumously published in 2006), Capote soon abandoned the project and, two years later, completed his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Published in 1948 with the help of his friend and fellow writer Carson McCullers, the book received mixed reviews from critics but benefitted from its risque subject matter and its equally provocative dust jacket, which prominently featured a picture of Capote gazing at the camera in an attitude of seductive repose. Written in a southern gothic style, the novel is a semiautobiographical story of an effeminate 13-year-old, Joel, who is sent from New Orleans to his reclusive quadriplegic father’s rural Alabama plantation after his mother dies. Estranged from his father since birth, Joel befriends a transvestite named Randolph and Idabel, a tomboy who is loosely based on Capote’s Monroeville playmate Harper Lee.

Capote then spent the next 10 years traveling Europe and elsewhere with his longtime partner and novelist Jack Dunphy. During this time, he published an astonishing variety of works, from travel narratives and journalism pieces for the New Yorker to original Hollywood screenplays, Broadway adaptations of his fiction, and, perhaps most significantly, an experimental journalistic travel narrative called The Muses Are Heard: An Account (1956) and the commercially successful novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958).

The first, a literary and journalistic account of an American theatrical production performing in Russia during the cold war, appeared on the pages of the New Yorker before appearing in book form. The Muses Are Heard was Capote’s first conscious attempt to produce what he considered to be a new sort of writing, a “high” journalism that retains fidelity to facts while presenting them with all of the “fictional technical equipment” a novelist has at his or her disposal (Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel” 26).

As Capote himself later wrote in Music for Chameleons, “The Muses Are Heard had set me to thinking on different lines altogether: 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” (xiv). Capote began to designate this genre experiment as the “nonfiction novel,” a term whose paradoxical and contradictory nature has been the source of much critical debate (for an excellent analysis of this, see Heyn).

On November 16, 1959, Capote came across a small notice in the New York Times entitled: “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.” Thus began Capote’s five- year obsession with the brutal, apparently motiveless murder of the Clutter family at the hands of Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith. With his longtime friend Nelle Harper Lee, Capote immediately traveled to the small middle-American farming community of Holcomb, Kansas, to gather information and conduct interviews for what was to become his most famous novel. During the course of his investigation of the crime’s mysterious causes and tragic consequences, Capote gained the trust of the criminals, the investigating officers, and many of Holcomb’s residents. Capote became especially close to Perry Smith, who entrusted his interviewer with all of his personal effects and journals before his death. What resulted from these researches was one of the most commercially successful novels the publishing industry had ever produced, and Capote’s words were again adapted for film in 1967.

After becoming so intimate with two condemned men and watching their repeated appeals fail to save them from the noose, Capote ceased writing and busied himself with arranging what became known as the party of the decade, the famous Black and White Ball, the guest list for which was so illustrious it was published afterward in the New York Times. This event, extravagant, public, and decadent, was to be representative of Capote’s life for the next decade. Though he often claimed to be working on a “masterwork” in the same “nonfiction novel” style as In Cold Blood, which he called Answered Prayers (posthumously published in 1987), his writing habits suffered from his increasing addiction to drugs, alcohol, fame, and the distractions of the jet-set lifestyle.

When Capote finally did publish chapters from Answered Prayers in Esquire starting in 1975, he alienated many of his rich and famous friends, who recognizably appear in the chapters from his work in progress revealing personal and scandalous secrets. Like his “Old Mr. Busybody,” “nothing came of it:” Capote’s rich friends no longer wanted to socialize with an indiscrete gossipmonger, and his attempt to turn his life into a revealing piece of artful nonfiction was never completed. In the remaining years before his death in 1984, Capote struggled with substance abuse and continued to write, publishing a novella and collection of short pieces entitled Music for Chameleons: New Writing (1983).

After becoming increasingly ill and despondent, Capote died of a drug overdose in the house of Joanne Carson, the second wife of comedian and talk show host Johnny Carson, on August 25, 1984. Though no one knows if he intended to commit suicide, Capote told Mrs. Carson not to call the paramedics. In 2005, Capote’s life and writings were introduced to a new generation of audiences with the success of Bennett Miller’s biographical film Capote, which focuses on the author’s time in Kansas researching In Cold Blood. Capote and his most successful novel are recognized for their sociological significance and for their influence on postwar American fiction and nonfiction.