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Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel)
Encyclopedia
Other Voices, Other Rooms is a novel written by Truman Capote
published in January 1948
. Other Voices, Other Rooms is written in the Southern Gothic
style and is notable for its atmosphere of isolation and decadence.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is significant because it is both Truman Capote's first published novel and semi-autobiographical
. It is also noteworthy due to its erotically charged photograph of the author, risque content, and debut at #9 on the New York Times Best Seller list
, where it remained for nine weeks.
and took up writing Other Voices, Other Rooms. After leaving Alabama, he continued to work on the manuscript in New Orleans, Louisiana
. His budding literary fame put him in touch with fellow southerner and writer Carson McCullers
. Capote joined McCullers at the artists' community, Yaddo
, in Saratoga Springs, New York
to continue working on his novel. As friends, Carson helped Truman locate an agent and a publisher (Marion Ives and Random House
) for Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote continued to work on the novel in North Carolina
and eventually completed it in a rented cottage in Nantucket, Massachusetts
. Truman Capote took two years to write Other Voices, Other Rooms.
The story focuses on the lonely and slightly effeminate
13-year-old boy Joel Harrison Knox following the death 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 on an isolated plantation in rural Alabama, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, debauched transvestite
Randolph, and the defiant tomboy
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 mute quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs after being inadvertently shot by Randolph and 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.
Mr. Edward R. Sansom: Joel's paralyzed father, a former boxing manager.
Miss Amy Skully: Joel's sharp-tongued stepmother who is in her late forties and shorter than Joel. Miss Amy's character is reminiscent of Callie Faulk, a older cousin with whom Truman Capote lived in Alabama. She is also reminiscent of Capote's maternal grandmother, Mabel Knox, who always wore a glove on her left hand to cover an unknown malady and was known for her Southern aristocratic
ways.
Randolph: Miss Amy's first cousin and owner of Skully's Landing. Randolph is in his mid thirties and is effeminate
, narcissistic
, and openly homosexual
. He also likes to cross dress
in a white wedding gown. Randolph's character is largely imaginary, but is a faint shadow of Capote's older cousin Bud Faulk, a single man, likely homosexual, and role model for Capote while he was growing up in Alabama.
Idabel Thompkins: A gloomy, cantankerous tomboy
who befriends Joel. Idabel's character is an exaggeration of Capote's childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee
.
Florabel Thompkins: Idabel's feminine
and prissy sister.
Jesus Fever: A centenarian
, pygmy
ish, African American
mule-driver at Skully's Landing, where he had been a slave seven decades ago.
Missouri Fever (Zoo): Jesus' granddaughter who is in her mid twenties. She wears a scarf on her elongated neck
to 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, as a child, lived with his older cousins.
Ellen Kendall: Joel's kind, gentile aunt who sends him from New Orleans to live with his father.
Little Sunshine: A short, bald, ugly, African American hermit
who lives at The Cloud Hotel.
Miss Wisteria: A blond midget
who befriends Joel and Idabel at a fair traveling through Noon City.
is manifest in the novel by Joel's paralytic father who is physically inaccessible for most of the novel and whose only means of communication involves rolling tennis balls down the stairs.
Another theme is self-acceptance
as part of coming of age
. Deborah Davis points out that Joel's thorny and psychological voyage while living with eccentric Southern relatives involves maturing "from an uncertain boy into a young man with a strong sense of self and acceptance of his homosexuality
." Gerald Clarke describes the conclusion of the novel, "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."
In addition to the two specific themes above, John Berendt notes in his introduction to the 2004 Modern Library
edition, several broad themes including the terror of abandonment, the misery of loneliness and the yearning to be loved.
Another theme is understanding others. John Knowles
says, "The theme in all of his [Truman Capote's] books is that there are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding."
Gerald Clarke points out that within the story Randolph is the spokesperson for the novel's major 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 its form; the disappointment that invariably follows high expectations; and the perversion of innocence."
, described as a 'distributor of great 'classic title' books produced in fine bindings for collectors.'
optioned movie rights to the novel without having seen the work. Additionally, Life
magazine conferred Capote equal space alongside other writers such as Gore Vidal
and Jean Stafford
in an article about young American writers, even though he had never published a novel.
Literary critics of the day were eager to review Capote's novel and express their opinions. Mostly positive reviews came from a variety of publications including The New York Herald Tribune, but The New York Times
published a dismissive review. Diana Trilling wrote in The Nation
about Capote's "striking literary virtuosity" and praised "his ability to bend language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect and varied rhythms of speech." Capote was compared to William Faulkner
, Eudora Welty
, Carson McCullers
, Katherine Anne Porter
, and even Oscar Wilde
and Edgar Allan Poe
. Authors as well as critics, weighed in; Somerset Maugham remarked that Capote was "the hope of modern literature."
After Capote pressured the editor George Davis
for his assessment of the novel, he quipped, "I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn
." Some twenty-five years 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 the gay protagonist. Other Voices, Other Rooms is ranked number 26 on a list of the top 100 gay and lesbian novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999. More than fifty 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 twentieth century. The other three novels are Djuna Barnes
' Nightwood
, Carson McCullers
' Reflections in a Golden Eye
, and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar
.
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. Gerald Clarke, a modern biographer, observed, "The famous photograph: Harold Halma's picture on the dustjacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms 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."
In an article titled A Voice from a Cloud in the November 1967 edition of Harper's Magazine
, Capote acknowledged the autobiographical nature of Other Voices, Other Rooms. He wrote "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." In the same essay Capote describes how a visit 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 knee by a cottonmouth moccasin
--precisely as happens to Joel Knox." Capote uses childhood friends, acquaintances
, places, and events as counterparts and prototype
s for writing the symbolic tale of his own Alabama
childhood.
at the Hamptons International Film Festival
. The movie starred David Speck as Joel Harrison Knox, Anna Thomson
as Miss Amy Skully, and Lothaire Bluteau
as Randolph. The movie had its official US release on December 5, 1997.
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
published in January 1948
1948 in literature
The year 1948 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel is renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction....
. Other Voices, Other Rooms is written in the Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot...
style and is notable for its atmosphere of isolation and decadence.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is significant because it is both Truman Capote's first published novel and semi-autobiographical
Autobiographical novel
An autobiographical novel is a form of novel using autofiction techniques, or the merging of autobiographical and fiction elements. The literary technique is distinguished from an autobiography or memoir by the stipulation of being fiction...
. It is also noteworthy due to its erotically charged photograph of the author, risque content, and debut at #9 on the New York Times Best Seller list
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
, where it remained for nine weeks.
Conception
Truman Capote began writing the manuscript for Other Voices, Other Rooms after being inspired by a walk in the woods while he was living in Monroeville, Alabama. He immediately cast aside his rough manuscript for Summer CrossingSummer Crossing
Summer Crossing is Truman Capote's first novel, written during the 1940s. Capote eventually cast it aside and it was thought to be lost for over 50 years, but was eventually published in 2005.- Conception and critical reception:...
and took up writing Other Voices, Other Rooms. After leaving Alabama, he continued to work on the manuscript in New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...
. His budding literary fame put him in touch with fellow southerner and writer Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South...
. Capote joined McCullers at the artists' community, Yaddo
Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400 acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."...
, in Saratoga Springs, New York
Saratoga Springs, New York
Saratoga Springs, also known as simply Saratoga, is a city in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 26,586 at the 2010 census. The name reflects the presence of mineral springs in the area. While the word "Saratoga" is known to be a corruption of a Native American name, ...
to continue working on his novel. As friends, Carson helped Truman locate an agent and a publisher (Marion Ives and Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
) for Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote continued to work on the novel in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
and eventually completed it in a rented cottage in Nantucket, Massachusetts
Nantucket, Massachusetts
Nantucket is an island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the United States. Together with the small islands of Tuckernuck and Muskeget, it constitutes the town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and the coterminous Nantucket County, which are consolidated. Part of the town is designated the Nantucket...
. Truman Capote took two years to write Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Plot summary
The story focuses on the lonely and slightly effeminate
Effeminacy
Effeminacy describes traits in a human male, that are more often associated with traditional feminine nature, behaviour, mannerisms, style or gender roles rather than masculine nature, behaviour, mannerisms, style or roles....
13-year-old boy Joel Harrison Knox following the death of his mother. Joel is sent from New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...
to live with his father who abandoned him at the time of his birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion on an isolated plantation in rural Alabama, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, debauched transvestite
Transvestism
Transvestism is the practice of cross-dressing, which is wearing clothing traditionally associated with the opposite sex. Transvestite refers to a person who cross-dresses; however, the word often has additional connotations. -History:Although the word transvestism was coined as late as the 1910s,...
Randolph, and the defiant tomboy
Tomboy
A tomboy is a girl who exhibits characteristics or behaviors considered typical of the gender role of a boy, including the wearing of typically masculine-oriented clothes and engaging in games and activities that are often physical in nature, and which are considered in many cultures to be the...
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 mute quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs after being inadvertently shot by Randolph and 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
Mardi Gras
The terms "Mardi Gras" , "Mardi Gras season", and "Carnival season", in English, refer to events of the Carnival celebrations, beginning on or after Epiphany and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday...
costume.
Characters
Joel Harrison Knox: The 13-year-old protagonist of the story. Joel is a portrait of Truman Capote in his own youth, notably being delicate, fair-skinned and able to tell outrageous tales without hesitation.Mr. Edward R. Sansom: Joel's paralyzed father, a former boxing manager.
Miss Amy Skully: Joel's sharp-tongued stepmother who is in her late forties and shorter than Joel. Miss Amy's character is reminiscent of Callie Faulk, a older cousin with whom Truman Capote lived in Alabama. She is also reminiscent of Capote's maternal grandmother, Mabel Knox, who always wore a glove on her left hand to cover an unknown malady and was known for her Southern aristocratic
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
ways.
Randolph: Miss Amy's first cousin and owner of Skully's Landing. Randolph is in his mid thirties and is effeminate
Effeminacy
Effeminacy describes traits in a human male, that are more often associated with traditional feminine nature, behaviour, mannerisms, style or gender roles rather than masculine nature, behaviour, mannerisms, style or roles....
, narcissistic
Narcissism
Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...
, and openly homosexual
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
. He also likes to cross dress
Cross-dressing
Cross-dressing is the wearing of clothing and other accoutrement commonly associated with a gender within a particular society that is seen as different than the one usually presented by the dresser...
in a white wedding gown. Randolph's character is largely imaginary, but is a faint shadow of Capote's older cousin Bud Faulk, a single man, likely homosexual, and role model for Capote while he was growing up in Alabama.
Idabel Thompkins: A gloomy, cantankerous tomboy
Tomboy
A tomboy is a girl who exhibits characteristics or behaviors considered typical of the gender role of a boy, including the wearing of typically masculine-oriented clothes and engaging in games and activities that are often physical in nature, and which are considered in many cultures to be the...
who befriends Joel. Idabel's character is an exaggeration of Capote's childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee
Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee is an American author known for her 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama...
.
Florabel Thompkins: Idabel's feminine
Femininity
Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Though socially constructed, femininity is made up of both socially defined and biologically created factors...
and prissy sister.
Jesus Fever: A centenarian
Centenarian
A centenarian is a person who is or lives beyond the age of 100 years. Because current average life expectancies across the world are less than 100, the term is invariably associated with longevity. Much rarer, a supercentenarian is a person who has lived to the age of 110 or more, something only...
, pygmy
Pygmy
Pygmy is a term used for various ethnic groups worldwide whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as any group whose adult men grow to less than 150 cm in average height. A member of a slightly taller group is termed "pygmoid." The best known pygmies are the Aka,...
ish, African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
mule-driver at Skully's Landing, where he had been a slave seven decades ago.
Missouri Fever (Zoo): Jesus' granddaughter who is in her mid twenties. She wears a scarf on her elongated neck
Neck ring
Neck rings are formed with one or more spiral metal coils of many turns worn as an ornament around the neck of an individual. In a few African and Asian cultures neck rings are worn usually to create the appearance that the neck has been stretched. Padaung women of the Kayan people begin to wear...
to hide a large scar inflicted by Keg Brown, who was sentenced to a chain gang
Chain gang
A chain gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work, such as mining or timber collecting, as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include building roads, digging ditches or chipping stone...
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, as a child, lived with his older cousins.
Ellen Kendall: Joel's kind, gentile aunt who sends him from New Orleans to live with his father.
Little Sunshine: A short, bald, ugly, African American hermit
Hermit
A hermit is a person who lives, to some degree, in seclusion from society.In Christianity, the term was originally applied to a Christian who lives the eremitic life out of a religious conviction, namely the Desert Theology of the Old Testament .In the...
who lives at The Cloud Hotel.
Miss Wisteria: A blond midget
Midget
A midget is a short person with relatively average bodily proportions in comparison with other human beings. The term is often improperly used to describe a person with the medical condition dwarfism. The two terms are often used synonymously because both terms originate as words defining small...
who befriends Joel and Idabel at a fair traveling through Noon City.
Major themes
On more than one occasion Capote himself asserts that the central theme of Other Voices, Other Rooms is a son's search for his father. In Capote's own words, his father, Arch Persons, was, "a father who, in the deepest sense, was nonexistent." Again, in his own words, Capote writes "the central theme of Other Voices, Other Rooms was my search for the existence of this essentially imaginary person." This theme of searching and alienationSocial alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
is manifest in the novel by Joel's paralytic father who is physically inaccessible for most of the novel and whose only means of communication involves rolling tennis balls down the stairs.
Another theme is self-acceptance
Self-acceptance
Self-acceptance is defined as affirmation or acceptance of self in spite of weaknesses or deficiencies.Although this term has been often understood in a common sense way, researchers have defined it formally in terms of positive and negative self-concepts...
as part of coming of age
Coming of age
Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood. The age at which this transition takes place varies in society, as does the nature of the transition. It can be a simple legal convention or can be part of a ritual, as practiced by many societies...
. Deborah Davis points out that Joel's thorny and psychological voyage while living with eccentric Southern relatives involves maturing "from an uncertain boy into a young man with a strong sense of self and acceptance of his homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
." Gerald Clarke describes the conclusion of the novel, "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
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
. "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."
In addition to the two specific themes above, John Berendt notes in his introduction to the 2004 Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
edition, several broad themes including the terror of abandonment, the misery of loneliness and the yearning to be loved.
Another theme is understanding others. John Knowles
John Knowles
John Knowles was an American novelist best known for his novel A Separate Peace. He died in 2001 at the age of seventy-five.-Early life:...
says, "The theme in all of his [Truman Capote's] books is that there are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding."
Gerald Clarke points out that within the story Randolph is the spokesperson for the novel's major 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 its form; the disappointment that invariably follows high expectations; and the perversion of innocence."
Publication History
Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1979 as part of the 60 Signed Limited Editions (1977-1982) series by the Franklin LibraryFranklin Library
The Franklin Library, the distributing arm of the publishing division The Franklin Press , was the United States' largest distributor of great 'classic title' books produced in fine bindings for collectors—similar to the mantle carried now by Easton Press—until the company permanently closed,...
, described as a 'distributor of great 'classic title' books produced in fine bindings for collectors.'
Reception and critical analysis
The novel's reception began before the novel hit bookshelves. Prior to its even being published, 20th Century Fox20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
optioned movie rights to the novel without having seen the work. Additionally, Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
magazine conferred Capote equal space alongside other writers such as Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
and Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970....
in an article about young American writers, even though he had never published a novel.
Literary critics of the day were eager to review Capote's novel and express their opinions. Mostly positive reviews came from a variety of publications including The New York Herald Tribune, but The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
published a dismissive review. Diana Trilling wrote in The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
about Capote's "striking literary virtuosity" and praised "his ability to bend language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect and varied rhythms of speech." Capote was compared to William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, and even Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
and Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
. Authors as well as critics, weighed in; Somerset Maugham remarked that Capote was "the hope of modern literature."
After Capote pressured the editor George Davis
George Davis (editor)
George Davis was an influential American fiction editor and minor novelist.-Early life:After an early period in Chicago, Davis spent much of his twenties as an expatriate in Paris.-The Opening of a Door:...
for his assessment of the novel, he quipped, "I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by...
." Some twenty-five years 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 the gay protagonist. Other Voices, Other Rooms is ranked number 26 on a list of the top 100 gay and lesbian novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999. More than fifty years after its publication, Anthony Slide
Anthony Slide
Anthony Slide is a writer who has produced more than seventy books and edited a further 150 on the history of popular entertainment. He wrote a "letter from Hollywood" for the British Film Review from 1979 to 1994, and he wrote a monthly book review column for Classic Images from 1989 to 2001...
notes that Other Voices, Other Rooms is one of only four familiar gay novels of the first half of the twentieth century. The other three novels are Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
' Nightwood
Nightwood
Nightwood is a 1936 novel by Djuna Barnes first published in London by Faber and Faber. An edition published in the United States in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace included an introduction by T. S. Eliot.....
, Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South...
' Reflections in a Golden Eye
Reflections in a Golden Eye (novel)
Reflections in a Golden Eye is a 1941 novel by American author Carson McCullers.It first appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1940, serialized in the October–November issues. The book was published by Houghton Mifflin on February 14, 1941, to mostly poor reviews...
, and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar
The City and the Pillar
The City and the Pillar is the third published novel by American writer and essayist Gore Vidal, written in 1946 and published on January 10, 1948...
.
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. Gerald Clarke, a modern biographer, observed, "The famous photograph: Harold Halma's picture on the dustjacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms 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."
In an article titled A Voice from a Cloud in the November 1967 edition of Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, Capote acknowledged the autobiographical nature of Other Voices, Other Rooms. He wrote "Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise
Exorcism
Exorcism is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed...
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." In the same essay Capote describes how a visit 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 knee by a cottonmouth moccasin
Agkistrodon piscivorus
Agkistrodon piscivorus is a venomous snake, a species of pit viper, found in the southeastern United States. Adults are large and capable of delivering a painful and potentially fatal bite. When antagonized they will stand their ground by coiling their bodies and displaying their fangs...
--precisely as happens to Joel Knox." Capote uses childhood friends, acquaintances
Interpersonal relationship
An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...
, places, and events as counterparts and prototype
Prototype
A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον , "primitive form", neutral of πρωτότυπος , "original, primitive", from πρῶτος , "first" and τύπος ,...
s for writing the symbolic tale of his own Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
childhood.
Adaptations
On October 19, 1995 Artistic License Films screened a film version of Other Voices, Other Rooms directed by David RocksavageDavid Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley
David George Philip Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, KCVO, DL , was styled from birth Viscount Malpas until 1968, and subsequently Earl of Rocksavage until 1990...
at the Hamptons International Film Festival
Hamptons International Film Festival
Hamptons International Film Festival was founded to provide a forum for independent filmmakers from around the world to express their vision. The Festival is traditionally held for five days in mid-October in theatre venues from Montauk to Southampton and attracts roughly 15,000 visitors annually...
. The movie starred David Speck as Joel Harrison Knox, Anna Thomson
Anna Levine
Anna Kluger Levine is an American actress. She has also been credited as Anna Levine Thompson and Anna Thomson.-Filmography:* Desperately Seeking Susan as Crystal* Murphy's Romance as Wanda...
as Miss Amy Skully, and Lothaire Bluteau
Lothaire Bluteau
Lothaire Bluteau is a French-Canadian actor. He was born in Montreal, Quebec and performs in both French and English. He had a recurring role in the third season of the television series 24 as the character Marcus Alvers.-Biography:...
as Randolph. The movie had its official US release on December 5, 1997.
External links
- Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995) at the Internet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...