The Gift for Us of the Liberation of an Exquisite Career
Upon Willa Cather’s passing her life companion Edith Lewis was dealing with something more than Truman Capote’s plagiarism of Willa’s works. Truman’s proclivity to abuse was going further over the line than that even in the early years and would become more persistent and assuming as the years passed despite Edith’s efforts to ward him off in public perception without drawing overt attention to the problem, just awareness and protecting Willa and the nature of the literature. As far as the public could see, that wasn’t much of a problem in that Truman was making sure that he was the most famous person with the identity of ‘writer,’ certainly a free landscape to enter, and his presumed connection to Willa Cather was kept purposely there, but as a vague one. Edith knew it wasn’t vague but covert deflection of personal and intellectual property infringement and an identity pose. Edith wanted to show the real of becoming to differentiate from Truman’s putting on an identity as writer in this manner while outright ‘borrowing’ from Willa. Through her actions we can see that she was concerned with the effects on Willa’s work and legacy, even though they existed on a different level and could forever hold their own. The public forum can be a different matter. Edith was impassioned to not let it happen in the public sphere. Truman’s plagiarism, when mentioned by critics, was downplayed publicly, just make a persistent public appearance as a deflecting personality, even though it was quite evident.
Truman’s plagiarism of Willa was not as readily available to pinpoint as some of his other transgressions, but this one was long-running, pervasive, and hidden by breaking it up. Willa’s was an exquisite, careful career that transcended ordinary feats. In my first comparison re-readings going back and forth from Truman’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Willa’s The Song of the Lark I kept thinking, gosh, this sure influenced him, in passages about Fred, for example, or Thea’s effect on others around her in New York City, the ‘flame to the moths.’ There were direct references. It wasn’t until finding that he had pieced together selections from all of her works that the plagiarism became apparent. It was if he had purposefully taken puzzle pieces as his own. The biggest red flag during this was his writing about his personal connection to Willa, mentioning it at different instances, but at the end of his life still on his mind, and there being no questioning from the public or press about such an odd act. He was still trying to cover while also personally validating his actions by assumed personal proximity—which was never actually given, or given away. He had done it with many celebrities such as Marlon Brando, assuming too much familiarity, breaching a personal space to make a name for himself at the expense of the other entity, and then go on to belittle them, someone ‘huge’, as is characteristic of narcissistic patterns—not just gossip or personality traits. Truman’s story about Willa, although evidence refutes it and most efficiently by Edith herself, was just assumed as truth and even though he was a known to not be telling the truth ever—it was as if that didn’t matter or count. And so what is getting run over is the right of Being, personhood, and actually hard-won professional achievements, and essentially even normal respect for another. Suddenly they are being walked on, and freely, and with no public awareness, by the press and public.
The use of her life and material wasn’t “influence” or personal relationship at all, it was lifting passages and then further, purposefully and openly flaunting them as his own for adulation and recognition and public power. The agenda was always the biggest one. He meant it for fame. It was hidden in that he had spent time making it barely traceable, taking bits, but important parts, from each of her works. Truman’s hours in bed or behind closed doors, ‘writing,’ cut off from others, were hours taking excerpts from the party of “Flavia and Her Artists” and the apartment arrangement in “Coming, Aphrodite!” and rewording them, but not very far off at all, almost exact, with himself as voice of the narrator, the one to whom it was happening. It went beyond the fictional works into biographical detail and into actually reenacting life situations as his own in public—crossing the lines of Willa’s identity. One expects that there will be stalkers with fame, but what a situation in protecting intellectual property and personal boundaries from someone everyone knows, that that person has made sure everyone knows about so that it is harder to show as if it isn’t possible, as happens on a smaller scale in narcissistic situations, that the ‘flamboyant’ has preemptively deflected criticisms that it knows is coming. It’s laid the groundwork as to be taken as hearsay. In that way, it’s ‘ahead of the game’ and looks resilient, even innocent because it placed itself ready to be the focus of persecution. Edith was not in an easy situation. But she made moves to make sure Willa shined in the most substantial, real, and brightest way possible. What was happening would actually be bringing this about while culture has focused on the ‘train wreck’ sensational as somehow of substance or courage or true inner voice.
But, too, there was a darkness to Truman and his writing and his actions that were much harder to explain. It’s almost socially inappropriate, considered somehow socially untouchable or off-limits because of ‘fame’ and ‘stature’ as ‘writer,’ or literary, but also as personal fragility and vulnerability right beneath the tough, enduring surface that can be used in any circumstance where the question arises. There’s a strange inviolability around Truman’s peculiarity and attention-seeking which was actually a honed approach of ostentatious assumed differentness to make himself inviolable, and as if it in its innocence it had not developed from something that became determined to do harm, the cracked brain and psyche from childhood, even though it gave out all the hints as warning that it in fact did intend harm—“I warned you,” this would be dismissed by its adherence to something in it juvenile, always remaining the vulnerable child despite clear signs otherwise. It had learned its way to get past the red flags others were seeing, even from childhood, anything to throw one off a continuing grasp or rational cognizance of what was happening. George Plimpton’s biography of Truman is full of these instances from cover to cover, but it is constantly written off as quirks of personality instead of the exact signs of aberration behind intended harm and manipulation. Nothing is straight up, it is explained away. Now it takes experts carefully trained in how to pinpoint and word the now known tell-tale signs and put them together into a diagnosis (and ability to tell you where it leads in its patterns). But the reality is there to be known—hints at something very wrong, as in “Truman was very upset that he didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize”*—what Willa had won with her novel One of Ours in 1923, as if rightfully his, considering himself the best along with his sense of characteristically narcissistic entitlement of the best public recognition that is offered, and Willa being from whom the method of collecting characters and stories for In Cold Blood was directly imitated—as can also be seen in the critical biography by E. K. Brown that Edith commissioned and supported upon Willa’s passing, the very loving act she was doing to thwart this easy public assumption of Truman’s innocence. It was also the prize which Harper Lee would soon go on to win after going to Kansas with Truman, but she herself was solicited to help him write In Cold Blood. He had calculated for himself to win it with whom and what he had enlisted. It was an act of strong will about himself and was never actually substantiated in his own high value of his ‘works,’ although his coercion to make them sensational. His actions followed the script of Willa’s critical biography. To him, it should have worked, they ‘should have complied.’ Certainly the money from the sensationalism poured in and he used it to be even more public, to display the power and prestige. But he wanted Willa’s clout. He had to have it. It was expected. It had ‘somehow’ failed him. It is a deep, tangled mess until one has some insight from now understood personality disorders—and specific ‘clusters’ of them that show expected, exact patterns of a mind maneuvering other people. We no longer have to be baffled by the audacity of the crossing of personal and professional lines, such as Truman calling investigator Alvin Dewey, who should have been respected by Truman at first as a human being and then as a professional and one in a difficult moment, instead calling him, “Foxy,” a sexualized debasement of his personhood and adulthood, and giving Truman “rights.” Truman deliberately used the work Edith, an accomplished editor in her own right, was having created in 1948 to be used to thwart him—as his own dialogue. That’s the way the patterns works, it repeats the script it is given. It twists it to its agenda. Nor do we have to wonder at the adamant grab for attention and fame, nor be fooled by the process of fame itself. If there is a specialness that fame witnesses and grants, awareness of manipulation will tell us much more about our own lives and what we value and how to be more vital and free than praising it unknowingly. Realness, in fact, does matter. This problem was never satiated with fame or money, in fact Truman insisting repeatedly that he had rewritten the entire game of writing: that he had “invented a genre” while actually following the script of exactly what to do and where to do it found written by E.K. Brown in the critical biography. But in his mind, the definition of writer belonged to him. His job was to impress that upon the public.
But this darkness became what Edith Lewis was facing off in taking care of Willa Cather’s literary estate, and what would also arrive to Audrey Hepburn. Perhaps it is no wonder that Audrey moved on to raise a family instead, to be in love and love her boys, instead of chasing fame, which must have looked so empty and neurotic to her on Truman, knowing his personal violations and the ruse he was pulling off on the public and at the expense of a brilliant author and doing it harder after the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s had shown what he was doing, but not with public humiliation, in talent, radiance, and humor. Unless one considers fame to be open to even mental illness, and its harms considered harmless. What comes of this is this miracle that in Willa Cather’s life this happened—her work the actual brilliant forerunner to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and its now social standing through Audrey Hepburn’s heart and courage in her actions in the movie, and that now the mental health deviation patterns can be discerned back eight decades to inform us in this moment in bringing the brilliance through, and in being able to bring to the forefront the effects of fame protecting, discerning that it was even nurturing the personal and professional invasion which was never okay to the artists and people who were being violated, that Truman’s trauma was passed forward in actual pain, and bring to light when fame in these patterns are actually effects of the personality disorders and not specialness of extraordinary talent or spirit or social cause as it makes itself appear to be. And so what emerges is the actual effect liberated in their courage of two of the most extraordinary talents that do bring these attributes to the forefront: Willa Cather and Audrey Hepburn. That is the extraordinary of this moment, what is possible to discern and know the priceless that will move us into touching and knowing realness.
THE EVIDENCE
In Truman’s article he entitled the vague source from which his material comes “Voice from a Cloud” published in Harper’s in 1967 (following his very public Plaza ball and media blitz), came with the note: “Capote was twenty three years old when Other Voices, Other Rooms" was published. This essay will preface the twentieth anniversary edition, to be issued by Random House in February. Mr. Capote's book "In Cold Blood" has been a bestseller since 1965.” (It was released in January 1966.) He opens his article with a defensiveness of his having taken other works: “Other Voices, Other Rooms (my own title: it is not a quotation) was published in January 1948.”
Here are Willa’s words included in Edith’s publishing of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (with the article originally written for Part Six of The Colophon, 1931), entitled: “MY FIRST NOVELS” [There were Two]:
“My first novel, Alexander’s Bridge was very like what painters call a studio picture. It was the result of meeting some interesting people in London. Like most young writers, I thought a book should be made out of ‘interesting material,’ and at that time I found the new more exciting than the familiar. The impressions I tried to communicate on paper were genuine, but they were very shallow. I still find people who like that book because it follows the most conventional pattern, and because it is more or less laid in London. London is supposed to be more engaging than, let us say, Gopher Prairie; even if the writer knows Gopher Prairie very well and London very casually. Soon after the book was published I went for six months to Arizona and New Mexico. The longer I stayed in a country I really did care about, and among people who were a part of the country, the more unnecessary and superficial a book like Alexander’s Bridge seemed to me. I did not writing down there, but I recovered from the conventional editorial point of view.
When I got back to Pittsburg I began to write a book entirely for myself; a story about some Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on ranch in Nebraska, when I was eight or nine years old. I found it a much more absorbing occupation than writing Alexander’s Bridge; a different process altogether. Here there was no arrange nor ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong. This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding. The other was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time."
Truman’s article follows her manner, descriptions, and layout as a student copying an instructor’s example but filling in his own information, giving himself also two first novels and simply replacing London with New York as if fill-in-the-blank-space. He continues in the article: “It took two years to write and was not my first novel, but the second. The first, a manuscript never submitted and now lost, was called Summer Crossing- a spare, objective story with a New York setting.” And then on to discussing its lacking, just as Willa did, and on to what moved to the deeper, more personal experience as with her:
"Not bad, as I remember: technically accomplished, an interesting enough tale, but without intensity or pain, without the qualities of a private vision, the anxieties that then had control of my emotions and imagination. Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons: an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable."
Truman always brings the subject back to being exactly about himself, not what Willa was doing in the broader sense of discovery through the process of writing to the exquisite to be known and how she got there. Truman, then, was not only copying Willa again in 1967, but using what Edith had put together in 1948-49 with publisher Alfred Knopf with the forward by gay friend and literary socialite Stephen Tennant—and now putting that exactly as his article in Harper’s, where Willa herself had been published in the early part of the century, and this being to ANNOUNCE that he was ‘importantly’ reissuing a 20th Anniversary Edition, at this very moment of the success of his very public In Cold Blood and Black and White Ball. He had taken Edith’s efforts as the very script. This is seven years after Audrey has shown he had taken Willa’s works in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and now Truman had ‘outdone’ Audrey by being more public, more forceful, more daring. The press and the public eat it up.
He continues and casually drops in Willa’s name, and in an order as if ‘unimportant’ while belittling critics who are stating that he most definitely had “influences” (they pointing out something else was going on). He publicly takes them on at his highest moment of fame:
"Surely there were reasons for this adamant ignorance, no doubt protective ones: a fire curtain between the writer and the true source of his material. As I have lost contact with the troubled youth who wrote this book, since only a faded shadow of him is any longer contained inside myself, it is difficult to reconstruct his state of mind. However, I shall try. At the time of the appearance of Other Voices, Other Rooms, critics, ranging from the warmest to the most hostile, remarked that obviously I was much influenced by such Southern literary artists as Faulkner and Welty and McCullers, three writers whose work I knew well and admired. Nevertheless, the gentlemen were mistaken, though understandably."
He continually throws in that he “admired” artists from which he has stolen.
"The American writers who had been most valuable to me were, in no particular order, James, Twain, Poe, Cather, Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett; and, overseas, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Dickens, Proust, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Turgenev, De Maupassant, and Emily Bronte. A collection more or less irrelevant to Other' Voices, Other Rooms; for clearly no one of these writers, with the conceivable exception of Poe (who was by then a blurred childhood enthusiasm, like Dickens and Twain), was a necessary antecedent to this particular work. Rather, they all were, in the sense that each of them had contributed to my literary intelligence, such as it was. But the real progenitor was my difficult, subterranean self." [Emphasis mine.]
Willa’s statement in her article: “Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately attuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment. Kansas is almost as unpromising.”
Archived in Salon magazine is the process by which Truman came to decide to travel to Kansas and to write In Cold Blood (the year after publishing the plagiarized Breakfast at Tiffany’s from Willa): ““In Cold Blood" began, as the story goes, when Truman Capote came across a 300-word article in the back of the New York Times describing the unexplained murder of a family of four in rural Kansas.”
And then the process biographer E. K. Brown describes of Willa, also coming from Edith in 1949:
“There was scarcely a man or a woman in Red Cloud who had any ‘conversation,’ who knew anything worth hearing and could tell something of it, whom Willa Cather did not frequent. Doctors, lawyers, clergy, men of affairs, she listened to them all; and when there was a woman such as Mrs. Miner, whom she drew as Mrs. Harling, Ántonia’s employer, Willa Cather never tired of eliciting her experience of life and the conclusions she had drawn from it.” [ . . . ]
The town as she knew it in the 1880s has been described in The Song of the Lark with the name of Moonstone.”
Written about Truman’s process in Kansas in Salon:
"Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged . . . There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.
Capote seized on the grisly story and went down to Kansas to turn it into a book. He spent six years researching "In Cold Blood," and claimed to have invented a genre, the nonfiction novel; later, Tom Wolfe and others would include "In Cold Blood" in their own movement, known as New Journalism.”
And Truman took a female writer with him (and whose book To Kill a Mockingbird was about to come out in July 1960):
“Harper Lee was a fairly tough lady, and Truman was afraid of going down there alone. I’ve been told the situation there was fairly tense. People wouldn’t be happy to have this little gnome in his checkered vest running around asking questions about who’d murdered whom. He asked Harper if she would go, and once she agreed, he said, ‘Would you get a gun permit and carry a gun while we’re down there?’” John Barry Ryan qtd. by George Plimpton in Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (1997).
E. K. Brown wrote of a close friend of Willa’s as she was growing up named William Ducker to whom she became close and who ignited literature for her in her early years:
"William Ducker, “Uncle Billy” to so many children in Red Cloud at the time when Willa Cather knew him, was the first to make Greek and Latin literature come alive for her. [ . . . ] When he was fifty he came to Red Cloud with members of his family, who opened a store in which sometimes he might be found leaning over a counter with the Iliad or the Aeneid or the Odes of Anacreon lying open before him; and he gave his own children lessons in the classics and other subjects to supplement the meager official schedule. He too found something remarkable in Willa Cather, and he supervised her reading as closely as if she were a daughter. After she had begun to study at the University of Nebraska, she continued to read Latin and Greek with Mr. Ducker in the vacations; and she contrasted his passion for poetry with the somewhat arid scholarship she found in the classical instructors in Lincoln. Ducker’s sudden death in the terrible drought-ridden summer of 1893 was one of her first deep griefs."
Truman would then made sure he ‘bonded’ with Alvin Dewey in Kansas, even putting him on display at the Black and White Ball as his character as a real person, the real person he knew for his writing from Kansas, with Gloria Steinem reporting for Vogue: “Alvin Dewey answered questions about problems of the Clutter case, just as dignified and direct in the Paley dining room as he had been in Kansas during the murder investigation in In Cold Blood.” Truman was putting the process and the character on display, just as Edith had provided to Brown in 1948, but he making the statement very, very public with himself as the actual center, and this reiterated from the ‘research’ he did in 1959, now on display in 1966-67, and further publicity. This wasn’t something he was going to let go of. It was in his head that Willa’s writing and process was his own, it was his identity he had taken on, and with an exact script from Edith. This is why it is much darker than the public could realize—and much more malignant and aberrant.
Brown describes of Willa:
"The pleasure that Willa Cather found in the company of older people, and the readiness with which they accepted her, appear very sharply in “Two Friends,” the story with which Obscure Destinies closes. The two middle-aged men—one of them was the merchant Mr. Miner—pass the early part of their evenings together; it is the only time they see each other. In the colder months they sit in the store that one of them owns; on any night that it is warm enough they draw two chairs out on the broad sidewalk. They allow the narrator of the story, from the time she was ten years old, to sit within hearing of their wide-ranging talk and to make what she can of it. A whole evenings discussion might pivot on a scientific novelty, a play, a reminiscence of the older and better West, or the life-history of a remarkable farm family in this or a neighboring county."
Gerald Clarke wrote in Truman Capote: A Biography:
"When he appeared at The New Yorker to show Mr. Shawn the clipping, the identity of the killer, or killers, was still unknown, and might never be known. But that, as he made clear to Shawn, was beside the point, or at least the point he wanted to make.What excited his curiosity was not the murders, but their effect on that small and isolated community. "As he originally conceived it, the murders could have remained a mystery.” said Shawn, who once again gave his enthusiastic approval. "He was going to do a piece about the town and the family--what their lives had been. I thought that it could make some long and wonderful piece of writing."
Back to Truman’s article “Voice from a Cloud” and his discussion of his inspiration for his “first two” novels he wrote:
"For, more and more, Summer Crossing seemed to me thin, clever, unfelt. Another language, a secret spiritual geography, was burgeoning inside me, taking hold of my night-dream hours as well as my wakeful daydreams. One frosty December afternoon I was far from home, walking in a forest along the bank of a mysterious, deep, very clear creek, a route that led eventually to a place called Hatter's Mill. The mill, which straddled the creek, had been abandoned long ago; it was a place where farmers had brought their corn to be ground into cornmeal.
As a child, I'd often gone there with cousins to fish and swim; it was while exploring under the mill that I'd been bitten in the knee by a cottonmouth moccasin-precisely as happens to Joel Knox. And now as I came upon the forlorn mill with its sagging silver-gray timbers, the remembered shock of the snakebite returned; and other memories too-of Idabel, or rather the girl who was the counterpart of Idabel, and how we used to wade and swim in the pure waters, where fat speckled fish lolled in sunlit pools; Idabel was always trying to reach out and grab one.
Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole Look. Usually when a story comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long sustained streak of lightning that darkens the tangible, so-called real world, and leaves illuminated only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape, a terrain alive with figures, voices, rooms, atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must soothe and tame it. Which, of course, is an artist's principal task: to tame and shape the raw creative vision.
It was dark when I got home, and cold, but I didn't feel the cold because of the fire inside me. My Aunt Lucille said she had been worried about me, and was disappointed because I didn't want any supper. She wanted to know if I was sick; I said no. She said, "Well, you look sick. You're white as a ghost." I said good night, locked myself in my room, tossed the manuscript of Summer Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, got into bed fully clothed, and with pathetic optimism, wrote: "Other Voices, Other Rooms-a novel by Truman Capote." Then: "Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can .. ."
It is unusual, but occasionally it happens to almost every writer that the writing of some particular story seems outer-willed and effortless; it is as though one were a secretary transcribing the words of a voice from a cloud. The difficulty is maintaining contact with this spectral dictator."
His transitions, as to Idabel, and content mirror E. K. Brown on Willa’s early life in the chapter “From Virginia to the Divide [1873-1883]” up to the time she was 10 years old, and this in a discussion of the ‘apparition’ from which his ideas came. Brown wrote:
“A hundred yards or so to the west along the road to the village was Back Creek, a sluggish stream except in spring, crossed then by an old suspension bridge. She liked to hang on this bridge and sing, ‘I stood on the bridge at midnight,’ though that was scarcely the time she chose. Less than a mile to the southwest was the mill of the Seiberts, where Mrs. Boak had grown up, and there were few things that gave Willa Cather so much pleasure as to talk with the miller in his cool dark mill, or watch the great wooden wheel turning hour by hour.
With Margie Anderson, a young girl who had come to Willowshade as nursemaid and general help, she would go as far as Timber Ridge to visit Margie’s mother, Mary Ann, the Mrs. Ringer of Sapphira, who ‘was born interested,’ had a gift for telling stories, and a homely wisdom about people. She knew the histories of al the families in the region, rich and poor, and all the dramatic events that had become legends among the country people. Her talk was full of wit and fire, it was shot through with the vivid native idiom; and the stories she told, Willa Cather remembered all her life, as she remembered the drives along the mountain roads when she accompanied Mrs. Boak on errands of mercy or medicine, or her mother on visits to cousins, neighbors, or dependents.”
The snake incident, again, being from My Àntonia and Jim Burden’s experience with Àntonia, although Jim is not bitten, but is the conquerer and grows much more in Àntonia’s eyes. The summary of the novel, “Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to the fictional settlement of Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy” reads, of course, as the beginning of Truman’s Other Voices, Other Rooms.
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