Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel - Theories Regarding Missing Chapters

Theories Regarding Missing Chapters

The three chapters published in Esquire, totaling fewer than 200 hardcover pages, were published in 1987 under the title Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. The chapter "Yachts and Things" was found among Capote’s papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library and then published in the December 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.

Revised versions of the Esquire chapters that were purported to have existed - along with "A Severe Insult to the Brain", "And Audrey Wilder Sang" and "Father Flannagan's..." - have never been located.

In the years prior to his death, Capote frequently read from these chapters to friends at dinners, but such was his gift of storytelling that few could discern whether he was actually reading from a manuscript or improvising. He attempted to sell one of the chapters to Esquire sometime in the early 1980s but balked and feigned illness when an editor asked to see the story. Capote claimed that lover John O'Shea had absconded with "A Severe Insult to the Brain" in 1977 and sued for repossession, but he eventually reconciled with O'Shea and dropped the lawsuit. At least one Capote associate claims to have acted as a courier for the full manuscript. According to Joseph Fox, four of Capote's friends claim to have read drafts of "Father Flanagan's All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Cafe" and "A Severe Insult to the Brain". Capote regularly cited dialogue and plot points from these chapters in multiple conversations with Fox that never wavered or changed over the years. In his editor's note, Fox "hesitantly" theorized that the two chapters did exist at one juncture but were destroyed by Capote in the 1980s.

Shortly before his death in 1984, Capote informed Joanne Carson that he had finally finished Answered Prayers and was preparing to die in peace. Carson allegedly had read the three chapters prior to this date and described them as being "very long." On the morning preceding his death, Capote handed a key to Carson for a safe deposit box or locker that contained the completed novel, stating that "the novel will be found when it wants to be found." When Carson pressed Capote for a precise location, he offered a myriad of locations in various cities. An exhaustive search for the manuscript after Capote's death yielded nothing.

A third and less tantalizing belief, held by a minority of Capote intimates, including Andy Warhol (who frequently partied with and employed the author throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s) and longtime lover Jack Dunphy (who had extricated himself from much of Capote's affairs by this era but by all accounts knew him better than anybody else with the possible exception of the Paleys), was that the publication of "La Cote Basque" had traumatized Capote to the extent where he ceased all work on Answered Prayers after finishing "Kate McCloud" and was incapable of finishing it. In his diary, Warhol made frequent mention of drunken ramblings related to the novel by Capote but was never able to secure any serious plot details. When he did discuss the contents of one of the chapters to a privileged Brigid Berlin, Warhol was irritated that she did not tape the discussion.