domingo, 5 de fevereiro de 2012

Truman Capote - VOICE FROM A CLOUD

Truman Capote
VOICE FROM A CLOUD

Other Voices, Other Rooms (my own title: it is
not a quotation) was published in January 1948.
It took two years to write and was not my first
novel, but the second. The first, a manuscript never
submitted and now lost, was called Summer Cr'ossing-
a spare, objective story with a New York setting.
Not bad, as I remember: technically accomplished,
an interesting enough tale, but without
intensity or pain, without the qualities of a private
vision, the anxieties that then had control of my
emotions and imagination. 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.
Surely there were reasons for this adamant
ignorance, no doubt protective ones: a fire curtain
between the writer and the true source of his
material. As I have lost contact with the troubled
youth who wrote this book, since only a faded
shadow of him is any longer contained inside myself,
it is difficult to reconstruct his state of mind.
However, I shall try.
At the time of the appearance of Other Voices,
Other Rooms, critics, ranging from the warmest
to the most hostile, remarked that obviously I was
much influenced by such Southern literary artists
as Faulkner and Welty and McCullers, three writers
whose work I knew well and admired. Kevertheless,
the gentlemen were mistaken, though understandably.
The American writers who had
been most valuable to me were, in no particular
order, James, Twain, Poe, Cather, Hawthorne,
Sarah Orne Jewett; and, overseas, Flaubert, Jane
Austen, Dickens, Proust, Chekhov, Katherine
Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Turgenev, De Maupassant,
and Emily Bronte. A collection more or less
irrelevant to Other' Vuices, Other Rooms; for
clearly no one of these writers, with the conceivable
exception of Poe (who was by then a blurred
childhood enthusiasm, like Dickens and Twain),
was a necessary antecedent to this particular
work. Rather, they all were, in the sense fhat each
of them had contributed to my literary intelligence,
such as it was. But the real progenitor was
my difficult, subterranean self. The result was both
a revelation and an escape: the book set me free,
and, as in its prophetic final sentence, I stood there
and looked back at the boy I had left behind.
I was born in New Orleans, an only child; my
parents were divorced when I was four years old.
It was a complicated divorce with much bitterness
on either side, which is the main reason why I
spent most of my childhood wandering among the
homes of relatives in Louisiana, Mississippi, and
rural Alabama (off and on, I attended schools in
New York City and Connecticut). The reading I
did on my own was of greater importance than my
official education, which was a waste and ended
when I was seventeen, the age at which I applied
for and received a job at The New Yorker magazine.
Not a very grand job, for all it really involved
was sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers.
Still, I was fortunate to have it, especially since I
was determined never to set a studious foot inside
a college classroom. I felt that either one was or
wasn't a writer, and no combination of professors
could influence the outcome. I still think I was
correct, at least in my own case; however, I now
realize that most young writers have more to gain
than not by attending college, if only because
their teachers and classroom comrades provide a
captive audience for their work; nothing is lonelier
than to be an aspiring artist without some
semblance of a sounding board.
I stayed two years at The New Yorker, and during
this period published a number of short stories
in small literary magazines. (Several of them
were submitted to my employers, and none accepted,
though once one was returned with the
following comment: "Very good. But romantic in
a way this magazine is not.") Also, I wrote Summer
Crossing. Actually, it was in order to complete
the book that I took courage, quit my job,
left New York, and settled with relatives, a cotton-
growing family who lived in a remote part of
Alabama: cotton fields, cattle pastures, pinewoods,
dirt roads, creeks and slow little rivers, jaybirds,
owls, buzzards circling in empty skies, distant
train whistles-and, :fivemiles away, a small country
town: the Noon City of the present volume.
It was early winter when I arrived there, and
the atmosphere of the roomy farmhouse, entirely
heated by stoves and fireplaces, was well suited to
a fledgling novelist wanting quiet isolation. The
household rose at four-thirty, breakfasted by electric
light, and was off about its business as the sun
ascended-leaving me alone and, increasingly, in a
panic. For, more and more, Summer Crossing
seemed to me thin, clever, unfelt. Another language,
a secret spiritual geography, was burgeoning
inside me, taking hold of my night-dream
hours as well as my wakeful daydreams.
One frosty December afternoon I was far from
home, walking in a forest along the bank of a
mysterious, deep, very clear creek, a route that led
eventually to a place called Hatter's Mill. The mill,
which straddled the creek, had been abandoned
long ago; it was a place where farmers had
brought their corn to be ground into cornmeal.
As a child, I'd often gone there with cousins to fish
and swim; 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. And
now as I came upon the forlorn mill with its sagging
silver-gray timbers, the remembered shock
of the snakebite returned; and other memories
too-of Idabel, or rather the girl who was the
counterpart of Idabel, and how we used to wade
and swim in the pure waters, where fat speckled
fish lolledin sunlit pools; Idabel was always trying
to reach out and grab one.
Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame
me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved
in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling
with the whole Look. Usually when a story
comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long
sustained streak of lightning that darkens the tangible,
so-called real world, and leaves illuminated
only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape,
a terrain alive with figures, voices, rooms,
atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like
an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must soothe and
tame it. Which, of course, is an artist's principal
task: to tame and shape the raw creative vision.
It was dark when I got home, and cold, but I
didn't feel the cold because of the fire inside me.
My Aunt Lucille said she had been worried about
me, and was disappointed because I didn't want
any supper. She wanted to know if I was sick; I
said no. She said, "Well, you look sick. You're
white as a ghost." I said good night, locked myself
in my room, tossed the manuscript of Susmner
Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected
several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow
lined paper, got into bed fully clothed, and with
pathetic optimism, wrote: "Other Voices, Other
Rooms-a novel by Truman Capote." Then: "Now
a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the
best means he can .. ."
It is unusual, but occasionally it happens to
almost every writer that the writing of some particular
story seems outer-willed and effortless;
it is as though one were a secretary transcribing
the words of a voice from a cloud. The difficulty is
maintaining contact with this spectral dictator.
Eventually it develuped that communication ran
highest at night, as fevers are known to do after
dusk. So I took to working all night and sleeping
all day, a routine that distressed the househuld
and caused constant disapproving comment: "But
you've got everything turned upside down, You're
ruining your health." That is why, in the spring of
the year, I thanked my exasperated relatives for
their generosity, their burdened patience, and
bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans.
There I rented a bedroom in the crowded apartment
of a Creole family who lived in the French
Quarter on Royal Street. It was a small hot bedroom
almost entirely occupied by a brass bed, and
it was noisy as a steel mill. Streetcars racketed
under the window, and the carousings of sightseers
touring the Quarter, the boisterous whiskey
brawlings of soldiers and sailors, made for con-
Truman. Capote was twenty-three ueare old when
"0[11.61' Voices, Other Rooms" uiae P1~blished.This
essay will preiace the twentieth-anniversa1'y edition,
to be issued by Random House in February,
Mr. Capote's book "In Cord Brood" hus been a bestseller
since 1965.

Retrieved from Harper's Magazine, November 1967 (Pages 99 and 100)

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