Another iconic American literary figure has officially entered the Feud chat. On the fifth episode of Capote vs. The Swans, airing Wednesday night, Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) falls deeper into the depths of alcoholic despair as he continues to be alienated from his beloved swans after the fallout from his Esquire short story “La Côte Basque, 1965.” Enter a well-timed visit from none other than legendary writer and activist James Baldwin, portrayed by actor Chris Chalk, who both challenges and comforts the struggling author. In Capote vs. The Swans, the two seminal writers trade barbs and words of encouragement, and it turns out their real-life relationship was similarly fraught.
In the episode, “The Secret Inner Lives of Swans,” Baldwin visits Capote, who is in the midst of an alcohol-induced slumber, right as Capote is on the brink of ending it all. Chalk’s Baldwin is at once a sharpshooter and a relentless truth-teller, refusing to let Capote waste his gift. The pair bounces around New York, going from the restaurant La Côte Basque, where Capote accurately notes that his swans “would never do this—have lunch alone with a Black man,” to an underground gay bar where they commiserate about being queer writers in the mid-70s. They end up back at Capote’s apartment, where Baldwin inspires Capote to, at least temporarily, put down the bottle and pick up the pen. “Your book, it is the firing squad that killed the Romanovs,” Baldwin says to Capote in Feud. “It’s your guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette.” By the episode’s end, Capote has regained his sense of self and dines on a swan stolen from Central Park, prepared by a La Côte Basque chef no less.
In reality, Baldwin would most likely not have been around New York to guide Capote on his journey of self-discovery. By the mid-1970s Baldwin, like Capote, was already a prolific and celebrated author, having rose to national prominence via his lauded works like 1953’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, 1955’s essay collection Notes of a Native Son, and his controversial and groundbreaking queer novel Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956. By the time those books were published, Baldwin had long since abandoned his native Harlem for Paris, in large part due to the unrelenting racism in America. Baldwin would die on December 1, 1987, a few years after Capote, of stomach cancer at his home in Saint-Paul de Vence, France.
“I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.),” wrote Baldwin in his essay The Discovery of What It Means to be an American, in 1959. “I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer…Still, the breakthrough is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to leave this country.” Abroad, Baldwin would continue churning out beloved work, including his 1962 novel Another Country, his essay collection The Fire Next Time in 1963, and the novel If Beale Street Could Talk in 1974. (Nearly half a century later, in 2018, Barry Jenkins would adapt If Beale Street Could Talk into a film by the same name, starring KiKi Layne, Stephan James, and an Oscar-winning Regina King.) By the time Capote’s imagined rendezvous with Baldwin occurred in the mid-1970s, Baldwin was already primarily living in Saint-Paul de Vence. Capote vs. The Swans writer Jon Robin Baitz knew as much, framing episode five as “a play, really—an imagined encounter,” Baitz told Vanity Fair. “They knew each other, but there was no real love lost between them in actuality.”
Baitz clearly did his research. Capote, it seems, was not too fond of Baldwin’s writing, at least as far as his peer’s fiction was concerned. “I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom,” wrote Capote to literature scholar and Smith college professor Newton Arvin in 1962. While that was certainly less than complimentary, he had kinder things to say about Baldwin’s non-fiction writing, although that too was caged in Capote’s classic brand of caustic cattiness. “I do sometimes think his essays are at least intelligent, although they almost invariably end on a fakely hopeful, hymn-singing note.”
That’s not to say Capote was the only one who had acerbic words for Baldwin. In the December 17, 1964 issue of the New York Review of Books, American theatre critic Robert Brustein wrote a scathing review of Nothing Personal, a collaboration between Baldwin and famed high fashion photographer Richard Avedon. In the review, called “Everybody Knows My Name,” Brustein rips their collaboration to shreds, beginning, “Of all the superfluous non-books being published this winter for the Christmas luxury trade, there is none more demoralizingly significant than a monster volume called Nothing Personal.” Avedon’s photos were accompanied by occasional text from Baldwin, which Brustein also went out of his way to eviscerate in his review. Baldwin’s contributions to Nothing Personal, Brustein wrote, pop up “interrupting from time to time, like a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie, to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem.” Harsh.
Not so fast, said Capote. In his published response, “Avedon’s Reality,” found in the January 28, 1965 edition of The New York Review of Books, Capote defended Nothing Personal, saying that he was both “interested and startled” by Brustein’s review. “Brustein is an intelligent man: a theater critic of the first quality, one of only three this reader can read with a sense of stimulation,” Capote acknowledges. “But surely Brustein’s comments regarding the Avedon-Baldwin collaboration is as distorted and cruel as he seems to find Avedon’s photographs.”
While much of the letter is in defense of Avedon—a friend of Capote’s—the In Cold Blood author does show support for Baldwin too, disputing Brustein’s assertion that Baldwin and Avedon made the book simply for the money. “First of all, if the publisher of this book sold every copy, he would still lose money. Neither Baldwin nor Avedon will make twenty cents,” wrote Capote. “Brustein is entitled to think that Avedon and Baldwin are misguided; but believe me he is quite mistaken when he suggests, as he repeatedly does, that they are a pair of emotional and financial opportunists.” Even when they don’t like each other’s work, artists of a feather stick together.
