Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only. Now at thirteen Joel was nearer a knowledge of death than in any year to come: a flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door. In the woods they walked the tireless singings of larks had sounded a century, and more, and floods of frogs had galloped in moonlight bands; stars had fallen here, and Indian arrows, too; prancing blacks had played guitars, sung ballads of bandit-buried gold, sung songs grieving and ghostly, ballads of long ago: before birth.

Joel Knox is thirteen. He has been living in New Orleans with a caretaker most of his life, until a letter finally comes from a far-flung estate in the Louisiana backwoods: yes, Joel's biological father, Edward Sansom, would like for Joel to come and stay with him. Arriving at the estate, Joel finds a small cadre of strange and reclusive people: his father's anxious wife Amy; effeminate "cousin" Randolph; Zoo, a black servant who provides the closest thing Joel will get to parenting in this strange place; her ancient father Jesus Fever; the redheaded tomboy Idabel and her twin sister. A strange white-haired lady appears at a window like a ghost and is never seen again. Life with this group turns out to be quiet and strange, like "living in a glass bell," and where is his father anyway?

I picked up Other Voices, Other Rooms because I was inspired, in a perverse way, by Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: Capote and McCullers, she contends, were bitter enemies--McCullers, it seems, accused Capote of cribbing from her. (It's hard not to see her point: look how young Joel longs for nothing more to see snow, like Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, published just two years before. And I have no idea if this is borne out by timing, but the descriptions of cousin Randolph striding through the empty manse in his silk kimono certainly seems to recall McCullers herself, who cultivate this look to accommodate her long-term illness.) With McCullers in mind, though, I became impatient with the familiarity of Capote's southern Gothic: the overgrown mansion, the woman with the scar around her neck, the identical twins.

But I was eventually won over by the dreamlike quality of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Joel is frustrated by the strangeness and loneliness of his new home, but as the days wear on, its strangeness seems to seep into his mind, and his outlook becomes more and more feverish, prone to visions and hysterias. When he is at last allowed to see his father, he is only unsettled more: Edward Sansom is a paraplegic whose eyes are perpetually open, and who tosses tennis balls into the sitting room to demand attention. At last Randolph tells him the full story: many years ago, his girlfriend began an affair with a handsome boxer. Randolph, enraged not by her unfaithfulness but the unwelcome realization that he too was in love with the boxer, tried to shoot them--but hit Sansom, the boxer's manager instead. Now they live here in this house, caring for each other--each an abandoned half, cast off to make a unity.

The estate is an outpost at the end of the earth where the injured and guilty flee. It's only here that Randolph can really live, in his kimono and painted toenails--that white-haired lady at the window, of course, is him, too. It's where Zoo can live and be safe from the possessive lover who gave her the scar, though she lives with the daily fear of his return. This strange place is a haven, but a fragile haven, and it hardly seems a place for a boy as young, and as sensitive, as Joel. Thirteen year old boys have such active imaginations already, and Joel is no exception, but life at Skully Landing threatens to push that imagination into overdrive. An abortive attempt at running away with Idabel is no good; he brings the madness of the place with him, and when he's felt up on a Ferris wheel by a little person--I am not joking--he nearly breaks from reality completely. Only when he's dragged back to his newfound home can he really begin to find himself again.

The strong implication here is that Joel, like Randolph, must learn to accept his own homosexuality, and that Randolph, who nurses him through his pneumonia, is his true exemplar and father figure. (His love for Idabel, we presume, is a response to her masculine nature as opposed to her more feminine sister Florabel.) And yet the book suggests that there are few places in the world where people who have become truly themselves can live without degradation and shame, places that must seem strange to a world to whom they've turned their back.