Understanding Truman Capote

Chapter 3 Other Voices, Other Rooms

chapter 3 Other Voices, Other Rooms The photograph on the book jacket of Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), shows the author reclining on a Victorian couch and staring provocatively at the viewer.1 In one hand he holds a cigarette , while the other rests on his crotch. Many reviewers found this image as distasteful as the book itself. Time characterized Other Voices, Other Rooms as “calculated to make the flesh crawl. . . . But for all the novel’s gifted invention and imagery, the distasteful trappings of its homosexual theme overhang it like Spanish moss”; and the New York Times Book Review concluded that “the story of Joel Knox did not need to be told” (quoted in Clarke 155). These responses capture some of the pervasive concerns about homosexuality at the time. In the same year Alfred Kinsey released Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which reported (among other things) that most men masturbated, nearly 50 percent had engaged in extramarital affairs, some experimented with bestiality, and 37 percent “had reached orgasm through at least one homosexual act” (Fraterrigo 41).2 The House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation into Alger Hiss in 1948 as well, and rumors soon characterized Hiss’s accuser, a former Communist and admitted homosexual, as a jilted gay lover. Other Voices, Other Rooms, which immediately landed on the New York Times best-seller list, contributed to this turmoil. The novel is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who discovers and learns to accept his homosexuality. Since his mother’s death, Joel Harrison Knox has been staying with his aunt, but he decides to leave after receiving an unexpected invitation to live with his estranged father in Skully’s Landing. The nearest town to the Landing is populated by disabled and 44 Understanding trUman capote freakish people, and the family members waiting for Joel—his stepmother Amy and effeminate older cousin Randolph—have unusual bodies as well. A faint mustache grows on Amy’s upper lip, and her gloved hand thumps like wood against solid objects. Randolph’s feminine features, crooked nose, golden hair, and pudgy body dovetail with his penchant for dressing as an eighteenth-century countess. The strangeness of these characters—particularly those who blur gender boundaries—heightens Joel’s discomfort with his own body and sexuality. From the outset he worries that his father, Ed Sansom, will reject him for not being “taller and stronger and handsomer and smarter-looking” (51–52), but his fantasies about finding a masculine role model are shattered soon after he arrives. Sansom, the former manager of a prizefighter named Pepe Alvarez, became paralyzed after Randolph accidentally shot him. Grief and guilt have consumed Randolph ever since. When Joel tries to leave town after going to the circus, he catches pneumonia, and Randolph nurses him back to health. Joel’s delirious state enables him to recognize his burgeoning affection for Randolph. In the closing moments of the novel, Joel sees Randolph dressed as a lady and goes to him. This decision to embrace his own homosexuality, however, seems to necessitate Joel’s isolation from others. His friendship with neighbor Idabel Thompkins, a tomboy who discovers her own same-sex desire in the novel, ends when her family sends her away to live with other relatives. Likewise his deep affection for Missouri (“Zoo”) Fever, a young African American woman who works for Amy and Randolph, does not last either. Her experiences with spousal abuse and rape position her too solidly in the real world for Joel. He wants to be protected from the social realities of racial and sexual violence, not exposed to them, so he chooses instead to live with Randolph. Freak shows, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America between 1840 and 1940, play an integral role in the novel. Acts of gender/ sexual ambiguity and racist depictions of nonwhites were staples on the sideshow stage, and both appear in Other Voices, Other Rooms to indict the ways society relegated same-sex desire and African Americans to the realm of the freakish. For white gays and lesbians in the novel, homosexuality transforms them into spectacles—figures to be mocked and ostracized by mainstream America: “So fierce is the world’s ridicule,” Randolph explains to Joel, that “we cannot speak or show our tenderness” (147–48). Just as the book condemns these cultural practices, it also links homophobia with the plight of African Americans. The damaged black body provides...