Summer Crossing is Truman Capote's lost manuscript written in the 1940's. He vacated an apartment and asked the landlord to throw all the contents out - which he did not. Capote's papers remained hidden until the man died fifty years later and the lot was brought to Sotheby's. Included was this first novel, which was rescued by The Truman Capote Literary Trust and The New York Public Library.
Capote foreshadows his best known creation Holly Golightly, in Grady McNeil, a seventeen year-old New York society girl in 1945 whose parents have sailed for France to pick out her unwanted debutante gown. With her married sister in East Hampton, Grady is now free to openly see her boyfriend Clyde, a Brooklyn Jew who parks cars in a lot. Of course, there is the kind of outgoing young blonde man (a Capote stand-in) named Peter Bell who hangs around Grady, perversely dressed in flannel suits and jewelled belts with white tie and sneakers, who is also adrift that Summer after being kicked out of Cambridge. The story really belongs to Grady, slowly turning midway towards Clyde. Grady knows there is no practical future with him, but choses to live in the fantasy of those two months - partying, visiting Clyde's working class family, and looking towards an uncertain future.
This has an episodic quality (with a truncated ending), but with sentences so florid in the best way. Poetic and original, it is a pleasure to read. Just one example, as Grady takes Clyde to the Central Park Zoo: "The cat house of a zoo has an ornery smell, an air prowled by sleep, mangy with old breath and desires. Comedy in a doleful key is the blowsy she-lion reclining in her cell like a movie queen of silent fame; and a hulking ludicrous sight her mate presents winking at the audience as if he could use a pair of bifocals. Somehow the leopard does not suffer; nor the panther; their swagger makes distinct claims upon the pulse, for not even the indignities of confinement can belittle the danger of their Asian eyes, those gold and ginger flowers blooming with a bristling courage in the dusk of captivity."
Inspiring Breakfast At Tiffany's, Grady is a free-spirited heroine experiencing her first freedom. I found this a winning story as only Capote could tell it, it has his recognizable mark. The flow could have been more polished, had he not chosen to set this aside in favour of his first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Very enjoyable.
First publication 2004 / Tradeback / 142 pages
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