Altering Perception for Fame: Truman Capote and Taylor Swift

Truman Capote himself said he had no content. He said that he was a liar. He showed his desperate need and intent to invade personal lives past boundaries and cause as much harm as possible for fame. Truman Capote demonstrated malignant narcissism, his patterned personality disorder in every line written and every action and in his obsessive preening for constant attention. Why did no one believe him when he said what he was? As narcissists do, he assumed ownership of other people—and now we can see—their writing. Personality disorders distort perception in their own head and then manipulate that perception with others.

Now we can look at the evidence at the beginning of Truman Capote’s career of manipulation of fame and at the very same moment the plagiarism of Willa Cather ten years before Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Willa Cather’s life-long partner and estate executor Edith Lewis and their close English gay friend Stephen Tennant together demonstrate Edith’s recognition of Truman’s plagiarism of Willa in 1948, the very year after Willa passed. Empty and full of personal malice, Truman was feeding an appetite for content, not just of people, but of the greatest writing and writers. Because it is eternal, Willa Cather’s Being and vision now can come shining through.

This is where the road forks. One way is those who abuse and agree to be abused, the other is those who don’t. Some think it doesn’t matter, and those are the ones who choose that abuse doesn’t make a difference in their lives. (It makes all the difference to know what it is and be free from it.) As has been pointed out in shock and disbelief, over half the population of America just handed the mundane government over to all the known and now textbook patterns of abuse for the illusion of immortal fame, money, and power—not true power, but power over others’ lives and ‘decisive, deliberate actions’ viewed in Old West and Gilded Age mythology as heroic and “morally right” because of their will and forcefulness, ‘so it must be right’ (despite the clear evidence).

We aren’t going with you. Some of us have learned very well how to avoid abusers.
It makes for a far more tremendous story and life. Don’t worry, there’ll be better mythology, too, grounded in wonderful eternal truths. The way that that comes about is inspired. This moment is pregnant with it.

(It is far more than a life or story of crime, which is stupidly easy, conniving learned just by being hyper-vigilant and invasive about what works on people and repeating that. Just start with a lie, a theft, a manipulation of another person and see what they fall for. It’s a toddler’s game, quite literally when they learned it.)

Life is a tremendous thing without their forced-fame, forced-confusion, obfuscation, lies, fraud for money, ownership of your life and your body (instead of taking loving care of their own—they do not know how to love), unmitigated emotions of hate and anger as weapons so that they can be the center of attention and take everyone down beneath them (although there is no one lower, which they celebrate at this ‘accomplishment,’ the daring!), which is always the goal to make themselves “special” and above all others, even in a nightmare mess. It doesn’t matter to them. Only their “specialness” matters.

And no one here is kneeling down and letting them take over our existences—or our life’s works.

Getting past narcissism is one cultural feat that will bring us into this new world.

Although I did not know what it was or how it operated when I was young, I knew the abuse of narcissism and its devaluing and manipulations very well before 2010. That life experience came out in me in something I didn’t quite understand its origination and just wanted to move past into creativity of a differently structured world, but it was a massively internally intense passion for setting things right from those who assumed authority. Dammit, it’s still there. I think now, a gift from the cosmos. In fact, it was that very passion that made me first write to John Mayer, this gorgeous very real and intense spirit, and say essentially, ‘Don’t let them do that to you.’ In those years to come I would work and learn every day in how to get past it, how to change our world away from that. I recognized the path from literature, and literature held the answers as I followed it, in tremendous life-opening ways. Now today I understand the situation in all its intricacies and the brilliance and beauty of getting by it. It’s the true, lively, even humorous heroic we all need.

And there’s an outstanding story of how I’m going to show it to you and how it has operated in American culture without our awareness and with our praise and kept something gorgeous closed—until this, our beautiful moment. It is truly stunningly beautiful to see the brilliance shine through. It brings joy in the face of real ugliness. It brings laughter, no matter what the polls say.

I’ve been writing about the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s and what Audrey Hepburn did to set right this very wrong. For whatever reason, a harsh mother, abandoning father, and the invasion of the Nazis, Audrey had that spirit too. Willa Cather had it. I think her intricate knowledge of it came out in later life when she could write Sapphira and the Slave Girl, but that is for some other time to show. Willa Cather was most definitely examining the abusive structure of American culture and how to alter it, how to open the new world in a completely different way. And so now we must jump back to ten years before Truman Capote’s plagiarism of her works in the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958 to 1948 when he published Other Voices, Other Rooms. And here we will find what we need to know about what was coming.

Let us first point out that the master writer Willa Cather passed in April 1947.

Knowing this makes visible Truman’s actions as evil-minded eighteen years before his blood-thirst in “researching” (invading and “befriending” without bonds and with the intent to gather intimate information to betray and call it the literarily elevated “non-fiction novel” imitating step-by-step Willa Cather using all the traceable people in her life as inspiration as characters—but she had good reason as Leonardo da Vinci did) and pushing for even more murder for his In Cold Blood (during which time Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, and who had known him since childhood, said Truman was a compulsive liar), and twenty-seven years before his insatiable appetite for personal damage and emotional harm against those who allowed him in the door before “La Côte Basque 1965”—with the target of his headline grabbing ‘Exposed His Rich and Famous Friends’ so that, ‘in the end’, he could presumably be more than they were. Breakfast at Tiffany’s sits right in this milieu, if you didn’t see it before.

His forced fame—not his literary talent—allowed him to do this. His fame made people blind to his character and spirit—and as we will see: his “writing.” He was considered culturally “juggernaut” because he forced himself into the limelight every single day of his life, loud and visible ‘must be true’ he forced, and he “cleverly” based this on what people believed (watching what worked on people): that a “writer” had the right. He was completely wrong when he stated what a writer’s material is, eliminating the deep power of insight as the great writers have:

Truman: “A writer’s material is totally derived, or at least a certain kind of writer, social observer, for which I consider myself that kind of writer, journalistic, novelistic type of writer, genre, that’s all they have, that’s all there is, there’s no other material, uhhh, so, everybody knew that I was writing this book, you knew that I was writing this book, I even let you read parts of this book . . .”

David Susskind: “You came and read parts aloud . . . “

Truman: “[ . . . ] You weren’t shocked or amazed . . .”

David Susskind: “No, but I’m not in the book . . .”

Truman: “I tell you, who knows! (laughs at having evil power over others and smiling up in the air at his position of assumed authority and right) “Your time may come” (while intimately patting him on the hand and arm).

Mark Twain’s House in Greenwich Village next to the Brevoort Hotel



The house Truman Capote passed off as his own in NYC to be the place where he famously “wrote” Breakfast at Tiffany’s

In order to give this “standing” a basis in reality he had to formulate an identity like the master writers in New York City. And so he fashioned his identity on these personal details, down to what house he chose for that fame that would mimic the stalwarts in NYC, or what writer he lifted from in order to give the most “regarded” and “serious” self-mythology around his oeuvre. Cue also personal biography details happenstancingly involving Robert Frost and how special Truman was in that situation, and meeting Willa Cather in a snow storm outside a library, no less, when a story became necessary, and how special he was in that situation—from a habitual liar and manipulator of opinion, whatever was necessary to be said to cover the reality. A child knows what works. It all was extremely calculated using names that rightly carry weight, while also being criminal, but when “cunning” false-heartedness is considered intelligence (overlooking what should immediately be noticed, but we nice folk don’t judge until the narcissist appropriates and directs our emotional outrage for themselves, obfuscating that judgment), what is theft of something “imaginary” like intellectual property from the greats if you are really apt at manipulatively drawing attention through shock and purposefully crossing lines for that attention? And what does it matter if a biography is stocked with lies suited to make the “writing” appear weighted and true? (Cue riverboats as instant biographical details for Truman when his text is far too derivative of Mark Twain. Suddenly he had personal experience in childhood on riverboats.) Fame, they come to learn, speaks louder than actions. It’s an appetite for ‘give me another personal line to cross for fame and see what I will do!’ Brazen mistaken for courage. It’s an opportunity for even more attention—no matter how far they have to go, the further, the “better.” Knowing a pattern is knowing what he will do. Literature has nothing to do with it. The greats have just been used for the framework of identity. We think we recognize it and it’s safe to praise and reward and give it more publicity, even for something innocuous as ‘what he wore’ and “who he was with.’ It’s just entertainment, after all, i.e. the public assumption that “It has no true sting.” That is what it wants you to think so that the next sting is more insidious, and more glorified.

1948

And so in 1948, the year after Willa Cather passed, Truman published his “first novel” and positioned himself for certain fame posing as a pre-pubescent boy sexually posed lounging on a Victorian couch ready to be all at once violated and pleasured by the public. This forceful grab for fame was the point. Within the pages is a purposeful invasion of Willa Cather’s works “The Enchanted Bluff” (1909) and The Professor’s House (1925) and her biographical details along with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but making himself the very special center. From Other Voices, Other Rooms:

During the last weeks before the letter came he skipped school three days out of five to loaf around the Canal Street docks. He got into a habit of sharing the box-lunch Ellen fixed for him with a giant Negro stevedore who, as they talked together, spun exotic sea-life legends that Joel knew to be lies even as he listened; but this man was a grown-up, and grown-ups were suddenly the only friends he wanted. And he spent solitary hours watching the loading and unloading of banana boats that shipped to Central America, plotting of course a stowaway voyage, for he was certain in some foreign city he could land a good-paying job. However, on his thirteenth birthday, as it happened, the first letter from Skully's Landing arrived.

He was ready to take the accolades of being a “great writer” by taking great material. The innocent cover, the perpetrator within. The calculation makes you accept both, and the calculation was for fame. The “victim” is then mind-boggling allowed, emboldened, rewarded to be the perpetrator. What you do know by instinct is that it has a very bad feeling.

2009

The press and public permission immediately granted Taylor Swift’s ulterior motives of her public ploy of sexy, available innocence in September 2009 when it went up for public poll at the moment Kanye drew attention to an unseen problem (and who was harshly censured learning that speaking out doesn’t work in politics or entertainment). Taylor’s “innocence,” although even artistically the evidence was in place to the contrary, with young, hot boyfriend Taylor Lautner in tow that night with his credentials for this being his publicity reigning from Twilight (2008) (cue innocent teddy-bear-holding full-culmination-embrace football field make out scene in Valentine’s Day filmed in 2009), and a new installment New Moon opening in November two months later, in other words, the boyfriend publicity in place making him a viable candidate to propel her stature and fame, in—cough—music (just mimic biography of being in a bedroom learning guitar and writing songs and not having any hired guns, all by herself—the “writer,” even though executives, marketers, writers, and publicists were on the payroll), she was presumed in this marketing as an as-of-yet sexually inactive, sexy innocent teenage inviolable. This “virginity” was then purposefully offered up in marketing with sexual photographs of tight rock-n-roll dresses raised up in Rolling Stone in January 2010.

But the marketing of fame and innocence-to-be-violated was in place. Taylor Swift was then emboldened by the public fame-power-over-others granted to do the same thing as Truman, even if someone wasn’t actually a boyfriend but held that wanted power of fame—no one was going to be “above” her. The opportunity was there to put everyone beneath her in perception. She could do just as Truman in patterns: drop a “story” in the form of a legitimated art to show the underestimated power of a rattlesnake bite. The goal was power, stature, and fame. No one bothered to look around at the original sources or question the motives.

What was lost?

Skewing perception works. Narcissists thrive on it. Audiences give up their own powers of judgment to vicariously live the “bold” (forceful) deceit.

1949

Before we look at what Truman did in the manipulative text of Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948 when he was twenty-three and what difference that damage actually makes, what happened in the social context is also important as it shows people close to Willa Cather moving at that moment to mitigate the damage and crimes Truman was committing propagated culturally on “fame” being freely handed out to a victim/shock-seeker.

As I have been writing, in the year 1925 Willa published The Professor’s House, the year in which she also wrote back to F. Scott Fitzgerald about his admitted plagiarism in The Great Gatsby of her A Lost Lady (1923) (and when in fact, as pointed out by Tom Quirk in his article “Fitzgerald and Cather: The Great Gatsby” — the plagiarism went much further than lifting a mere identity of the feminine and went into other of her works such as Alexander’s Bridge, and that Willa most certainly would have noticed but did not mention in writing him). By 1927 a thirty year old William Faulkner then plagiarized The Professor’s House, but Willa had already purposefully moved on into her path of physical and literary realizations and had moved into the more essential powerful effects of place, painting, religion, legend, and heritage in Death Comes for the Archbishop that was published the same year as Faulkner’s. (As scholar Merrill Maguire Skaggs points out, she would later go back and address him through art in her “Before Breakfast,” to not attack for her earmarked work, but more importantly address the essence of what Faulkner had missed in his appropriation in his Mosquitoes (1927).

July 1924: “Willa Cather stands in a yard with her brother Roscoe Cather's daughters: Virginia and twins Margaret and Elizabeth.” Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

By the time Truman found her texts, as we can now importantly look, Willa’s personal history shows the direction and importance of what she was writing, the importance of her choices, and where her focus was and for personal, literary, and cultural reasons, that the year before the publication of The Professor’s House (1925) which is centered on two little girls’ cultural inheritance of the adventures of the orphaned Tom Outland, Willa took photographs with her young twin nieces, Margaret and Elizabeth, and older niece Virginia in July 1924 in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and following the publication, in Santa Fe the year after with the twins in 1926 at the cathedral featured in 1927’s Death Comes for the Archbishop—also an importantly redirected lineage of the culture on the feminine. From her actual friendship with Mark Twain in Greenwich Village in 1908, by1909 she was considering what it meant to continue the American literary adventure and the important direction of its literary path forging the way, and the price of not doing so in “The Enchanted Bluff,” not in the fantastical, and not just in dreaming, but in the necessity of spirit and determination to carry it through, which she would personally do. Mark Twain passed the following year in 1910, and in 1912 Willa was headed herself to the American West beyond where his Mississippi River boys had gone. If this was “the beginning of American literature,’ Willa was saying, “Yes, and” . . . here is where we have to go looking forward to actually go ahead and alter the structure and possibility. By 1920, in a story right there in Greenwich Village a block from where Willa sat listening to Twain, she had set a story with the same Washington Arch in view where the female takes off to take a hot air balloon ride (from Coney Island), which would have been recognizable in its parallel to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn taking off in tall tales in Tom Sawyer Abroad. Pursuing a depiction of the feminine which had not been articulated and this clear in her letters and choices, Willa had her female attempt the heights of adventure before drawing back the veil to what was inside Eden Bower that the character didn’t recognize in herself. From both “The Enchanted Bluff” and the dreamt of rock bluff and the adventure seeking to not just articulate, but bring about as further and incarnate and thereby alter the structure of view, she was changing the course of the entire thing on the feminine.

Truman thus made himself Tom Sawyer/Tom Outland, and as Tom Outland does in Willa’s “Tom Outland’s Story” in her The Professor’s House (with the father living in his own world up in the attic room as Willa’s Godfrey St. Peter does), takes his adventures to two (twin) sisters: just as Willa’s twin nieces. And as necessary, Truman would purposefully lie to skew the personal details and say the female tomboy Idabel of Other Voices, Other Rooms was based on childhood friend Harper Lee (who later wrote him as Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird) who pointed out his lies:

“I don’t know if you understood this about him,” she wrote, “but his compulsive lying was like this: if you said, ‘Did you know JFK was shot?’ He’d easily answer, ‘Yes, I was driving the car he was riding in.’”

 

Ms. Lee wrote that Mr. Capote’s drinking and misery soured their friendship. Jealousy ended it.

 

“I was his oldest friend, and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold,” she wrote. “He nursed his envy for more than 20 years.” (NYTimes 28 April 2017).

14 June 1926: “Willa Cather stands with her twin nieces Elizabeth and Margaret Cather next to a statue of Archbishop Lamy, the prototype for Cather's Father Latour in her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. Edith Lewis may have taken this photograph.” Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

Clearly, the ‘enchanted bluff’ and the mesa where Tom Outland finds the immense ancient treasure that is not valued by culture meant something else for Willa, the still, formidable cultural treasure touching and holding life itself to be realized on top of that mesa in the American Southwest and its alive, silent, penetrating voice, as she had recognized in her The Song of the Lark (1915) and the awakening of the Being and body in its vitality in knowing itself. This then, for Thea Kronborg is the strength of her own voice that then infuses the culture when she has learned how to refine and deliver it. Her feminine presence then speaks of its Being beyond the pages.

As I have been writing, those mesas take on that vitality and new-rootedness for culture in her own personal choices such as writing from the rock cliffs at Grand Manan and the rerouting of even religion in Shadows on the Rock. Tom Outland was trying to deliver it, but it wasn’t worth anything except to the two little girls whose childhoods could be inspired by the feats and possibilities, thus a delivery of the path of adventure to the feminine.

Truman’s appropriation, true to narcissistic patterns, made it about himself, with only the intent of it being about himself and showing what he is like, with no intent of delivering Willa’s treasure to alter culture—and no insight into it. But for Willa, as Cynthia K. Briggs writes in her article “Insulated Isolation: Willa Cather’s Room with a View”:

Because as a writer Willa Cather felt the importance of place, she created characters who become part of their place, who feel a sense of insulated isolation in their place. She creates for them personal sanctuaries that strengthen their spirits and enable them to better cope with their world. The characters learn to establish their own sanctuaries by transplanting their parishes into the world, an echo of Cather's own experience. That this sanctuary may be either a small room or an expansive space seems at first to be contradictory; if, however, no matter what its form, the sanctuary is based on something solid-as the wise man's house is built upon a rock in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:24)—the space feeds the spirit. There the character feels "not on the earth, yet of it" ("Old Mrs. Harris" 155) largely because of the physical structure of the space. More often than not, however, Cather combines the small room and the expansive space by creating a room with a view. This sacred space, with its insulated view of the world, nourishes the characters, as a parish should, strengthening them for their sojourn in the world.

1933: Caption: “Willa Cather's niece Mary Virginia Auld sits on the embankment behind Cather and Edith Lewis's Grand Manan cottage during a visit to Grand Manan. Cather or Edith Lewis may have taken this photograph.” Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

1933: “On Grand Manan Willa Cather sits, reclining slightly, on a rock embankment. Edith Lewis may have taken this photograph.”Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

Caption: “Taken from a streetside bordered by shrubs, this image shows Quebec's Chateau Frontenac on a bluff above buildings at the street's end. Cather first visited Quebec City in 1928, and her 1931 novel Shadows on the Rock is set there.”

Truman’s voice in Other Voices, Other Rooms is insidious. He is warning at every paragraph what he needs to do. Looking forward to the crimes he will personally perpetuate on those who will come to know him and let him in in the coming years, this text would have served as portent. In each telling of an incident he starts out as deceptively mundane, full of an ornate practice of similes, leading up to a need to show a sickness, some shock simply stated out of no where so that the readers gets a clue as to whom they are actually listening, like finding oneself in a locked room one freely walked into, but finding oneself there with an abuser. He then derives pleasure from the “power” of what he can now perpetrate, stated as simply as any other writer’s novel, but his laced with intent to show you who he is, the pleasure of showing you who he is, but also keeping it hidden. At the beginning Truman clues the reader in:

Ellen and her family were good to him, still he resented them, and often felt compelled to do hateful things, such as tease the older cousin, a dumb-looking girl named Louise, because she was a little deaf: he'd cup his ear and cry "Aye? Aye?" and couldn't stop till she broke into tears. He would not joke or join in the rousing after-supper games his uncle inaugurated nightly, and he took odd pleasure in bringing to attention a slip of grammar on anyone's part, but why this was true puzzled him as much as the Kendalls. It was as if he lived those months wearing a pair of spectacles with green, cracked lenses, and had wax-plugging in his ears, for everything seemed to be something it wasn't, and the days melted in a constant dream. Now Ellen liked to read Sir Walter Scott and Dickens and Hans Andersen to the children before sending them upstairs, and one chilly March evening she read "The Snow Queen." Listening to it, it came to Joel that he had a lot in common with Little Kay, whose outlook was twisted when a splinter from the Sprite's evil mirror infected his eye, changing his heart into a lump of bitter ice [ . . . ].

It is also what he seeks to do to the innocence of childhood, statements which are only of the sick:

Squinting one eye, Randolph studied the spokes of amber light whirling out from the sherry as he raised and revolved his glass. "Not funny, dear me, no. But the story has a certain bizarre interest: would you care to hear it?"

"How unnecessary," said Amy. "The child's morbid enough."

"All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace," said Randolph and went right ahead.

[ . . . ] "He was, however, a little feeble-minded. The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictablility and perverted innocence in common." His expression became smugly remote, as though, having made an observation he thought superior, he must pause and listen admiringly while it reverberated in his head [ . . . ]”

There is the insinuation of sexuality with his child self: “Holding hands with Randolph was obscurely disagreeable, and Joel's fingers tensed with an impulse to dig his nails into the hot dry palm; also, Randolph wore a ring which pressed painfully between Joel's knuckles.”

Truman demonstrates that he already has a contemplation and obsession with fame:

All Thursday night he'd left the electric light burning in the strange room, and read a movie magazine till he knew the latest doings of the Hollywood stars by heart, for if he let his attention turn inward even a second he would begin to tremble, and the mean tears would not stay back. Toward dawn he'd taken the magazine and torn it to shreds and burned the pieces in an ashtray one by one till it was time to go downstairs.

And his words and artifacts would finally be special and important, “And then of course the world and all its folks would love him, and Sammy, well, Sammy could sell this old letter for thousands of dollars.”

The “treasure” Truman is delivering is meant to demonstrate a shock conclusion all about himself, his personality and his sexuality, the high stylistic and form of delivering it, conceal the crime of where he got it, and thus the calculated photograph of himself determining fame on the back cover. The story would thus be about him.

Imagine the shock of Edith Lewis, Willa Cather’s life partner and executor, less than a year after Willa’s passing, in the sudden publicity parade around Truman, reading Truman’s voice, and upon recognizing what Truman had done with Willa’s ideas in The Professor’s House. Because this recognition is not openly stated we have to look at the immediate moment that it happened and the actions that were taken.

Although Truman would begin telling the story that he had met Willa, in 1953 Edith Lewis never makes mention of this but does purposely draw attention to another young literary gay who was actually very close with Willa, even left in her will, and does so with a precisely telling detail. In her 1953 biography of Willa Cather Edith Lewis wrote just five years after Truman’s publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms:

Willa Cather’s own letter on The Professor’s House, which she permitted to be published in her life-time, and which is included in the volume Willa Cather on Writing, gives a clue to the story’s unusual form; but as Stephen Tennant, in his Preface to that volume, has so sensitively recognized, form itself is here a kind of symbol; and his title, The Room Beyond, states imaginatively what in fact became more and more Willa Cather’s preoccupation as an artist:—the bringing into being of something beyond the situation or the characters of a story, something beyond the story itself,—the unseen vision, the unheard echo, which attend all experience.

Later she writes pointing out a decisive difference,

Stephen Tennant, in his distinguished Preface to Willa Cather on Writing, has said: “She loved faithfulness . . . She gave the impression of one who has gazed deep and long into the crystal of human fidelity.” Perhaps in that crystal she found the mirror of her own strongest instinct. She had not one of those divided natures that sometimes turn on themselves and what they have cherished, that hate where they love, and find in betrayal itself an ultimate truth; though she could comprehend and portray such a nature in Myra Henshaw, in My Mortal Enemy. All her impulses were simple, direct, unswerving, as if they came from some changeless center of integrity.

 

Even at the end of her book she reiterates the closeness of Willa and Stephen:

I think her friendships came to mean more and more to her in the years that followed. One of the friendships that counted most for her was that with her English friend Stephen Tennant, youngest son of Lord and Lady Glenconner. He had written to her about A Lost Lady while he was still a student at the Slade School in London. They had corresponded ever since. She kept all his letters--the only one she kept like this, except Miss Jewett's. His visits to America about this time gave her a kind of stimulus and delight entirely new; for he was the only one among the new generation of writers with whom she could talk about writing on an absolutely equal plane, with complete freedom and--though their views were in many ways so different--with complete sympathy and accord. On one of his visits he told her how warmly Thomas Hardy had spoken to him of A Lost Lady. I think no other tribute every gave her so much pleasure, for she admired Hardy as the greatest of living novelists.

The Preface by Stephen Tennant of which she speaks was begun immediately in 1948 at the publication of Truman’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in January, and titled like it, as Edith mentions, “The Room Beyond,” and to be published the following year, 1949. Willa was the one who was close friends of Stephen’s, establishing an on-going correspondence with the young man that lasted the rest of her life and included Stephen coming from England to visit her in New York City. Tellingly of the moment Willa passed and Truman’s novel was published, Edith wrote to him herself and became close friends with him.

That same year in 1948 Truman found his way to Stephen’s house in England through Cecil Beaton and would come away disparaging him publicly, true to form. This shows two traits of malignant narcissism: immediately rushing into the situation into personal boundaries and then making public statements to ward off anything the “friend” might say. Biographers most often just repeat what Truman would say, repeating it as fact without giving place that he was an unreliable narrator. But the facts of what both Edith and Stephen do and write show what was actually happening.

For example, Stephen Tennant’s biographer and even Willa Cather’s, James Woodress, simply restate Truman’s story of his having met Willa with no other evidence. Truman’s insistence upon telling this story, his hyper-vigilance, especially as it weighed upon him enough for it to be the last thing he scribbled down before he died is that he “doth protest too much,” something very much on his mind to cover up what others had exposed in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his reputation and deceits at stake. It can be seen that he was covering his tracks and trying to make it a personal admiration that gave him the “right” or validity to “appropriate” Willa, her name and reputation and her writing by stating that there had been a “personal relationship.” Why would he keep telling a story about Willa Cather?

Stephen Tennant’s biographer shows the timeline as Stephen writing the introduction to Willa’s On Writing in 1948, the writing of this piece taking place the same year but after the publication of Truman’s Other Voices, Other Rooms in January 1948 and Truman’s simultaneous fame bomb. Stephen was writing:

It was, like all such pieces written by Stephen, a very subjective view, drawing a great deal on their time together at the Slade, and Rex's early influences. Its perceptions are astute, but within a limited scope; Stephen's very specialized arena. This technique of his, to sum up friends' genius in such a personal way (and one which often reflected well on Stephen's part in their careers, itself a comment on Stephen's own creative psyche), was very much the tone of the other monograph on which Stephen had begun to work, a preface to a volume of Willa Cather's critical essays, commissioned by Alfred Knopf, to be published the following year.

 

Edith Lewis needed this voice. The biographer, Philip Hoare, then glosses Truman’s visit to Stephen:

Meanwhile, there were other friends to attend to—Cecil in particular, who had Truman Capote staying with him at Reddish. Beaton had met Capote in the States, and had got on well with the new literary talent who was impressing New York with his angelic good looks, his high voice, his extraordinary behaviour - and his brilliant writing. That year he published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which met with critical acclaim and a certain degree of notoriety. This was prompted by the author-photograph on the dust-jacket, which had Capote draped languidly over a Victorian couch, looking like a latter-day Aubrey Beardsley. His acquaintance with, and admiration for, Willa Cather also made Capote an obvious guest for Cecil to take over to amuse Stephen—and vice versa.

Capote was suitably impressed by Wilsford [Stephen’s home], and its owner, and together they had a long talk about Cather. However, Truman's slight suspicions about this strange place and his colourful host were confirmed when lunch was served. 'He gave me a meal with candy violets in the soup,' recalled Capote incredulously. 'After that I wasn't so keen . .. The house was quite extraordinary, and he was bubbly, out of a Charles Adams cartoon - we stayed quite awhile!

Philip Hoare’s source for this is Truman in an interview with Hugo Vickers on the 28 June 1983, a year before Truman’s passing. Hoare continues:

Stephen was impressed, and pleased, when, on leaving, Truman presented him with a copy of Other Voices, Other Rooms, which the author inscribed to him. After that, Stephen would often ask news of 'dear Truman' from Cecil (who saw a great deal of Capote thereafter), asking when he might come again. He wasn't to know that 'dear Truman' had been put off by the highly coloured menu at Wilsford.

 

Willa’s own biographer, James Woodress, writing about the time around 1942, makes the same oversight and repeats Truman’s story as Willa’s biographical truth, even though her reticence to socialize is well-documented, and this especially in 1942, we are to believe she freely went to a restaurant with Truman. In the face of this, too, Stephen Tennant, the young gay friend, is the one with the actual relationship with her--as Edith Lewis repeats no less than in three places in her biography of Willa--as Truman repeats his story to give himself the same history. Woodress writes,

Cather kept to her normal routines and concealed from all but old friends and family her personal problems and anguish over the state of the world. She continued going to the Society Library, and to people who saw her there browsing among the stacks, she seemed a commanding presence. One of these observers was young Truman Capote, recently out of high school and a very junior member of the New Yorker staff. A quarter of a century later he had vivid memories of meeting her there. He was in the habit of going to the library to do research and "three or four times I noticed this absolutely marvelous-looking woman. She had a wonderful open, extraordinary face, and hair combed back in a bun. Her suits were soft, but rather severe— very distinguished-looking—and her eyes . . . were the most amazing pale, pale blue. Like pieces of sky floating in her face."

"One day about five-thirty, I came out of the library, and there she was, standing under the canopy. It was snowing hard, and she was looking this way and that, as if she couldn't decide whether to walk or wait for a taxi. I stood there, too, and she said she didn't think there were any taxis. I said no, I guess there was no point trying to get back to the office, I guessed I'd just go home. Suddenly she said, 'Would you like a hot chocolate? There's a Longchamps restaurant just around the corner, and we could walk there.' Well, we walked there, and she said she'd noticed me in the library several times. I told her I was from the South, was working on a magazine, and that I wanted to be a writer. She said, 'Oh, really? What writers do you like?'

We talked about Turgenev and Flaubert. Then she asked what American writers I liked. I told her that my favorite was Willa Cather. Which of her works did I like best? Well, I said, My Mortal Enemy and A Lost Lady were both perfect works of art. 'That's very interesting,' she said. 'Why?' So I told her why, and we talked for a while. 'Well,' she said finally, 'I'm Willa Cather.' It was one of the great frissions of my life! I knew it was true the minute she said it. Of course she was Willa Cather."

He deceitfully makes a point of being in awe of her and admiration—all the while having copied her words.

The truth lies in specifically what Stephen Tennant wrote in his introduction “The Room Beyond,” given this background time and environment, very telling of the way he meticulously describes Willa’s voice, the radical difference between Truman’s spirit and intent and hers. Here are some of his telling statements:

An artist of her vigour and individuality was bound to read the work of others with an exceptionally shrewd and discriminating eye. [ . . . ] She possessed the ability to read the work of others with a child’s crystalline vision, combined with a mature and seasoned wisdom quite her own, and extraordinarily beautiful in its quiet sureness. [ . . . ] She furnished and gave a window to the Room Beyond.

He continues,

It is Willa Cather’s genius to reveal an even an even deeper awareness and significance in the finest work she criticizes. [ . . . ] Often she delves deeper into a situation or predicament than the artist of whom she writes. She saw—into the Room Beyond. [ . . . ] She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all the writer said, and did not say.

[ . . . ]

I should like to stress the particularly personal capacity for sympathy in this great writer and critic. One can say that the finest edge of her critical writing would have been powerless without the great range of her sympathies and ability to like, to divine, Life—even at its most grim and stark,—at its poorest and emptiest.

The wealth of her human warmth of feeling has been one of the great factors in the popularity of her books. It pervades everything—as fire pervades the center of the earth.

[ . . . ] we se, through Willa Cather’s clear vision, the full power, beauty, and tragedy of the writer’s life and work in all their most moving truth [ . . . ] The very absoluteness of her concentration in another artist’s gifts liberates her own soul, her heart, with a most passionate clarity.

Stephen’s entire essay is an insight into what massive difference this makes and how carefully Willa had worked to achieve that vision that carries us forward. Each line is a distinct rebuttal to Truman Capote, from “Art is not life, and it is not a substitute for it, or an aggrandizement of a dubious reality,” to “she delights the reader with the deepest kind of joy—almost like self-realization, an intensification of some sure self-knowledge, which, in its turn, illumines life, and the august, ravaged, and exalted past, in a clear light.”

Perhaps a brilliant and sensitive and far-seeing new light.