This is by Truman Capote (1924-84). It was published in 1948; it was his first novel; and it's semi-autobiographical.

I came across it via Henry Eliot's Read the Classics. It was flagged up on 30 September 2024, the 100th anniversary of Capote's birth, but as usual, I didn't tackle it in a timely fashion...

My version was brilliantly read by Cody Roberts. The story is set in the American Deep South, and hearing it read with the appropriate accents enhances the text enormously.

I didn't have much Capote experience. Breakfast at Tiffany's, of course, which I listened to in 1992, didn't initially like, but then very much warmed to. A Christmas Memory, another story on the same tape (yes, tape...), which I found poignant and evocative: "Oh my, it's fruit-cake weather!" And the 2005 movie Capote, which charts the genesis of his non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. According to my diary at the time, the film told a powerful story of exploitation and artistic conflict of interest.



***

On my first run-through, I found Other Voices, Other Rooms a tad bewildering, but always atmospheric, beautiful, and thought-provoking.

We open with Joel Knox, 13, being sent to live with his father, Edward Sansom. This father walked out on his child 12 years ago, so is an unknown quantity. But Joel's mother has now died, and his Aunt Ellen, who took him in, to live alongside her own numerous family, sees no reason to fail to comply with the father's wish.

Joel is clearly a fish out of water as he makes the journey from New Orleans to Skully's Landing (in an unspecified state that most people think is Alabama). He's delicate, with "a kind of tired, imploring expression" and "an unyouthful sag about his shoulders".

And from the start, there is some mystery about Edward Sansom. He's "the guy that married Amy Skully", says the truckdriver transporting Joel as far as Noon City, who remains cagey about the inhabitants of Skully's Landing (The Skulls, as locals ominously call it).

We go on to meet a cast of frankly peculiar characters: Shrivelled black centenarian Jesus Fever; his granddaughter, Zoo (fated, it seems, to encounter systemic male violence, but a friend to friendless Joel); the Thompkins sisters, in particular tomboy Idabel (struggling against conventional gender roles, and apparently modelled on Harper Lee); stepmother Miss Amy, whom we never entirely trust; and Miss Wisteria, a little person who's hard to categorize (adored by Idabel, but more than a little predatory towards Joel). Edward Sansom turns out not to be the hero of Joel's dreams, but paralysed, bedridden, and utterly helpless. Then there's Cousin Randolph, who -- well, more of him in a minute.


Somehow this Bologna street-art face made me think of Randolph...

The environment is more another character than a backdrop: A crumbling mansion, partly burned down; an over-exuberant garden; and beyond that, an always slightly threatening stretch of countryside.

Examples: "Grass and bush and vine and flower were all crushed together. Massive chinaberry and waterbay formed a rigidly enclosing wall. Now at the far end, opposite the house, was an unusual sight: like a set of fingers, a row of five white fluted columns lent the garden the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin: Judas vine snaked up their toppling slenderness, and a yellow tabby cat was sharpening its claws against the middle column... Invisible birds prowling in leaves rustled, sang; beneath the still facade of forest restless feet trampled plushlike moss where limelike light sifted to stain the natural dark... Black, orange-trimmed butterflies wheeled over wheel-sized ponds of stagnant rain water, the glide of their wings traced on green reflecting surfaces; a rattlesnake’s cellophane-like sheddings littered the trail, and broken silver spiderweb covered like cauls dead fallen branches."

Everywhere, ghosts. Not only the mysterious figure at the window, whom Joel occasionally catches a glimpse of, but layer upon layer of ghostly memories, etched not only upon Skully's Landing but upon the Cloud Hotel, deserted now, and inhabited only by Little Sunshine, the hermit.

This is a good description of the effect: "Capote’s writing ... can only be described as intoxicating: it sweeps the reader away to a world of decaying mansions, eerie swamplands and nightmarish travelling shows -- a world populated by faded southern belles, misshapen hermits and haunted children -- and lingers in the mind long after the final, glittering sentences have disappeared between the covers."

These elements are the hallmarks of Southern Gothic, of course. Thomas Aervold Bjerre summarizes: "Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations... The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history."

Certainly, this all fits. Marcus Klein, writing about Other Voices in 1969, comments: "All around there are suggestions of an ancient (and ambiguous) evil by which the viability of the South was destroyed, and all the adults around Joel are engaged in looking backward to a dream of the past, the other voices and other rooms."


These strange Bologna sculptures chimed in with my reading of this book...

And through all this kaleidoscope of impressions, we perceive, loud and clear, Joel's longing to be loved. Quite early in the piece, he joins Jesus Fever and Zoo for a prayer meeting:

"There was no prayer in Joel's mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil-paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

"'Amen,' whispered Zoo.

"And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came."

This is one of the most moving moments in a book that champions all kinds of outsiders and oddities, all those who are lonely and alienated and isolated for whatever reason, all those who are just looking for a way to be.



***

Capote himself said the central theme of the book "was my search for my father -- a father who, in the deepest sense, was nonexistent".

About two thirds of the way through the book, we learn the backstory of two potential father-figures, Edward and Randolph.

Edward, back in the day, managed a boxer called Pepe Alvarez. Randolph's girlfriend, Dolores, falls in love with Pepe. But so does Randolph: "It was different, this love of mine for Pepe, more intense than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier." The four of them continue as "grotesque quadruplets", until one night Pepe and Dolores abscond, taking everything with them. Randolph, in a kind of stupor, ends up shooting Ed, who stays alive, but never recovers. Amy comes from Skully's Landing. She and Ed marry in New Orleans, but that's a strange sort of business. According to Randolph, she's now what she always wanted to be: A nurse (given her effect on bluejays, however, we're not sure how tender a nurse she will be). They all return to the Landing: "I suppose," says Randolph, "we shall go on together until the house sinks, until the garden grows up and weeds hide us in their depth." He continues, meanwhile, to search for Pepe Alvarez, sending letter after letter to postmasters around the world. (And, of course, it's Randolph who wrote the letter to Ellen, the one that purported to be from Ed, requiring the presence of Joel.)

Joel, too, is starting to discover himself. He's drawn to the stroppy and unfeminine Idabel. He hides from Miss Wisteria: "He dared not show himself, for what she wanted he could not give."

At the end, Joel narrowly misses being reclaimed by Ellen, who comes to visit. But he's not theirs any more. He has sided with Randolph: "His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus. The wall yellowed in the meticulous setting of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold, seasonal colour. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph’s window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge where, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

Gerald Clarke, in his biography of Capote, writes: "Truman has written, in symbol and allegory, the story of his boyhood. Joel is his alter ego, his emotional and spiritual Doppelgaenger. 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... 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."

Others see more ambivalence in this decision: "Joel chooses the surety of his new-found family at Skully’s Landing rather than once again becoming a drifter... Whether this is a positive or a negative choice is left rather ambiguous: Joel has left behind his adolescence and become a man, but he does so by joining the human-ghosts that populate Skully’s Landing."

Of course, you can argue long and hard about the potential exploitation inherent in the situation we leave Joel in. But the age was the age: Would he have been happier with Ellen and Co? Or would he have become the self-denier that James Baldwin portrays in Giovanni's Room?



***

Other Voices almost immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list. And sales were aided by Harold Halma's publicity photo, which graced the back of the 1948 edition dust jacket:



The photo gambit made Capote vulnerable, however, ensuring that the autobiographical core of the book was obvious to the world. As Clarke comments: "Truman... had not foreseen that the picture would overshadow and in some ways trivialize the work it was promoting."

***

This is a novel that resembles a luxuriant jungle, and I feel I've only scratched the surface in my double pass: First listening, and then looking at the text more closely. Paul Carmignani points out that it "has been puzzling the critics ever since it saw print; because of its poetic and highly idiosyncratic nature, it is open to a variety of interpretations". He quotes a Capote interview where the author explains how each of the characters represents some aspect of himself, suggesting a kind of phantasmagoric hall of mirrors (and, indeed, mirrors are mentioned fairly frequently in the text). So this is a little disorienting.

Yet, as Capote says, he was attempting to escape "from the realities of my own troubled life, which wasn’t easy. My underlying motivation was a quest for some sense of serenity, some particular kind of affection that I needed and wanted... I never felt I belonged anywhere".

That comes across quite unambiguously. And that we can understand.