Understanding Truman Capote

Notes

notes Chapter 1—Understanding Truman Capote 1. Her divorce from Arch became official on November 9, 1931, and on February 14, 1935, Lillie Mae’s legal petition for complete custody was granted. “Joe [Capote] became a father, and at the age of ten Truman Streckfus Persons was renamed Truman Garcia Capote” (Clarke 38). 2. This was not Capote’s first experience with sexual abuse. At Trinity School for boys, for example, one of the teachers would walk Truman home and stop at a movie theater. “They would sit in the privacy of the back row, and while the teacher fondled him, Truman would masturbate the teacher” (Clarke 44). 3. Clarke 63. 4. Clarke 158. 5. Reumann 21. 6. Reumann 97. 7. Clarke 363. 8. See “‘Some Unheard-of Thing’: Freaks, Families, and Coming of Age in Carson McCullers and Truman Capote.” 9. See Hassan, “The Daydream and Nightmare of Narcissus.” 10. See Garson’s Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction. 11. In the most basic sense, I am using the word “canon” to refer to literary works being actively taught in a university setting today. 12. Capote made these comments in reference to his 1958 plans to return to Moscow . He decided not to finish this second journalistic project because of fears that the people he profiled with pro-Western views might be punished. Chapter 2—A Tree of Night and Other Stories 1. Clarke 74–77. 2. Capote described writing short fiction this way to Andrew Lyndon in a letter on May 15, 1950: “I’m so happy to be writing stories again—they are my great love” (Truman Capote Papers, New York Public Library, Box 23A, Folder 2, Letters to Andrew Lyndon, 1947–1952). 3. Kennedy 427. 4. It should be noted that inflation and stagnant wages made it difficult for many Americans to participate in this culture of spending. Massive strikes over working conditions, pay, and pension plans resulted. Toward the end of November 1945, for example, “225,000 auto workers at General Motors went on strike. Two months 158 notes to pages 20–46 later they were joined by 174,000 electrical workers, and then 800,000 steel workers. Within a year of V-J Day more than 5 million men and women walked off the job” (Chafe 93–94). The subsequent settlements between corporations and unions such as the United Auto Workers helped move the United States more fully into a consumerbased economy. 5. According to Richard Rhodes, “the most recent estimates place the number of deaths [at Hiroshima] up to the end of 1945 at 140,000. The dying continued; fiveyear deaths related to the bombing reached 200,000” (734). In Nagasaki 70,000 died by the end of 1945, “and 140,000 altogether across the next five years” (741–42). 6. Kennedy 779. Chapter 3—Other Voices, Other Rooms 1. The photograph was taken by Harold Halma. Even though Capote’s editor, Robert Linscott, ultimately chose the photo, he did so with Capote’s strong recommendation . Both men wanted to generate publicity for the book. 2. For additional analyses on these statistics, see Reumann 165–67. 3. Although human curiosities had been common attractions in taverns and public squares since the 1700s, these itinerant performers began appearing in dime museums in the nineteenth century. Here audiences could gaze at freaks alongside dioramas, menageries, stuffed animals, jugglers, historical wax tableaux, cabinets filled with curious objects, and other oddities. Live performers soon became central to the dime museum’s appeal, and this form of entertainment reached its apex with P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in 1841. Located in the heart of New York City near the Astor Hotel and Delmonico’s Restaurant, Barnum’s dazzling establishment became a fashionable public attraction. Due to the prominence he gave freak performers and the unprecedented scope of his promotional efforts, he helped make the freak show a national pastime. 4. Tom Thumb, born Charles Sherwood Stratton in 1838, was one of Barnum’s most famous and financially successful exhibits. Barnum initially offered the impoverished Stratton family three dollars a week to display Charles at the American Museum. Soon afterward they toured throughout the United States and Europe. (In 1844, for example, Queen Victoria invited him to the palace twice.) Barnum advertised Tom Thumb as a twelve-year-old dwarf; though he exaggerated his age, Thumb was apparently twenty-five inches and fifteen pounds when Barnum first met him in 1842. He most likely had ateliotic...