Truman Capote’s “Shut a Final Door”: A Review

I’ve had Truman Capote on my mind for a while.  I’ve loved his writing since I first discovered it at the age of twelve or so, and I can tell you, unequivocally, that once you’ve read Capote, it’s impossible to forget the scope of his capabilities (in my case, his words, however faint in spots, festoon at least a few sections of the interior walls of my skull, and periodically inspire a synaptic firing or two from among the ranks of my otherwise more indolent cerebral neurons).  So for me, Truman Capote is always kind of “there.”  At least in the neurologically imprinted sense of the word.

More recent, acute Capote triggers, however, have presented themselves to me from the direction of a couple of different sources. 

In early January, after my mother had passed away, I was looking through some photos of my former 5,000+ book personal library, most of which was lost in a catastrophic flood in 2008 (along with about half of my house).  In one of the photos, a section of the library’s shelving was visible.  This particular section contained my doomed collection of 20th century American literature first edition printings.  One of those first editions was a signed copy of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote’s first published novel.  The book was a treasure, and its loss was heartbreaking (not that the rest of the flooded library, or half of my flooded house weren’t – but I think you get my drift).  As in the case of all of my “artifact” printings, I always keep a later edition, often a paperback, around for actual reading (you can read about this penchant in my essay “In Praise of the Printed Word – My Love Affair with Books”).  Other Voices, Other Rooms is no exception.  So, in spite of the loss of my treasured first edition, autographed copy, I can read Capote’s Southern Gothic tour de force (and thinly disguised semi-autobiography) any time I’d like.  And I did.  This past January.  So, at this point, Capote and his skills had ventured back into prefrontal cortex territory. 

For his fabulous website, Grammaticus, in late February of this year, my friend and fellow writer and blogger, Nenad Knežević, had written a wonderful review of Answered Prayers, Capote’s famous unfinished, and posthumously published novel, in its closest public approximation of “complete” (Capote had allowed some of the novel to trickle out in the form of four of its chapters, published in Esquire in 1975 and 1976).  I read Nenad’s excellent review with great interest (as I do with every piece he features on Grammaticus).  And of course, thoughts of a review that I myself had written several years ago of a brilliant Capote short story, “Shut a Final Door,” were inescapable.  I’d immediately referenced this review in a tweeted response to Nenad back in February, and I mentioned, in the last RGG newsletter, that I’d be resurrecting my review and publishing it right here this April.  So I’m on the hook.  I wrote the review back in 2011, but here it is now in mostly its original form.

“Shut a Final Door” by Truman Capote

By John G. Stamos

Truman Garcia Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1924.  His parents divorced when he was two years old, and for the next six years, he was basically passed around – living with various relatives in various cities and towns throughout the American Deep South.  His mother (and father) were entirely absent from his life during this time.  At the age of eight, he went to live with his mother, and her second husband (who adopted and renamed him) in New York City.  Capote’s childhood and early life informed his writing in a number of important ways.  He garnered experience with these geographies, and their populations, and cultivated a vast store of impressions, opinions, and insights regarding them.  He’d taught himself to read and write before he’d started school, and began writing creatively at a young age.  He wrote his first work of fiction at the age of eleven.  His prodigious writing was his outpunch; it was his way of processing and reacting to that which his young mind – and heart – had internalized.

His intimate knowledge of the character – both foibles and strengths alike – of the denizens of the Deep South, as well as that of the glittering pinnacle-dwellers of Park Avenue, enabled him, throughout his writing career, to relate the nature of these people – and these places – with an uncanny accuracy.  His invariable cynicism, whetted by years of an early childhood devoid of familial love (with one notable and vitally important exception – his mother’s distant relative, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, loved him dearly, and she appears as a character in one of his autobiographical short stories, “A Christmas Memory”), manifests itself with an unparalleled, cool elegance in his prose.  

Capote had the ability to master the literary genre of Southern Gothic, in all of its romance and decrepitude, because he’d lived it; lived its peaks and lived its valleys.  And he handled Manhattan society in the same fashion.  His arsenal of experience, cynicism, and a prolixity unmatched in grace, symbolism, and implication, allowed him to spin unforgettable yarns of wealth and poverty alike, as well as stories of the intersection of the two conditions.  And it allowed him to write autobiographical works (“A Christmas Memory”) and non-fiction (his most famous work, In Cold Blood) as if they really were works of fiction – the brainchildren of his artful mind and practical grasp of the world’s undeniables.

Capote’s mastery is evident in all forms of writing, including the short story.  In this form, his writing somehow manages to be simultaneously concise and elegantly elaborate.  I imagine it as a kind of stylized mash-up featuring an EXTREMELY reserved Henry James (who’s also somehow discovered the technique of implication – James is never reserved in terms of his verbosity, and implication, at least as Capote wields it, is not his strong suit, either), a serious P.G. Wodehouse, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a pinch of John Berendt thrown in for good measure.  His short stories are verbose and sleek at the same time.  And they’re told with an omniscient cynicism that only a writer of Capote’s background and insight could possibly hope to manage.

I first read Truman Capote’s short story, “Shut a Final Door,” in an anthology of horror and the supernatural, of all places, sometime back in the early 1990s.  By this time in my life, I’d read every one of Capote’s novels, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (his famous novella), and a number of his short stories, so I was very familiar with his style, while at the same time, always blown away by each unfamiliar Capote piece that came my way, in spite of the utter consistency of that style.

“Shut a Final Door,” obviously unfamiliar to me at that time, did indeed blow me away.

The story concerns a shallow, self-absorbed Walter Ranney and his terrifying comeuppance at the hands of…  well, you’ll ultimately need to decide on that answer for yourself after you read the story.  But I’ll give you an idea of my thoughts on this matter shortly.

Ranney is a young, recent Manhattan transplant (presumably from Connecticut, as Capote references his family as living Hartford), who’s high on ambition but low on work ethic and drive.  He is shallow, duplicitous, dishonest, and self-centered.  In his dealings with others, he exercises not a shred of decency or honor, and assesses their value in terms of his own ability to use them for his benefit.  Capote develops Ranney’s character from the third person limited point of view, and elegantly blends delectable verbosity with truncated innuendo to drive home to the reader the finer points of Ranney’s psychology, and its toxic effects on those around him.  In this fashion, Capote allows Ranney to display the full array of his foul attributes.  His shallow, empty-headed, and needless malice and unadulterated dishonesty leaves a wide swath of resentment, hatred, and abandonment in his wake.  Capote’s proficiency with the third person perspective allows at once some topical (for the reader) and extremely remedial (for the character himself) understanding of Walter Ranney’s formative crucible, the character’s own limited recognition of his thorough vileness, and his complete lack of understanding of its true genesis and the extent of its destructive effectiveness.

Walter Ranney is a Grade A prick (as only Truman Capote can depict one), and he has no idea, at least consciously, of this being the case, let alone why he is one.

After turning literally everyone he’d become close to in NYC against him, and finding himself jobless and utterly alone, he receives the first in a series of terrifying, anonymous telephone calls.  Capote’s description of the caller’s voice is bone-chilling.  To Walter Ranney, this phone call is beyond terrifying – it’s galvanizing.  It prompts him to leave Manhattan forever and board a train to Saratoga.

He recalls, at this point in the story, a bizarre dream he’s had while sleeping on the train.  The dream is loaded with symbolism (as dreams typically are – but this is special symbolism, this is Truman Capote symbolism), and it provides to the reader a reasonable notion that, at least subconsciously, Walter Ranney is beginning to grasp the hows, whys, and whats of his situation.

Walter receives another horrifying, impossible phone call at a hotel room in Saratoga (it’s not a room registered to him and he can not comprehend the caller’s ability to locate him here), and he makes one final run for it. 

The story reaches its denouement in a hotel room in New Orleans (which, not coincidentally, is the author’s birthplace – the circle is now complete – circles are a major theme in this short story), and the reader is left with a few questions, only one of which is salient.  But Capote’s storytelling skills are peerless, and I, as the reader, was able to divine the identity of the nameless, faceless specter placing the terrible calls to his protagonist.

“Shut a Final Door” by Truman Capote is short, bleak, and lethal.  Capote’s own eloquence has manufactured the tale’s bleakness and deadliness without the reader barely noticing.  He is an unparalleled master of this form of fiction.  Stylish, graceful, brutal.  Explicit and tacit all at one time.  As with every single one of Capote’s short stories (and I’ve read them all), “Shut a Final Door” is a lyrical dagger thrust.

I’ll wrap this review up with two questions of my own: Can a writer of Capote’s skill craft a story in which its reader is led to an inescapable conclusion by that writer’s use of ingenious symbolism, flowing narrative, and uncanny perspective?  Is there ever anything more terrifying than the prospect of confronting the thing that’s always lived deep inside you, calling your shots, making you move, making you act?

J.G.S.  September, 2011