PARTISAN REVIEW
ending of the story, the sweet music of the angels. Another curiosity
in the book is that the villain is also a writer. His villainy consists in
his being cheap and successful, indicating that it is not prosperity and
fame the hero and public find purifying. What is it then? The hero's
mind is intensely ordinary; his concern for and interest in literature
are only what one might expect from a college boy who has taken courses
in the English department. Furthermore, no answer is supplied to the
deep psychological question of why the hero, with his unmistakably sin–
cere contempt for the easy and commercial, should have written a book
not strikingly better than the sort his wicked novelist might have turned
out in his rich decline. In the purest sense the
aim
of the hero seems
to be one of mere function, the condition of public beatitude which the
role of writer provides so efficiently. The implication of this, and other
stories of its kind, cannot be missed. America, far from scorning the
writer, regards
him
with awe. This feeling of awe gets into the first
novels of young Americans without censorship. Later, the writer, over–
whelmed by the responsibilities of his sacred office, begins to dream
and to mutter about acrobats and seals.
Truman Capote's
Other Voices, Other Rooms
can hardly be said, as
has been claimed, to be striking a new note in fiction. On the contrary,
its most fascinating contribution is that it rings a tinkling funeral bell
for some of our recent Southern fiction. Here at last is the parody
whose appearance was inevitable; amidst sherry and gloom, withering
homosexuals, and dainty sadistic women, many of the devices that have
served young Southern writers well have been literally done to death.
It is understandable that the end should come, not with Faulkner,
but with a minor imitation of a very talented minor writer, Carson
McCullers. Capote has even expropriated, in fine scalawag fashion,
Carson McCullers' most distinctive character: the rowdy, boyish, but
sensitive young girl whose speech has an earthy, weird humor; he has
also made this girl
his
best character. All of this is done with such
swan-song cunning that Carson McCullers, if she continues to write
in her old vein, can only appear to be imitating Capote.
Up until this time the charm and capriciousness of Southern fic–
tion, the extravagance of character, the comedy of provincial life, the
love of gentility and pretense, had the appealing quality of having
been observed firsthand. Now, in Capote's book, these attitudes seem
literary and clever. Whimsicality and neurosis are divorced from char–
acter and become things in themselves, a kind of technical brilliance.
Previously, this gifted, knowing, bargain basement use of fashionable
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