Rare Truman Capote Story from Early 1950s Is Being Published for First Time 

Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)
Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)
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Rare Truman Capote Story from Early 1950s Is Being Published for First Time 

Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)
Author Truman Capote, shown in his apartment on July, 23, 1980. (AP)

Along with such classics as “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” Truman Capote had a history of work left uncompleted and unpublished.

Capote, who died in 1984 shortly before his 60th birthday, spent much of his latter years struggling to write his planned Proustian masterpiece “Answered Prayers,” of which only excerpts were released. As a young man, he wrote a novel about a love affair between a socialite and a parking lot attendant that was published posthumously under the title “Summer Crossing.”

Shorter work, too, was sometimes abandoned, including a piece released this week for the first time.

Capote was in his mid-20s and a rising star when he moved from New York City to Taormina, Sicily, in 1950 and settled in a scenic villa named Fontana Vecchia, once occupied by D.H. Lawrence. Acclaimed for his debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and for his eerie short story “Miriam,” Capote would describe the move to Europe as a needed escape from the American literary scene, which he likened to living inside a light bulb, and an ideal setting to get work done: He wrote the novel “The Grass Harp” in Sicily and worked on numerous short stories.

“I am so happy to be writing stories again — they are my great love,” he wrote to a friend.

One story from Sicily, “Another Day in Paradise,” is an unfinished work that appears in the new issue of The Strand Magazine. Written at a time of relative contentment for Capote, “Another Day” is a narrative of disillusion and entrapment: The middle-aged American heiress Iris Greentree has used her inheritance — a small one because her mother didn't trust her with money — to buy a villa in Sicily. She will end up betrayed by the local man who persuaded to invest her money, Signor Carlo Petruzzi, and too broke to sell the home and return to the US.

“The past had trained her to envision an affair from a futureless angle; at the most, she hoped such episodes would end in friendship. It was so humiliating that Carlo should have turned out not to be a friend. She’d trusted him to the extent of her capital: let him sell her the land, allowed him to build the villa, supply, at pirate prices, the native paraphernalia that furnished it,” Capote wrote.

“He was an emotional crook and, beyond that, a common gangster who’d pocketed at least half the money supposedly spent on Belle Vista. All this she could forgive him — could, but didn’t. The unforgivable aspect of the ghastly man’s behavior was that it had destroyed the meaning of these lines in her journal: `I belong. At last, somewhere.'”

Much of Capote's fiction was set in New York or in the American South, but “Another Day in Paradise” has the easy pace, decorative language and cutting — sometimes cruel — humor of his best known work, and the themes of loneliness, fear and regret. Thomas Fahy, author of “Understanding Truman Capote,” says that the author likely related to Iris Greentree's sense of displacement and alienation.

“He was constantly moving around as a child, from New Orleans to Alabama to New York to Connecticut,” Fahy says. “You could see how his life became very lonely and isolated.”

The Strand has published rare works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and many others. Managing editor Andrew Gulli found the Capote story in the Library of Congress, inside an “old red- and gold-scrolled Florentine notebook,” he writes on the Strand editorial page. The handwritten manuscript, worked in pencil, was at times so hard to make out that Gulli needed a transcriber to help prepare it for publication.

Fahy says that Capote’s time in Sicily, where he remained for just over a year, left him with the kind of feelings many authors have when away from their native countries — a heightened sense of distance from home that likely helped inspire “Another in Paradise,” and a heightened clarity. which he drew upon for “The Grass Harp” and its memories of his years in Monroeville, Alabama.



In Senegal, the Bastion of the Region’s Francophonie, French Is Giving Way to Local Languages

A man sits outside a stationary store with French signs in Dakar, Senegal, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP)
A man sits outside a stationary store with French signs in Dakar, Senegal, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP)
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In Senegal, the Bastion of the Region’s Francophonie, French Is Giving Way to Local Languages

A man sits outside a stationary store with French signs in Dakar, Senegal, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP)
A man sits outside a stationary store with French signs in Dakar, Senegal, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP)

For decades Senegal, a former French colony in West Africa, has been touted as the bastion of the French language in the region. Leopold Sedar Senghor, the country’s first president and a poet, is considered one of the founding fathers of the concept of Francophonie, a global alliance of French-speaking countries.

But many say a shift is underway. While French remains the country’s official language, inscribed into its constitution, its influence is waning. It is giving way to Wolof, the most widely spoken local language — and not just on the street, where the latter has always been dominant, but in the halls of power: government offices, university corridors and mainstream media.

As the French president hosts the annual Francophonie summit north of Paris, Senegal’s president is not attending in person. He sent the foreign minister as his representative instead.

“Wolof is on the rise because Senegalese people want to be seen,” said Adjaratou Sall, professor of Linguistics at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, who began researching the Wolof language in 1998. “They want to detach themselves from the colonial heritage and reclaim their own cultural identity.”

There are 25 languages in Senegal. Six of them have the status of national languages, but Wolof is largely dominant. Out of the population of 17 million people, over 12 million speak Wolof, compared to around 4 million French speakers.

But like in most former colonies, French has traditionally been the language of Senegalese political and cultural elites. The vast majority of schools across the country and all universities are French speaking. All official documents are issued in French. With the education rate in Senegal at around 60%, this excludes a large part of the population.

President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the youngest elected leader in Africa, was voted in six months ago on an anti-establishment platform, and his rise reflected the frustration of the Senegalese youth with the traditional, elderly political class. He has made a point in making all of his official speeches in both languages, French and Wolof, and pledged to give local languages the primary role in schools, with French introduced later.

The shift comes as most West African nations are rethinking their relationship with France, which is losing its clout in the region. In some cases, like in Burkina Faso and Mali, which are ruled by military juntas, the divorce with the French language has been abrupt: They dropped French as the official language and banned many French-speaking media outlets.

The decline of French in Senegal has been more subtle. But to a careful observer, the signs are everywhere: More and more billboards are either bilingual, or in Wolof. Although all university courses are still conducted in French, Sall said that professors and students speak Wolof to each other in the corridors, which would have been unthinkable when she started working. Some Senegalese writers are publishing their books in Wolof, and not in French.

“Surely, the nationalism which began to take root with the new government is playing a role,” said Fall. “But another important factor has been the revolution in the media, which started with Sud FM.”

Sud FM, the first private radio station in Senegal, started broadcasting programs in Wolof in 1994. The morning news program in Wolof now has over 2 million listeners, said its director, Baye Oumar Gueye.

“We replied to a real need: providing information to the population, who does not speak French,” Gueye said in an interview in his office. “They can now participate in the exchange of information.”

He added: “The use of the French language is decreasing. When you want to reclaim your sovereignty, the first thing is to have your own language.”

El Hadj Aip Ndiaye, who has been driving a taxi in Dakar for the past 45 years, said he remembers well the launch of Sud FM. “Everyone listened to it,” he recalled.

Ndiaye, who did not go to school and speaks a very limited French, said he listens to the radio everyday from 5 a.m. until midnight, as he drives across the dusty roads of Dakar in his yellow, rickety taxi.

“Before, all the news on the radio was in French,” he said. “I could not understand it. But with news in Wolof, you can understand what they are saying. You understand the world better, and you can take part in the conversation.”

“People are now proud to speak Wolof,” he said. “Before, when you spoke Wolof, you were judged as a peasant. But now, even our president speaks Wolof a lot, so people are not afraid to speak it.”

But even the biggest proponents of Wolof do not want a revolution. Fall, the linguistics professor, said she dreamed of university courses being held in Wolof, and children being taught in their local language, whether it would be Wolof, Serrer or Peul.

“We will get there, but it's a process,” she said. “And we need French as well. It is the language of openness, which allows us to communicate with others in the region.”