[In the following essay, Nance examines the defining characteristics of Capote's early short stories.]

The early fiction of Truman Capote is dominated by fear. It descends into a subconscious ruled by the darker archetypes, a childhood haunted by bogeymen, a world of blurred realities whose inhabitants are trapped in unendurable isolation. The stories set in this dark world include “A Tree of Night” (1943), “Miriam” (1944), “The Headless Hawk” (1946), “Shut a Final Door” (1947), and “Master Misery” (1948) (S).¹ Deep below the surface they are really one story, and they have one protagonist. This story will be continued, and its hero will achieve a peculiar liberation in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). The fear and sense of captivity that overshadow these stories result from the individual's inability to accept and respond properly to reality. On the social level this means inability to love other persons. More essentially, it means refusal to accept mysterious and frightening elements within the self, for the persons encountered by the protagonist are most properly viewed as projections of inner personae. One indication of the climate of the protagonist's inner world is the fact that nearly all of these persons are grotesques.

The stories are fundamentally psychic in orientation. In at least two cases—“Miriam” and “Shut a Final Door”—the line between realism and fantasy is definitely crossed: things happen that are literally impossible. Usually, however, the settings seem realistic; we are kept in a world that is conceivably real, though strange, and the effects are wrought through manipulations of the protagonist's consciousness. The characteristic style of the early work is intensely poetic, and the meaning of the stories rests heavily on intricate patterns of symbolism. The most prominent stylistic and symbolic motif in the fiction up to and including Other Voices, Other Rooms is that of descent into a state of intensified and distorted consciousness. This happens in each story, the differences being mostly in what might be termed focal length. Sometimes the setting remains normal and the character simply becomes sleepy or drunk, or has a dream. At other times the entire setting takes on dreamlike characteristics, often through weather imagery such as darkness or snow. In the most extreme cases the reader is pulled completely into the illusion by means of apparitions or mysterious voices presented as real. This scale of reader involvement is one of several ways of looking at the stories and not, incidentally, a simple measure of their total effectiveness: Capote handles his various effects always with considerable skill.

Perhaps the most obvious thing to be noted about Capote's early work is its highly personal quality. The stories take place in an inner world almost entirely devoid of social or political concern. Because of this subjective orientation, even the treatment of human relations has about it an air of isolation, of constriction. With this qualification in mind, one may go on to observe that love and the failure of love are of central concern in Capote's fiction. The meaning of love, as it emerges in the early work, would seem to be uncritical acceptance. In each story the protagonist is given an opportunity to accept someone and something strange and disturbing, to push back the frontier of darkness both in the surrounding world and in the soul. Not until Joel works his way through Other Voices, Other Rooms does one of them manage to do so. Their characteristic kind of failure appears in simplest form in the tendency to dismiss any challenging new presence as “crazy.” Capote's impulse, from “A Tree of Night” to In Cold Blood, is to accept and understand the “abnormal” person; it has been, indeed, one of the main purposes of his writing to safeguard the unique individual's freedom from such slighting classifications as “abnormal.”

“A Tree of Night,” the earliest story included in Capote's Selected Writings, sets the pattern of the self-protective hero who lives in fear because of a refusal to accept. Compared to some of the stories which follow, this one is relatively simple. The style is unobtrusive, the symbolic structure modest. Events stay within the bounds of credibility, and yet the reader is chillingly exposed to the grotesque both in the external world and in the semiconscious mind of the young heroine.

Nineteen-year-old Kay, returning to college from her uncle's funeral, is forced to sit in a train compartment opposite two other passengers: a gin-reeking dwarfish woman with a huge head, and a corpselike man. The woman persuades her to drink some gin and goes to get paper cups. Kay is left alone with the man, unable to take her eyes off him, repelled but fascinated, especially by his eyes “like a pair of clouded milky-blue marbles, thickly lashed and oddly beautiful” (S 6).

The movement of this story is Kay's descent into a half-world of subconscious childhood fears. Already begun when she entered the compartment, it accelerates as she waits drowsily for the woman's return. When the man unexpectedly strokes her cheek, she leans forward in confusion and gazes into his eyes. “Suddenly, from some spring of compassion, she felt for him a keen sense of pity; but also, and this she could not suppress, an overpowering disgust, an absolute loathing: something about him, an elusive quality she could not quite put a finger on, reminded her of—of what?” (S 7). When Kay tries to escape, the woman seizes her wrist and shows her a worn handbill describing her companion as “Lazarus, the Man Who Is Buried Alive.” She explains that they do a traveling show featuring a mock burial.

The man begins playing obscenely with a peach-seed love charm, insisting that she buy it, and Kay finally runs from the compartment. When she steps out onto the black, freezing observation platform the immediate danger of sleep is removed but her mind begins to slip back toward a ghost-ridden childhood. The area, though new to her, is “strangely familiar.” Unable to light a cigarette, she angrily tosses it away and begins “to whimper softly, like an irritable child” (S 14). She longs to go inside and sleep but knows that she is afraid to do so. Suddenly, compulsively, she kneels down and touches the red lantern that hangs in a corner, the one source of warmth and light. A “subtle zero sensation” warns her that the man is behind her, and she finally gathers courage to look up. Seeing his harmless face in the red light, she knows that what she fears is not him but

a memory, a childish memory of terrors that once, long ago, had hovered over her like haunted limbs on a tree of night. Aunts, cooks, strangers—each eager to spin a tale or teach a rhyme of spooks and death, omens, spirits, demons. And always there had been the unfailing threat of the wizard man: stay close to the house, child, else a wizard man'll snatch and eat you alive! He lived everywhere, the wizard man, and everywhere was danger. At night, in bed, hear him tapping at the window? Listen!

(S 14–15)

Danger is still everywhere for Kay. Holding onto the railing and “inching upward,” she returns from childhood and the deepest part of her mind only to accompany the man back into a coach “numb with sleep.” She wants to cry out and waken the other passengers, but the fear of death is too strong: “What if they were not really asleep?” (S 15) Tears of frustration in her eyes, she agrees to buy the love charm, “if that's all—just all you want” (S 15). There is no answer, and Kay surrenders to sleep, watching the man's pale face “change form and recede before her like a moon-shaped rock sliding downward under a surface of water” (S 15–16). She is dimly aware when the woman steals her purse and pulls her raincoat “like a shroud above her head” (S 16).

Kay's immersion in the subconscious has not been cathartic. The wizard man she buried alive there as a child has finally come forth like Lazarus, but only to haunt her in an even more insistent shape. She has not eluded him any more than she will elude death. In fact, death seems already on her, short-circuiting her life, as the raincoat-shroud is pulled above her head. But Kay's failure is not simply her mortality. She is like a child living fearfully in the dark because, shutting her eyes against ghosts, she has shut out love and life.

Capote's next story, “Miriam,” though its materials are different, follows a pattern essentially the same as that of “A Tree of Night.” Like Kay, Mrs. H. T. Miller hides repressed fears beneath a fastidious exterior, the penetration of which provides the main action of the story. A sixty-one-year-old widow, she lives alone and unobtrusively in a modest but immaculate New York apartment. Her life is neither broad nor deep. Her interests are few, and she has almost no friends. Her activities are “seldom spontaneous” (S 17). Snow is falling lightly as she goes out for a movie one night, leaving a light burning because “she found nothing more disturbing than a sensation of darkness” (S 17). She moves along “oblivious as a mole burrowing a blind path,” but outside the theater she is agitated by the sight of a little girl with long, silver-white hair. Miriam's intrusion into Mrs. Miller's life begins gently, with a request that she buy her ticket, since children are not admitted alone. On closer examination Mrs. Miller is struck by the girl's large eyes, “hazel, steady, lacking any childlike quality whatsoever” (S 19). As they talk, it emerges that Mrs. Miller's name, until now hidden beneath her late husband's initials, is also Miriam. Disturbed by the girl's coolly self-contained manner, she leaves her and goes in alone.

A week of snow follows, progressively shutting Mrs. Miller off from her familiar world. She loses count of the days. One evening, comfortably settled in bed with hot-water bottle and newspaper, her face masked with cold cream, she is roused by the persistent buzz of the doorbell. She notes that the clock says eleven, though she “was always asleep by ten.” Indifferent to the lateness of the hour, Miriam gently forces her way into the apartment. Indifferent also to the season, she wears a white silk dress. The older woman, by now thoroughly frightened, tries to disarm this apparition by recourse to familiar categories: “Your mother must be insane to let a child like you wander around at all hours of the night—and in such ridiculous clothes. She must be out of her mind” (S 21). Miriam continues to study Mrs. Miller, “forcing their eyes to meet” (S 22). In the jewel box she finds a cameo brooch that was a gift from Mr. Miller and insists on having it. Suddenly Mrs. Miller is stunned by the realization that she is, in this “hushed snow-city,” alone and helpless. The cameo, now on the girl's breast, emphasizes the identity of the two Miriams, “the blond profile like a trick reflection of its wearer” (S 23).

Miriam leaves and Mrs. Miller spends the next day in bed. When the next morning dawns with unseasonable brilliance, the bad dream seems to be over. Mrs. Miller straightens the apartment and then goes out shopping, this time spontaneously, having “no idea what she wanted or needed” (S 25.) Then, “as if by prearranged plan,” she finds herself buying glazed cherries, almond cakes—everything for which Miriam has expressed a desire. Meanwhile the weather suddenly turns colder, clouds cover the sun “like blurred lenses” (S 26), and snow begins to fall. When, later that day, Miriam returns with the intention of staying, Mrs. Miller at first yields with “a curious passivity” (S 27), then begs her to go away, dissolves in tears, and finally runs out the door.

For the next few minutes the story seems to return to the everyday world. Mrs. Miller pounds frantically on the door of the apartment below, is courteously received by a young couple, and incoherently tells them about a little girl who won't go away, and who is about to do “something terrible” (S 28). The man investigates but finds no one, and his wife, “as if delivering a verdict,” concludes, “Well, for cryinoutloud …” (S 29). Mrs. Miller climbs slowly back to her apartment and finds it as it was before Miriam entered, but also as empty and lifeless “as a funeral parlor” (S 29).

Having lost her bearings now completely, Mrs. Miller is sinking again, this time deeper than ever. “The room was losing shape; it was dark and getting darker and there was nothing to be done about it; she could not lift her hand to light a lamp” (S 29–30). Then, sitting passively, she begins once more to feel that it has all been only a bad dream. “Suddenly, closing her eyes, she felt an upward surge, like a diver emerging from some deeper, greener depth” (S 30). Feeling her mind waiting as though for a “revelation,” she begins to reason that Miriam was just an illusion, and that nothing really matters anyway. For all she has lost to Miriam is “her identity,” but now she is confident she has again found herself, Mrs. H. T. Miller (S 30). Comforting herself with these thoughts, she becomes aware of the harsh sound of a bureau drawer opening and closing, then the murmur of a silk dress “moving nearer and swelling in intensity till the walls trembled with the vibration and the room was caving under a wave of whispers” (S 30). She opens her eyes to the dull, direct stare of Miriam.

In a 1957 interview for the Paris Review, Capote, asked what he thought of his early stories, expressed qualified admiration for Other Voices, Other Rooms and added, “I like The Grass Harp, too, and several of my short stories, though not ‘Miriam,’ which is a good stunt but nothing more. No, I prefer ‘Children on Their Birthdays’ and ‘Shut a Final Door,’ and oh, some others, especially a story not too many people seemed to care for, ‘Master Misery.’”²

Capote's judgment on “Miriam,” though it tends to ignore the story's close thematic kinship with his others, seems reasonably just. Comparison with “A Tree of Night” can highlight some of the story's limitations. Both have the same underlying theme: subjection to fear because of a failure of acceptance. But while in the earlier story a few simple and believable events are made to evoke bottomless psychological depths, in “Miriam” the machinery becomes an end in itself. The story's haunting effect, which is undeniable, comes from skillful ghost-story manipulation of a too-solid embodiment of the subconscious as alter ego. Miriam reminds one of Poe's William Wilson and Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde. Today's reader wants more subtlety than that.

In the two stories so far examined, the emphasis has fallen more heavily on failure to accept oneself than on failure to love other persons. Kay would not be expected to enter into a much closer relationship with her two traveling companions, and Mrs. Miller's visitor is less a person to be loved than a haunt and a symbol. Capote's next two stories, “The Headless Hawk” and “Shut a Final Door,” deal more emphatically with love, and in this way represent at least a partial broadening of scope. Nevertheless there is an essential similarity among all these stories, perhaps most evident in the way they end. Like Kay and Mrs. Miller, Vincent and Walter wind up more conscious than ever that they are trapped.

“The Headless Hawk” begins with an epigraph that could as fittingly be applied to any of the early stories. It is from The Book of Job (24:13, 16–17):

They are of those that rebel against the light; they know not the ways thereof, nor abide in the paths thereof. In the dark they dig through houses, which they had marked for themselves in the daytime: they know not the light. For the morning is to them as the shadow of death: if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death.

(S 31)

The story records Vincent's affair with the enigmatic girl, “D.J.” Like Mrs. Miller's encounter with Miriam, it is a descent into a dreamlike world of uncertainty, a nonliberating confrontation with subconscious fears. For Vincent this is not the first such experience but the culmination of a long series of failures at love. Corresponding to the extent of his experience is a degree of self-awareness far beyond that of Kay or Mrs. Miller. Vincent knows, as he proceeds through the affair, what its outcome will be. So, in a sense, does the reader, for the story employs a frame chronology in which the central action appears as a flashback. The opening section finds Vincent already nervously resigned to being constantly shadowed by an unnamed, elfin girl; then comes the story of their meeting and eventual breakup, and the brief closing section simply reaffirms the finality of the first part.

As the story opens, Vincent Waters is already down at the “deeper, greener depth” (S 30) from which Mrs. Miller mistakenly thought she was emerging just before Miriam's final appearance. As he closes the art gallery of which he is manager and starts home on a humid afternoon, he feels as though he moves “below the sea. Buses, cruising crosstown through Fifty-seventh Street, seemed like green-bellied fish, and faces loomed and rocked like wave-riding masks” (S 31). He sees the girl, ghostlike in a green transparent raincoat, and she follows him through the streets. Her eyes have a shocked look, “as though, having at one time witnessed a terrible incident, they'd locked wide open” (S 33). Vincent has been oppressed lately by a sense of unreality; voices these days seem to come to him “through layers of wool” (S 32). Entering his basement apartment, he looks back to see the girl standing listlessly on the sidewalk. The rain, threatening all day, still holds back.

Part Two begins abruptly with their first meeting. On an idle winter morning at the gallery she quietly appears before him dressed “like a freak” in masculine odds and ends. She wants to sell a painting, and her few remarks hint that she painted it in an asylum. The institution was apparently presided over by a Mr. Destronelli, whom she mentions as if expecting Vincent to recognize the name. He shakes his head and, making a capsule survey of his life, wonders why eccentricity has such appeal for him. “It was the feeling he'd had as a child toward carnival freaks. And it was true that about those whom he'd loved there was always a little something wrong, broken. Strange, though, that this quality, having stimulated an attraction, should, in his case, regularly end it by destroying it” (S 36). Vincent overcomes “an intense longing to touch her head, finger the boyish hair” (S 36), as she unwraps the picture and places it before him.

A headless figure in a monklike robe reclined complacently on top a tacky vaudeville trunk; in one hand she held a fuming blue candle, in the other a miniature gold cage, and her severed head lay bleeding at her feet: it was the girl's, this head, but here her hair was long, very long, and a snowball kitten with crystal spitfire eyes playfully pawed, as it would a spool of yarn, the sprawling ends. The wings of a hawk, headless, scarlet-breasted, copper-clawed, curtained the background like a nightfall sky.

(S 36–37)

The picture is crudely done, but to Vincent it seems to reveal “a secret concerning himself” (S 37). He decides to buy it, but before he can write a check the phone rings and the girl vanishes, leaving only the address “D.J.—Y.W.C.A.”

Vincent hangs the painting above his mantel and on sleepless nights talks to the hawk, telling it about his life, which he feels has been “without direction, and quite headless” (S 38), a long series of good beginnings and bad endings both in art and in love. He is, he feels, “a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another” (S 38). February and March pass but he is unable to find the girl. He becomes more and more disturbed, and friends notice the change in him. On an April evening, wandering the streets slightly drunk, he finds her. At his approach she is terrified, but soon her head relaxes on his chest “like a child's” (S 41) and she agrees to go home with him.

Vincent has lighted his room with candles, and it appears to waver in their “delirious light” (S 41). He himself feels a “drugged drunk sensation” (S 42). On this occasion the girl seems to him more attractive, less abnormal. Unusually relaxed, she talks about her childhood, then about Mr. Destronelli—“Everybody knows him” (S 42). As Vincent embraces her he glances at a mirror where “uncertain light rippled their reflections” (S 43). He asks what “Mr. Whoozits” looks like, then notices that for the first time she is staring at the painting, studying a particular object, but “whether hawk or head he could not say” (S 43). Pressing closer to him, she replies, “Well, he looks like you, like me, like most anybody” (S 43). This rather intricate scene brings together several strands in the story. The initiation of their affair, it takes place in a setting of multiple distortion (Vincent's mind, the candlelit room, the mirror's wavering reflection). The girl sinks into her childhood and emerges with Mr. Destronelli, whom she identifies with both herself and Vincent, staring up at the painting as she speaks so that her words could as easily apply to the figures there, both hawk and human being. Vincent is entering not only into physical union with the girl but into a blurred identification with her, the hawk, and Destronelli. At the same time the latter two remain apart, hovering threateningly over the scene.

Next morning Vincent discovers that the girl has no sense of time and is preoccupied with a mysterious “he” who she thinks brought her here. Vincent declares his love, then remembers numerous others he has loved, female and male, all eccentric and all betrayed by him. But he tells her that there was only one, now dead, and “to his own ears this had a truthful ring” (S 45).

The affair continues for a month and ends on D.J.'s eighteenth birthday. Vincent has kept her a private experience, not mentioning her to any of his friends. He has given her money for clothes, but the things she has spent it on are, like the name D.J., more masculine than feminine. She prepares for the birthday party “with the messy skill of a six-year-old playing grownup” (S 46). Their celebration consists of dinner at the automat followed by a movie. Both are aware that they are nearing the end, and the impulse to separate comes from the girl as well as from Vincent. As they go to bed, she thanks him for the violets he has given her and adds, “It's a shame they have to die” (S 48).

Meanwhile Vincent has slipped into a dream that seems to compress his life, past and future, into a stagnant present. In an endless hall lit by chandeliers he sees a degenerate old man in a rocking chair. “Vincent recognizes Vincent. Go away, screams Vincent, the young and handsome, but Vincent, the old and horrid, creeps forward on all fours, and climbs spiderlike onto his back” (S 48). Thus laden, he is ashamed to find himself in a throng of elegantly dressed couples, all silent and motionless. Then he recognizes that many of them are similarly burdened, “saddled with malevolent semblances of themselves, outward embodiments of inner decay” (S 48). The host appears, bearing a massive headless hawk on his arm, and orders the guests to dance. Vincent's old lovers one after another glide into his arms, and he hears “a cracked, cruel imitation” (S 49) of his voice speak hypocritically to each. Then D.J. appears, bearing on her back a beautiful child.

“I am heavier than I look,” says the child, and a terrible voice retorts, “But I am heaviest of all.” The instant their hands meet he begins to feel the weight upon him diminish; the old Vincent is fading. His feet lift off the floor, he floats upward from her embrace. …

The host releases his hawk, sends it soaring. Vincent thinks, no matter, it is a blind thing, and the wicked are safe among the blind. But the hawk wheels above him, swoops down, claws foremost; at last he knows there is to be no freedom.

(S 49)

Beneath the Gothic stage props, the meaning of this dream is reasonably clear. In it, as in the story as a whole, Vincent is burdened with guilt and the expectation of death. With at least a potential sympathy the scope broadens to include others, many of them similarly burdened. The host, no doubt Vincent's image of Mr. Destronelli, carries the headless hawk, the two functioning as a unit like falcon and falconer. The waltz symbolizes the lack of direction in Vincent's life, always circling and changing partners, never progressing. But his affair with D.J. has given him a clearer understanding of himself. Previously he thought it “strange” that the defects in his lovers, after attracting him, destroyed the attraction. Now he blames his own want of love and is overwhelmed by his “wickedness.” Presumably it is her complete innocence that drove the lesson home, for she bears on her back a child, the opposite of Vincent's degenerate old man. He has hoped that contact with her would free him, but soon learns that his fate is darker and more inescapable than he thought. For such as Vincent and the girl (and no other kind of person has yet appeared in Capote's fiction) there is no love and no freedom. The hawk that pursues her will get him, too.

The defeat Vincent has dreamed must still be painfully acted out. When he wakes at dawn and reaches out for the “mother-comfort” of the girl's presence, the bed is empty. He finds her in the yard, and as he approaches she whispers, “I saw him. He's here” (S 50). Desperate to free himself of his dreamed guilt, Vincent finds a pretext ready. He knocks her hand away and almost slaps her. “‘Him! Him! Him! What's the matter with you?—’ he tried too late to prevent the word—‘crazy?’ There, the acknowledgment of something he'd known, but had not allowed his conscious mind to crystallize. And he thought: Why should this make a difference? A man cannot be held to account for those he loves” (S 50). It sounds like Mrs. Miller's self-deluded hope that she is rising from the depths and that “like everything else,” her meeting with Miriam was “of no importance” (S 30). Vincent, however, has been here before and knows better.

Later in the day Vincent returns from the gallery, violently ill, to learn from the superintendent's wife that D.J. has attacked the gas man with her scissors, calling him “an Eyetalian name” (S 52). Hiding until D.J. goes out, he begins to pack her things. His fever increasing, he falls to the bed and into a surrealistic nightmare in which a butterfly appears and, to his horror, perches like a ribbon bow above the severed head in the painting. He finds the scissors and stabs them at the insect. It escapes and the blades dig into the canvas “like a ravening steel mouth, scraps of picture flaking the floor like cuttings of stiff hair” (S 54). Sitting in terror he recalls things D.J. has told him. In her fantasies Mr. Destronelli has taken many forms, among them those of “a hawk, a child, a butterfly” (S 54). He was in the asylum, and after she ran away she encountered him in other men who mistreated her. One of them was a tattooed Italian; another painted his toenails. She is certain that eventually “he” will murder her. This fantasy of the girl's corresponds to Vincent's dream and knits the story's symbolism into an even more complicated pattern. Its principal function is to emphasize her role as Vincent's alter ego. Like him, she is a traveler in circles and “a victim, born to be murdered,” though her victimization has been on a much more concrete and rudimentary level than his. At the same time, Vincent sees even more clearly that as their life-patterns mesh, he is being cast in the role of her destroyer, Destronelli.

The final brief section of the story begins at the moment when D.J. follows Vincent home and stands on the walk outside his apartment. It is July, about two months after their separation. Since then Vincent has been wasted by pneumonia, and his constant haunting by the girl has resulted in a “paralysis of time and identity” (S 56). On this evening he goes out for supper just as the long-threatening rain is about to begin. There is a clap of thunder and, as she joins him in the “complex light” of a street lamp, the sky is like “a thunder-cracked mirror,” and the rain falls between them “like a curtain of splintered glass” (S 57).

It can be only a partial justification of the complexity of this story to say that it enmeshes the reader as it does the characters. Capote once said, “All I want to do is to tell the story and sometimes it is best to choose a symbol.”³ For “The Headless Hawk,” he chose too many symbols. It is the most complex and involuted of all his short stories, several of which tend toward excess in this respect. Only his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, surpasses it in symbolic density, and it is interesting to note that as his career progressed, Capote has moved first to a simpler fictional technique and finally to the “nonfiction novel.”

The symbolism in “The Headless Hawk,” too heavy to be carried naturally by the action, is concentrated principally in three focal points which are themselves intricately and arbitrarily contrived: the painting, Vincent's dream, and the girl's rambling fantasies. All of it is intended to point up meanings already more or less explicit in the dramatic action. These meanings finally come down to one: Vincent himself is the headless hawk. He is both victim and victimizer, and he is directionless and alone. Through a balance brilliantly achieved, whatever else one must say about the story, the girl becomes both a living person and a projection, a delusion of the submerged consciousness (what Miriam is for Mrs. Miller and the wizard man for Kay.) At the same time she is a profitless encounter, a test which Vincent fails by rejecting instead of loving. It is this aspect of his theme that Capote emphasizes in his next story.

Walter Ranny of “Shut a Final Door” is in many respects identical with Vincent; certainly the title of his story would fit Vincent's as well. The two stories differ mainly in perspective. Walter is viewed far more objectively than is Vincent, for the story's focus is less on the undulating consciousness than on the external world of persons, places, and events. In this respect it points toward Capote's later work—not the deeply submerged Other Voices, Other Rooms, but the later, more social short novels, The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Essentially, though, “Shut a Final Door” is part of the dark fiction of fear, failure, and captivity.

The story opens on a sufficiently “social” note: “Walter, listen to me: if everyone dislikes you, works against you, don't believe they do so arbitrarily; you create these situations for yourself” (S 58). Anna's remark, for all its glib triteness, is the story of Walter's life. Too insecure for love or even friendship, he is a treacherous coward for whom the reader feels an immediate distaste, only partially removed as the story probes more deeply into his fears.

The conversational tone of the opening is appropriate, for the dominant motif in the story involves malicious and inescapable voices. That, and circles: “He said you said they said we said round and round. Round and round, like the paddle-bladed ceiling-fan wheeling above” (S 59).

The fan is in a drab side-street hotel in New Orleans, where Walter has come with “a feeling of having traveled to the end, the falling off” (S 59). He lies under the fan thinking that his life has been a circle. Trying to find the center, the explanation of it, he rejects as “crazy” Anna's opinion that it was his own doing; he prefers to blame his parents. Still looking for the center, he decides to begin with Irving, the first person he'd known in New York. Like “The Headless Hawk,” this story begins at the end, jumps back to the beginning, then progresses to the end again, completing a circle that symbolizes the protagonist's life.

Irving, delicate and boyish, is friendly to Walter during his first lonesome days in New York. He has many friends and introduces Walter to all of them. Among them is Margaret, “more or less Irving's girl friend” (S 60), whom Walter steals, hurting Irving irreparably and establishing the pattern of betrayal that will characterize his own brief social climb. Soon he realizes that he has no friends and tries to analyze his trouble:

He was never certain whether he liked X or not. He needed X's love, but was incapable of loving. He could never be sincere with X, never tell him more than fifty percent of the truth. On the other hand, it was impossible for him to permit X these same imperfections: somewhere along the line Walter was sure he'd be betrayed. He was afraid of X, terrified.

(S 64)

Walter meets Rosa Cooper, a wealthy heiress, and begins spending most of his weekends at her Long Island home, making valuable contacts. Among these is Anna Stimson, a horsey fashion editor with a highly irregular past. Walter makes her his mother confessor because “there was nothing he could tell her of which she might legitimately disapprove” (S 66). He asks Anna if she loves him.

“Oh,” said Anna, “when was anything ever what it seemed to be? Now it's a tadpole now it's a frog. … Flying around inside us is something called the Soul, and when you die you're never dead; yes, and when we're alive we're never alive. And so you want to know if I love you? Don't be dumb, Walter, we're not even friends. …”

(S 66–67)

The theme of deceptiveness is already a familiar one, and will be exploited most fully in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Often quite effective when woven into the plot and atmosphere of the stories, it here sounds like shallow cynicism, neither well dramatized nor adequately “distanced” from the author. It is an indication of the way Capote loses power when he tries to philosophize.

When on the same day Walter is fired from his job and dropped by Rosa, he is suddenly flooded with vivid memories of boyhood trips with his father to Saratoga. He has just decided to go there when the telephone rings. It is a long-distance call from a town he doesn't know, and after some rattlings a strange, dry voice says, “Hello, Walter.” He hears breathing as clearly as if the person were standing beside him, but when he asks who it is the only answer is, “Oh, you know me, Walter. You've known me a long time” (S 70).

On the train Walter has a dream in which he sees coming toward him a funeral-like procession of cars bearings many of his past and present acquaintances. Feeling naked, he hails the first limousine and sees his father open the door. “Daddy, he yelled, running forward, and the door slammed shut, mashing off his fingers, and his father, with a great belly-laugh, leaned out the window to toss an enormous wreath of roses” (S 71). Walter's problem is basically the same as Vincent's and this dream is reminiscent of his. Both dramatize a fear which is ultimately of death, though Walter's is couched in simpler, more clinical terms: he is a child rejected by his father.

D.J.'s counterpart in this story is the woman Walter finds looking at him when he wakes from this dream. She is a cripple with her left foot encased in a giant shoe. He helps her with her luggage, but it is only that evening, in a hotel bar, that they become acquainted. She explains that she is there because her doctor is going to lecture to a medical convention about her case. Like Walter, she is afraid. She tells him she is a domestic and takes care of a boy named Ronnie: “I'm better to him than his mother, and he loves me more” (S 73). Walter finds her depressing but is too afraid of loneliness to leave her. When the bar closes, the woman asks him, blushing, if he wants to go to her room. He goes, but, seeing her coming out of the bathroom, reeking with dime-store perfume and wearing only “a sleazy flesh-colored kimono and the monstrous black shoe” (S 73), he realizes that he can “never go through with it. And he'd never felt so sorry for himself: not even Anna Stimson would ever have forgiven him this” (S 73–74). When she is ready he comes to the edge of the bed, kisses her cheek, and says, “I think you're so very sweet, but …” (S 74). Then the telephone rings.

Walter's search for a mother, as well as his father, is made explicit and becomes one of the principal themes of the closing section. When the phone rings, the woman answers, mistakes “Ranny” for “Ronnie,” and is frightened that something has happened to the boy. Then she gets the name correct and begins to hang up, but Walter seizes the phone. The message is the same as before, and after hearing it Walter falls across the woman, crying and begging, “Hold me, please” (S 74). She calls him “Poor little boy,” and he goes to sleep in her arms (S 74). The next day he takes the train for New Orleans, “a town of strangers, and a long way off” (S 75). As he lies sweltering in the hotel room, now back at the moment at which the story began, the telephone rings. “So he pushed his face into the pillow, covered his ears with his hands, and thought: think of nothing things, think of wind” (S 75).

Walter's fixation is powerfully, if somewhat crudely, conveyed by the telephone calls, which could have no “natural” explanation. Like Miriam, the bodiless voice is a projection of subconscious fears, and it has the same kind of artificiality that she does. Essentially, of course, they are both related to the more subtle wizard and headless hawk.

The next and final “dark” story, “Master Misery,” recalls most strongly the first, “A Tree of Night.” The heroines of both are young women, and their fear contains a strong sexual element. More than any of the other stories, “Master Misery” is heavy with suggestions of sleep, dreams, childhood, and the unconscious; and while it differs from “Miriam” and “Shut a Final Door” in containing nothing that is not literally possible, it is perhaps the most bizarre story of all. It is the one that Capote said he liked especially, though hardly anyone else seemed to.

Sylvia is one of a class familiar in American fiction: the young girl from the Midwest come to work in New York. She is also a wandering spirit, confirmed in restlessness and unconventionality because she “wants more than is coming to her” (S 109). She is close kin to D.J. of “The Headless Hawk” and also to later heroines, among them Holly Golightly. As the story opens, Sylvia is returning to the apartment she shares with Henry and Estelle, an “excruciatingly married” couple from her Ohio hometown. The day has been unusual, for in a restaurant she overheard a man talking about someone who buys dreams. His companion found this “too crazy” (S 101) for him and left the address lying on the table, where Sylvia later picked it up. Estelle says it is too crazy for her, too, and asks incredulously if Sylvia really went to see “this nut” (S 101).

Though she denies it, Sylvia did; unable to get the idea out of her mind, she had gone to the man, whose name was A. F. Revercomb, and sold a dream for five dollars. He had been pleased with it and asked her to return. Unsettled by the experience, Sylvia speculated that he was mad, but finally left the question open. On the way home she walked through the park and was badly frightened by two boys who began following her. Going to bed at the end of this fateful day, Sylvia feels “a sense of loss, as though she's been the victim of some real or even moral theft, as though, in fact, the boys encountered in the park had snatched (abruptly she switched on the light) her purse” (S 101). She dreams of “cold man-arms” encircling her, and Mr. Revercomb's lips brushing her ear. The day's experiences, especially the selling of her dream, have blended in one overwhelming fear of violation.

A week later she again finds herself near Mr. Revercomb's house. It is the Christmas season, an especially lonely time, and she is drawn to a window display in which a mechanical Santa Claus slaps his stomach and laughs. The figure seems evil to her, and with a shudder she turns away.

Later, as she dozes in Revercomb's waiting room, the quiet is broken by a loud commotion and a “tub-shaped, brick-colored little man” (S 104) pushes his way into the parlor, roaring drunkenly, “Oreilly is a gentleman, Oreilly waits his turn” (S 104). He is quickly thrown out; when Sylvia emerges a short while later, she sees him, looking “like a lonely city child” (S 104) and bouncing a rubber ball. She smiles, for he seems a harmless clown. Oreilly admits that he has made a fool of himself but also accuses Revercomb: “I didn't have an awful lot to begin with, but then he took it every bit, and now I've got niente, kid, niente” (S 105). As to his present occupation he explains, “I watch the sky. There I am with my suitcase traveling through the blue. It's where you travel when you've got no place else to go” (S 105). He asks Sylvia for a dollar for whiskey, but she has only seventy cents, for, confronting “the graying invisibility of Mr. Revercomb (impeccable, exact as a scale, surrounded in a cologne of clinical odors; flat gray eyes planted like seed in the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses)” (S 106), she had not been able to remember a dream.

She tells Oreilly that she will probably not go back, but he says, “You will. Look at me, even I go back, and he has long since finished with me, Master Misery” (S 106). Starting off in the rain, they approach the Santa Claus display and Oreilly, standing with his back to the figure, says,

“I call him Master Misery on account of that's who he is. … Only maybe you call him something else; anyway, he is the same fellow, and you must've known him. All mothers tell their kids about him: he lives in hollows of trees, he comes down chimneys late at night, he lurks in graveyards and you can hear his step in the attic. The sonofabitch, he is a thief and a threat; he will take everything you have and end by leaving you nothing, not even a dream. Boo!” he shouted, and laughed louder than Santa Claus. “Now do you know who he is?”

Sylvia nodded. “I know who he is.”

(S 106–107)

In an artificial juxtaposition similar to those in “The Headless Hawk,” Oreilly speaks of Revercomb while standing in front of the Santa Claus, emphasizing the growing identification of these two figures and giving the first clear hint that he himself will assume a destructive role toward Sylvia, much as Vincent did toward D.J. In this scene the rain provides the customary atmosphere of distortion and blurred identities.

Sylvia, now living both specifically and generally in a world of dreams, has begun to lose her grip on the world of everyday reality. She has moved to a cheap furnished room and let it become filthy. Fired from her job, she has lived for a month on the income from her dreams. Estelle visits her, scolds her, and insists on knowing whether the decline is because of a man. Sylvia, amused, admits that it is.

“You should have come to me before,” Estelle sighed. “I know about men. That is nothing for you to be ashamed of. A man can have a way with a woman that kind of makes her forget everything else. If Henry wasn't the fine upstanding potential lawyer that he is, why, I would still love him, and do things for him that before I knew what it was like to be with a man would have seemed shocking and horrible. But honey, this fellow you're mixed up with, he's taking advantage of you.”

(S 108–109)

Estelle is the first of Capote's characters to be ridiculed in this way, but she will not be the last. Though satirized here as an embodiment of society's fatuous gentility, she also speaks with its prosaic rightness. Sylvia is, indeed, getting mixed up with a man who will take advantage of her—not only Mr. Revercomb, but that grey eminence's more immediate representative, Oreilly.

Sylvia answers, also more truly than she knows, that the affair she is involved in hasn't “anything to do with love” (S 109). She rejects the suggestion of marriage and reminds Estelle that they're “not children any more; at least, I'm not” (S 110), but her actions when finally left alone seem intended to belie the assertion. First she sucks a piece of sugar, her grandmother's remedy for bad temper, then she pulls from under the bed a musical cigar box made for her by her brother when she was fourteen. The tune it plays is “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” Inside this box of childhood memories she keeps the little book in which she has begun recording her dreams, since they are “endless” now and hard to remember.

Later, hurrying to Mr. Revercomb's she finds the mechanical Santa Claus has been replaced by the equally disturbing display of a plaster girl riding madly on a bicycle that gets nowhere. But Mr. Revercomb likes her dream about the “three blind children” (S 110), and she leaves with an envelope containing ten dollars.

In one of Sylvia's conversations with Oreilly, Master Misery, already linked with the maniacal Santa Claus, is explicitly probed down to his final meaning, death. Oreilly tells her that their vicious circle of dream-selling is “just like life” (S 112), but she disagrees: “It hasn't anything to do with life. It has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone” (S 112).

When Oreilly is arrested for stealing a bottle of liquor, Sylvia collapses. For days she lies in her room, hardly eating, drugged with sleep. On the radio she hears a weather report reminiscent of Joyce's “The Dead”: “A snowstorm moving across Colorado, across the West, falling upon all the small towns, yellowing every light, filling every footfall, falling now and here” (S 114). Discovering that snow has smothered the city, she opens the window to feed the birds and forgets to close it; snow blows into the room. “Snow-quiet, sleep-silent, … Mr. Revercomb, why do you wait upon the threshold? Ah, do come inside, it is so cold out there” (S 115).

The figure she dimly sees at the door just before losing consciousness is not Revercomb's but Oreilly's, and when she wakes he is holding her in his arms and singing, “cherryberry, moneyberry, happyberry pie, but the best old pie is a loveberry pie …” (S 115). When she asks why he isn't in jail he says he was never there, then quickly changes the subject. With “a sudden feeling of floating” (S 115) she asks how long he has been with her, and he replies that she let him in yesterday—then quickly begins the “wicked” story of how he escaped from the police.

Oreilly stays with her over the weekend, and it is like a beautiful party. They laugh and dance and she feels loved and declares that she will never be afraid again. She decides that she would like to get her dreams back and go home. “And that is a terrible decision, for it would mean giving up most of my other dreams” (S 117). He insists that she go directly to Revercomb with the request; she does, and soon is back in his arms crying, choking, then laughing hysterically. “He said—I couldn't have them back because—because he'd used them all up” (S 118).

As if on a signal, they separate, Sylvia giving Oreilly her last five dollars to buy whiskey for his travels in the blue. Then she starts toward home.

I do not know what I want, and perhaps I shall never know, but my only wish from every star will always be another star; and truly I am not afraid, she thought. Two boys came out of a bar and stared at her; in some park some long time ago she'd seen two boys and they might be the same. Truly I am not afraid, she thought, hearing their snowy footsteps following after her: and anyway, there was nothing left to steal.

(S 119)

This closing line is delicately ambiguous. Possibly a continuation of Sylvia's thoughts, it is also the last of several hints that her virginity has been lost to Oreilly. This suggested sexual theft is, of course, only a metaphor for the author's real concern: the theft of Sylvia's dreams by Mr. Revercomb. She dreams of Mr. Revercomb as a father-lover, and in her delirium his role is transferred to Oreilly. Sylvia is victimized in much the same way as D.J. was, and both their stories have as a major theme the sad fact that victims who try to be lovers are doomed not only to see themselves reflected in one another but also to advance each other's destruction.

While Capote may be granted his fondness for this story, it is nevertheless weak in several respects. Like “The Headless Hawk,” though to a lesser degree, it is a network of meanings too often artificially represented by symbols and only half realized in concrete dramatization. Oreilly in particular is difficult to see as a human being, and the identification of him with Sylvia, Revercomb, Santa Claus, and the cycling girl is too obviously contrived, as is much of the action.

The principal weakness of the story, however, is at its center, the business of selling dreams. “Dreams” can mean and half-mean many things, and the story contains a vagueness which is less suggestive than confusing. It might, for example, be read with some validity as an attack on psychoanalysis or on the scientific mentality in general—or perhaps an expression of a young writer's fear of exploitation.

While the implications of the story are vague, its overall pattern is clear, and even clearer when it is compared to the stories that preceded it. Like them, it traces the decline into captivity of an individual made vulnerable by refusal or inability to accept reality. But though the pattern is a familiar one, there is a significant change of emphasis: for the first time the victim-heroine is viewed with definite approval. While Capote's early stories are characterized, from a moral standpoint, by a fluctuating and sometimes almost nonexistent narrative point of view, all the earlier protagonists have to some extent been held responsible. Even in Kay there was a trace of the victimizer as well as the victim. But Sylvia completely escapes responsibility. She does so by being a childlike, innocent dreamer. The dreamer (almost always feminine), who made her first appearance in D.J. and here becomes the central character of the story, will be the typical protagonist of the stories that follow Other Voices, Other Rooms. Because the dreamer is unconventional, whatever moral disapproval enters these stories is reserved for the society from which she deviates.

“Master Misery” completes the first phase of Truman Capote's career as a writer of fiction, the dominant characteristics of which should by now be evident. The protagonist, while varying and developing in ways already discussed, is always and essentially a victim. The central action of each story is not so much his movement into the state of captivity as an immersion in his own deeper being that culminates in a shattering and final revelation of his plight. In each case the dark force that haunts the protagonist is projected outward—through characters of varying degrees of credibility, through images or dream or delirium, through concrete symbols—until it may be said to constitute the very framework and texture of the story.

But in each case it is also focused in one particular manifestation or set of related ones: a wizard man in a tree of night; Miriam; Mr. Destronelli and a headless hawk; a disembodied telephone voice; Mr. Revercomb-Master Misery. That these figures dominate the stories is pointed up by the fact that in every case but one they appear in the title. And Capote's custom of so naming his stories is to continue. It has been noted that the next phase of his career is marked by a new emphasis on the dreamer. The titles of several of the stories express or are related to the dreamer's dream or ideal: “Children on Their Birthdays” and Breakfast at Tiffany's, for example. One can see, then, in the very titles of the stories, a progression from fear to fantasy, from captivity to some kind of wistful freedom. Movement from captivity to freedom is also the theme of Capote's next, and longest, piece of fiction—Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Notes

1. The Selected Writings of Truman Capote (New York: Random House, 1963). Quotations from this volume are identified in the text by S and the page number.

2. Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), p. 290.

3. Current Biography, 1951, p. 93.