about Truman Capote’s “Summer Crossing”

Truman Capote started writing Summer Crossing in 1943 while he was employed at The New Yorker, but he set the novella aside to write what became his first published work, 1948’s Other Voices, Other Rooms. Sometime after, an editor at Random House offered Capote lukewarm feedback on Summer Crossing. Capote himself then expressed a lack of confidence in the novella and, evidently, put it aside for good. The drafts were thought to be lost but turned up years after Capote’s death, and the novella was finally published in 2005.

As the Summer Crossing story goes, it is 1945, and a wealthy 17-year-old socialite named Grady McNeil stays behind in New York City while her parents travel to summer in France. Grady, finally alone, pursues her new and secret relationship with Clyde Manzer, a young parking lot attendant. Meanwhile, Grady’s close, lifelong friend and social peer Peter Bell makes clear his romantic interest. But Grady instead plays house with Clyde and then marries him. The gaping class and cultural divide between them soon comes into view, though, and events and feelings turn, leaving Grady desperate in the final pages.

I enjoyed reading Summer Crossing. I can understand an editor offering it a tepid response; even I thought Clyde seemed like a caricature, and Grady marrying Clyde was not very believable. But I have also read more highly acclaimed works with worse flaws.

Besides, the writing.

I expect first novels to be a bit indulgent and flowery with the prose, but Capote was incapable, I think, of real error; Summer Crossing is intense in its poeticism but not overly flowery and indulgent. I marked this part:

Whenever she had reason to be, Grady was always surprised at how fondly concerned her feelings for Janet actually were: a trifle of a person, like a seashell that might be picked up and, because of its pink frilled perfection, kept to admire but never put among a collector's serious treasures: unimportance was both her charm and her protection, for it was impossible to feel, as Grady certainly didn't, threatened by or jealous of her.

A while ago I tried to read Other Voices, Other Rooms, but somehow I could not get into it. I remember thinking the richness of detail was overwhelming, and that it must be almost unbearable to be that sensitive to one's surroundings, for so much of life to fall under your attention.

Here is another passage I noted from Summer Crossing:

At home everyone had remarked how much alike they looked, both of them skinny and straggling and red-headed. She fluffed the doll’s hair and straightened her skirt; it was like old times when Margaret had always been such a help: oh Margaret, she began, and stopped, struck still by the thought that Margaret’s eyes were blue buttons and cold, that Margaret was not the same anymore.

Carefully she moved across the room and raised her eyes to a mirror: nor was Grady the same. She was not a child. It had been so ideal an excuse she somehow had persisted in a notion that she was: when, for instance, she’d said to Peter it had not occurred to her whether or not she might marry Clyde, that had been the truth, but only because she’d thought of it as a problem for a grown-up: marriages happened far ahead when life grey and earnest began, and her own life she was sure had not started; though now, seeing herself dark and pale in the mirror, she knew it had been going on a very long while.