They were hardworking people, the Carters. Jennings, with the help of a few sharecropping field hands, cultivated his land with a horse-drawn plow. As for his wife, her chores were unlimited. I helped her with many of them: feeding the pigs, milking the cows, churning milk into butter, husking corn, shelling peas and pecans—it was fun, except for one assignment I sought to avoid, and when forced to perform, did so with my eyes shut: I just plain hated wringing the necks of chickens, though I certainly didn’t object to eating them afterward.
This was during the Depression, but there was plenty to eat on Mary Ida’s table for the principal meal of the day, which was served at noon and to which her sweating husband and his helpers were summoned by clanging a big bell. I loved to ring the bell; it made me feel powerful and beneficent.
It was to these midday meals, where the table was covered with hot biscuits and cornbread and honey-in-the-comb and chicken and catfish or fried squirrel and butter beans and black-eyed peas, that guests sometimes appeared, sometimes expected, sometimes not. “Well,” Mary Ida would sigh, seeing a footsore Bible salesman approaching along the road, “we don’t need another Bible. But I guess we’d better set another place.”
Of all those we fed, there were three who will never slip my memory. First, the Presbyterian missionary, who was traveling around the countryside soliciting funds for his Christian duties in unholy lands. Mary Ida said she couldn’t afford a cash contribution, but she would be pleased to have him take dinner with us. Poor man, he definitely looked as though he needed one. Arrayed in a rusty, dusty, shiny black suit, creaky black undertaker shoes, and a black-greenish hat, he was thin as a stalk of sugar cane. He had a long red wrinkled shirt. I thought he was nice, we all did; he had a flower tattooed on his wrist, his eyes were gentle, he was gently spoken. He said his name was Bancroft (which, as it turned out, was his true name). My uncle Jennings asked him: “What’s your line of work, Mr. Bancroft?”
“Well,” he drawled, “I’m just lookin’ for some. Like most everybody else. I’m pretty handy. Can do most anythin’. You wouldn’t have somethin’ for me?”
Jennings said: “I sure could use a man. But I can’t afford him.”
“I’d work for most nothin’.”
“Yeah,” said Jennings. “But nothing is what I’ve got.”
Unpredictably, for it was a subject seldom alluded to in that household, crime came into the conversation. Mary Ida complained: “Pretty Boy Floyd. And that Dillinger man. Running around the country shooting people. Robbing banks.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Bancroft. “I got no sympathy with them banks. And Dillinger, he’s real smart, you got to hand him that. It kinda makes me laugh the way he knocks off them banks and gets clean away with it.” Then he actually laughed, displaying tobacco-tinted teeth.
“Well,” Mary Ida countered, “I’m slightly surprised to hear you say that, Mr. Bancroft.”
Two days later Jennings drove his wagon into town and returned with a keg of nails, a sack of flour, and a copy of the Mobile Register. On the front page was a picture of Mr. Bancroft—“Two-Barrels” Bancroft, as he was colloquially known to the authorities. He had been captured in Evergreen, thirty miles away. When Mary Ida saw his photo, she rapidly fanned her face with a paper fan, as though to prevent a fainting fit. “Heaven help me,” she cried. “He could have killed us all.”
Jennings said sourly: “There was a reward. And we missed out on it. That’s what gets my goat.”
Next, there was a girl called Zilla Ryland. Mary Ida discovered her bathing a two-year-old baby, a red-haired boy, in a creek that ran through the woods back of the house. As Mary Ida described it: “I saw her before she saw me. She was standing naked in the water bathing this beautiful little boy. On the bank there was a calico dress and the child’s clothes and an old suitcase tied together with a piece of rope. The boy was laughing, and so was she. Then she saw me, and she was startled. Scared. I said: ‘Nice day. But hot. The water must feel good.’ But she snatched up the baby and scampered out of the creek, and I said: ‘You don’t have to be frightened of me. I’m only Mrs. Carter that lives just over yonder. Come on up and rest a spell.’ Then she commenced to cry; she was only a little thing, no more than a child herself. I asked what’s the matter, honey? But she wouldn’t answer. By now she had pulled on her dress and dressed the boy. I said maybe I could help you if you’d tell me what’s wrong. But she shook her head, and said there was nothing wrong, and I said well, we don’t cry over nothing, do we? Now you just follow me up to the house and we’ll talk about it. And she did.”
Indeed she did.
I was swinging in the porch swing reading an old Saturday Evening Post when I noticed them coming up the path, Mary Ida toting a broken-down suitcase and this barefooted girl carrying a child in her arms.
Mary Ida introduced me: “This is my nephew, Buddy. And—I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Zilla,” the girl whispered, eyes lowered.
“I’m sorry, honey. I can’t hear you.”
“Zilla,” she again whispered.
“Well,” said Mary Ida cheerfully, “that sure is an unusual name.”
Zilla shrugged. “My mama give it to me. Was her name, too.”
Two weeks later Zilla was still with us; she proved to be as unusual as her name. Her parents were dead, her husband had “run off with another woman. She was real fat, and he liked fat women, he said I was too skinny, so he run off with her and got a divorce and married her up in Athens, Georgia.” Her only living kin was a brother: Jim James. “That’s why I come down here to Alabama. The last I heard, he was located somewhere around here.”
Uncle Jennings did everything in his power to trace Jim James. He had good reason, for, although he liked Zilla’s little boy, Jed, he’d come to feel quite hostile toward Zilla—her thin voice aggravated him, and her habit of humming mysterious tuneless melodies.
Jennings to Mary Ida: “Just the hell how much longer is our boarder going to hang around?” Mary Ida: “Oh, Jennings. Shhh! Zilla might hear you. Poor soul. She’s got nowhere to go.” So Jennings intensified his labors. He brought the sheriff into the case; he even paid to place an ad in the local paper—and that was really going far. But nobody hereabouts had ever heard of Jim James.
At last Mary Ida, clever woman, had an idea. The idea was to invite a neighbor, Eldridge Smith, to evening supper, usually a light meal served at six. I don’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. Mr. Smith was not much to look at, but he was a recently widowed farmer of about forty with two school-aged children.
After that first supper Mr. Smith got to stopping by almost every twilight. After dark we all left Zilla and Mr. Smith alone, where they swung together on the creaking porch swing and laughed and talked and whispered. It was driving Jennings out of his mind because he didn’t like Mr. Smith any better than he liked Zilla; his wife’s repeated requests to “Hush, honey. Wait and see” did little to soothe him.
We waited a month. Until finally one night Jennings took Mr. Smith aside and said: “Now look here, Eldridge. Man to man, what are your intentions toward this fine young lady?” The way Jennings said it, it was more like a threat than anything else.
Mary Ida made the wedding dress on her foot-pedaled Singer sewing machine. It was white cotton with puffed sleeves, and Zilla wore a white silk ribbon bow in her hair, especially curled for the occasion. She looked surprisingly pretty. The ceremony was held under the shade of a mulberry tree on a cool September afternoon, the Reverend Mr. L. B. Persons presiding. Afterward everybody was served cupcakes and fruit punch spiked with scuppernong wine. As the newlyweds rode away in Mr. Smith’s mule-drawn wagon, Mary Ida lifted the hem of her skirt to dab at her eyes, but Jennings, eyes dry as a snake’s skin, declared: “Thank you, dear Lord. And while You’re doing favors, my crops could use some rain.”
PREFACE TO MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS
(1980)
My life—as an artist, at least
—can be charted as precisely as a fever: the highs and lows, the very definite cycles.
I started writing when I was eight—out of the blue, uninspired by any example. I’d never known anyone who wrote; indeed, I knew few people who read. But the fact was, the only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap-dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.
But of course I didn’t know that. I wrote adventure stories, murder mysteries, comedy skits, tales that had been told me by former slaves and Civil War veterans. It was a lot of fun—at first. It stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more alarming discovery: the difference between very good writing and true art; it is subtle, but savage. And after that, the whip came down!
As certain young people practice the piano or the violin four and five hours a day, so I played with my papers and pens. Yet I never discussed my writing with anyone; if someone asked what I was up to all those hours, I told them I was doing my school homework. Actually, I never did any homework. My literary tasks kept me fully occupied: my apprenticeship at the altar of technique, craft; the devilish intricacies of paragraphing, punctuation, dialogue placement. Not to mention the grand overall design, the great demanding arc of middle-beginning-end. One had to learn so much, and from so many sources: not only from books, but from music, from painting, and just plain everyday observation.
In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days was the plain everyday observations that I recorded in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbor. Long verbatim accounts of overheard conversations. Local gossip. A kind of reporting, a style of “seeing” and “hearing” that would later seriously influence me, though I was unaware of it then, for all my “formal” writing, the stuff that I polished and carefully typed, was more or less fictional.
By the time I was seventeen I was an accomplished writer. Had I been a pianist, it would have been the moment for my first public concert. As it was, I decided I was ready to publish. I sent off stories to the principal literary quarterlies, as well as to the national magazines, which in those days published the best so-called “quality” fiction—Story, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly—and stories by me duly appeared in those publications.
Then, in 1948, I published a novel: Other Voices, Other Rooms. It was well received critically, and was a best seller. It was also, due to an exotic photograph of the author on the dust jacket, the start of a certain notoriety that has kept close step with me these many years. Indeed, many people attributed the commercial success of the novel to the photograph. Others dismissed the book as though it were a freakish accident: “Amazing that anyone so young can write that well.” Amazing? I’d only been writing day in and day out for fourteen years! Still, the novel was a satisfying conclusion to the first cycle in my development.
A short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, ended the second cycle in 1958. During the intervening ten years I experimented with almost every aspect of writing, attempting to conquer a variety of techniques, to achieve a technical virtuosity as strong and flexible as a fisherman’s net. Of course, I failed in several of the areas I invaded, but it is true that one learns more from a failure than one does from a success. I know I did, and later I was able to apply what I had learned to great advantage. Anyway, during that decade of exploration I wrote short-story collections (A Tree of Night, A Christmas Memory), essays and portraits (Local Color, Observations, the work contained in The Dogs Bark), plays (The Grass Harp, House of Flowers), film scripts (Beat the Devil, The Innocents), and a great deal of factual reportage, most of it for The New Yorker.
In fact, from the point of view of my creative destiny, the most interesting writing I did during the whole of this second phase first appeared in The New Yorker as a series of articles and subsequently as a book entitled The Muses Are Heard. It concerned the first cultural exchange between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.: a tour, undertaken in 1955, of Russia by a company of black Americans in Porgy and Bess. I conceived of the whole adventure as a short comic “nonfiction novel,” the first.
Some years earlier, Lillian Ross had published Picture, her account of the making of a movie, The Red Badge of Courage; with its fast cuts, its flash forward and back, it was itself like a movie, and as I read it I wondered what would happen if the author let go of her hard linear straight-reporting discipline and handled her material as if it were fictional—would the book gain or lose? I decided, if the right subject came along, I’d like to give it a try: Porgy and Bess and Russia in the depths of winter seemed the right subject.
The Muses Are Heard received excellent reviews; even sources usually unfriendly to me were moved to praise it. Still, it did not attract any special notice, and the sales were moderate. Nevertheless, that book was an important event for me: while writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary.
For several years I had been increasingly drawn toward journalism as an art form in itself. I had two reasons. First, it didn’t seem to me that anything truly innovative had occurred in prose writing, or in writing generally, since the 1920s; second, journalism as art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism, and when they did, it took the form of travel essays or autobiography. The Muses Are Heard had set me to thinking on different lines altogether: I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.
It was not until 1959 that some mysterious instinct directed me toward the subject—an obscure murder case in an isolated part of Kansas—and it was not until 1966 that I was able to publish the result, In Cold Blood.
In a story by Henry James, I think The Middle Years, his character, a writer in the shadows of maturity, laments: “We live in the dark, we do what we can, the rest is the madness of art.” Or words to that effect. Anyway, Mr. James is laying it on the line there; he’s telling us the truth. And the darkest part of the dark, the maddest part of the madness, is the relentless gambling involved. Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite the bullet and walk the plank, have a lot in common with another breed of lonely men—the guys who make a living shooting pool and dealing cards. Many people thought I was crazy to spend six years wandering around the plains of Kansas; others rejected my whole concept of the “nonfiction novel” and pronounced it unworthy of a “serious” writer; Norman Mailer described it as a “failure of imagination”—meaning, I assume, that a novelist should be writing about something imaginary rather than about something real.
Yes, it was like playing high-stakes poker; for six nerve-shattering years I didn’t know whether I had a book or not. Those were long summers and freezing winters, but I just kept on dealing the cards, playing my hand as best I could. Then it turned out I did have a book. Several critics complained that “nonfiction novel” was a catch phrase, a hoax, and that there was nothing really original or new about what I had done. But there were those who felt differently, other writers who realized the value of my experiment and moved swiftly to put it to their own use—none more swiftly than Norman Mailer, who has made a lot of money and won a lot of prizes writing nonfiction novels (The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, The Executioner’s Song), although he has always been careful never to describe them as “nonfiction novels.” No matter; he is a good writer and a fine fellow and I’m grateful to have been of some small service to him.
The zigzag line charting my reputation as a writer had reached a healthy height, and I let it rest there before moving into my fourth, and what I expect will be my final, cycle. For four years, roughly fr
om 1968 through 1972, I spent most of my time reading and selecting, rewriting and indexing my own letters, other people’s letters, my diaries and journals (which contain detailed accounts of hundreds of scenes and conversations) for the years 1943 through 1965. I intended to use much of this material in a book I had long been planning: a variation on the nonfiction novel. I called the book Answered Prayers, which is a quote from Saint Thérèse, who said: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” In 1972 I began work on this book by writing the last chapter first (it’s always good to know where one’s going). Then I wrote the first chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters.” Then the fifth, “A Severe Insult to the Brain.” Then the seventh, “La Côte Basque.” I went on in this manner, writing different chapters out of sequence. I was able to do this only because the plot—or rather plots—was true, and all the characters were real: it wasn’t difficult to keep it all in mind, for I hadn’t invented anything. And yet Answered Prayers is not intended as any ordinary roman à clef, a form where facts are disguised as fiction. My intentions are the reverse: to remove disguises, not manufacture them.
In 1975 and 1976 I published four chapters of the book in Esquire magazine. This aroused anger in certain circles, where it was felt I was betraying confidences, mistreating friends and/or foes. I don’t intend to discuss this; the issue involves social politics, not artistic merit. I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.
However, I did stop working on Answered Prayers in September 1977, a fact that had nothing to do with any public reaction to those parts of the book already published. The halt happened because I was in a helluva lot of trouble: I was suffering a creative crisis and a personal one at the same time. As the latter was unrelated, or very little related, to the former, it is only necessary to remark on the creative chaos.