An Odd Psychological Type

In a letter sent from Sicily dated June 24, 1950, Truman Capote—already the author of a notorious first novel and a collection of highly admired short stories—scolded his high-school friend Phoebe Pierce for being a poor correspondent. "Why are you so silent?" he implored.

Twelve years later Capote—by then the celebrated author of seven books, two Broadway plays, and three produced screenplays—instructed his former beau Newton Arvin, "There are certain people with whom one can be the closest and longest and most loving friends—and yet they can quite quickly drop out of one's life forever simply because they belong to some odd psychological type. A type that only writes when he is written to, that only telephones when he is telephoned. That is—if one does not write him or phone one just will never hear from him again." Capote then reported on an experiment he had conducted with Pierce, having decided six years earlier not to contact her unless she contacted him first. She never did. "After 16 years of the closest friendship!" he complained.

Capote's purpose for sharing the results of his experiment was to berate Arvin for belonging to that same frustrating group of psychological misfits who never initiate contact. Far from becoming a self-absorbed celebrity who shed his less-famous contacts once he hit pay dirt, Capote remained a loyal friend who resented being given the cold shoulder. His sensitivity to abandonment is central to William Todd Schultz's new "psychobiography" of the author.

"Psychobiography is not biography," states Schultz, a professor of psychology at Pacific University. Whereas biography examines the "what, where, when, how, and who" of the subject's life, he explains, psychobiography "zeros in on the why." In particular Schultz attempts to answer why Capote, as early as 1958, set out to research and write a novel, "Answered Prayers," that would skewer the wealthy New York women who had welcomed this elfin homosexual into their social circle—a book that, upon publication, was guaranteed to destroy his close friendships with those women.

"There is something a little mesmerizing about locating mysteries in people's lives, then fleshing these mysteries out and, finally, shedding what intensity of light one can on them," Schultz writes. As that presumptuous passage might suggest, the author's analysis of Capote's motives can at times become annoying, but for the usual reason astute psychoanalysis is often annoying—because it is so convincing. Capote "feared closeness, intimacy, and the vulnerability occasioned by seeking out love, because these things, from his earliest childhood, ended in rejection or abandonment," asserts Schultz before adding, quite plausibly, that the novelist kept the poisonous book project in reserve as the ultimate weapon should Gloria Vanderbilt, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland, or Capote's other swans consider turning him out. But why publish the three extant chapters of a book he would never finish, and at a time when Capote was still on good terms with these women? Schultz cites a "hyperactivating strategy" of preventive abandonment: Capote "set café society on fire in order not to get burned." Capote's act of literary arson thereby spared him the pain of rejection: "He wasn't abandoned. He wasn't a victim. He was a victimizer." Once his victims retaliated, Capote predictably found himself banished from café society.

Authors of forthcoming books in the Oxford University Press's Inner Lives series, of which Schultz is the editor, plan to analyze the science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick, the pop musician John Lennon, and—inevitably—Sigmund Freud. But Schultz called dibs on what is probably the best material. "Capote's early life provides us a near-perfect graph for any student of Freud who predicts that a disastrous adulthood is the all but inevitable result of a miserable childhood," writes Reynolds Price in introducing the posthumous Complete Stories of Truman Capote (2004). The themes of Capote's published writing bear this out. Schultz offers a brilliant reading...