Truman Capote - Salem Press

Truman Capote
was that the killers were the evil side of the same
yearning for love, acceptance, even artistic achievement
(especially with Smith) that he had known.
That desire is seen in a key scene in Miami after the
murders, as Perry realizes that all his hopes and
ambitions are a dead end:
Anyway, he couldn’t see that he had “a lot to live
for.” Hot islands and buried gold, diving deep
in fire-blue seas toward sunken treasure—such
dreams were gone. Gone, too, was “Perry O’Parsons,”
the name invented for the singing sensation
of stage and screen that he’d half-seriously hoped
some day to be.
In Capote’s musical, House of Flowers, one of the
characters sings a song of yearning for escape from
the everyday titled “I Never Has Seen Snow,” and
snow is a recurring image in many Capote works
for the elusive dreams of life. One of the young boyfriends
of the Clutter girl recalls becoming lost in a
snowstorm in In Cold Blood. The cook, Missouri,
hopes to run away north to see snow in Other Voices,
Other Rooms. Judge Cool’s distant wife had died in
the snows of Switzerland in The Grass Harp. Ultimately,
in a world that fails to understand or make
room for the sensitive, artistic spirits, the “different,”
Capote returns frequently to the idea, stated
by Judge Cool, that whatever passions compose
them, private worlds are good—that is, unless
turned to evil ends by the greater uncomprehending
world.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
First published: 1948
Type of work: Novel
A young boy, seeking his lost father, moves into
a strange household in Mississippi where he
encounters bizarre relatives while trying to find
love.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote’s first published
long work, is a moody and atmospheric tale characterized
both by its strange setting—a decaying
mansion in rural Mississippi—and by the host of
peculiar characters it presents to the reader.
The book details the encounters of thirteen-
400
year-old Joel Knox Sansom, who travels to an old
mansion, Skully’s Landing, where he hopes to
meet his long-lost father, Edward Sansom. In its
emphasis on romantic and ghostly settings and its
use of strange, eccentric characters, Other Voices,
Other Rooms is typical of what has been termed the
southern gothic school of fiction, a style of fiction
marked by its use of the grotesque both in locale
and in characterization.
This category can be seen in the works of other
southern-born fiction writers such as William
Faulkner (his short story “A Rose for Emily” and his
1931 novel Sanctuary both offer elements of southern
gothic), Tennessee Williams (his 1958 play
Suddenly Last Summer deals with incest, homosexuality,
insanity, lobotomy, and cannibalism), Carson
McCullers (her 1941 novel Reflections in a Golden Eye
and her story “Ballad of the Sad Café” both have
grotesque situations and characters), and Flannery
O’Connor (her 1952 novel Wise Blood deals with religious
obsession and madness). In Other Voices,
Other Rooms, Capote uses this sense of the strange
and the mysterious to convey the loneliness, isolation,
and naïveté of Joel.
When Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, he meets
a variety of unusual characters: an ancient black
man, Jesus Fever; Jesus Fever’s granddaughter, a
twenty-one-year-old cook named Missouri (nicknamed
“Zoo”); Joel’s father, the bedridden invalid
Edward Sansom (who communicates with the rest
of the household by rolling red tennis balls down
the stairs); his father’s new wife, Miss Amy; and a
much-talked-about cousin, Randolph. En route to
the Landing, Joel also has met two young girls, the
twins Florabel Thompkins and her tomboy twin sister,
Idabel. (Many interpreters of Capote’s work
see Idabel as Capote’s fictional version of his own
childhood friend, Harper Lee.)
While the main plot of the book appears to be
dealing with Joel’s attempt to find and, later, to talk
with his father, Capote really is presenting the
plight of Joel as a lonely, sensitive youth who is, in
fact, trying to come to terms with his own identity
in an environment where he has no moorings. In
one key scene, he tries to pray; he finds it almost impossible
to ask God for someone to love him, yet
that is really what the boy is seeking.
It is the search for love that defines the lives of
many of the characters in Other Voices, Other Rooms:
Cousin Randolph, Joel’s homosexual older rela-