Along with such classics as In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote had a history of work left uncompleted and unpublished. Another Day in Paradise is one such short story, which was discovered by Andrew F Gulli, managing editor of Strand Magazine, and was published in Issue 70 of the magazine this week.
Strand has published rare works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and others in the past. 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, written in pencil, was at times so hard to make out that Gulli needed a transcriber to help prepare it for publication.
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 DH 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.
Another Day In Paradise was one such vignette that Capote wrote at a time of relative contentment. A narrative of disillusion and entrapment, it tells the tale of middle-aged American heiress Iris Greentree who used her inheritance – a small one because her mother didn't trust her with money – to buy a villa in Sicily. She is later betrayed by Signor Carlo Petruzzi, a local man who persuaded to invest her money.
“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 behaviour 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 – humour 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.”
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 Day in Paradise, and a heightened clarity, which he drew upon for The Grass Harp and its memories of his years in Monroeville, Alabama.
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How to come clean about financial infidelity
- Be honest and transparent: It is always better to own up than be found out. Tell your partner everything they want to know. Show remorse. Inform them of the extent of the situation so they know what they are dealing with.
- Work on yourself: Be honest with yourself and your partner and figure out why you did it. Don’t be ashamed to ask for professional help.
- Give it time: Like any breach of trust, it requires time to rebuild. So be consistent, communicate often and be patient with your partner and yourself.
- Discuss your financial situation regularly: Ensure your spouse is involved in financial matters and decisions. Your ability to consistently follow through with what you say you are going to do when it comes to money can make all the difference in your partner’s willingness to trust you again.
- Work on a plan to resolve the problem together: If there is a lot of debt, for example, create a budget and financial plan together and ensure your partner is fully informed, involved and supported.
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One in nine do not have enough to eat
Created in 1961, the World Food Programme is pledged to fight hunger worldwide as well as providing emergency food assistance in a crisis.
One of the organisation’s goals is the Zero Hunger Pledge, adopted by the international community in 2015 as one of the 17 Sustainable Goals for Sustainable Development, to end world hunger by 2030.
The WFP, a branch of the United Nations, is funded by voluntary donations from governments, businesses and private donations.
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It is currently estimated that one in nine people globally do not have enough to eat.
On any one day, the WFP estimates that it has 5,000 lorries, 20 ships and 70 aircraft on the move.
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