Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel)
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Other Voices, Other Rooms | |
Reprint with peephole cover |
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Author | Truman Capote |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre(s) | Southern Gothic |
Publisher | Random House (Signet Books for image shown) |
Publication date | 1948 (1949 for image shown) |
Media type | Print (Hardback) (paperback for image shown) |
Pages | 231 pp (142 pp for edition shown) |
ISBN | n/a |
Other Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel written in the Southern Gothic style by Truman Capote.[1] Truman Capote began writing the manuscript for Other Voices, Other Rooms while he was living in Monroeville, AL and continued to work on the manuscript in New Orleans, Saratoga Springs and North Carolina. He eventually completed it in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
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[edit] Plot Introduction
The story focuses on 13-year-old Joel Knox following the loss of his mother. Joel is sent from New Orleans, Louisiana to live with his father who abandoned him at the time of his birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion in rural Alabama, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, debauched transvestite Randolph and defiant Idabel, a girl who becomes his friend. He also sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his father remain a mystery. When he finally is allowed to see his father, Joel is stunned to find he is a quadriplegic, having been crushed by a piano to the point of nearly dying. Joel runs away with Idabel but catches pneumonia and eventually returns to the Landing where he is nursed back to health by Randolph. The implication in the final paragraph is that the "queer lady" beckoning from the window, is Randolph in his old Mardi Gras costume. Gerald Clarke, in Capote: A Biography (1988) described the conclusion:
- 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.
[edit] Reception
When Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948, it stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, selling more than 26,000 copies.
The promotion and controversy surrounding this novel catapulted Capote to fame. A 1947 Harold Halma photograph, used to promote the book, showed the then-23-year-old Capote reclining and gazing into the camera.[2] Gerald Clarke, in Capote: A Biography (1988), wrote, "The famous photograph: Harold Halma's picture on the dustjacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside. Truman claimed that the camera had caught him off guard, but in fact he had posed himself and was responsible for both the picture and the publicity." Much of the early attention to Capote centered around different interpretations of this photograph, which was viewed as a suggestive pose by some. According to Clarke, the photo created an "uproar" and gave Capote "not only the literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted."
[edit] Critical Analysis
This novel has often been considered autobiographical, and Truman Capote would admit that it was some years after it was first published. Capote described the symbolic tale as "a poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion." The novel is a semi-autobiographical refraction of Capote's Alabama childhood. Decades later, writing in The Dogs Bark (1973), he looked back:
- Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons, an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is considered by Anthony Slide, a modern scholar, to be one of only four familiar gay novels of the first half of the twentieth century. The other three novels include Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar.[3]
[edit] Quotations
- At Jesus Fever's funeral;
- "It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect."
- "A resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage."
- "The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries." (P 113)
- "Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure." (Miss Amy)
- "She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Stryker, Susan. Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001, page 6.
- ^ Bronski, Michael, ed. Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003, pages 342-343.
- ^ Slide, Anthony. Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press), page 2.
[edit] References
- Austen, Roger (1977). Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America, 1st ed., Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. ISBN 978-067252287X.
- Bronski, Michael (2003). Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, 1st ed., New York, NY: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 978-0312252676.
- Capote, Truman (1973). The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places, 1st ed., New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0394487519.
- Clarke, Gerald (1988). Capote, A Biography, 1st ed., New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0241125496.
- Slide, Anthony (2003). Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 1st ed., Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press. ISBN 978-156023413X.
- Stryker, Susan (2001). Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback, 1st ed., San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0811830209.
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