Truman Capote's ode to the unlovables

An essay on Capote's underrated gothic bildungsroman Other Voices, Other Rooms

"The trio on the porch were figures in a woodcut engraving; the Ancient on his throne of splendid pillows, a yellow pet relaxed in his lap gazing gravely in the drowning light at the small servant bowed at its master’s feet, and the arms of the black arrow-like daughter lifted above them all, as if in benediction. But there was no prayer in Joel’s mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil-paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved."

Writing is a little like witchcraft and Capote is a most powerful wizard: under his spell, the sinful becomes saintly, the grotesque sublime, and common-place misery assumes fantastic dimensions. The trio on the porch are Joel and his unlikely friends Zoo and Jesus Fever, three of the unlovables – the outcasts, the freaks, the artists –, at the heart of Capote’s debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Here, in their engraved form, they are elevated to the state of holy figures, radiating with a solemnity that defies all cynicism. It is the perfect moment for Joel (who is imprinted on Capote himself) to make his simple wish: the wish to be loved.

Not long before the scene recorded above, Joel has made his arrival to Skully’s Landing, Mississippi, forced by his mother’s death to move in with the father who abandoned him at birth. Joel’s new home reeks of death: its grounds rest on an ex plantation, its innards preserve spectral secrets, its residents lead ghostly lives. A crippling paralysis dooms Mr. Sansom, Joel’s dad, to immobility and speechlessness. The mule-driver and freed slave Jesus Fever is over a hundred-years-old and his protracted longevity is miraculous, but his death is the only condition for his granddaughter Zoo’s beginning of a new life away from the place that has witnessed her literal and psychic scarring.

But the most paralytic of the inhabitants of Skully’s Landing is cousin Randolph, who models cardboard on dead birds and only fully embraces his authentic self when disguised in a Mardi Gras costume. He is the “queer lady” whom Joel spots beckoning from a top window and suspects of being a ghost all the way until a decisive revelation is made.

All of them haunted by a terrible loneliness, all of them harbouring shameful flickers of personal history, they are Capote’s unlovables and, by setting them apart from an already fragmented world, their identity is their ordeal. When life’s scorn reaches unbearable intensity, they take refuge in other rooms, in separate realms of unreality, be these fantasy, deception, or madness.

But where for some alienation and disharmony with one’s surroundings translate in a sense of inner deformation, Capote, speaking through Joel, traces the greatest beauty in dissonance. Thus, when first meeting Jesus Fever, whose impressively old age scares all the other children, Joel feels all but afraid in observing “a touch of the wizard in his yellow spotted eyes: it was a tricky quality that suggested … magic and things read in books”.

Likewise, the housemaid Zoo, whose scarred, long neck, makes her “almost a freak”, is described by Joel in terms of candid admiration: “Zoo, with her fluid, insinuating grace, could only be… the mermaid bride of an old, drowned pirate”. Joel’s simple observation redeems the conventionally unsightly as the very thing which makes Zoo beautiful.

As in other grotesque narratives that I admire, such as Kafka’s surrealist writings and Terry Gilliam’s hallucinatory films, there is, in Capote, a conscious distortion of reality, a juxtaposition of the sinister and the familiar which gives one the impression of wearing a pair of warping spectacles. Having been taught to look away from the deviant, suddenly gazing straight at what is usually concealed and out of sight naturally requires some adjustment; but once the initial dizziness has subsided, an improved vision is good as gained, which makes us able to discern the deeply human essence of paradox and realise that the deepest truths often blurt out of the mouth of lunatics.

Other Voices, Other Rooms fittingly rests on this aesthetic formulation by Baudelaire:

"Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry."

Capote’s gift lies in his ability to spark in readers a sense of recognition in difference. His extravagant characters’ pain, desires, and fears, speak to our own desires, to our own pain and fears. With the tenderest touch, though never falling in cheap sentimentality, Capote addresses what lies at the core of every man and woman’s preoccupation: the anguish that comes from alienation and loneliness, the search for an identity, the longing for understanding, acceptance, love.

These concerns are condensed in Randolph’s moving narration of his cursed love for boxer Pepe Alvarez, whose blending of tragic and irony and glowingly aphoristic turns of phrase appoint as the novel’s poetic pinnacle. In an overdue heart to heart, Randolph tells Joel of his unrequited love for Alvarez. One night, the boxer gets drunk and treats Randolph to a brutal assault. Fallen into a state of deep melancholia, Randolph is trudging the streets of New Orleans when he meets a man, a man just like himself:

"I sat in Jackson Square; except for the tolling of train bells, it was quiet and all the Cabildo was like a haunted palace; there was a blond misty boy sitting beside me, and he looked at me, and I at him, and we were not strangers: our hands moved towards each other to embrace. I never heard his voice, for we did not speak; it is a shame, I should so like the memory of it. Loneliness, like fever, thrives on night, but there with him light broke, breaking in the trees like birdsong, and when sunrise came, he loosened his fingers from mine, and walked away, that misty boy my friend."

Now, if this isn’t a superb evocation of the evanescent quality of one-night stands. A few concise and vivid phrases are enough to relate Randolph’s brief break from solitude, with an intensity that would make Virginia Woolf blush for once stating that “the extremes of passion are not for the novelist”.

Capote, like Randolph and Joel, was himself an unlovable: a dwarfish, ever-youthful-looking, gay man, in whom the anxieties of childhood remained a permanent condition. Even his exhibitionism and social climbing embodied the acute, the visceral wish to be loved that belongs to every child, that belongs to every adult. Capote is all of us, when writing that -

“What we most want is to be held… and told… that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa’s eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama’s long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall) … everything is going to be alright.”