Publicity scandal aside, Other Voices, Other Rooms was praised for the astonishing beauty of its prose, and Capote’s use of landscape and weather to create an atmosphere of mounting dread and despair. Harold Halma’s portrait of Truman Capote, 1946. The sexual suggestiveness of the photo created a minor scandal – the Los Angeles Times opined that Capote looked “ as if he were dreamily contemplating some outrage against conventional morality” – giving him a notorious public persona to match his talent as a writer. His sales were also helped by a publicity photo taken by Harold Halma, in which a doe-eyed Capote stares into the camera, his hands resting over his crotch. Whatever he did, it worked – Other Voices, Other Rooms was an instant success, making the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, selling over 26,000 copies, and announcing Capote as a major talent in American literature.

Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.” Perhaps that self-deception was a trick Capote needed to play on himself to make the writing process bearable, and not drown under the sadness of his own memories, rendered via the portrait of Joel with searing intensity. In an essay published in 1973, Capote 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. Like Joel, Capote was a precocious effeminate child, abandoned by his parents and shipped off to live with yokel relatives in the Deep South, spectacularly out of place in every setting and with a desperate (and largely unfulfilled) desire to be loved. Into this baroque atmosphere, Capote added an undertow of intense emotional longing, strongly influenced by his unhappy childhood in the Depression-era Deep South. The story and milieu followed the Southern Gothic tradition of American literature, made popular by William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Capote’s friend and one-time mentor Carson McCullers – a genre often as campy as it is horrifying, featuring decaying mansions, insane relatives, nasty secrets in the attic, picturesque Black servants, sweaty summer days unrelieved by air-conditioning, and dinner tables groaning with “ collards, yams, black-eyed peas cornbread” washed down with rivers of bootlegged booze. Why it’s a classic: Other Voices Other Rooms was Capote’s first full-length novel, written in his mid-20s following success as a short story writer and a growing reputation in New York’s literary scene. He sees the queer lady again at the window, who we assume is Randolph in drag, and moves towards the house, determined to leave his boyhood behind him. He returns home one afternoon to discover that his aunt has come to visit. Joel receives a postcard from Idabel who has succeeded in leaving town. Zoo returns, describing a harrowing attempted rape by four men on a roadside. He is rescued by Randolph who brings him back to the Landing and nurses him back to health. Idabel disappears and Joel searches for her in a storm, taking refuge in an abandoned house before collapsing with pneumonia. Zoo leaves for Washington, and Joel and Idabel run away to a carnival in Noon City, where they meet a blonde midget named Miss Wisteria. Joel finally discovers his father in an upstairs bedroom, paraplegic and partially mute after being accidentally shot by Randolph in a drunken brawl years before.

He also sees a “queer lady” with “fat dribbling curls” watching him from a upper window, whose presence is similarly unexplained. Joel strikes up a friendship with Zoo, who dreams of escaping to live in the snowy Northern states, and his neighbour Idabel Thompkins, a ferocious tomboy. Despite Joel’s frequent questions, no one will reveal his father’s whereabouts. Joel’s father is mysteriously absent, and the only other inhabitants are the young housekeeper Missouri Fever (nicknamed Zoo) and her elderly father Jesus. There he meets his dour stepmother Amy and her cousin Randolph, a flamboyantly gay drunkard who reminisces about a lost romance with a Latino boxer named Pepe.

After a difficult journey, he arrives in the remote township of Noon City, and from there travels to his father’s home, a decaying mansion on a former slave plantation named Skully’s Landing. Joel Knox, a lonely and effeminate 13 year-old boy, is sent to Mississippi to live with his father, who abandoned the family shortly after Joel’s birth. In which I review Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote’s 1948 Southern Gothic novel about a lonely young boy sent to live with his creepy relatives in Depression-era Mississippi.

Harold halma photo of truman capote