“It was August, and it was as though bonfires burned in the red night sky, and the unnatural Southern landscape, observed so assiduously from the train … intensified a feeling of having travelled to the end, the falling off…”
This early short story from Truman Capote begins with its twenty-three-year-old protagonist, Walter Ranney, alone in New Orleans, sifting through the recent events that have brought him from New York to “this stifling hotel in this faraway town.” Told via flashback, the main action of the story takes place a few months earlier with Walter’s arrival in New York, where it is immediately apparent that he is something of an opportunist; self-centred and amoral; quite happy to pick up and discard friends and lovers (of either sex) in order to further his climb through the echelons of privileged society. But as Walter’s various lies, betrayals and indiscretions come back to bite him, he is also revealed to be strangely, and rather movingly, fatalistic:
“It was like the time he’d failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties. Now he would leave New York, take a vacation trip; he had a few hundred dollars, enough to last him until fall.”
And so Walter’s sad and listless “vacation trip” begins. He drifts down to Saratoga; gets drunk in a seedy bar (where he fails to include himself among the bar’s procession of “summer-season grotesques: sagging silver-fox ladies, and little stunted jockeys, and pale loud-voiced men wearing cheap fantastic checks”); then, after a half-hearted and abortive sexual encounter, he moves on, ultimately winding up in New Orleans.
The loneliness that is Walter’s constant companion throughout these closing passages is evoked by a series of anonymous phone-calls, the voice on the other end (“dull and sexless and remote”) ringing off after cryptically intoning, “Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” These phone-calls remain tantalisingly unexplained and gently nudge the story into the murkier realms of the uncanny.
With this in mind, it is interesting to note that ‘Shut a Final Door’ was originally collected with another early short story – and another study in loneliness and the uncanny – 1945’s ‘Miriam’. In ‘Miriam’, instead of a callow youth sweating fearfully away in high-summer while being plagued by mysterious phone-calls, Capote gives us an elderly widow, marooned in mid-winter, while being tormented by a mysterious child. It is as if the young Capote already knew that loneliness is all-inclusive, crosses all boundaries, and does not discriminate against gender, class or age.
Indeed, given that Capote was only twenty-three when he wrote ‘Shut a Final Door’ (the same age as Walter) and knowing what we do about Capote’s ultimate fate (a lonely alcoholic, ostracised from the society that proved to be so symbiotic to his work) it is tempting to view ‘Shut a Final Door’ as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Heel – or as a kind of message in a bottle: scrawled from the subconsciousness of the young Capote for his future self to find (and hopefully heed).
But even without this element of autobiographical foreshadowing, and despite Walter’s numerous shortcomings, Capote still manages to evoke great sympathy for his protagonist-cum-surrogate. And one is certainly left with the impression that this trip to New Orleans will turn out to be a permanent vacation for Walter Ranney, the story ending where it begins, with Walter, alone in his hotel room, watching the ceiling fan rotate above his head (“turning, turning, stirring stale air ineffectually”), while the telephone rings unanswered. “Think of nothing,” Walter tells himself, “think of wind.”
First published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 1947, and available to read here; collected in A Tree of Night and Other Stories, Random House, 1949. Currently available in A Capote Reader, Abacus 1989. Picked by Wayne Gooderham. Wayne is the author of Dedicated To: The Forgotten Friendships, Hidden Stories and Lost Loves found In Second-Hand Books. He has written for The Guardian, The Observer, Time Out and Wasafiri and has had fiction published by Fairlight Books. He blogs at http://livesinlit.com and http://bookdedications.co.uk/. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.
A Personal Anthology 