Capote (17 page)

“He was extremely generous and very sweet to me,” she remembered long after. “But everybody said he treated me like a child. When we got home from our honeymoon, he pointed to the telephone and said, ‘When that thing rings, no matter what anybody wants, the answer is no!’ My job was to keep people away from him and not interrupt his work. I never even knocked on his door. If I wanted to say something to him, I put a note under it.” After they divorced in 1940, both his depression and his isolation intensified. “Saw no one all day. A bath of solitude” was one typical entry in his diary. Analyzing himself with the same dispassion he might have brought to a poem by Longfellow, he explained the nature of his emotional defects to Howard: “There is such a thing as a sort of affectional impotence. I don’t mean now what is called psychic impotence or certainly literal impotence (though both or either may be involved), but, in the sphere of the emotions, a great and poignant need of love combined with an incapacity, at the last moment, either to possess or to be possessed—and again I mean something intangible. Every capacity for tenderness is present—except the one power of penetrating or being penetrated with the last intimacy.” Even in his fantasies he was by himself. Instead of counting sheep or silently reciting lines of poetry when he had trouble falling asleep, he would imagine that he was on an alien planet, and that his task was to name all the trees and creatures he discovered there. But from horizon to horizon he was the only human being to be seen. He had the entire planet to himself.

Aside from his books, happiness eluded him, and he tried to commit suicide at least three times. One of those attempts was stamped with a particular, telling pathos. It was winter, and he walked to a pond near his apartment to watch a group of skaters, ruby-cheeked in the frigid air and glowing with the undimmed vitality of youth. It must have been a scene—and so Newton, whose mind always turned to literary analogies, may have thought too—very much like one in Thomas Mann’s
Tonio Kröger
: Tonio, the writer, the observer, the eternal outsider, witnesses a similar group of carefree young people dancing—“you blond, you living, you happy ones!” They evoke memories of his boyhood, and, overcome by the thought of what could have been, he retreats to his bed and sobs with “nostalgia and remorse.”

So it was with Newton, who at that moment probably would have traded everything he had done and all he had written if he could have exchanged places with one of those robust young athletes skating effortlessly across the ice. After gazing at them for some time, he trudged home to his apartment, opened a bottle of liquor, and played, over and over, a recording of John McCormack singing Hugo Wolf’s
Ganymede.
As McCormack’s rich and expressive tenor poured out, in words and music, what Newton had just seen, the glories of youth and beauty, Newton swallowed sixteen Nembutals. Luck alone brought a friend into his apartment the next morning, before they had finished their terrible work.

This was the anguished and tormented man who came to Yaddo in the summer of 1946. “Woke again just after five,” he wrote in his diary a few months earlier. “Thoughts of death and self-destruction. ‘Morning tears.’” In May he described himself as feeling “rather blue,” and that is probably how he still felt when he met Truman, who doubtless seemed, that naughty, amusing Ganymede, to belong to the blissful race of the blond, the living, and the happy ones.

When he was around Truman, or merely even thinking about him, Newton was a man transformed, a different person altogether from the gloom-shrouded depressive who had been muttering about suicide a few months before. He described his unfamiliar feeling of “psychological euphoria” to Granville Hicks and added proudly: “I was never more chipper in my life.” His only complaint in those waning days of July was the bittersweet one familiar to any ardent lover who is deprived of the one he loves. Although Truman was sending him as many as three letters a day from New Orleans, they were no substitute for Truman himself. Just a few weeks short of his forty-sixth birthday, Newton had apparently conquered his “affectional impotence” and with great excitement was exploring emotions he previously had encountered only in fiction. For probably the first time in his adult life he needed not just the occasional, but the constant company of another human being.

“All would be fair indeed, on the personal plane, if it were not for this apartness from little T.C.,” he told Howard a few days after Truman had left Yaddo. “It came too soon and is lasting too long. At this stage we really should be inseparable.” He was also afraid, he added, that the
Harper’s Bazaar
assignment might bring illness or breakdown to his young lover, who was reporting that he and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the
Bazaar
’s photographer, were marching miles every day in New Orleans’ tropical heat. “However, as you say, he is young, blessedly young, God be praised, and buoyant, and tough too in his way, and I am not really fretting like an old woman. But I love him so tenderly that I can’t be wholly indifferent to these possibilities.”

Their separation only seemed long, however, and on July 28, just twelve days after they had said goodbye at Yaddo, Truman flew back to New York, raced from the airport to Grand Central, and caught the first train to Northampton. “Look where I am!” he exultantly wrote Howard that night, alone for a moment while his host was off shopping for their dinner. “Arrived today and needless to say, am delighted: with Northampton (of which I’ve seen nothing), Newton’s apartment, and Newton.” He remained delighted during the four days he was there, and on his return to New York, he gave a final accounting to Mary Louise, who was vacationing in Maine. “I had a wonderful time in Northampton with Newton. I love him most tenderly, more really than I can tell you, for he is the sweetest, gentlest person, next to yourself, that I ever met.”

August was a busy and difficult month for both of them: Newton was unhappily teaching summer classes at Wesleyan, an all-male college in Middletown, Connecticut; accustomed to instructing women, he was finding it unnerving to lecture to men, whose faces, viewed from his podium, looked distressingly unresponsive and inscrutable. Truman’s days were equally trying: after more than a year of being treated like
Harper’s Bazaar
’s crown prince, he was jarred by an unpleasant dispute with the editors. In Mary Louise’s absence, they were balking at paying the full expenses for his trip South, which had turned out to be far more costly than he had anticipated, and talking also about postponing publication of the story he had written at Yaddo, “The Headless Hawk,” which had been scheduled for the October issue. The prospect of actually losing rather than making money on the New Orleans article was annoying enough, but the possibility that “The Headless Hawk” might be locked away and forgotten in some editor’s file cabinet was more than annoying; it sent him into a panic. His name had not been attached to any new fiction since “A Jug of Silver” came out in
Mademoiselle
at the end of 1945, and his precociously shrewd sense of how a writer should manage his career warned him that he would have to appear with a story soon or stand in danger of forfeiting the reputation he had so suddenly acquired with “Miriam.”

Those problems were in fact resolved to his satisfaction. His finances were straightened out; “The Headless Hawk” was scheduled for the November issue, a month after “Notes on N.O.”; and he was free to concentrate his emotional energies on Newton. They faithfully wrote each other at least once a day, and for both of them the arrival of the mailman was the brightest, most impatiently awaited moment of the day. “Your letters make a music like Mozart in my ears,” Newton said. In early August, Truman sent him a picture of himself as a boy and a pair of silver cuff links engraved with his initials. “Dearest,” Truman said. “The cufflinks were given to me by someone else who loved me too, dear, darling Sooky, on my 12th birthday—wear them, darling, if you can. I love you. T.” They were small treasures to Truman—Sook had died just a few months before—and Newton responded with as much gratitude as if they had been a rare first edition of Hawthorne or Longfellow. “I am still looking at the cuff links and at the little picture, my angel, with tears just
behind
my eyes; was ever anyone’s feller so prodigal to him as mine is? I despair of telling even you what a strange tender feeling they have given me. Could I not now, please, have one of your eyes or one of your hands by return mail? Oh, my dearest, dearest, how terribly much you signify to me. I love you.”

A few days later, on August 14, exactly two months after that magic ring had closed around him, Newton reminded his angel how important the fourteenth day of any month now was to him. “Today is an anniversary, and I have been thinking of it for days now. I have never remembered a date like
this
in my life—remembered it so intensely, I mean, for of course there never
was
a date like June 14, before, not in this life, and I shouldn’t suppose in any.” Crowding into a few months the love letters he had not written in all the years before, he wrote again and again in the same impassioned spirit. “I woke up in the night last night,” he said, “plagued not by a nightingale but by a mosquito—and as I lay going back to sleep again, I longed unspeakably to have you there in my arms and to float off into sleep with
you.
Not having you was an ache of loneliness and loss.” His neat and tidy world had been turned upside-down by such unruly and unfamiliar emotions, and he half-jokingly added: “You little monster! I never planned or designed to fall hopelessly in love this way, at this time; it is extremely distracting and against efficiency; and I can ill afford the constant thought and time it entails.”

Some who knew Newton, astonished and made jealous perhaps by his unprecedented outpouring of emotion, worried that he had allowed his passion to overrule his reason. Carson, who only a few months before had informed him that he was her most precious friend, suspected that Truman might toy with him for a while, then, when he was bored, leave him, inflicting some mortal wound in the process. Howard, who had decided that Truman was not, after all, the darling of the gods, feared just the opposite. In a letter to John Malcolm Brinnin, he likened Truman to Truman’s own creation, the evil, manipulating Miriam; he was afraid, Howard said, that Truman might now try to play Newton’s Miriam, attaching himself so tightly that Newton would be crushed by his embrace, as Mrs. Miller was in the story.

Truman inadvertently fed that suspicion by letting it be known that Newton might leave both Smith and Northampton so that they could be together in New York. “I hear all sorts of interesting rumors
a ton sujet
,” Howard boldly reported to Newton. “I hope you aren’t doing anything too drastic in the Way of the World Well Lost—though, come to think of it, you are about Antony’s age and T.C. is what A. never had, Cleopatra in her prime!” Newton, who must have been tired of Howard’s once again bracketing him with a doomed and tragic character, rather coolly replied: “What interesting rumors you must hear! I wish I knew what some of them were. But I’m afraid there isn’t a very solid basis for them.”

In fact, it was Truman who regularly made the four-hour journey to Northampton, taking with him some of his own jazz records so that he could listen to something besides what he called “that gloomy old funeral music” that Newton enjoyed—that gloomy old funeral music being symphonies and concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, and the like. Newton occasionally, if nervously, ventured down to New York, dragging Truman, who had hitherto avoided such elevated pursuits, to the opera and the art museums. He acted, recalled Daniel Aaron, like a euphoric bridegroom with his new bride, and like bride and bridegroom, Truman and he played the usual newlywed games. Reversing the spelling of their names, they had affectionate code words for each other; Newton was Notwen Nivra, Truman, Namurt Etopac. In one letter Notwen so forgot himself that he even made a sexual joke, tepid though it may have been: “LOST Probably in Manhattan. One peppermint-stick, beautifully pink and white, wonderfully straight, deliciously sweet. About a hand’s length. Of great intrinsic and also sentimental value to owner.”

Newton had had other romances with younger men, but none had affected him like this one, and Truman made him feel youthful—younger, no doubt, than he had felt when he actually was young—and even giddy, bestowing on him a portion of his own remarkable zest and enthusiasm. “It was like a draught of some exquisite liqueur to hear your actual voice—and to laugh so gaily with you—as
I
can’t do, and never could, with any other human being,” he wrote Truman after one phone conversation. At the end of a Saturday in September, Newton allowed his diary a brief but rather touching glimpse into one of their happy days in Northampton. They had had lunch at a restaurant in town, he said, but then they had spent the rest of the day alone in his apartment. In the late afternoon they drank their ritual Manhattans. After that, he noted: “No third meal at all. No time for it. Rather violent or at least intense amour, followed by sudden and profound sleep together.”

Truman was equally entranced. “I miss [Newton] most dreadfully,” he told Howard, “and, though I see people constantly, am very lonely. It is very curious, isn’t it, how everything worked out? I appreciate your generosity, dear Howard, in giving N. to me; I’m afraid I could never be so generous.”

Once again, however, his affection could not be separated from his need, and he also recognized how useful Newton could be to a young man who, for all practical purposes, had received no formal education. Truman’s reading had been wide, certainly, but so scattered and haphazard that he had missed entirely many of the standard works of literature familiar to any graduate of a good liberal-arts college. Many of his friends, who had that advantage, were often amazed, as well as amused, by how open and naive he was in expressing his ignorance. Andrew Lyndon recalled going with him to Radio City Music Hall to see the movie version of
Great Expectations.
“Truman was still writing
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, whose hero was raised by strangers, as Pip, the boy in Dickens, was. There we were in that vast theater, and Truman was squirming in his seat, becoming more and more nervous. All of a sudden he put both hands on my arms and said, ‘Oh, my God, darling! They’ve stolen my plot!’ He really was an insane combination of sophistication and naïveté. I remember telling Newton about it, and he said, ‘Just wait until he discovers Shakespeare. That’s going to be interesting.’”