[In the following essay, Allmendinger detects the influence of Eudora Welty's “Why I Live at the P.O.” on Capote's “My Side of the Matter.”]

Grobel: “Has any American writer had an influence on you as a writer?”

Capote: “No American writer has.”

—Conversations with Capote

I

The apartment was in the wildest disorder—the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of the floor. On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled with blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots.¹

So Poe describes the scene of the crime, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He startles the reader with a graphic depiction of the bedroom, but he stumps the reader with a detail that has since become a staple of detective fiction. Auguste Dupin learns, on forcing the door, that

no person was seen. The windows, both of the back and front room, were down and firmly fastened from within. … The door leading from the front room into the passage was locked, with the key on the inside.²

Dupin wrestles with the right of access to a locked room. In a similar fashion, critics struggle with the seductive image and mythic biography of Truman Capote. In conversations, interviews, and the preface to his last book, Music for Chameleons, Capote denies the influence of other writers on his work. Describing his own development, he conjures up the image of a locked room—of a writer who withdraws from the influence of society, to create. Critics have been less successful than Poe's detective in solving the puzzle of the room, locked from within. In the last thirty years, they have accepted the proclamations of a man whose conversation was often more convincing than his prose; whose own texts contradict the denials of literary influence. Books and articles have linked Capote to the work of his contemporaries in only a vague, suggestive sense, but a piece from his early period draws specifically upon Eudora Welty. “My Side of the Matter” is a clear reconstruction of her short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and a case study in the anxiety of female influence. In his response to Welty, Capote alters the gender of his characters to depict a battle between the sexes and centers the plot on a male protagonist, accused of stealing from a woman.

II

In the preface to Music for Chameleons, Capote says: “I started writing when I was eight—out of the blue, uninspired by any example.”³ Capote means to impress the reader with the emergence of his art, as a magician seeks to startle the audience, pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Here and elsewhere, Capote loads the denial of literary influence with a rhetorical force that seeks to amaze the audience and suggest that writing is an uninspired feat. In Conversations with Capote, the author belittles Ezra Pound by telling Lawrence Grobel that the poet sought help from T. S. Eliot. He adds: “I've never had anybody that I could show things to and ask their opinion.”⁴ He insists that Norman Mailer and other contemporaries have drawn from his work to produce the nonfiction novel and have won awards for their unacknowledged debt to his own novel, In Cold Blood. But he denies that he, in turn, has drawn from Henry Adams or Hemingway, as Malcolm Cowley suggests.⁵ He reiterates this statement throughout a series of interviews with Grobel and insists upon it with an air of protestation.

I don't think of myself in terms of relationships with other writers at all and I don't feel in competition with other writers. Because I don't write about the same things as any other writer that I know of does. Or have the same interests. Or as a personality that's in any kind of conflict with any other writer. I have absolutely no envy of any other writer.⁶

Capote suggests that literary influence is not a tradition, which bonds together writers in a helpful sense, but a psychological abnormality which brands the writer as psychotic with a “personality” disorder, in “conflict” or “competition” with tradition. Capote relates self-sufficiency to self-esteem and isolates himself from the canon.

In doing so, he builds an image around his own identity as an autonomous writer. He tells Grobel that he hid in his bedroom and started to write when he was eight years old. “I mean, really seriously, so seriously that I dared never mention it to anybody. I spent hours every day writing and never showed it to a teacher.”⁷ Capote allows the reader to imagine that he has fought off the curious and withdrawn from the world to write in his room. In the preface to Music of Chameleons, he says that his family sought to discover the purpose of his confinement. “Yet I never discussed my writing with anyone; if someone asked what I was up to all those hours, I told them I was doing my school homework.”⁸ Grobel accepts the scenario or finds the image of the locked room sufficiently interesting to include in a preface to his interview. He tells the reader that Capote was inspired to write Other Voices, Other Rooms during a winter walk in the forest. “When he finally reached home, he went straight to his room, locked the door, got into bed fully clothed, and … wrote: ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms—a novel by Truman Capote!’”⁹

III

The image of the locked room seems to have satisfied critics for the last thirty years. In Cold Blood has drawn attention because of the connection between the nonfiction novel and its precursors: The Education of Henry Adams and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. But “My Side of the Matter” has been overshadowed by other stories in A Tree of Night. Since winning the O. Henry Awards, both “Miriam” and “Shut a Final Door” have received scrutiny, but articles dealing with these stories discuss themes and predicaments that attract most readers of Southern American fiction: the Gothic, the grotesque, the obsession with the past, the use of local color and dialect. American critics have skirted the issue of influence since the publication of A Tree of Night and have focused on major stories in the collection.

“My Side of the Matter” borrows its plot from Welty's work, “Why I Live at the P.O.” Both stories tell of a woman who returns home to her family, with child, and precipitates an argument that leads to the withdrawal of the narrator from other members of the household. Stella-Rondo returns with Shirley-T., a child she has “adopted.”¹⁰ Sister challenges the parenthood of Shirley-T., accuses Stella-Rondo of having borne the child herself, and provokes an argument which broadens in scope as it builds to climax. Systematically throughout the narrative, Papa-Daddy, Mama, Uncle Rondo and Shirley-T. turn against Sister and persuade her to leave the house. She moves to the post office.

And if Stella-Rondo should come to me this minute, on bended knees, and attempt to explain the incidents of her life with Mr. Whitaker, I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen.

(56)

Marge returns to her aunts, three months pregnant, in “My Side of the Matter.” Both Eunice and Olivia-Ann disparage her husband—the narrator—belittle his manhood, and question the fatherhood of the child. They antagonize Sylvester and succeed in turning his wife and their maid against him. After a skirmish, Marge's husband locks himself in the parlor, defies the other members of the family and, like Sister, determines to spite them.

Oh, yes, they've started singing a song of a very different color. But as for me—I give them a tune on the piano every now and then just to let them know I'm cheerful.¹¹

Capote characterizes the people in his story by exploiting particular elements that occur in Welty's earlier work. Uncle Rondo becomes ridiculous when he appears “in the hall in one of Stella-Rondo's flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias, like something Mr. Whitaker probably thought was gorgeous” (48). Capote uses the same garment to undercut the authority of Eunice and to mock her romantic self-image. “She troops around the house, rain or shine, in this real old-fashioned nighty, calls it a kimono, but it isn't anything in this world but a dirty flannel nighty” (197). Olivia-Ann has a pathetic, romantic attachment to Gary Cooper and has “one trunk and two suitcases full of his photos” (200). Her fantasy has its counterpart in the trivial feud between Sister and Stella-Rondo, who fight over Mr. Whitaker while sitting for “Pose Yourself” photos (46). Papa-Daddy intimidates the community of China Grove, as well as his family, by exploiting his alleged wealth and power. He uses his position to procure the office of postmistress for Sister and to marshal the town against her when she leaves. “There are always people who will quit buying stamps just to get on the right side of Papa-Daddy” (56). Welty exploits the comedy by characterizing Papa-Daddy as a man who denies the rumors of wealth, but capitalizes on them to wield power. Sister says: “He's real rich. Mama says he is, he says he isn't” (47). Capote puts Eunice in the same position. “Not that she hasn't got plenty of money! Naturally she says she hasn't but I know she has …” (197). Sylvester attributes the influence of Eunice to her status in Admiral's Mill.

Of course anything Eunice says is an order from headquarters as not a breathing soul in Admiral's Mill can stand up and say he doesn't owe her money. …

(197)

Capote caricatures the battle between David and Goliath by juxtaposing the status of Eunice with that of the narrator. While Eunice conceals her funds and denies her wealth, Sylvester exaggerates the importance of his job in Mobile, and consistently refers to his “perfectly swell position clerking at the Cash'n'Carry” (196–197). Welty also pits the authority of Papa-Daddy against the subordinate Sister, who runs “the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi” (47).

Welty and Capote tell their stories in the first-person. In part, they do so to color the narrative with a silly urgency and impromptu exaggeration, both of which help to characterize the tall tale. Sister and Sylvester are obsessed with their own importance, the injustice of “life,” and the righteous indignation which motivates their behavior. Their ramblings also enliven the events of the past, turning them into oral reconstructions of the immediate present. Run-on syntax, slang, idiomatic phrases, and italicized words animate experience and imitate the inflection of vocal speech patterns. Sister and Sylvester talk to their audience and recreate their scenes, using rhetoric to grab the attention or gain the sympathy of the reader. Sister uses one device which occurs nowhere else in the works of Welty: the recreation of speech tempos through the hyphenation of letters within a single word. She prepares the reader for the reaction of Papa-Daddy, who rebels against the notion that he should cut off his beard. Stella-Rondo says: “‘Papa-Daddy, Sister says she fails to understand why you don't cut off your beard.’ So Papa-Daddy l-a-y-s down his knife and fork!” (47). The reader anticipates the response of Papa-Daddy, who slowly l-a-y-s down his utensils and prepares to put up his dukes. Capote appropriates the same device in a dialogue between Eunice and Marge. Marge describes the narrator as “the best-looking” man she knows, and the narrator says: “Eunice eyes me u-p and d-o-w-n and says, ‘Tell him to turn around’” (198). Again, the elongation of the phrase “u-p and d-o-w-n” enables the reader to see Eunice, as she scans the body of the narrator with careful scrutiny, and prepares the reader for the sarcastic comment which follows the pause. “‘You sure must've picked the runt of the litter. Why, this isn't any sort of man at all’” (198).

Two other strategies have their counterparts in “My Side of the Matter”: the comic one-liner, used to describe a character, and the rhetorical question, addressed to the reader. Sister systematically slays her antagonist-of-the-moment with comic barbs throughout the story. “Papa-Daddy is about a million years old and's got this long-long beard” (47). “You ought to see Mama, she weighs two hundred pounds and has real tiny feet” (50). She exaggerates the age and weight of her family and undercuts one aspect of their appearance by insisting on the incongruity of another. Welty turns the longevity of Papa-Daddy into a joke and makes the grandfather into a caricature of Methuselah, with a “long-long beard.” Sister's description of Mama cannot bear scrutiny, any more than her mother's “real tiny feet” can possibly bear the weight of her “two hundred pounds.” Capote's description of Eunice bears more than a faint resemblance to Welty's description of Mama. “Eunice is this big old fat thing with a behind that must weigh a tenth of a ton” (197). Elsewhere, Olivia-Ann is “real pale and skinny and has a mustache” (197). Marge has “no looks, no body, and no brains whatsoever” (196). The narrator resents the interference of Eunice, Marge, and Olivia-Ann by telling Eunice about Mrs. Harry Steller Smith, a canary that Olivia-Ann has released from its cage. Sylvester silences Olivia-Ann and turns aside to the reader. He says, triumphantly: “Remember Mrs. Harry Steller Smith?” (202). He begs the reader to side with him and uses the rhetorical question in the same way that Sister does, to win the sympathy of the reader. When Stella-Rondo says that her uncle looks like a fool in her kimono, Sister comes to his defense. “‘Well, he looks as good as he can,’ I says. ‘As good as anybody in reason could’” (49). Stella-Rondo tells Uncle Rondo in a later scene that Sister has described him as “a fool in that pink kimono” (52). Sister responds, by asking the reader to pity her plight. “Do you remember who it was really said that?” (52).

IV

Capote might well have entitled his story “My Side of the Matter: Or, Do You Remember Who It Was Really Said That?” His imitation of Welty and his denial of literary influence put him in an interesting position. His comments to Grobel suggest that a writer who bonds himself to tradition loses his identity and becomes psychotic, but his refusal to identify the source of his own work seems equally perverse. Capote's alterations of the earlier story reveal more clearly than the similarities that he struggles to resolve this paradox. “My Side of the Matter” transforms the narrator into an alter ego of the author and turns the antagonists into a successive string of females, who challenge Sylvester. The plot now centers on the accusation of theft—by a man, from a woman. The struggles between Sylvester and the women in Admiral's Mill have their counterpart in the acceptance and refusal of Welty as the original source, and represent the anxiety of female influence, which Capote must overcome.

The reassignment of sex roles in the second story turns the battle between Sylvester and the opposition into a gender issue. Sister faces off against a series of enemies who are equally distributed between the male and female sex—against Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo on the one hand, and Stella-Rondo and Mama on the other. Capote turns the conflict between the narrator and the other characters into a battle between the sexes. Sylvester now confronts Eunice, Olivia-Ann, Bluebell, and eventually Marge in a series of encounters that test his manhood. He asserts his authority by insisting that he has a position of patriarchal importance at the Cash'n'Carry, by defending his ability to impregnate his wife, and by demanding to sleep with her. The women attempt to separate Sylvester from the rest of the house because of his sexual status. Eunice says: “Birds setting in their roost—time we went to bed. You have your old room, Marge, and I've fixed a cot for this gentleman on the back porch” (200). The women are horrified by the possibility that Sylvester could assert the male prerogative, impregnate his wife, and work on her affections. They seek to castrate the protagonist, who finds an alternate means of asserting his sexual strength. Sylvester describes the influence of Eunice over Marge, and his attempt to counteract it.

She has turned that girl against me in the most villainous fashion that words could not describe. Why, she even reached the point when she was sassing me back, but I provided her with a couple of good slaps and put a stop to that. No wife of mine is ever going to be disrespectful to me, not on your life!

(201)

When he learns that he can't control his wife as a sexual male, he turns to force and seeks to assert his power, as a member of the “stronger” sex. He exerts physical power over other women in the house as well. As the battle progresses, he picks a parasol off of the hat tree and raps Bluebell “across the head with it until it cracked in two” (204). He describes himself as a victor in the sexual sense—as a “man.” Only Sylvester has the strength to barricade himself behind the parlor door with “that big mahogany table that must weigh a couple of tons” (205). And only Sylvester can appropriate sexual power—pick and choose between Marge and “a five-pound box of Sweet Love candy” (205) that becomes a mock-romantic substitute for the female companion.

Sylvester creates a history for himself and other characters by building a sexual hierarchy that subordinates women and defines people by establishing their patriarchal roots. He undermines female influence by attributing the importance of Eunice and Olivia-Ann to the appropriation of masculine power. “There is a big table in one corner of the parlor which supports two pictures of Miss E and O-A's mama and papa. Papa … was a captain in the Civil War” (202). The male tradition empowers the past and enables the narrator to live for the future. Sylvester says: “Oh, if it wasn't for that little unborn George I would've been making dust tracks on the road, way before now” (200). Unlike Marge, Eunice, and Olivia-Ann, Sylvester has no parents or past, according to the narrative. He is completely self-created and, as the narrative progresses, the reader learns that he is also able to create little men in his own image. Sylvester determines that the unborn child is a boy, believes that it will grow to be a man, and decides to protect it until the man can protect himself. He names the child and confers upon it the attribute of male power. “George Far Sylvester is a name we've planned for the baby. Has a strong sound, don't you think?” (199). The “strength” of the male child is due to his distance from the female group, as the middle name “Far” suggests. The reader establishes the identity of Sylvester himself through a naming process in the narrative which is self-referential and gender-reflexive, within the male tradition. The narrator uses the reflexive pronoun “I” to refer to himself and withholds his name from the reader as he withholds his presence and power from the women, at the end of the narrative. Through the naming of George Far Sylvester, the reader learns to identify the narrator himself as Sylvester—to link the father and son together, through the patriarchal surname.

Eunice and Olivia-Ann acknowledge their “inferiority” by imitating men or assuming the costume and behavior of the opposite sex to achieve power. Eunice chases Sylvester with her father's Civil War sword—a comic, phallic symbol and a relic from the male world of war and bloodshed. Olivia-Ann “squats around most of the time whittling on a stick with her fourteen-inch hog knife” (198). Both she and Eunice brandish their weapons, wave them in the face of the protagonist, and challenge his potency. They represent a threat to the male and give him a “half-inch cut” (204) that harms him less than it hurts his masculine pride. Sylvester counters the authority of women, throughout the story, by telling the reader that Eunice and Olivia-Ann fail as men and function as comic, pathetic imitations of the real thing. Eunice “chews tobacco and tries to pretend so ladylike, spitting on the sly” (197). Olivia-Ann has a “mustache” (197). Sylvester portrays the women as sex-starved maiden aunts who envy Marge because they can't get a man for themselves. In the absence of actual men, they imitate the opposite sex and persecute Sylvester because he represents the real thing.

They mock his pretensions to manhood, as he mocks theirs. Eunice glories in the role of bread-winner and belittles Sylvester.

Why don't the little heathen go out and get some honest work? … If he was any sort of man you could call a man he'd be trying to put a crust of bread in that girl's mouth instead of stuffing his own off my vittles.

(201)

Olivia-Ann pokes fun of his small size and bad back, and refers to him as a “runt” (198). Both women devalue the man by denigrating his capacity to procreate and defining his status as a sexual failure. Olivia-Ann echoes her sister when she says that “he isn't even of the male sex” (198). “How can a girl have a baby with a girl?” (199). References to impotence and castration proliferate throughout the text and testify to the capacity of women to disarm their male opponents. Sylvester compares the tyranny of Eunice, in the community of Admiral's Mill, to the alleged rape of a woman by an elderly man.

… if she said Charlie Carson (a blind, ninety-year old invalid who hasn't taken a step since 1896) threw her on her back and raped her everybody in this county would swear the same on a stack of Bibles.

(197)

The sisters assert their presence in the house, as they do in the community. Sylvester finds that “the fancy man tore out of this house one afternoon like old Adolf Hitler was on his tail and leaped into his Ford coupé, never to be heard from again” (201). Olivia-Ann locates the source of the feud, below the belt, and gives Sylvester a terrific “knee punch” (204) before running into the yard and shouting:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
                    coming of the lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where
                    the grapes of wrath are stored.

(204)

She brings the opponent to his knees—literally—and tramples the “grapes of wrath,” neutering the man whose genitals threaten the women.

The conflict begins with the accusation of Eunice, early in the story. Sylvester says:

I happened to find close to a thousand dollars hidden in a flower pot on the side porch. I didn't touch one cent, only Eunice says I stole a hundred-dollar bill which is a venomous lie from start to finish.

(197)

Later, the accusation precipitates the final fight in the story.

“Where is it?” says she. “Where's my hundred dollars that he made away with while my trusting back was turned?”

“This is the straw that broke the camel's back,” says I, but I was too hot and tired to get up.

“That's not the only back that's going to be broke,” says she, her bug eyes about to pop clear out of their sockets.

(203)

The theft by a man, from a woman, summarizes the conflict between men and women and symbolizes the central theme of the story: female influence and the denial of it. Eunice proclaims the dependence of men upon her and threatens to break the back of a man whose body is weaker than hers. Sylvester maintains his innocence, first by fighting Eunice, then by pushing her out of the parlor. The final image is an answer to the accusation. Sylvester locks himself in the room, using his physical isolation to assert his actual innocence, and to demonstrate his independence.

V

Capote leaves the crime—and the issue of influence—unresolved at the end of the story. He allows the reader to suspect Sylvester and certainly means to suggest that the locked door is evidence of an empty assertion. The isolation of the protagonist cannot, in itself, absolve him of the crime or his complicity in it. The denials cannot function, on their own, as an adequate defense. Capote compares the confrontation between Eunice and Sylvester to an earlier scene of accusation and denial. Eunice meets Sylvester, when he first arrives, and tells Marge that he looks like the “runt of the litter.” Sylvester says: “I've never been so taken back in my life! True, I'm slightly stocky, but then I haven't got my full growth yet” (198). Sylvester responds to the accusation with a weak defense. The reader dismisses the reasoning process of the protagonist and carries a skeptical reaction to Sylvester over into the final episode of accusation and denial. To this extent, Capote allows the reader to doubt Sylvester, to interpret the outcome of the story, and to care about it. But ultimately he undermines the issue of female influence by leaving it open-ended. He suggests that the plot is irrelevant and that the accusation of theft is simply one in a chain of petty incidents in the narrative, championed by ridiculous people. The interaction of characters and the complication of events create a diversion which subverts interpretation and subordinates the issue of female influence to the illustration of the spectacle itself.

In an interview with Playboy, in March, 1968, Capote said: I've never been psychoanalyzed; I've never even consulted a psychiatrist. I now consider myself a mentally healthy person. I work out all my problems in my work.¹²

Capote seems to work out the problem of influence in “My Side of the Matter,” using the battle between Sylvester and the women to illustrate his own anxiety. He imitates Welty and reveals this intent, by tipping his hat to tradition in the title of the story. “My Side of the Matter” might well read “My Response to Eudora Welty,” for Sylvester's battle seems to reflect Capote's own involvement with his predecessor. But in his comments on his work—in conversations, writings, and interviews—Capote contradicts the blatant link between himself and earlier writers. The psychological search for his own identity, within the text, leads the reader to suspect that the struggle between two images of the author—the psychotic and the “mentally healthy person”—never resolves itself. Taken in context with the author's statements about tradition and the struggle to create a literary identity, “My Side of the Matter” ultimately remains a problematic work. Sylvester's retreat to the parlor parallels Sister's withdrawal to the post office and indicates the extent to which the author draws upon his literary model. But Sylvester's rebuttal, behind the locked door, mirrors the protestations of the author, who uses the image of the locked room to illustrate his own autonomy. Capote's story, therefore, represents an intriguing compromise: a testimonial to tradition and a denial of it.

Notes

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” from The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 147.

2. Ibid., p. 150.

3. Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons (New York: Random House, 1975), p. xi.

4. Lawrence Grobel, Conversations with Capote (New York: New American Library, 1985), p. 97.

5. Ibid., p. 116.

6. Ibid., p. 149.

7. Ibid., p. 52.

8. Capote, Music for Chameleons, p. xii.

9. Grobel, Conversations with Capote, p. 82.

10. Eudora Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 46. Further references to this story are from the same edition and are included, parenthetically, within the text.

11. Truman Capote, “My Side of the Matter,” from “The Grass Harp” and “A Tree of Night” (New York: Signet Books, 1980), p. 205. Further references to this story are from the same edition and are included, parenthetically, within the text.

12. William L. Nance, The Worlds of Truman Capote (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), p. 53. I borrow this passage from an interview in Playboy, which Nance quotes.