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 "Of the Farm" by John Updike

In Of the Farm, a contrived little family engages in some emotional thrust and parry during a weekend on some property in rural Pennsylvania. Joey, a thirty-five-year-old Manhattan executive, his new wife, Peggy, and her smart pre-teen son, Richard, have come to visit Joey's widowed mother, who still lives on the family farmland. Feelings of resentment and self-pity frustrate the gathering.

This slim, 1965 novella by John Updike was the first I have read by the American author. I have mixed feelings about it. Although the emotional scab-picking can seem indulgent in moments, tender feeling comes in the balance—and Updike, with elegant prose, can be forgiven for lingering in anticipation of those little resolutions.

something about "Diary of a Madman" by Nikolai Gogol

"Diary of a Madman," a short story by Nikolai Gogol, documents the warping of thought in an impoverished civil servant. The diary's author is incurably insecure and envious; his entries reveal his deepening delusions. This work, written in 1835, attacks Russia's class structure. I did not enjoy this read. Most of the Russian literature I have read dealt with these themes in some way but with better jokes.

something about "Bel-Ami" by Guy de Maupassant

Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant, is a great read. It is about a young man, Georges, a merciless social climber in Paris circa 1885 (the year of the book's publication). Early in the book, Georges sets his sights on Madeleine, the crafty wife of his supervisor, Forestier. Forestier grows deathly ill, and Georges comes to support Madeleine in the final hours before her husband's death. Moments after Forestier dies, Georges asks Madeleine to join him out on the balcony; there, he makes his move.

"I want you to listen to what I'm going to say and try to understand me. Above all, don't be angry if I talk about such things at a moment like this, but I shall be leaving the day after tomorrow, and when you come back to Paris, it may perhaps be too late. So here goes. As you know, I'm only a poor devil with no money at all who's still making his way. But I've got determination, I think some intelligence, and I've made a start—a good start. With a successful man, you know what you're getting; with someone just beginning, you never know where he'll finish up. That may be a bad thing or it may be a good thing. Anyway, I told you one day in your home that my dearest dream would have been to marry a wife like you. And I want to say that again now. Don't try to answer me. Let me go on. I'm not making you a proposal. That would be an odious thing to do at this time and place. I'm only anxious that you shouldn't fail to know that a word from you can make me a happy man, that you can make me either your friend, your brother if you like, or else even your husband, as you will—that my heart and whole body are all yours. I don't want you to answer me now; I don't want to talk about it any more, here. When we meet again in Paris, you'll let me know what you've decided. Until then, not a word. You agree?"

He had spoken without looking at her, as if he were scattering the words in the darkness in front of him. And she seemed not to have heard him as she, too, stood motionless, staring vaguely ahead at the vast landscape under the pale light of the moon.

For many minutes they remained side by side, elbow to elbow, thinking in silence. Then she murmured: "It's a little cold," and, turning round, went back to the bed. He followed her.

As he came near, he recognized that Forestier really was beginning to smell and he moved his chair away because he would not have been unable to stand the stench for long.

That scene made an impression on me. Georges is motivated by a ravenous hunger for status, but his relationships with powerful women are complicated by his feeling of real affection toward them. That affection is never better expressed in Bel-Ami than in this scene. But the timing is obviously horrific and undermines the connection the reader wants to feel with Georges.


Note: Georges does not experience change or get redeemed. That adds to the book's novelty.

"Selected Short Stories" by Guy De Maupassant

I do not remember how or when I added the French writer, Guy De Maupassant, to my reading list, but I am thankful for the suggestion. The short stories in this collection are flirtatious and efficiently satisfying. Maupassant captured very human episodes that are water-ringed by vague taboos and unseemliness. This collection, translated with an introduction by Roger Colet, was published by Penguin Books in 1971.

From Maupassant's masterpiece, "Boule De Suif":

The others ordered wine, except for Cornudet, who demanded beer. He had his own special way of opening the bottle, giving the liquid a good head, and examining it, first tilting the glass and then holding it up between the lamp and his eyes to appreciate the colour. When he drank, his great beard, which was the colour of his favorite beverage, seemed to quiver with emotion, and he squinted so as not to lose sight of his mug; he looked as if he were performing the one function for which he had been born. It was as though he were establishing in his mind a connexion, or even an affinity, between the two ruling passions of his life—Pale Ale and Revolution—and he certainly never drank the one without thinking of the other.

I enjoyed every word of these 30 stories, but "Boule De Suif" is easily my favorite. 

Maupassant, a French writer and protégé of Gustave Flaubert, is considered a member of the naturalist school and wrote much of his work in the 1870s and 1880s. He wrote, according to Wikipedia, hundreds of short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse.

something about "The Easter Parade" by Richard Yates

Richard Yates, sometimes my favorite American writer, drops us into the tragically ordinary lives of two sisters, Emily and Sarah Grimes. Emily is younger and somehow goes her own way; Sarah marries and disappears into a family. Sarah, whose husband is physically abusive, eventually dies of complications from alcoholism (the same fate suffered by her mother). Emily occupies most of the novella's narrative. She confesses, "I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life." Yates' fifth book, published in 1976, is characteristically poignant, uncomfortably intimate, and penetrating.

Notes:

• The Easter Parade opens with, "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce."
• Still have not read Revolutionary Road, but it is a damn fine movie.
• I read The Easter Parade in the Everyman's Library edition, 2009, which includes Revolutionary Road and the short stories from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

something about Truman Capote's novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

In Truman Capote's classic novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Holly Golightly often appears to be a mean, awful person. But she cries on Fred's shoulder the first time they meet. We quickly see that Holly is a contradiction, a "real phony." She feigns an aloof, carefree attitude to protect herself from rejection; she acts refined and educated to disguise the fact that she comes from extreme poverty. She is very vulnerable, which makes her very dangerous.

Capote is a sentimental literary genius because he knows how to cut edges around his open heart. During a crucial, heart-wrenching scene in which Holly reunites with her pitifully naive first husband, Doc, Capote inserts a scream from Holly's upstairs neighbor: "Shut up! It's a disgrace. Do your whoring elsewhere."

This novella's many wonderful lines include the following:

You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky.

And

So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived.

something about "Herodias" by Gustave Flaubert

The short piece, "Herodias," appears in Gustave Flaubert's 1877 work, Three Tales. (The other two tales are "A Simple Heart" and "Saint Julian the Hospitalier.") "Herodias" concerns the characters and events surrounding the beheading of John the Baptist.

Flaubert casts as the central figure Herod Antipas, now commonly known as King Herod. At the time of the events, however, Herod was probably referred to as Antipas, and he was seen as more of a governor, a regional figure, than a king. Flaubert depicts Antipas as a weak ruler manipulated by his wife, the title character, Herodias, a princess from a powerful family of vassals of the Roman Empire.

Antipas was unpopular, perceived by his public as sycophantic and idolatrous. Added to the ruler's frustrations was John the Baptist's high-profile condemnation of the marriage to Herodias—a scandal; to marry Antipas, Herodias divorced her first husband, Herod II, Antipas's half-brother.

In Flaubert's telling, Herodias uses her daughter, Salomé, to seduce Antipas and persuade him to take John's head. Flaubert deals us a story rich in politics, sex, and violence, then combines them all in the climactic scene of Antipas's seduction and John's beheading.

something about "Billy Budd, Sailor" by Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor is Herman Melville's last novel. It tells us the story of a handsome, well-liked, naive young sailor, Billy Budd, who was drafted into the British Royal Navy in 1797. While at sea, the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart, grows deeply envious of Budd and falsely accuses the young sailor of organizing a mutiny--an especially serious charge given that the recent mutinies in the Royal Navy have led to martial law at a time of ramped-up fears of French aggression. When confronted by his accuser in the presence of the ship's captain, Budd clocks Claggart, who drops dead. In the text, Budd's shocking, violent turn seems to erupt from a desperation born of his stutter, which renders him powerless to defend himself with words in the moment. A court martial ensues, and although nobody believes Budd was organizing a mutiny, the officers sentence the young sailor to death. To not execute him would risk encouraging actual mutiny and, therefore, national security. Melville's prose is characteristically and wonderfully eccentric, but the events and themes (law and reason?) in this very slim novel feel undercooked. It was published posthumously and should probably be considered unfinished. The book's latter portion reads like a coda rather than a conclusion.

Note: Is Claggart's accusation leveled out of maliciousness or out of a self-deceiving need?

something about "Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote"

This provided some relaxing nighttime reading. The two parts I enjoyed most: first, from Observations, the entry on Humphrey Bogart, which includes this:

Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy for breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition).

Second, "A Lamp in the Window," a wonderfully wrought short that suddenly sweeps the ground out from under you at the end.

something about Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

Most critics recognize The Sun Also Rises as Hemingway's best work. Published in 1926, the story follows an American expatriate traveling from Paris through Spain in the company of other American and British expatriates. Literary commentary inevitably refers to how the novel captures the Lost Generation's sense of disillusionment. Sure enough, Book I of this slim novel passes time in Paris, and there we see how unbearable disillusioned people can be, conspicuously bored and uncomedically witty. But after Book I, The Sun Also Rises reveals itself to be a potent, beautifully rich novel. Even the waste and cruelties of Book I become meaningful when recast in the violence at the fiesta.

There are so many wonderful lines. Examples:

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest.

And,

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

And that phrasing is called back later:

The bull gathered himself, then his head went forward and he went over slowly, then all over, suddenly, four feet in the air.

But maybe my favorite part is the chapter in which Jake is drunk in his hotel room, thinking through his views on life. This chapter includes the following:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

something from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" is one of my favorite pieces of writing. The story's themes of isolation, conformity, and human folly echo loudly. But it is Melville's humor that I heard clearly during my most recent reading. My favorite passage comes when the lawyer, after dismissing Bartleby on a Friday, returns to work Monday morning to find his scrivener still occupying the office. The lawyer, narrating, begins thinking through his next move:

“Not gone!” I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from which ascendancy, for all my chafing, I could not completely escape, I slowly went downstairs and out into the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I should next do in this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,—this too I could not think of. What was to be done? or, if nothing could be done, was there anything further that I could assume in the matter? Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively assume that departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular degree have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue the matter over with him again.

about borrowing "Ordinary Love and Good Will" by Jane Smiley

Ordinary Love and Good Will is a pairing of short stories written by Jane Smiley. I read "Ordinary Love," but, because that story was unsatisfying, I did not read "Good Will."

"Ordinary Love" transpires during a difficult weekend family reunion in which a 50-something mother of five discloses to her children the extramarital affair that years ago ruptured the family dynamic and prompted the father to steal the kids away to a new life in Europe. Now she is haunted by her choices.

I read reviews of this book and am perplexed because they all imply that in "Ordinary Love" the whole family is discussed thoroughly; my experience was that the mother's thoughts center on her twin sons, and somewhat myopically at that.

something about "The Years with Ross" by James Thurber

James Thurber worked as a writer, editor, and cartoonist at high-brow American magazine The New Yorker. Harold Ross was the publication's founder and served as its managing editor from 1925 to 1951. In the role of managing editor, Ross let loose his perfectionist's drive, relentlessly scrutinizing each cartoon and bit of text (sometimes to the point of over-editing).

The Years with Ross was published in 1957. James Thurber wrote the book as an affectionate remembrance of the profane, temperamental, eccentric, anti-intellectual prude whose fickleness and editing genius wrought frustration on the staff and contributors. Despite the hair-pulling Ross caused, he had many devotees. Thurber, who was in his 60s when he wrote this, was chief among them.

James Thurber was an accomplished writer and cartoonist. This portrait of Ross is charming, and the prose chuckles and rolls off the page. I highly recommend The Years with Ross (especially if you know a good editor).