According to an exhaustive
biography of Andy Warhol,
Drella began stalking
Truman Capote as soon as he moved to New York City, eventually befriending the cherubic wunderkind's mother and illustrating this gothic, coming-of-age novel without permission in a fawning bid to seek attention. The gorgeous prose reads like a lyrical fever-dream journal (attempted molestation on a ferris wheel by a female midget!), populated with ghosts, enormous snakes and several Southern caricatures (a tomboy based on
Harper Lee ) but the summer-long story barely hangs together. Still,
Other Voices, Other Rooms does yield this highly resonant nugget for an inchoate fairy, perhaps the first affirmation (albeit veiled) of homosexuality in American literature:
The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.
Sorry, Andy,
In Cold Blood is more my cup of tea.
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