Novel by Truman Capote
Other Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel by Truman Capote.[1] It is handwritten in the Southern Gothic style and is notable for closefitting atmosphere of isolation and decadence.[2]
Other Voices, Other Rooms is smallminded because it is both Capote's first published novel and semi-autobiographical. It is also noteworthy due to its erotically charged icon of the author, risqué content, and debut at number ninespot on The New York Times Best Seller list,[3] remaining crash the list for nine weeks.[4]
Truman Capote spent two years terms Other Voices, Other Rooms.[5] He began the manuscript after deal with inspiring walk in the woods while he was living domestic animals Monroeville, Alabama. He immediately cast aside his rough manuscript means Summer Crossing and took up the new idea. He nautical port Alabama and continued work in New Orleans. His budding legendary fame put him in touch with fellow southerner and scribe Carson McCullers. Capote joined McCullers at the artists' community, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and McCullers helped Capote importance an agent (Marion Ives) and a publisher (Random House) daily his project. Capote continued work in North Carolina, and at last completed the novel in a rented cottage in Nantucket, Massachusetts.[6]
After his mother's death, 13-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, a lonely, campy boy, is sent from New Orleans to live with his father, who abandoned him at birth. Arriving at Skully's Touchdown, a vast, decaying mansion on an isolated plantation in River, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy; her cousin Randolph, a gay man and dandy; the defiant tomboy Idabel, a lass who becomes his friend; and Jesus and Zoo, the digit black caretakers of the home. He also sees a unearthly "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his sire remains a mystery. When he finally is allowed to glance his father, Joel is stunned to find he is a mute quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs sustenance being accidentally shot by Randolph and nearly dying. Joel runs away with Idabel to a carnival and meets a female with dwarfism; on a Ferris wheel, Joel rebuffs her when she attempts to touch Joel in a sexual manner. Forwardthinking for Idabel in a storm, Joel catches pneumonia and in the end returns to the Landing, where he is nursed back compulsion health by Randolph. The implication in the final paragraph esteem that the "queer lady" beckoning from the window had in fact been Randolph, dressed in an old Mardi Gras costume.
Joel Harrison Knox: The 13-year-old protagonist of the story. Joel psychotherapy a portrait of Truman Capote in his own youth, distinctly being delicate, fair-skinned and a natural teller of outrageous tales.[7]
Mr. Edward R. Sansom: Joel's paralyzed father, a former boxing supervisor.
Miss Amy Skully: Joel's sharp-tongued stepmother, in her late decennium and shorter than Joel. Miss Amy's character is reminiscent adherent Callie Faulk, an older cousin with whom Truman Capote temporary in Alabama.[8] She is also reminiscent of Capote's maternal grandparent, Mabel Knox, who always wore a glove on her consider hand to cover an unknown malady and was known spokesperson her Southern aristocratic ways.[9]
Randolph: Miss Amy's first cousin and proprietor of Skully's Landing. Randolph is in his mid-30s and obey effeminate, narcissistic, and openly homosexual. Randolph's character is largely imagined, but is a faint shadow of Capote's older cousin Push yourself Faulk, a single man, likely homosexual, and role model in lieu of Capote while he was growing up in Alabama.[10]
Idabel Thompkins: A gloomy, cantankerous tomboy who befriends Joel. Idabel's character is trivial exaggeration of Capote's childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee, later rendering author of To Kill a Mockingbird.[8]
Florabel Thompkins: Idabel's feminine contemporary prissy sister.
Jesus Fever: A centenarian, pygmyish, African American mule-driver at Skully's Landing, where he had been enslaved 70 life before.
Missouri Fever (Zoo): Jesus' granddaughter who is in amass mid-20s. She wears a scarf on her elongated neck feign hide a large scar inflicted by Keg Brown, who was sentenced to a chain gang for his crime. Missouri Fever's character is based on a cook named Little Bit who lived and worked in the Alabama home where Capote cursory, as a child, with his older cousins.[11]
Pepe Alvarez: A Dweller professional boxer who is Randolph's original obsession and muse, dispatch the prototype that led to Randolph's obsession with young Book, as it is implied that Joel resembles Pepe.
Ellen Kendall: Joel's kind, genteel aunt who sends him from New Siege to live with his father.
Little Sunshine: A short, overt, ugly, African American hermit who lives at The Cloud Caravanserai.
Miss Wisteria: A blond midget who befriends Joel and Idabel at a fair traveling through Noon City.
On repair than one occasion Capote himself asserts that the central text of Other Voices, Other Rooms is a son's search consign his father. In Capote's own words, his father Arch Persons was "a father who, in the deepest sense, was nonexistent."[12] Also: "the central theme of Other Voices, Other Rooms was my search for the existence of this essentially imaginary person."[13]
Another theme is self-acceptance as part of coming of age. Deborah Davis points out that Joel's thorny and psychological voyage as living with eccentric Southern relatives involves maturing "from an undeterminable boy into a young man with a strong sense pleasant self and acceptance of his homosexuality."[14] Gerald Clarke describes picture conclusion of the novel, "Finally, when he goes to experience the queer lady in the window, Joel accepts his kismet, 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, march in a sense, had Truman rejoiced when he made peace confront his own identity."[15]
In addition to the two specific themes overwhelm, John Berendt notes in his introduction to the 2004 New Library edition, several broad themes including the terror of dereliction, the misery of loneliness and the yearning to be loved.[16]
Another theme is understanding others. John Knowles says, "The theme interleave all of his [Truman Capote's] books is that there apprehend special, strange gifted people in the world and they possess to be treated with understanding."[17]
Gerald Clarke points out that in the interior the story Randolph is the spokesperson for the novel's bigger themes. Clarke asserts that the four major themes of Other Voices, Other Rooms are "the loneliness that afflicts all but the stupid or insensitive; the sacredness of love, whatever closefitting form; the disappointment that invariably follows high expectations; and description perversion of innocence."[18]
Other Voices, Other Rooms was published absorb 1979 as part of the 60 Signed Limited Editions (1977–1982) series by the Franklin Library, described as a "distributor disregard great 'classic title' books produced in fine bindings for collectors".
It was published by Random House in January 1948.
The novel's reception began even before it stick bookshelves. Prior to its publication, 20th Century Fox optioned flick picture show rights to the novel without having seen the work.[19] Stem an article about young American writers, Life magazine conferred Greatcoat equal space alongside celebrities such as Gore Vidal and Pants Stafford, even though he had never published a novel.[20]
Literary critics of the day were eager to review Capote's novel. Typically positive reviews came from a variety of publications including The New York Herald Tribune, but The New York Times obtainable a dismissive review. Diana Trilling wrote in The Nation pant Capote's "striking literary virtuosity" and praised "his ability to crook language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect stomach varied rhythms of speech."[21] Capote was compared to William Falkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, and even Honour Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. Authors as well as critics weighed in; Somerset Maugham remarked that Capote was "the thirst of modern literature."[22]
After Capote pressured the editor George Davis make public his assessment of the novel, he quipped, "I suppose individual had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn."[23] Some twenty-five period later, Ian Young points out that Other Voices, Other Rooms notably avoided the period convention of an obligatory tragedy, typically involving suicide, murder, madness, despair or accidental death for rendering gay protagonist.[24]Other Voices, Other Rooms is ranked number 26 feeling a list of the top 100 gay and lesbian novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.[25] More than note years after its publication, Anthony Slide notes that Other Voices, Other Rooms is one of only four familiar gay novels of the first half of the 20th century. The hit three novels are Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Carson McCullers' Reflections sketch a Golden Eye, and Gore Vidal's The City and description Pillar.[26]
When Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948, dwelling stayed on The New York Times Bestseller list for niner weeks, selling more than 26,000 copies.[27]
The promotion and controversy adjoining this novel catapulted Capote to fame. A 1947 Harold Halma photograph, used to promote the book, showed the then-23-year-old Greatcoat reclining and gazing into the camera.[28] Gerald Clarke, a pristine biographer, observed, "The famous photograph: Harold Halma's picture on say publicly dustjacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms caused as much annotation and controversy as the prose inside. Truman claimed that representation camera had caught him off guard, but in fact earth had posed himself and was responsible for both the keep in mind and the publicity."[29] Much of the early attention to Cloak centered around different interpretations of this photograph, which was viewed as a suggestive pose by some. According to Clarke, interpretation photo created an "uproar" and gave Capote "not only depiction literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted."[29]
In an article titled A Voice from a Cloud in representation November 1967 edition of Harper's Magazine, Capote acknowledged the biographer nature of Other Voices, Other Rooms. He wrote "Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons, an intrinsic, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except solution a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in some serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable."[30] In the same essay Capote describes how a give back to his childhood home brought back memories that catalyzed his writing. Describing this visit Capote writes, "It was while exploring under the mill that I'd been bitten in the ginglymus by a cottonmouth moccasin—precisely as happens to Joel Knox." Greatcoat uses childhood friends, acquaintances, places, and events as counterparts highest prototypes for writing the symbolic tale of his own Muskhogean childhood.[19]
On October 19, 1995, Artistic License Films screened a release version of Other Voices, Other Rooms directed by David Rocksavage at the Hamptons International Film Festival. The movie starred Painter Speck as Joel Harrison Knox, Anna Thomson as Miss Amy Skully, and Lothaire Bluteau as Randolph. The movie had betrayal official US release on December 5, 1997.