Well, it was perhaps too good to last. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, and have found many of the structural and aesthetic choices, like that black-and-white episode, to be inspired ways of fleshing out a rather slim petty dispute between a writer and his muses. But I may have to draw the line at the level of fictionalization in “The Secret Inner Lives of Swans.”
We’re back in 1975, the day after the Esquire excerpt of Answered Prayers came out. Babe is furious at her husband and at that other love of her life, Truman himself. And Truman is adrift, at a loss how to move on. We’ve seen this before, Truman’s inability to have anticipated how his swans (Babe in particular) would react. But here we’re finally shown what pulled Truman out of his funk: none other than James Baldwin (Chris Chalk), who spends a day talking and dining and drinking with Capote, eventually getting him on track to understand what it was about Answered Prayers that called to him in the first place. By the end of the episode, the In Cold Blood writer is ready to pick up his pen again, to slay and feast upon the swans he once so loved.
I had to go back and sift through Laurence Leamer’s Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era — the book this series is based on — to make sure I hadn’t missed this juicy bit of writerly buddy-comedy interaction. Had I forgotten some anecdote about how the public (if put-on) rivalry between two gay American literary titans somehow helped push Truman out of his funk? I had not. There is nothing, in the public record at least, that would suggest such a meeting took place, let alone at the narratively convenient time Feud places it. And with Truman’s many drunken escapades, we can’t discount the possibility that this whole encounter is meant as a fever dream, a way for Feud and its fictional Capote alike to imagine an all-too-didactic dialogue while advancing the idea that our Truman is slowly losing his mind, yet remains cognizant enough of what he needs to do if he is to finish Answered Prayers. (It involves a sacrificed swan at the dinner table.)
Listen, a series like Feud was always going to take artistic liberties. I lauded it for doing so during the masquerade-ball episode: Using the Maysleses’ footage as the structuring conceit to stress how Capote’s swans were the OG housewives avant la lettre was inspired. But I am conflicted about what to make of arguably the most celebrated Black gay author of his generation being reduced to a narrative device through which our southern white protagonist finds his way. When Truman is at his worst, Baldwin arrives — first via telephone, and then at La Côte Basque — at the most opportune time to remind Truman that he is, and here I quote, “the toughest little faggot in town.” He serves no other purpose than helping his friend and sometimes-catty rival remember he is an author worth fearing — which is, in a way, what Babe and the other swans are really responding to.
Now, having dispensed with the obvious complaint about this episode’s central conceit, there are, I’ll admit, certain elements of these two literary figures’ wholly fictional day together that are effective. It would take someone like Baldwin to so artfully articulate how class and especially race — not to mention sexuality — are central to the way Truman’s swans are able to move through the world, to jab at Truman enough to get him to admit that his whiteness got him into rooms that remain shut to Baldwin. (“It is impossible for a white person — or, an American white person — to not be in some fundamental sense a racist,” Baldwin expounds at one point.) There’s an ambitious goal here, which is to filter Truman’s insights through the lens Baldwin used to understand the United States. If what Truman struggled with after publishing “La Côte Basque” was how to collect his thoughts on his swans into something memorable (something worthy of Proust), then it would require going not just for the gossip, but for the jugular — to portray how Babe and all those other swans were representative of an America as rotted and rotting as the European society they so desperately emulated.
Feud understands Baldwin is better positioned to distill Truman’s tidbits into broader critiques, and just as with Albert Maysles in the masquerade episode, Baldwin serves as a foil to whom Truman can vocalize the very things that filled his letters and notebooks: utterly bitchy remarks about the swans that, to hear Feud’s version of Truman tell it, he kept out of “La Côte Basque” precisely because he was going after the men, not the women. With Baldwin as his interlocutor, we get an eloquent Capote who could, perhaps, have made Answered Prayers into something as glorious and astute and truthful as the writer hoped it would be.
And so “The Secret Inner Lives of Swans” leverages Baldwin as a figure that allows Capote to unearth everything he’d been omitting from Answered Prayers and, in so doing, accomplishes in an hour of television what the original short story did to Babe and her ilk: airs their dirty laundry with a vicious hatred, with no love, just a desire to lay bare how empty and vapid the swans really were. (Could we have done without Baldwin’s biology lessons on actual swans, in particular his factoids about how strong gay swans really are? Yes. Mostly because they feel lacking in the sort of elegant prose the writer was so well known for then and especially now.) As Baldwin and Capote dine at La Côte Basque, peruse abstract paintings at the MoMA, and have drinks at the Library (a famed “cocksucker” bar in Manhattan), their conversation opens up the lives of Babe, Slim, Lee, Ann, and C.Z. more than any episode before this one. Narratively, it’s as if Feud began merely presenting the swans through Truman’s adoring eyes, allowing only their most beautiful faults (like Babe’s perfection) to be sketched. Now, though, with Baldwin’s stewardship, we’re finally given an unvarnished look.
We see a crass Slim using self-deprecating humor (“‘Formidable excellence’ is code for a dry hump!”) to illustrate how the gossip they share is a way to maintain their own social status. We see a vain Lee opting to go under the knife (“Everything the swans do is skin deep”) and encouraging Truman to take better care of himself; he’s looking awfully weathered, especially when he’s been on television. We see a drunken Babe disrupting her daughter’s birthday party (“All my swans are terrible mothers”), all that perfection crumbling. And we also see Babe and Lee ganging up on Ann, cutting her down to size in an ungodly display of social cruelty (“They have no ounce of humility or compassion”), which leads to the most delicious use of the F-word Feud has deployed yet.
The day serves as a way to replenish Truman’s talent and insight, to have him forgo any fears of what he might do to his swans, and it ends in a rightfully operatic manner: Not only has Truman allegedly finished writing Answered Prayers (he’s read much of it to Joanne Carson), but he’s somehow convinced a handsome Tavern on the Green waiter–cum–wannabe chef to kill a swan and cook him for him. All while “Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas opera trills in the background. Again, it’s all a bit on the nose, but there’s no denying it’s an efficient way to showcase Capote’s return to form. Except we know where that eventually leads him …
Wit vs. Beauty
• After comparing himself to Prometheus last week, Capote now gets compared to that “American Prometheus” himself: Oppenheimer! Oscar FYC campaigning is getting out of hand!
• Anyone who’s watched Capote (2005) surely remembers the key mention of Baldwin that tees up Truman taking on In Cold Blood: After telling an assembled party of guests that he lunched with “Jimmy” the other day, he piquantly teases what he thought of him: “He’s lovely, he’s a lovely man. And he told me the plot of his new book. And he said, ‘I just wanted to make sure it’s not one of those problem novels,’ you know. And I said, ‘Jimmy. Your book is about a Negro homosexual who’s in love with a Jew. Wouldn’t you call that a problem.’” Philip Seymour Hoffman managed to imbue the quip — meant to be cutting even as it felt so carefully self-directed — with the necessary bitterness.
• Which brings us to the one line about Baldwin Capote’s readers may be more familiar with. In 1962, in a letter to Newton Arvin, he expounded expansively on what he thought of his fellow writer: “I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom. I do sometimes think his essays are at least intelligent, although they almost invariably end on a fakely hopeful, hymn-singing note.” At least Feud hints at this kind of rivalry, with both Truman and Jimmy admitting maybe it’s because they so respected each other’s work that they came so hard for one another.
• As for other gay writers of the time, like, say Gore Vidal? “Gore?” Truman mumbles. “He’s dancing in joy at my misfortune. Voodoo doll in hand.” If nothing else, this episode should get someone in Hollywood interested in making a full-blown limited series about the coterie of mid-century gay writers and artists: Who doesn’t want to see Truman interacting with Vidal? With Williams? With Auden? With O’Hara? With Isherwood? With Cadmus? (The list goes on!)
