ABRIR 3.2. La adolescencia - Biblioteca de la Universidad ...

Ficción y Realidad en la obra de Tru,nan Capote
sons, temperamentalí>’ suited to motherhood. Living with her husband in a
New Orleans hotel, she sent Truman to live with relatives in Monroeville
when he was barely able to walk, and for the first nine years of his life he
lived mostí>’ in Alabama under the supervision offemale cousins and aunts.
A Spfrítual Orphan’
In that period, he said years later, he felt like “a spiritual orphan,
like a turtle on its back.”
“You see,” he said, “1 was so difl’erent from everyone, so much
more intelligent and sensitive and perceptive. 1 was having fifty perceptions
a minute to everyone elses five. 1 always felt that nobod>’ was going to
understand me, going to understand what 1 felt about things. 1 guess that’s
why 1 started writing. At least on paper 1 could put down what 1 thought.
Most summers the boy returned to New Orleans for a month or so,
and accompanied his father on trips up and down the Mississippi aboard
the riverboat on which Mr. Persons worked as a purser. Truman learned
to tap dance, he said, and was proud ofthe fact that he once danced for the
passengers acconipanied by Louis Armstrong, whose band was playing on
the steamboat.
Man>’ of his stories, notably “A Christmas Memor>’,” which paid
loving tribute to his oid cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who succored him in his
childhood loneliness, were based on his recollections of life in and around
Monroeville. So were his first published novel, “Other Voices, Other
Rooms,” his second, “The Grass Harp,” and the collection of stories, “A
‘[ree ofNight.”
Character in ‘Mockingbird’
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