The Joy of Novel Information
Joshua Gentry
In the summer of 2022, I visited the Truman Capote Archive Located at the New York Public Library to conduct research for my honors thesis. After my first day, a profound realization struck me: beyond the ever-expanding reach of the internet, outside of the texts in the endless rows of books in Main Stacks, is an undiscovered treasure trove of invaluable information waiting to see the light of day. Prior to my archival research experience at the NYPL, I had yet to encounter the (somewhat overwhelming, yet exciting) burden of working with novel information—material not presented to me in the form of a book, article, or lecture. Now, facing the revelation that there is a new world of information I previously did not know existed, I was forced to encounter the unfamiliar challenge of figuring out, with no previous experience, how to approach this raw material as a researcher and, eventually, how to write about it. My transformation through the introduction to novel information would be the most significant influence on my honors thesis’s final form.
The impetus for my visit to the Capote archive, and for my thesis topic in general, was to gain a better understanding of how Capote’s debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a coming-of-age story focusing on a queer protagonist written by Capote when he was only twenty-three could become a New York Times bestseller and catapult its author to national prominence during the Lavender Scare Era (an institutionally led attack on queer American’s which posited their existence as a threat to national security, among a litany of other affronts). Knowing that I would need to gain a better understanding of who Capote was, the circumstances behind the novel’s conception, as well as the world that the author was writing from, I secured funding from the University to visit Capote’s archive at the NYPL and to see the novel’s manuscript at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. To my delight, when I was corresponding with the staff at the NYPL to reserve time to visit the Capote Archive, I was informed that they recently began housing George Plimpton’s Archive, which inhabited nearly a decade’s worth of research and interview manuscripts he had accumulated while writing his 1997 biography on Capote.
The inciting information I uncovered during my first day visiting the Capote archive, which spurred my revelatory realization, stemmed from correspondence between Capote and Newton Arvin. Before I came to the archive, the most alluring aspect of its collection was the large amount of correspondence from the period briefly before, during, and after the release of Capote’s debut novel. I was confident that within the writing of this correspondence, I could uncover information about who Capote was when writing the novel, or at least gain a deeper understanding of the circumstances surrounding him during the time of the novel’s conception. I did not expect that the bulk of these letters were between Capote and his then romantic partner Newton Arvin, a much older acclaimed literary critic of the time and professor at Smith College. Arvin's name was familiar to me before arriving at the archive because of the dedication Capote places for him in the beginning of his novel; however, I was completely unaware of how much Arvin’s influence flooded its pages.
Through the letters between Arvin and Capote, I was able to gain a deeper appreciation for the novel’s dedication; then, through my research at the George Plimpton Archive, I was able to uncover more about their relationship, which then completely changed how I would approach my thesis. Chiefly, I discovered how Capote’s queer coming-of-age story represented an intersection of two generations of queer culture meeting and influencing one another. An older, repressed, and closeted one who lived in the subtext of literary pages and behind closed doors, and the younger, which Capote was helping to place in full view, on the page, demanding the attention of the wider heteronormative world around them. My time at the archive allowed me to learn how Capote’s novel marked a shift in queer representation by placing queer themes and characters at the forefront of the text—giving them the opportunity to leave the novel in joyful, non-tragic ways, resulting in a new aesthetic to contextualize queer existence in post-WWII America.
My time visiting the archives at the NYPL substantially expanded my understanding of the novel and author that my thesis focused on, but more importantly, it changed how I interact with the world around me. I saw how much is still unsaid, unwritten, and in need of being uncovered. I implore you to consider the topics, texts, and authors which most fascinate you and greet the reality that no matter how many people have already written about them, there is still more there for you to discover—that you need to discover and share with us. Find out where their work is archived, get yourself there (have the University fund your work; they have plenty of resources, utilize them!) and allow your world/mind to grow. Lastly, take the crucial next step and help expand our minds as well by sharing what you learned about the topics and texts that matter most to you.