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Other Voices, Other Rooms Came to Him in the Form of a Revelation During a Walk in the Woods

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Other Voices, Other Rooms Came to Him in the Form of a Revelation During a Walk in the Woods Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Epigraph INTRODUCTION PART ONE ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE PART TWO SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN ELEVEN PART THREE TWELVE About the Author Copyright Page FOR NEWTON ARVIN The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9 INTRODUCTION John Berendt As Truman Capote remembered it years later, the idea for Other Voices, Other Rooms came to him in the form of a revelation during a walk in the woods. He was twenty-one, living with relatives in rural Alabama, and working on a novel that he had begun to fear was “thin, clever, unfelt.” One afternoon, he went for a stroll along the banks of a stream far from home, pondering what to do about it, when he came upon an abandoned mill that brought back memories from his early childhood. The remembered images sent his mind reeling, causing him to slip into a “creative coma” during which a completely different book presented itself and began to take shape, virtually in its entirety. Reaching home after dark, he skipped supper, put the manuscript of the troublesome unfinished novel into a bottom bureau drawer (it was entitled “Summer Crossing,” never published, later lost), climbed into bed with a handful of pencils and a pad of paper, and wrote: “Other Voices, Other Rooms—a novel by Truman Capote. Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can . .”1 Whether or not Capote’s remarkable first novel came to him as he said it did, in a spontaneous flow of words as if dictated by “a voice from a cloud,” the work that emerged two years later was as lyrical and rich in poetic imagery as if it had been written by a writer possessed. The setting of Other Voices, Other Rooms is the rural South of Capote’s youth rather than New York, where “Summer Crossing” had been set. Capote’s impressionist prose style creates an atmosphere of dreamlike elegance: “the white afternoon was ripening towards the quiet time of day when the summer sky spills soft color over the drawn land”; and at night, “a vine-like latticework of stars frosted the southern sky.” His narrative glows with an abundance of colors, some of which seem to have been invented on the spot: “The wagon’s rickety wheels made dust clouds that hung in the green air like powdered bronze.” He is no less ingenious in drawing character portraits, for example, the century-old black mule-driver, Jesus Fever, whose “face was like a black withered apple, and almost destroyed; his polished forehead shone as though a purple light gleamed under the skin.” As for the crotchety stepmother, Miss Amy: “Her voice had a weary, simpering tone; it struck the ear like the deflating whoosh of a toy balloon.” Capote fills the page with evocative images, one after the other, from fairy-tale sweet to downright eerie— as in the swampy ruins of the Cloud Hotel where in the ballroom “a fallen chandelier jeweled the dust, and weather- ripped draperies lay bunched on the waltz-waved floor like curtsying ladies”; and where “water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom’s decaying piano.” This is bravado wordplay—exuberant, brilliant, daring, and unabashedly ostentatious. The genre is pure Southern Gothic, set deep in a lush and mysterious terrain full of Spanish moss, overgrown gardens, and “swamplike hollows where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man’s head.” Capote christens his places with names that carry allegorical nuances: Noon City, Paradise Chapel, Skully’s Landing, the Cloud Hotel, the Drownin Pond. His characters are a collection of misfits, eccentrics, and oddballs, any one of whom would have been at home in virtually any story written by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, or Flannery O’Connor—even characters with minor roles: the one-armed barber; the traveling-show midget, Miss Wisteria; and the saloon-keeper, Miss Roberta, who toys with the single hair growing out of a wart on her chin. Other Voices, Other Rooms is the story of Joel Harrison Knox, a thirteen-year-old boy who was raised in New Orleans and, after his mother’s death, is sent to the rural South to live with his father who had abandoned him when he was an infant. Joel’s journey to his new home takes him to ever-smaller towns over less-traveled roads through yet murkier landscapes to the overgrown and nearly deserted Skully’s Landing. There, in a half-ruined mansion with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing, he meets his father, a bedridden, near-mute invalid who communicates by tossing red tennis balls from his bed onto the floor. Other members of this strange household include Joel’s strait- laced stepmother, her effeminate “silver-tongued” cousin Randolph, the old black mule-driver, and the mule-driver’s granddaughter, Missouri “Zoo” Fever. Capote at first denied that Other Voices, Other Rooms was autobiographical. And yet, like the fictional Joel Knox, Capote had been born in New Orleans, longed to see his absent father, was sent as a young boy into the rural South to live with relatives, and took his mother’s last name, not his father’s. Capote’s description of Joel as “too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned” could have been a self-portrait, as could the observation that “a girlish tenderness softened his eyes” and that “his voice was uncommonly soft.” Capote was taunted for his effeminacy; Joel is called “sissy-britches.” The tomboy Idabel is based on Capote’s childhood friend the writer Harper Lee, and the fretful Miss Amy is reminiscent of one of the relatives Capote lived with in Alabama, Callie Faulk. Twenty years after publication, Capote recanted somewhat. He admitted having come to realize that Other Voices had been an unconscious, intuitive attempt to exorcise his demons. “I was not aware,” he wrote in the November 1967 Harper’s, “except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.”2 To call it “unpardonable” seems a bit harsh. In order to create fictional characters and give them thoughts, speech patterns, mannerisms, and motives, writers have little choice but to draw on people they have known, including themselves, even though they may have no intention of writing an autobiography. Capote had done so repeatedly in his short stories. No matter how vivid the writer’s imagination, it is inevitable that his characters, however original they may seem on the page, will have antecedents in the real world, as stored in some form somewhere in the author’s mind. So it is not surprising to find traces of an author’s psychological DNA in his fictional characters—all of his fictional characters, not just the ones who resemble himself. Few first novels have created as much prepublication excitement as Other Voices, Other Rooms. Before its release in January 1948, the twenty-three-year-old Capote had published only a handful of very good short stories, and he had already become the talk of literary circles. Twentieth Century-Fox had optioned the movie rights for Other Voices sight unseen, and Life magazine had given Capote the most prominent display in a feature about young American writers, even though all the other writers covered in the story, including Gore Vidal and Jean Stafford, were better known at the time and had already published at least one novel. 3 It was not solely on the basis of Capote’s then-meager literary output that he managed to find himself in the spotlight. He had already become something of a personality in New York, and a very strange personality at that. He stood a diminutive five feet three, had a childlike face, blond bangs, a pixieish manner, a knack for drawing attention to himself, and an unflagging determination to be famous. Brendan Gill recalled that when Capote worked as a copyboy at The New Yorker at the age of seventeen, he looked “as exotic as an osprey,”4 with his round face, his shoulder-length blond hair, and his occasional opera cape. Upon catching sight of him in the hallway for the first time, the magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, cried out, “For God’s sake! What’s that?”5 In a year that also saw the publication of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, Capote’s book held its own. Critical response was, on balance, favorable. Canceling out the barb hurled by Carlos Baker in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (“The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told, except to get it out of the author’s system”6), the daily critic of the Times, Orville Prescott, praised “the potent magic of [Capote’s] writing” and declared that the book was “positive proof of the arrival of a new writer of substantial talent.”7 Discussion of the literary worth of Other Voices, however, became entangled with, and at times overshadowed by, even livelier talk about the provocative photograph that adorned the back of the dust jacket. The photograph, taken by Harold Halma, showed an androgynous, barely post-pubescent Capote lounging on a sofa in a sultry pose, looking seductively into the camera. The photograph caused a furor, and Capote was anguished that the distraction would take attention from the book and damage his reputation as a serious writer. He protested that the photograph had been a candid shot, taken when he was not aware of it, and that furthermore he had not been consulted on its use for the book jacket.
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