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)