
          Marie Faulk Rudisill. Truman Capote. William
Morrow & Co., 1983.
          By Swift, HarrietHarriet Swift
          Vol. 5, No. 6, 1983, pp. 21-23
          
          Marie Faulk Rudisill, Truman Capote's aunt, has succeeded in
accomplishing what most people thought was impossible: she has brought
her nephew and the homefolks in Monroe County, Alabama, into complete
agreement. Both Capote and Monroeville are deeply offended by
Rudisill's new book, Truman Capote, and are united in
their opinion of the memoir: It's all wrong.
          The book, subtitled "The story of his bizarre and exotic boyhood by
an aunt who helped raise him, "tells of Capote's childhood, filtered
through the history of lore of his mother's family. Rudisill, now
seventy-two and living in Beaufort, South_Carolina, wrote the book
with the help of James C. Simmons, a California writer with an
academic background in Southern literature.
          Rudisil1 opens her story with the 1954 suicide of Lillie Mae Faulk
Persons Capote, her sister and Truman's mother. After an intimate
pre-funeral chat with her nephew about his homosexuality and her
dashed hopes for a match with his childhood friend and Monroeville
neighbor, Nelle Harper Lee (author of To Kill a
Mockingbird), Rudisill settles down for one of those languid,
repetitive family brooding sessions that every Southerner is
acquainted with from birth. AII family closets and cupboards are
emptied and ruminated over, underlining the favorite themes of love,
love lost, betrayal, the inevitability of hardship and the evil in the
hearts of men, women and small children.
          Rudisill chronicles the fortunes of the Faulk tribe from the time
of the War between the States, which she says devastated the huge
family plantation and left the family destitute. One daughter, in the
best Scarlette O'Hara tradition, grasps that King Cotton's rule is
over and determines to build a new life. She parlays her sewing talent
into a small shop that offers hats, lingerie and other feminine finery
to the town carriage trade. Jenny Faulk, who never marries, is a woman
of iron will and razor-sharp business instincts. She builds a house in
Monroeville and becomes head of a family which includes her widowed
mother, a brother and two spinster sisters. Later, two young cousins
from Mississippi are added to the household when their parents' deaths
leave them orphans.
          One of the orphans begins a family of his own at eighteen, briefly
bringing his sixteen-year-old bride to Miss Jenny's house before
striking out on his own as a horse trader. When he is mortally injured
while breaking a horse, Miss Jenny brings his widow and five children
to her house. The young widow grieves herself to death and Miss Jenny
takes on the raising of the children. The eldest is the beautiful and
spirited Lillie Mae. She and Jenny fight constantly.
          In the middle of this unending battle of wills is Lillie Mae's
younger sister Marie, nicknamed Tiny, who is alternately Lillie Mae's
confidante and victim. The imperious Lillie Mae sets her cap for a
rich husband and fetches up one Archulus Persons, the unattractive and
unambitious son of a Fine Old Alabama Family from Troy. Their son
Truman 

is born in 1924 and is more or less consigned to Miss Jenny's
household until Lillie Mae acquires a second mate in 1931, a wealthy
Cuban businessman who lives in New_York City. There are regular visits
back to Monroeville but Truman has been molded by growing up amidst a
family headed by a stern matriarch, an indifferent mother, an
obsessively devoted older spinster (Sook, the model for the sweet,
simple-natured cousin in A Christmas Memory), and the
other "bizarre and exotic" members of the household and citizenry of
Monroe County.
          Although Truman Capote now issues a blanket "no comment" through
his literary agency on his aunt's book, he was quoted in The
Washington Post shortly after its publication as saying "If there are
twenty words of truth in it, I will go up on a cross to save
humanity." Monroeville, always more circumspect in its pronouncements
than its most famous son, puts its feeling another way: "Why would she
do this to her family?" is the first response when the home folks are
asked about Rudisill's book. "Why would she do this to Monroeville?"
is almost always the next comment.
          Capote's discomfort is easy to understand. No matter how
uninhibited one has been about coming out of the homosexual closet and
making literary hay of an unorthodox family background in the
mysterious South, it can only be painful to have childhood foibles and
parental indifference committed to the printed page. Especially when
the story is being told by a relative one has not seen or spoken to in
fifteen years.
          Monroe County's unhappiness with the book is part of a larger
problem. This dignified, tranquil Black_Belt community prides itself
on an unremarkable gentility that prized good manners, bland opinions
and unbroken calm. There were no civil_rights demonstrations in Monroe
County, no "incidents" that made their way to the six o'clock
news. There was no Ku Klux Klan to speak of, and the county has
remained a bastion of temperance to this day. Into this peaceful
Southern Eden came unwanted and distasteful celebrity through the
successful writing careers of Capote and Nelle Lee. To Monroeville,
Marie Rudisill's memoir is yet another cross to bear.
          Although the hometown reaction is rooted in a code that believes in
keeping family skeletons in the closet and settling disputes behind
locked doors, the predictable wail of "It's not true! That isn't the
way it happened!" seems justified. There are some odd errors and
omissions in the memoir that nod darkly toward hazy memories of half a
century ago shaped for publication by, say, a California writer with a
background in Southern literature. For the reader unfamiliar with
Alabama and Monroe County, Rudisill stretches her credibility with
supposedly verbatim quotes of long conversations that took place over
fifty years ago and, in some cases, before her birth. For the reader
who does know anything about Monroe County, the story is riddled with
inaccuracies and puzzlements.
          One of the strangest assertions concerns the love of Lillie Mae's
life, a proud Indian doctor from a nearby reservation. There are no
Indian reservations in Monroe County and never have been, according to
those familiar with the generally unimpressive history of the
county. Rudisill places the reservation on the edge of town, Claiborne
(consistently misspelled as "Clairborne), at the edge of the Alabama
River. The names of families and institutions are misspelled
(including her own college) and well-known facts are scrambled. She
says, for instance, that Nelle Lee's only brother died at birth, when
he in fact was the model for To Kill a Mockingbird's
Jem.
          Monroeville's indignant howls of "how could she do this!" go to the
heart of the book's purpose and the town's annoyance. Actually, it's
easy to see how Aunt Tiny could do this to her family (two sisters,
reportedly very unhappy over the memoir, still live in
Monroeville). The book is less about Monroeville and the shaping of a
literary legend than it is about the settling of old scores. Lillie
Mae Capote has been dead almost thirty years, but the wounds she
inflicted on her younger sister have never quite healed. Lillie Mae,
the egotistic beauty, delighted in humilating others and her
apparently eager to please young sister was a target too easy to pass
up. The guileless Tiny even followed Lillie Mae to New_York, but
complains bitterly about being used and manipulated by her sister. The
sins of the mother are visited in the son, who seems never to have
properly appreciated all that Aunt Tiny did for him.
          "How could she do this to Monroeville," is a bit more
complex. Although Rudisill spins yarns that she knows go against
Monroe County's grain, telling of wanton young white_women (Lillie
Mae), interracial alliances producing children acknowledged by white
fathers (in one case her uncle), wild bucks who rode horses into
stores and staid businesswomen with secret lovers from New
Orleans (shudder), she emphasizes her family's refinement,
uniqueness and charm at every chance. Her father's horses weren't just
horses, but "magnificent white stallions," they all attended
"prestigious" schools, ordered clothes from "the finest stores," and
were included among the "gentry" of Monroe County. The Faulks, one is
supposed to see, were a Fine Old Family of charming eccentrics in the
best Southern tradition. Even without the notoriety bestowed by Truman
Capote, the Faulks were an impressive and intriguing bunch, her book
insists. Aunt Tiny may have been an overlooked middle child, but she
is emphatic that her family was counted among the aristocracy.
          Monroeville, however, is having none of it. Tiny has captured some
of the atmosphere of the time, those who have read the book say
politely, citing her descriptions of 1920s and '30s which recount the
long summers of heat and ennui, the insular life in the Black
Belt. But the balance of the book is not credible, they add, taking
special exception to Rudisill's depiction of the Faulks as a leading
family. She has "flowered up" the family's story, to use the words of
one Monroeville matron who hated the book. "The Faulks were rather
common," she says calmly, "not our kind of people." There was no
Taraesque plantation, say others who knew the family, vaguely
recalling some acreage outside of town. The general consensus paints
Miss Jenny and her clan as hardworking country people who took care of
their own but were regarded as a peculiar bunch and relegated to the
edges of the "nicest" circles.
          Truman Capote (the book) has garnered so-so to 
hostile reviews in
the literary world, causing only a small ripple of interest. In Monroe
County, it is being received with a sigh of resignation. There's a
waiting list for the town library's one copy. Those who have ordered
personal copies from bookstores in Birmingham and Atlanta are plied
with requests from family and frieds for a look-see. The town 

that
Nelle Lee described in To Kill a Mockingbird as a
"tired old" place in 1935 has grown and even prospered a bit. There's
a big Vanity Fair (lingerie) sewing factory, a junior college and
several large pulpwood mills on the Alabama River. But it's still a
very conservative place, completely satisfied with itself. A little
probing convinces one that the oft-stated indifference to celebrity is
genuine. Even if Nelle Lee were not obsessive about her privacy (she
has not published since the huge success of Mockingbird in 1960, she
does not give interviews and cuts off anyone who is quoted in print
about her) and if Truman Capote did not live what is delicately
referred to as "an unusual lifestyle," Monroeville would still not be
interested in being known for its writers.
          There is a market for Monroeville. Ann Pridgen, the town librarian,
reports a steady stream of letters and visitors from all over the
United_States and several foreign countries seeking information about
the town and its famous son and daughter. Steve Stewart, editor of the
county's excellent weekly newspaper, The Monroe
Journal, is often called on by visiting writers and
journalists who single out Monroe County when writing about the
South. Yet there are no To Kill a Mockingbird T-shirts
to be had in Monroeville, no signs proclaiming this the childhood home
of Lee and Truman Capote, only a mimeographed handout available at the
library of Chamber of Commerce office explaining that the Lee house is
now the site of a Dairy Queen and Boo Radley's tree does not
exist. The reading room in the musty museum in the old courthouse is
the Nelle Harper Lee-Truman Capote Room, but even that concession to
fame seems unenthusiastic and underplayed. Something was expected of
the town, and that seems to be [unclear]response.
          "We're the safest folks in the world," explains one shrewd
character in To Kill a Mockingbird to the disillusioned Jem and
Scout. The safest folks are nice to know and pleasant to visit but ill
at ease with the world of ideas and mystified by fame that seems to
them based on stories that are not "true" and images that are
distorted. Monroe Country, which did not choose to run for literary
immortality, has nevertheless been elected, but firmly refuses to
serve.
          
            Harriet Swift, currently a reporter with the
Oakland Tribune, is a native Alabamian who spent her
childhood summers on her grandfather's farm in Monroe
County.
          
        
