Summer Crossing: A Novel

In Hot Blood

In his introduction to Music for Chameleons (1980), Truman Capote argues that his "life -- as an artist, at least -- can be charted as precisely as a fever: the highs and lows, the very definite cycles". He makes no reference, however, to his earliest novel, Summer Crossing, which he had composed in the first flush of artistic excitement as a young man in the 1940s. Previously undiscovered and now published more or less unedited, the novel is indeed a febrile attempt to capture the heat and passion both of a summer romance and the act of writing itself.

Summer Crossing tells the story of Grady McNeil, a young socialite who, while her parents are travelling to Europe, takes the opportunity to pursue an unsuitable affair with Clyde Manzer, a young Jewish war veteran who is working as a car park attendant. The insubstantial plot need detain us no longer than it apparently did Capote. Clyde is a macho cipher into whom the author offers little insight; he is underprivileged, sexually experienced ("it ought to be good in a bed, honey") and, above all, masculine: "a mumbling power, subdued as a throttle left running, that dragged the slow-fuse of maleness through every syllable". As Grady becomes involved with Clyde, so she is adored from afar by Peter Bell, her camp companion whom we first meet, "perversely dressed", with a "wild-west belt of jeweled inappropriateness". A marriage, pregnancy and the impending parental return later, the situation remains carelessly unresolved between the three, and the novel rather abruptly ends.

It does not matter. The persistently intriguing debutant in Summer Crossing is Truman Capote, not Grady McNeil, and our pleasure is largely derived from his appearance -- clumsy, flushed, fleetingly brilliant -- as a stylist in the text. The first impression is that Capote owes a surprising amount to the metaphor-laden style of Henry James: "all their childhood she'd helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection"; "the house of their hostility was modestly furnished with affection"; a "secure warm bath" of friendship, and so on. In an interview in 1957, Capote spoke of a "lengthy spell of James" in his youth, an effect of which was also to compel him to write "awfully long sentences" himself. How true:

"Her family did come rather near thinking her perverse, and once when she was fourteen she'd had a terrible and quite acute insight: her mother, she saw, loved her without really liking her; she had thought at first that this was because her mother considered her plainer, more obstinate, less playful than Apple, but later, when it was apparent, and painfully so to Apple, that Grady was finer looking by far, then she gave up reasoning about her mother's viewpoint: the answer of course, and at last she saw this too, was simply that in an inactive sort of way, she'd never, not even as a very small girl, much liked her mother."

This is calamitous James: the unnecessarily overqualified prose of an evidently underqualified writer. However, Capote's employment of James's approach seeking ever to define, solidly to specify -- is indicative of a desire, from which he was later greatly to profit, to capture precisely the world around him. Summer Crossing, as a result, is a tremendously densely textured novel, as Capote feels his way through the process of writing: "the sun, shooting summer-tipped arrows, jingled the new-penny color of Grady's cropped hair, and her skinny, nimble face, shaped with bones of fish-spine delicacy, was flushed by the honeyed blowing light". There is a certain vitality about each individual evocation here, but the effect is ruined by the superfluous accumulation of all the images, like a youthful face spoiled by the application of too much make up. What we see is that Capote, at this stage, lacks the discrimination and confidence to trust in simplicity, and succumbs to the temptation of over-elaboration.

This is also evident in his hybridization of metaphors, in which one likeness is immediately negated by the next. Light can become, oddly, both crumbly and fluttery: "flakes of sunlight falling through a tree lilted about like butterflies". Or fluid, solid and crumbly: "the city quivering in a solution of solid afternoon: though even now the sky was growing fragile and soon would crumble into twilight". Or how about this surf'n'turf characterization of Grady's emotions, with its unconvincing combination of the botanic and the marine: "Grady sat silent, letting the surprise of his remark wrap around her like a vine; and it was then, while splashes of conversation at near tables rolled in waves, that she saw how far they were from the shore". We are tempted to scoff, with Holly Golightly: "Description. It doesn't mean anything".

We are, of course, reading this novel in the knowledge of Capote's later successes, such as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). There are certainly sufficient touches of talent in Summer Crossing to point the reader in the direction of the mature Capote, and to justify its publication now. The author's hypersensitivity, the source of the often unsightly rash of impressions elsewhere, can be a winning virtue. This is a description of stifling summer in New York: "starless night-fall sky had closed down like a coffin lid, and the avenue, with its newsstands of disaster and flickering fly-buzz sounds of neon, seemed an elongated, stagnant corpse". The sensation of a deathly-hot night is captured, down to the sibilance of the prose that fixes the reader into a sympathetic rictus of appreciation.

Otherwise, Capote is most consistently successful when simplistically specific, with moments of offhand, cast-off insight: the "scraps of sea" of Grady's eyes; the chairs "spook-white in their coverings against the grime of summer"; or a shirt "silk-wet with sweat and pasted to him like a thin plating of marble". This is redolent of later work; Capote was to comment, at the end of his career, how he "preferred to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek". Such an acquired preference is much more apparent in the piercingly perceptive stories he wrote in the 1950s and beyond, and in the journalistic style of his "non-fiction novels" such as In Cold Blood (1965). Even if that clarity of style is only occasionally evident in Summer Crossing, the novel still offers a worthwhile chance to catch a glimpse of what it was like when -- full of hot blood -- Truman Capote began to write.
Stephen Abell is a freelance writer living in London.

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