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Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote,
Tennessee Williams, and Others
When he began his memoirs, Winston
Churchill said, ‘I know history will be kind to me because I intend to write
it.’ Memoirs are, by their nature, biased and often self-serving. Donald
Windham’s Lost Friendships: A Memoir of
Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others is no exception. Windham sees
his relationship with Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams through the prism of
pain—the pain of lost friendships. That he loved both men is evident. That he
remained tolerant and approachable long after Capote and Williams had turned
into caricatures of themselves, is a testament to one of love's
virtues—forbearance. Some critics have said that Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and
Others is nothing more than a one man pity party. Perhaps, but Windham’s
recollections of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams is much more than that,
because he draws on his journals from the 1940s right through to their deaths.
Also included in the book are excerpts of letters both men exchanged with
Windham. Unlike other biographers of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams who must
look back on the stellar lives of these two men, Donald Windham had the advantage,
as he notes himself, of being there at the beginning and therefore, is looking
forward rather than backward in time. Of Capote, Windham writes, ‘… One of the
reasons I liked him was that his desire to be liked was likable in itself.’ Truman’s
tragedy is explained, when in Sirmione, Italy, he told Windham that ‘…he wanted
to be in love with and faithful to someone who was in love with him and
faithful to him, but that he wasn’t attractive enough, and knew it.’
Those of us who’ve read Capote’s work
(other than In Cold Blood) marvel at
his skill with words. Who would suspect, as Windham points out, ‘Truman’s inspiration
for his writing was not experience, but reading.... He’d read another person’s
work, and then take from it elements that would inspire him. He didn’t take his
inspiration from other writers but from their works.’
Truman Capote’s slide into silliness, and later clownishness was gradual. It began with his earning a lot of money, and an exaggerated sense that he could say and do anything, because he was universally loved through his fame. His delusion, as Windham describes it, reached its zenith when Capote began to see himself living in a fantasy world where, he was the only real person in it. Conversely, when he gave a fantasy masked ball for 540 of his close friends he remarked, ‘that the mistake people made was in thinking that the host that gave the party was the real him.’
The second part of Lost Friendships deals with Donald Windham’s friendship with Tennessee
Williams, and in some ways it’s more wrenching because the two had collaborated
professionally, whereas Windham and Capote had not. Of Tennessee Williams,
Windham wrote, ‘He did something I longed to do and didn’t have the courage to.
He put writing before knowing where he was going to sleep or where his next
meal was coming from.’
Of their friendship Windham says, ‘He
possessed my friendship and [I] didn’t possess Tennessee’s; and was his wont,
he hadn’t valued what he had, because he had it, and he valued what he didn’t
have because he didn’t have it.’
Windham makes much of Tennessee’s
fixation with the notion of his own death. Windham writes, and I paraphrase
here, that Tennessee was haunted with the idea of his death, therefore he
mirrors his fear that his heart is going to give out (unfounded as it turns
out) in his characters, Big Daddy’s cancer in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Violet Venable’s madness in Suddenly Last Summer, or the poet
Nonno’s death in Night of the Iguana,
etc. Windham also refers to Tennessee’s ‘poison of success’, which Windham
suggests, permitted Williams to believe that people only loved him for his
success and not for himself as a person worthy of love.
Both Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams
were artistic titans who, when offered the poison of success took it greedily,
and it killed them.
So if you want to read about the lives of
two of America’s great writers through the eyes of one who was up close and
personal, then I recommend Lost
Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others. In
this book, I believe you will find, ‘A nougat in which the almonds are good.’*
I leave off with an observation from
Tennessee Williams. ‘The sins of the world are really only its partialities and
its incompletions.’
*Andre Gide on his book Straight is the
Gate. ‘A nougat in which the almonds are good.’
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Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Lost Friendships by Donald Windham
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