TRUMAN CAPOTE House Of Flowers VG++ 1955 RARE PROMO Columbia LP 12508/9 10"

$

30

Vinyl:  VG++ Play Graded. Sounds Great! One side is the "Beginning", the other side is the "Conclusion". SUPER RARE White Columbia PROMO Labels are Clean.  This is the Original 1955 PROMO 1ST Pressing!   Here's Capote himself, reading his own story which is, itself, from the end of "Breakfast At Tiffany's".
See Review Below!
Cover: VG in plain white sleeve with the artist and subject written freehand and by the quality of the penmanship, it looks like it was written in the '50s).
Goldmine Standards.   I play grade every record that I sell on eBay as I have found you can't rate a record accurately by just visually inspecting it.  I wipe the dust off of every cover with clean, unscented baby wipes.  I professionally clean the vinyl.  (I also operate a Vinyl Record Cleaning business for your dusty/dirty records--if interested, send me a message).
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All records are packaged securely with the vinyl sandwiched between two cardboard stiffeners and shipped in a custom cardboard record mailer box. 
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Why buy a first or early pressing and not a re-issue or a ‘re-mastered’ vinyl album?  First and early pressings are pressed from the first generation lacquers and stampers. They usually sound vastly superior to later issues/re-issues (which, in recent times, are often pressed from whatever 'best' tapes or digital sources are currently available) - many so-called 'audiophile' new 180g pressings are cut from hi-res digital sources…essentially an expensive CD pressed on vinyl.  Why  experience the worse elements of both formats?  These are just High Maintenance CDs, with mid-ranges so cloaked with a veil as to sound smeared.  They are nearly always compressed with murky transients and a general lifelessness in the overall sound.  There are exceptions where re-masters/re-presses outshine the original issues, but they are exceptions and not the norm.  First or early pressings nearly always have more immediacy, presence and dynamics. The sound staging is wider.  Subtle instrument nuances are better placed with more spacious textures. Balances are firmer in the bottom end with a far-tighter bass. Upper-mid ranges shine without harshness, and the overall depth is more immersive.  Inner details are  clearer.   On first and early pressings, the music tends to sound more ‘alive’ and vibrant.  The physics of sound energy is hard to clarify and write about from a listening perspective, but the best we can describe it is to say that you can 'hear' what the mixing and mastering engineers wanted you to hear when they first recorded the music.

“House of Flowers” is one of three pieces of short fiction included at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s the story of Ottilie, a young woman from Haiti, whose only power is in deciding which life of submission she will lead, one as a prostitute or one as the wife of Royal Bonaparte, a native from the mountains. What makes this story remarkable, I think, is the double side of Ottilie’s situation. She is strong-minded and feels the power of being able to choose, but the reader sees just how dismal her options are.

Ottilie is younger and prettier than the other women at Champs Elysées, a bordello in Port au Prince, and she’s also a customer favorite. The proprietress, to protect her investment, gives Ottilie the best room with an electric light-bulb and the men buy her bangles and silks. She is happy with these new things, for she had nothing as a girl in the mountains. She laughs and gossips with her new friends, Baby and Rosita, and the bordello becomes her home.

But despite the attention from her customers, Ottilie wants love. She thinks she might love Mr. Jamison, an older American and one of her best customers. “How do you feel if you’re in love?” she asks her friends from the bordello. They tell her she will feel pepper on her heart and tiny fish swimming through her veins, but she does not understand. A voodoo priest tells her, “You must catch a wild bee and hold it in your closed hand…if the bee does not sting, then you will know you have found love.”

But the bee stings her hard and she knows she has not found love in Mr. Jamison.

It’s different when she meets Royal Bonaparte at a cockfight during carnival season. Like Ottilie, he’s from the mountains and she is drawn to this and to his beauty. She thinks she recognizes love. Capote is great at describing how she feels and it’s easy to picture her looking tentatively at Royal. “Ottilie was used to boldly smiling at men; but now her smile was fragmentary, it clung to her lips like cake crumbs.”

And when the bee does not sting her, she knows.

Royal takes her to his house of flowers, a seeming haven covered with wisteria and lilies, kept cool by its cover. But Ottilie’s new life is not easy and Royal soon returns to his old unmarried ways. And this married life includes Old Bonaparte, Royal’s spell-making grandmother, “a charred, lumpy creature” who torments Ottilie by leaving a cat’s head in her sewing basket, dead snakes and other dead creatures in the house. It’s a battle of wills and Ottilie fights back with clever revenge. When Old Bonaparte dies, Royal insists that Ottilie be tied to a tree for a day as punishment, to break the grandmother’s spell.

When Baby and Rosita come to rescue her, Ottilie must choose, but which life is better, one that promises security and friendship, but takes away much more, or one that started with love, but has turned into something else?

I liked this story because of Capote’s precise character descriptions. He explains situations by what his characters say, or don’t say, and by what they do. For example, through Rosita, he shows you how Ottilie is unable to see the house of flowers for what it is, small and unremarkable, promising nothing. Ottilie tells Baby and Rosita they need to get to a cool place and points to the house. She says, “It’s like you picked a wagon of flowers and built a house with them: that is what I think.” But Rosita sees the house differently. Instead of agreeing with Ottilie about the house, she sniffs and says only that they should get out of the sun. I think this is a terrific way of showing how communication is often subtle and hidden between the lines.

I also like how Capote gives you a glimpse of Royal’s true character and how it doesn’t come out completely until the end of the story. After Royal has dragged Ottilie out of the house, kicking and screaming and biting, he walks off to work annoyed, “sucking his hand where she had bit him.” Capote doesn’t say Royal is a jerk, he shows it in this small detail.

Ottilie chooses and the story ends, but not without the twist of a mind game, something I always love in a story. We can see she is trapped either way, but her spirit exerts some independence and rebellion. And I don’t think she feels bad or helpless about her decision.

I think this story reads a lot like a folk tale, mixing modern situations with old ways and superstitions. It seems like an experiment with style and characterization and I enjoyed reading it!