Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Randolph, who is in his mid-thirties, puzzles Joel with his odd behavior, his peculiar appearance—he dresses in silk pajamas and kimonos—and his ironic, Oscar Wilde-like way of speaking. “All children are morbid; it’s their one saving grace” is one of his epigrams. Joel is flattered by his attention, however, and as Randolph tells the story of his thwarted passion for a Mexican boxer, Pepe Alvarez, Joel begins to understand and sympathize with him. “The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries,” Randolph explains. “Weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.” In this and other passages, Randolph becomes the spokesman for the novel’s major themes—and the themes that dominate all of Truman’s writing: the loneliness that afflicts all but the stupid or insensitive; the sacredness of love, whatever its form; the disappointment that invariably follows high expectation; and the perversion of innocence.

  When Joel is finally allowed to see his father, he finds not the handsome, dashing man around whom he has built his fantasies, but an almost speechless paralytic who demands help by bouncing red tennis balls onto the floor from his bed. It was not his father’s, but Randolph’s spidery handwriting, in red ink on water-green paper, that had been on the letter bringing him to the Landing. Feeling both cheated and trapped, Joel runs away with Idabel, only to catch pneumonia from the rain and to be returned to the Landing. He is nursed back to health by Randolph, and in the end he realizes that there is no running away: the Landing is now his home, the place where he belongs. The queer lady with fat dribbling curls was Randolph, nostalgically dressed in the costume that had once attracted Pepe Alvarez at a Mardi Gras ball. When her ghostly face beckons from the window a second time, Joel obeys, pausing only, in the book’s last words, to look back at “the boy he had left behind.”

  Although Truman had never lived at any place as bizarre as Skully’s Landing and had never known a silver-tongued transvestite like Randolph, he had borrowed traits from real people for some of his characters. He could be examining a picture of himself at thirteen, for instance, when he describes Joel, who is “too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned” to be a real boy; he could also be referring to himself when he gives Joel his mother’s last name, Knox, rather than his father’s, Sansom. Harper Lee was a partial model for the rough and boyish Idabel—“sissy-britches,” she calls Joel—and poor Callie Faulk was the stand-in for the ever-complaining Miss Amy.

  Such surface similarities are insignificant compared with the hidden resemblances. On that subterranean level Truman has written, in symbol and allegory, the story of his boyhood. Joel is his alter ego, his emotional and spiritual Doppelgänger. Joel’s mother rejects him by dying; Nina rejected Truman by leaving him so often in the care of Sook and her other Faulk relations. The invalid at Skully’s Landing is Joel’s father in name only; so was Arch little more than a name to Truman. Joel is desperate for love—“God, let me be loved,” he prays—and so too, of course, was Truman. Joel makes several attempts to be a normal, heterosexual boy: he kisses Idabel, but is violently rebuffed; he tries to kill a dangerous swamp snake, but is petrified with fear. So too, in various ways, had a younger Truman tried and failed to be the normal boy his mother and everyone else wanted him to be. Finally, when he goes to join the queer lady in the window, Joel accepts his destiny, which is to be homosexual, to always hear other voices and live in other rooms. Yet acceptance is not a surrender: it is a liberation. “I am me,” he whoops. “I am Joel, we are the same people.” So, in a sense, had Truman rejoiced when he made peace with his own identity. Not for him were the guilt, disguises and endless remorse of a Newton.

  Almost nothing in Truman’s fictional world represents merely what it appears to be: it has another, deeper meaning as well. When a bell once used to summon slaves from the fields is uprooted from the ground, it signals Joel’s summons to a new life; when Mabel’s green-tinted play glasses are broken, she and Joel are forced to look at life as it is, in its true and often unpleasant colors. Symbol follows symbol in an intricate and quite deliberate pattern. Noon City, for example, was called Cherryseed City in Truman’s first draft, and Skully’s Landing was Minton’s Landing. Neither name had the extra dimension he was seeking; only in his second draft did he bestow upon them their more appropriate, symbolic names, which underline Joel’s psychological journey from day into night, from the active, aboveground world into the underground world of dreams. When he conveys Joel from the glare of Noon City through dark back roads to Skully’s Landing, Truman is entering his own subconscious.

  The people Joel encounters there are also meant to be understood symbolically. In its lack of realism and its reliance on symbolism, Other Voices is less a novel than a romance. A novel is, or should be, inhabited by realistic characters with a past and a future, as well as a present; a romance, by contrast, contains unrealistic, stylized figures who stand as psychological archetypes. “That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks,” explains the critic Northrop Frye, “and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around the fringes.” Randolph, Jesus Fever, and Joel’s father are all such stylized and archetypal figures, and the allegory that is creeping in around the fringes of Truman’s romance is an age-old one: the son in search of his father, the young man in quest of his identity. Although he arrives at another destination, a different concept of manhood, Joel Harrison Knox is walking in the footsteps of many a hero of myth and legend.

  A fiction so dense and freighted with symbols owes as much to poetry as it does to prose. “A poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion” was Truman’s own description of Other Voices. With the youthful exuberance of a lyric poet, he has rearranged the dictionary, exalting ordinary words into images of permanent beauty. When Joel first visits his father, he sets in motion “a menagerie of crystal chimes [that] tinkled on the mantel like brookwater”; in the eerie gloom of the Cloud Hotel, “water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom’s decaying piano.” At times, in his almost ecstatic reworking of language, Truman crowds too many of those vivid word pictures into too small a space, and his style veers into what might be called Swamp Baroque. But those overladen passages are uncommon and scarcely detract from the overall work, which is the product of a mature artist in sovereign control of his very considerable powers. Other Voices still surprises and astounds, as dreams and nightmares do.

  A month or so after he had finished writing it, Truman ran into his friend Doris Lilly on Madison Avenue. He was “bounding along like a goat in springtime,” she said, and although he stopped for a few seconds to say hello, he was too excited to stand still, bouncing up and down so vigorously that his glasses slid to the end of his nose. “They’re going to publish it!” he shouted. “My novel!” Then he bounded down the street again, “happy the way I have never seen a human being happy,” she said, “as he made his story come true.”

  As fall changed to winter, however, excitement waned and worry took its place. Rarely had a writer of fiction left himself so naked in print. For a mere two dollars and seventy-five cents, anyone could follow him to the most private corners of his mind. Nor could he claim, as novelists usually do, that his hero had sprung from his imagination, because there, on the back of the dust jacket, was a photograph of an author who exactly matched the description of Joel Harrison Knox. Appearing no more than thirteen himself, Truman lay languidly on a couch and peered up at the camera with eyes so wide and an expression so provocative that he seemed to be aiming at a seduction. That, certainly, was the message Newton had received when he had seen the picture a year earlier. “There is a look in [those] eyes that I know oh, so well,” h
e had said, “and that I decidedly hope no other human being knows in the same way. Do assure me that you were thinking of Notwen Nivra when you assumed that look!”

  Truman may well have been thinking of Notwen Nivra when he stared into Harold Halma’s Leica in January, 1947. But he had something else on his mind—publicity—when he showed his pictures to Bob Linscott, who chose that one for the dust jacket. Publicity was also on his mind when he said what he wanted written on the jacket’s inside flap, where authors traditionally list such things as their academic credits. Truman’s biography was, by contrast, more fictional than the story inside. He had, it stated, “written speeches for a third-rate politician, danced on a river boat, made a small fortune painting flowers on glass, read scripts for a film company, studied fortunetelling with the celebrated Mrs. Acey Jones, worked on The New Yorker, and selected anecdotes for a digest magazine….”

  When he wrote that in the fall, he had been, in his exhilarated mood, half in jest. Sitting in Northampton during the frigid and snowy Christmas holiday of 1947, suffering from a cold and sniffles, he had second thoughts, and normal prepublication jitters turned to panic. Most of the country—most of the world—seemed to him to be waiting for that slim volume of 231 pages. Booksellers reported that their customers had begun ordering it as early as October; Random House had scheduled an unusually large printing (for a first novel) of 10,000 copies; and unsolicited bids had already been received from eleven British and three French publishers, “an unprecedented situation for an author of a first novel that hasn’t even been published as yet,” declared the New York Herald Tribune. As Newton had predicted, publication of his book had become something of an event. Now Truman could only wonder: what would people say when they actually read it?

  The first reviews, which began appearing in early January, were not calming. “Much lush writing, frequently trailing off into illusory fancies of sick brains, losing its way, yet withal picturesque,” said the Library Journal. “Not recommended for libraries.” Then came a long barrage from the popular press. “The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told, except to get it out of the author’s system,” said Carlos Baker in The New York Times Book Review, the most influential such journal in the country. “Mr. Capote has concocted a witch’s brew which boils and boils to no avail,” said the critic for the Saturday Review. “[The book] is immature and its theme is calculated to make the flesh crawl…. The distasteful trappings of its homosexual theme overhang it like Spanish moss,” sneered Time; “a deep, murky well of Freudian symbols,” said Newsweek. “A minor imitation of a very talented minor writer, Carson McCullers,” adjudged Elizabeth Hardwick in Partisan Review.

  Although the prevailing opinion of the New York critics was negative, several found so much to praise that they seemed almost to have picked up a different title. “Other Voices, Other Rooms abundantly justifies the critics and readers who first hailed Capote as a writer of exceptional gifts,” wrote Lloyd Morris in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. “It is the most exciting first novel by a young American that this reviewer has read in many years, and it leaves him with the conviction that Capote’s talent is not only genuinely important but mature and resourceful.” Despite a few demurrers, Orville Prescott, the critic for the daily Times, generally agreed: “It is impossible not to succumb to the potent magic of his writing. Here are scenes as sharp and suggestive as anything in recent fiction…. Many a first novel is sounder, better balanced, more reasonable than Other Voices, Other Rooms. But few are more artistically exciting, more positive proof of the arrival of a new writer of substantial talent.”

  Outside Manhattan, most reviews were admiring. Contrary to what might have been expected, the “distasteful trappings” of homosexuality that had so upset the Time critic and some of his supposedly sophisticated colleagues in New York caused scarcely a flutter in the hinterland. “A short novel which is as dazzling a phenomenon as has burst on the literary scene in the last ten years,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune. “The clashing of characters makes a story worthy of the invention of Faulkner,” said the Dallas News. The Indianapolis Times announced the arrival of a masterpiece, “a book of extraordinary literary virtuosity—the kind of thing that makes most other fictional writing seem pedestrian and uninspired.”

  Like it or not, nearly every critic was struck by such an extravagant and dazzling display of linguistic fireworks, and many seemed compelled to make predictions about the future of its singular author. He “is gifted, dangerously gifted,” said the Times’s Prescott, who, like a stern but kindly teacher, went on to admonish him to “ponder long on how he intends to use his exceptional talents.” James Gray, a syndicated critic, appeared so stunned that he made an almost apocalyptic prophecy. Truman, he said, “seems destined to be one of our century’s bright angels of destruction.”

  Perhaps the most interesting and in some ways the most perceptive comments were never published. One came from Newton, to whom Other Voices was dedicated, and it was addressed to Newton’s friend Granville Hicks, who had found as much to fault as praise. “I can well understand one’s having reservations about Truman’s book,” responded Newton. “It’s not as if I didn’t have any of my own. But somehow—and it’s open to anyone to remark that I might be ever so slightly biased—I can’t think it’s terribly important to insist on the reservations just now. Whatever its limitations, the book is the work of a writer; the work of a boy born to be a poet and an artist, who touches with a kind of magic everything he draws near. Really, of how many young contemporary American writers can one possibly say that? And isn’t it the crucial point? So many journeymen; so many made writers; so many hacks. And then here comes a book that, to be perhaps pretentiously Jamesian, is very evidently the real right thing. Shouldn’t we simply, for the moment, thank our stars for that; and make the reservations in parentheses?”

  The second such comment came from Truman’s onetime mentor George Davis. Typical of the man, it was at once mean, shrewd and indelibly witty. Truman, who respected but feared the judgment of that “great literary ‘fig-yur,’” as he and Andrew sarcastically referred to him, had sent George an inscribed copy, then waited in vain for the expected congratulatory call. Not long after that, they met for dinner, but George still said nothing, devoting most of his attention to a discussion of the latest opera news during a long cab ride to a restaurant far uptown in Spanish Harlem. Truman sat in silence as they drove from the Fifties through the Sixties. He may even have held his tongue through the Seventies, but somewhere around Eightieth Street he was overcome by anxiety and, swallowing his pride, said, “George, I sent you a copy of Other Voices.”

  “Yes, I know. I got it,” said George, who, ignoring the hint, continued talking about the opera.

  “Um… um… um… have you read it?”

  “Oh, yes, I read it,” George replied, and, obviously enjoying the exchange, turned back to opera. “Have you heard those new Rossini arias that Jennie Tourel recorded, Andrew? They’re nothing like as good as Conchita Supervia’s.” Finally, Truman could bear the suspense no longer. “George, you said you got my copy of Other Voices and you said you read it,” he burst in, speaking so quickly and with such agitation that the words ran together to sound like one. “What did you think of it?”

  “Well,” George at last drawled, pausing to purse his lips and suck in his cheeks, as he usually did when he was about to make an important pronouncement. “I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn.”

  Other Voices almost immediately jumped onto the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for nine weeks. It sold more than 26,000 copies, a figure which, if not sensational, was considered extremely good, particularly given the subject matter and the lack of a conventional plot. Sales, however, were only one measure of its success. Although many other novels of 1948, including Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, outsold it several times over, no other was so much discussed, or became so con
troversial. Truman’s reputation, which had been building among literary people since “Miriam,” exploded in all directions. People who had never walked into a bookstore suddenly knew the name and, most certainly, the face of Truman Capote.

  Indeed, his photograph on the back cover probably caused more comment than his prose. Several papers and magazines reprinted it alongside their reviews, Random House used it in ads—“This is Truman Capote”—and huge blowups were sent to the shops. One night while Truman was visiting Andrew, Harold Halma went for a walk and overheard the conversation of two middle-aged women who were studying one of the blowups in a Fifth Avenue bookstore window. “I’m telling you, he’s just young,” said one. “And I’m telling you, if he isn’t young, he’s dangerous!” replied the other. Harold sprinted back to the apartment to tell Truman, who growled and pretended to be angry, but repeated the exchange to anyone who would listen.