White Girls (12 page)
I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again...Came home from one of those towns up in Illinois and to our complete surprise brought this child of two.
And Capote’s 1945 story, “My Side of the Matter”:
I know what is being said about me and you can take my side or theirs, that’s your own business. It’s my word against Eunice’s and Olivia-Ann’s, and it should be plain enough to anyone with two good eyes which one of us has their wits about them. I just want the citizens of the U.S.A. to know the facts, that’s all.
Truman Capote knew—with the insightfulness of the writer who wishes not to be one sometimes and can step aside and see what his or her function as a writer means to others—that photographs were more immediate and vital than words and would eventually be more attractive to the general reading audience. And as a fashionable person, he saw attractiveness as the barometer of morality. (Recall his on-the-air feud with Jacqueline Susann, author of
Valley of the Dolls
. Capote described her appearance as not unlike that of “a truck driver in drag,” a curious statement, layered like an onion. The truck driver as sometime homosexual erotic artifact; drag as part of the [then] homosexual code or underground; a truck driver in drag being, perhaps, of interest to Truman Capote only as an image of humor. With this comment he was spitting in the face of America for its acceptance of what he could not see as a “real” woman—someone successful as an author—and its rejection of the “real” one—himself. His joke empowered him, made him greater than the woman America seemed to prefer, Jacqueline Susann.)
Truman Capote’s travel book,
Local Color
(1950), with accompanying photographs by Karl Bissinger, Cecil Beaton, and so on, was an attempt to conjoin his writing with the photographic demands
of publicity. “My prettiest book, inside and out,” he wrote to John Malcolm Brinnin.
Before 1947, illustrations in the form of watercolors by Eugene Berman, Christian Berard, and the like were used, mostly, to represent authors. Truman Capote single-handedly created a new interpretation of photography for his audience. Thereafter, photographs—of the bodies that created the words—were used to sell words.
Eudora Welty, who, in the thirties and forties, took photographs for the WPA project, also photographed Katherine Anne Porter (on whom Capote modeled Alice Lee Langman in
Answered Prayers
). The difference between the photographs of Katherine Anne Porter and Capote’s authoress photograph on the jacket for
Other Voices, Other Rooms
is this: Porter is beautiful and therefore a removed object; Capote is sexual and simply embodies the subtext of his first book.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
is an idea about femininity made palatable by Capote’s shallow interpretation.
Only one woman author—not as famous as Capote—equaled the power of his 1947 photograph: Jane Bowles in Karl Bissinger’s portrait, taken in 1946 to accompany a story of hers that appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
. Bowles’s photograph is a reinterpretation of what Capote projected in 1947. It illustrates the idea that femininity, as an idea,
does
fuck you up.
Jane Bowles, “that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf,” was one woman author—a Jew, a lesbian, not a maiden aunt—from whom Capote tried to steal but could not. He attempted to retranslate her aesthetic—language and speech as unrepresentative of a woman’s internal life in general—in his script for John Huston’s film
Beat the Devil
. In it, Jennifer Jones plays Bowles (under the name
Gwendolyn) and speaks with Bowles’s syntax. “Isn’t that what we’re most interested in: sin?” she inquires, just as Bowles had written to a friend, “There’s nothing original about me but a little original sin.”
Gwendolyn’s loopy rationale (“I told him that I was in love with you when I thought you were dead...It made you seem less dead”) is also reminiscent of Bowles’s fiction; Christina Goering in
Two Serious Ladies
, for example: ‘“Oh, I can’t tell you, my dear, how sorry I am,’ said Miss Goering, taking both his hands in hers and pressing them to her lips...‘I can’t tell you how these gloves remind me of my child-hood,’ Miss Goering continued.”
Jane Bowles wrote of Capote in a letter to her husband, Paul: “Alice T[oklas] was delighted that you didn’t really care for him very much...She doesn’t seem to worry in the least, however, about my liking him. So I’m insulted...again.” Bowles did not consider Capote a woman. Her interest in the female body specifically precluded her complicity in Capote’s self-delusion. Her very noncomplicity may explain why one of the few truly laudatory pieces Capote ever wrote about a woman was his introduction to her
Collected Works
, which came out in 1966, shortly after the publication of
In Cold Blood
and Capote’s reversion to manhood: “Mrs. Bowles, by virtue of her talent and the strange visions it enclose[s], and because of her personality’s startling blend of playful-puppy candor and feline sophistication, [is] an imposing, stage-front presence.”
Realizing the authenticity behind Jane Bowles’s “feline sophistication” was the end, too, of Capote’s career as a woman author. There was no way into that sophistication without being literally exposed to women. Jane Bowles’s physical proximity to women was not something Capote could experience. And his anger, fear, and resentment of this
fact led to the self-caricature he projected in the film
Murder by Death
, and his unforgiving descriptions of any man he did not consider one—like Rusty Trawler, the millionaire, in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1958), who was also a portrait of the physically confused woman Truman Capote eventually became.
[Rusty] was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom. There wasn’t a suspicion of bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if he’d been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined as a blown-up balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering.
The above description presaged the familiar television image of Truman Capote in later years: a series of circles to be filled in by the imagination. Although his distinct, inimitable voice interfered with this imaginative process, Capote, like Rusty Trawler, could not, eventually, commit to what he had become. As Holly Golightly said, “Can’t you see it’s just that Rusty feels safer in diapers than he would in a skirt?...He tried to stab me with a butter knife because I told him to grow up and face the issue, settle down and play house with a nice fatherly truck driver,” a statement that recalls Jacqueline Susann, the truck driver with whom Truman Capote could not play at all.
Writing of a woman (Janes Bowles) without malice, Truman Capote saw himself, in comparison, as a man: the author of a book (
In Cold Blood
) about vanity turned to pain and grief and the taking of life, life
lived as a man.
In Cold Blood
is, above all, Truman Capote’s expression of his sadness at being a man, at the juncture writing creates between the self we see and the self we cannot know, that neither words nor photographs can ever accurately record.
In Cold Blood
is a book replete with this image question. Perry Smith is consumed by the idea of his face’s meaning, construction, and story; it is like language to him and to Capote.
In Cold Blood
is an examination of the way in which the traditional values associated with women—concern with appearance as it tells a story to the world—are adopted “naturally” by a man:
Time rarely weighed upon [Perry] for he had many ways of passing it—among them, mirror gazing...His own face enthralled him. Each angle of it induced a different impression. It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic.
In 1948, Capote went to Paris: “My book’s succès fou there,” he told John Malcolm Brinnin. “Why shouldn’t I be?” In 1949, he also went to North Africa, where he became reacquainted with “that modern legend,” Jane Bowles. A photograph was taken of them somewhere in Tangier. Capote is heavier than he was in 1947. Bowles is already whatever she was meant to be. She is directing her smile, her complete attention, which she equated with affection, toward Capote, who seems to be considering whether or not to accept this attention. In that moment, which appears to be a long one, Truman Capote began making his long move away from women, becoming closer still.
THE TWO NIGGERS
, a man and a woman, cutting across the field are looking for a little moonshine when they spot the white boy, Francis Marion Tarwater—the teenage antihero of Flannery O’Connor’s startling second novel,
The Violent Bear It Away
—who is digging a grave for his great-uncle Mason. Mason, a self-titled prophet who spent his life denouncing the world for having forsaken its Savior, believed that Tarwater might have the calling, too, but the boy is not feeling his religion right now, standing in the dirt, just this side of death. O’Connor writes:
The woman, tall and Indianlike, had on a green sun hat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled face, darker
than his hat. “Old man passed,” he said.
The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She...crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.
“Tell her to shut up that,” Tarwater said. “I’m in charge here now and I don’t want no nigger-mourning.”
“I seen his spirit for two nights,” she said. “Seen him two nights and he was unrested.”
“He ain’t been dead but since this morning,” Tarwater said...
“He’d been predicting his passing for many years,” Buford said. “She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn’t rested...”
“Poor sweet sugar boy,” the woman said to Tarwater, “what you going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?”
Published in 1960,
The Violent Bear It Away
appeared just as Martin Luther King Jr. was cutting a large revolutionary swath through the Old South, and only six years after
Brown v. Board of Education
, when that little black girl in sunglasses had her face dotted with the spittle of her white countrymen in Little Rock. The South may indeed have seemed like a “lonesome place” to whites then. Integration was not going slow, as William Faulkner had said it should (to which Thurgood Marshall responded, “They don’t mean go slow, they mean don’t go”). And, in order to move into a modern South, whites would need to be less encumbered by the old ways: by manners, by the Christian charity and moral rectitude of colored life—the “nigger-mourning” that cut to the soul.
Race and faith and their attendant hierarchies and delusions are O’Connor’s great themes. She was hailed for her artistic and social
independence, but readings of this American master often overlook the originality and honesty of her portrayal of Southern whiteness. Or, rather, Southern whiteness as it chafed under its biggest cultural influence—Southern blackness. It’s remarkable to consider that O’Connor started writing less than a hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and just a decade after Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
, two books whose imagined black worlds had more to do with their authors’ patronizing sentimentality than with the complicated intertwining of black and white, rich and poor, mundane and sublime that characterized real Southern life—and O’Connor’s portrait of it. Her black characters are not symbols defined in opposition to whiteness; they are the living people who were, physically at least, on the periphery of O’Connor’s own world. She was not romantic enough to take Faulkner’s Dilsey view of blacks—as the fulcrum of integrity and compassion. She didn’t use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply—and complexly—drew from life.
Flannery O’Connor’s electric vision is still surprising enough, nearly ninety years after her birth, to have inspired five critical studies in the year 2000 alone—the most compelling of which are Richard Giannone’s
Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist
and Lorine M. Getz’s
Flannery O’Connor, Literary Theologian
. But one hesitates to read her fiction autobiographically; it was not an approach O’Connor had much patience for. “I know some folks that don’t mind their own bisnis,” she wrote when she was twelve. Eighteen years later, she elaborated, in a letter to a friend, explaining why she had no interest in representing herself in writing:
To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen...Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.
From the beginning, O’Connor worked to alchemize her background into something beyond mere anecdote and eccentricity. Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, she was baptized Mary Flannery O’Connor at the Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. The Church’s sanctioning of mysticism would later have a profound influence on O’Connor’s writing, but Catholicism was a faith that had little sway in the “Christ-haunted” South O’Connor grew up in—a place where Jesus was God. Savannah had been settled first by Episcopalians and Lutherans, then by Baptists and Methodists; Catholics were excluded from the state’s charter until 1794, and were thereafter rarely regarded as anything but an itinerant non-Reformed sect, as alien a presence as the Jews. (“That must be Jew singing,” someone scoffs when two Catholic girls sing psalms in the 1954 O’Connor short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”)
