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.

something about John Updike's book "Rabbit, Run"

He is young, but desperation already has set in.

 

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is 26 years old and, with a tumbledown marriage and unserious, demeaning sales job, faces the deeply disturbing possibility that he peaked in high school. Rabbit was a star basketball player—a natural, at home and in control on the court. High-school Rabbit never could have imagined such a sorry life awaited him after graduation.

A few pages into Rabbit, Run, Rabbit runs from his problems, including his pregnant wife, Janice. He finds his old basketball coach; but coach, too, is unmoored these days, and scandalized.

Coach finds Rabbit a prostitute named Ruth. Ruth and Rabbit spar but seem to enjoy being together. That sours, too, and soon, at the urging of a lonely local priest, Rabbit returns to reconcile with Janice, who just gave birth to their second child. But Rabbit himself is a child still, and a monstrous one, who spoils the fragile peace at home and runs back to Ruth. That goes bad. And back at home, the new baby drowns in the bathtub as a distraught Janice binge-drinks.

John Updike was 28 when he published Rabbit, Run, his second novel. He was noticing, he thought, a lot of guys who seemed to peak in high school, so Updike wrote about that and, for his efforts, won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a reputation as a premier American writer. Updike wrote several sequels to Rabbit, Run; many critics consider this series Updike’s most important work.

This was only the second Updike novel I have read, the first being 1965’s Of the Farm. Unlike the elegant prose in Of the Farm, the writing style in Rabbit, Run borders on stream-of-consciousness—lots of rich imagery and detail relayed in flowing, haphazardly punctuated sentences filling page-long paragraphs. And this surprised and put me off a little because my concept of Updike is of a polished Northeastern intellectual, a writer for The New Yorker, a Man of Letters and so forth. Maybe there is no inconsistency there. But the writing was good, no doubt, so I stayed with it and, into the second half, I began enjoying it.

At times I also get the impression Updike was trying to remind the reader, Remember now, these are working-class folks, not too bright. But the main struggle was Rabbit himself. I have a soft spot for self-destructive, deeply flawed characters, which Rabbit certainly is; but he is also a conceited bastard who often treats people terribly and expresses barely enough desire to do otherwise.

Here are a couple of my favorite parts. Right in the middle of the book, Rabbit and Ruth are having one of their punchy talks and Ruth says: "You're so mug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" Then a couple pages and many words pass—her thoughts of him, of what she likes about Rabbit, of her past with men from early on, of this fling and her anxiety, of how Rabbit is so screwed up. Finally, the flow of her thinking leads into Rabbit's response:

... That was the thing about him, he just lived in his skin and didn't give a thought to the consequences of anything. Tell him about the candy bars and feeling sleepy he'll probably get scared and off he'll go, him and his good clean piece and his cute little God and his cute little minister playing golf every Tuesday. For the damnedest thing about that minister was that, before, Rabbit at least had the idea he was acting wrong but now he's got the idea he's Jesus Christ out to save the world just by doing whatever comes into his head. I'd like to get hold of the bishop or whoever and tell him that minister of his is a menace. Filling poor Rabbit full of something nobody can get at and even now, filling her ear, his soft cocksure voice answers her question with an idle remote smugness that infuriates her so the tears do come.

"I'll tell you," he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price."

Another good line comes when Rabbit returns after the baby has drowned, and his father in-law tells him the undertaker has the body.

Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.