Truman Capote and Willa Cather

by Janet Mason

Click here for audio commentary (9.59 MB)

Click here for audio listing/site map

I first became acquainted with Truman Capote when I was an adolescent in the 1970s and he was a guest on the Dick Cavett show. At this point, Truman was nearing the end of his career--and his life, which was cut short at 60--and was not in the best shape. But, still, he was riveting.

Growing up in a suburban tract house landscape, I felt like a "freak" and was immediately drawn to Capote--his falsetto voice, his slicing barbs, his expressive hands inching up behind his head and perching there like long necked swans yearning for flight.

Soon I was reading my way through In Cold Blood and then through everything else he had written. Of his books, my favorite has always been his first novel-published when he was 24--entitled Other Voices/Other Rooms, a charming coming of age story full of the Deep South's swamp laced mysteries, race relations, and basic human strangeness shown to us through the lens of the effeminate boy protagonist and his tomboy female friend (who we later come to know as Harper Lee).

Hollywood, with the release of "Capote" and now "Infamous," has brought Truman back into vogue-or perhaps has saved him from the great void. I actually have met younger people who before the movies were not only unfamiliar with his work but had never heard of him.

Truman Capote has always been more to me than a great writer, gay icon, or even "genius"-the word that he used to describe himself. When I was a young writer, Capote was a bridge to other writers, most notably to the Great American novelist Willa Cather.

Born in 1873, Cather spent much of her young life in the prairie country of Nebraska which she would immortalize in O Pioneers and My Antonia. Several other remarkable novels of Cather's include Death Comes to the Arch Bishop, a brilliant portrayal of the galvanizing forces of the Southwest and Song of the Lark, a portrait of a gifted opera singer.

Truman first met Willa Cather in 1942 when he was 18 and for a period of time she became his mentor. He chronicled this first meeting in his collection of essays, now entitled Truman Capote: Literary Conversations: He was leaving the New York Society Library on East 79th Street. Snow was falling heavily and he saw a woman standing on the side of the street looking for a taxi.

He described her as "mesmerizing:" …"her eyes especially: blue, the pale brilliant cloudless blue of prairie skies. But even without this singular feature, her face was interesting-firm jawed, handsome, a bit androgynous. Pepper-salt hair parted in the middle. Sixty-five, thereabouts. A lesbian? Well, yes."

In the snowstorm there was no taxi to be found and the woman suggested to him that the two of them go for a cup of hot chocolate. Not knowing who she was, Truman told Willa that he was a writer and he had published several short stories and was working on a novel. When she asked who his favorite living American authors were, he replied that he really liked Willa Cather. Then he asked her if she had read, My Mortal Enemy.

Cather replied that she had written it and a friendship commenced with Truman spending many evenings in the Park Avenue apartment that Willa shared with her long-time partner Edith Lewis.

Known for her quote that "The history of a country begins in the heart of a man or a woman" is in many ways a writer's writer. Many people come to her work late if they come to it at all. The reason for this is that she did not allow her work to be published in textbook editions, since she did not want young people to be forced to read her books. She wanted them to find the books on their own, and to enjoy them.

Had I met Willa Cather, as Truman did, on a snowy evening on East 79th Street, I would have been every bit the "school boy" as Truman described himself when he was babbling about her books.

Truman Capote has long been described as having gay pride before the phrase existed and as a writer his wide array of characters never excluded lesbians. There was the tomboy girl characters Idabel Thompkins in Other Voices/Other Rooms who he likens to another tomboy that his narrator had known… "a beefy little roughneck who had lived on the same block in New Orleans…who had a habit a waylaying him, stripping of his pants and tossing them high into a tree."In Breakfast a Tiffany's, Holly Golightly makes numerous references to lesbians, all of which were removed from the movie version, starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly. In the book, Capote cites Holly Golightly's preference for lesbian roommates as she says, "Of course, people couldn't help think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And I am. Everyone is a bit."

Writers tend to write about themselves, even when they are writing about someone else. So, I would say that this statement stands true for Truman as well as for Holly. His controversial last book, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, ends with his society matron character in "La Cote Basque"--the chapter named for the posh New York restaurant--envying the lesbian life a friend of hers.

In the end, Truman, returned to thinking and writing about his old mentor. The last thing he wrote--before his untimely death, caused by his addiction to drugs and alcohol--was 14 pages of a rough draft of an essay on Willa Cather.

This piece is being aired on This Way Out, the Los Angeles-based lesbian and gay radio syndicate that airs across the U.S. and in 22 countries abroad.