Answered Prayers

<p>P.B. Jones is the amoral, bisexual protagonist of this unfinished novel. He discovers that bed-hopping rather than literary ability is the way to get published. He discovers along the way that prayers that are answered cause more pain than those that remain ignored.</p>

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Contrary_Mary23 апреля 2016 г.
Капоте мог вести себя чудовищно цинично, сам того не замечая (и история создания "Answered Prayers" - лучшая тому иллюстрация: публикация фрагментов будущей - в итоге так и не законченной - книги привела к небывалому возмущению в светских кругах, единогласному исключению Трумена из тусовки и даже одному самоубийству), но когда он пытается быть циничным по-настоящему, ему это не очень удается. Такие уж они, эти невинные монстры, unspoiled monsters - как озаглавил Капоте первую главу этой полувымышленной, полуправдивой эпопеи о восхождении амбициозного и расчётливого хастлера, выросшего в католическом приюте в Миссури, к недоступным для большинства вершинам светского общества - и последовавшем затем трагическом низвержении. О деталях нам остается только догадываться - хотя Капоте списал половину персонажей со своих знакомых и щедро пересы́пал повествование сплетнями, имевшими хождение и в реальном мире, главная интрига, судя по всему, была по большей части вымышлена - и такой закрученной и динамичной интригой, кажется, еще ни одно произведение Капоте не могло похвастаться. Но в итоге все, чем нам остается довольствоваться - это три с половиной недлинных главы, ведущих в никуда и исполненных чудовищного ровно в той же степени, что и невинного.
Лично я сломалась на этом месте:

"That's why I drug: mere dry meditation isn't enough to get me there, keep me there, keep me there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his Outcast of yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, thousands, him and all the other dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except the price is too high, I'm killing myself." Then, scrapping the sleazy stand-up-comic tone: "I am, you know. But meeting you has made me change my mind. I wouldn't object to living. Provided you lived with me, Jonesy. It means risking a cure; and it is a risk. I've done it once before. At a clinic in Vevey; and every night the mountains collapsed on me, and every morning I wanted to drown myself in Lac Léman. But if I did it, would you? We could go back to the States and buy a filling station. No, no foolin'. I've always wanted to run a filling station. Somewhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Last Chance for Gas. it would be real quiet, and you could write stories."

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Contrary_Mary23 апреля 2016 г.
With drunks and madmen, always be logical.
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Contrary_Mary23 апреля 2016 г.
Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: "Scared?" Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny's derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a born bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn't free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I'd have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn't want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.
So I told him to take the cure. But added: "Let's not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that's my destiny." How optimistic I was in those sheltered days! — battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I've since withstood.
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Contrary_Mary23 апреля 2016 г.
Alice Lee Langman had several nieces, and once the eldest of them, a polite young country girl named Daisy, who had never left Tennessee, visited New York. I groaned when she appeared; it meant my having to move out of Miss Langman's apartment temporarily; worse, I had to cart Daisy around the city, show her the Rockettes, the top of the Empire State Building, the Stat en Island Ferry, feed her Nathan's Coney Island hot dogs, baked beans at the Automat, all that junk. Now I remember it with a salty nostalgia; she had a great time, Daisy did, and I had a better one, for it was as though I'd climbed inside her head and were watching and tasting everything from inside that virginal observatory. "Oh," said Daisy, spooning a dish of pistachio ice cream at Rumpelmayer's, "this is crackerjack"; and "Oh," said Daisy, as we joined a Broadway crowd urging a suicide to hurl himself off the ledge of a window in the old Roxy, "oh, this really is crackerjack."
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