Much has been made of it since its appearance on the dust jacket on Capote’s first novel, 1948’s Other Voices, Other Rooms. Actually, it is not a photograph, but a shadow ground through publicity, coming out the other side as something else. The mind cannot be blank in the face of it. It is an image that is an assertion, a point, asserting this: I am a woman. In 1947, women did not publish books. So determined to be authors were they—Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, Marguerite Young, say—that they buttoned themselves up on dust jackets in some Hemingway influenced image of a male American author. Truman Capote became a woman in 1947 just when “real” women would not or could not. And the woman he became in this photograph—itself better written than Other Voices, Other Rooms—wanted to be fucked by you and by any idea of femininity that had fucked you up. In his writing, Capote addressed this issue only once—in the “factual” short story “Dazzle,” which appeared in his last collection of writings, Music for Chameleons (1980).
