The title of Truman Capote’s early novel, Summer Crossing, refers to a luxury-liner voyage across the Atlantic made by financier Lamont McNeil and his pampered wife, and it also refers to a voyage across New York’s social barriers made by their seventeen-year-old daughter Grady in their absence. From the heights of the magnificent Lamont apartment on Fifth Avenue, Grady descends into the street, literally, picking up a lover in the parking lot where she keeps her car. Despite its lack of polish - unruly metaphors, several crude shifts in point of view, clichés of speech and characterization - the novel has charm and the power to distress. Its position on a borderline between two vastly different social worlds, and its characters who feel compelled to cross that line, hallmark the book as a kind of classic. It is a classic in the sense, as Frank Kermode has put it, that ‘literature which achieves permanence is likely to be transgressive’. And it is classic Capote. This febrile provocateur who crossed from the South of his abandoned childhood to the North of his ambition and used his plentiful social and literary talent to become the adopted pet of the ‘beautiful’ people with whom he felt himself to belong, continued throughout his career to be preoccupied with the possibility of any passage from one world into another.
Grady McNeil, restless, diffident, misunderstood, bears a heavy burden of mortality in being named for her stillborn older brother and for her uncle, also dead before his time in the First World War. Her name and her tomboyish beauty alert us to aspects in her character generated by Capote’s own sexuality, perhaps the most transgressive thing about him according to the laws and attitudes of the 1940s and 50s. It is not in order to shock her family that Grady runs from the humiliation of her upcoming debutante party and the safety of her WASP life on the Upper East Side to the arms of Jewish, Brooklyn- born-and-raised Clyde Manzer. Her parents are a phenomenon she simply cannot feel, and she fulfills one of Capote’s own childhood nightmares when she succeeds in being left entirely alone by them in their enormous apartment where the gilded furniture is hidden under ghostly white dust-covers. The fragile alternative life she tries to create for herself - in which, for instance, she clumsily burns her lover’s breakfast in the absence of her parents’ servants - is genuinely secret. And it is energized by scarcely tangible sexual antagonism between her and Clyde: their mutual instinct to pull away from one another is the very dynamic which forges the bond between them. Clyde is determined not to love Grady or even to want her much because she can end the relationship at any time, and he assumes she will. But it is Clyde’s very reticence, his elusiveness, which magnetizes her. Before they go to bed together, he resists her pleas to say he loves her; their dialogue has a grainy masculinity, as if written for two men, both Bogart, in a gay film noir.
However much sexual excitement they provoke in one another, Grady and Clyde can’t converse. Several passages tell how he withholds words from her, guards his talk, imposes quiet. Silence adds menace to his presence in the apartment and seems to guarantee that the relationship will fail. But at the very moment when the lovers are forced to go to a movie to get away from one another, Capote supplies their romance with a neon flash of criminality. In the hot summer street, there is news in the papers of murder: ‘The pavement was wet with a rain of electric color; passersby, stained by these humid glares, changed color with chameleon alacrity: Grady’s lips turned green, then purple. Murder! Their faces hidden behind tabloid masks, a group, steaming under a streetlamp and waiting for a bus, gazed into the printed eyes of a youthful killer. Clyde bought a paper, too.’ And the news triggers an echoing crime: Clyde steals a bunch of violets for Grady, which leads precipitously to their marriage.
There are other images of violent crime in the book, for instance, Clyde’s desecration of Mrs. McNeil’s bedroom: ‘Grady, as if she didn’t understand why it should have this invaded burglarized look, cussed the room with an aghast expression; she could only think: something ruthless has happened here, so heartless I shall never be forgiven…’ The crime is against Grady’s innocence as much as it is against her social class, and this formulation of her own sense of guilt about it enables us to understand why Capote would become obsessed with the story he read in The New York Times in November 1959 about the murder of the prosperous Clutter family on their farm in Kansas. As Summer Crossing reveals, he was waiting for just the right crime to come along so that he could write In Cold Blood. If Clyde Manzer is unevenly drawn, he nonetheless brings to life the stalking hunger of the outsider who holds himself back from, even denigrates, the privileged life he craves and the princess who lives it. His taciturn charisma, the threat of ruthlessness, his wish to make a mark, perhaps offer an insight into Capote’s attitude to the upper classes by which he was mesmerized, but more explicitly they offer a preview of the perversely over-stimulating brutality with which Capote, uncannily, was to come face to face when he met Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, the real-life murderers who were arrested six weeks after he first read about the Clutter murders.
So why did Capote throw Summer Crossing away? After all, he abandoned it twice - the first time to write Other Voices, Other Rooms, the second time to write The Grass Harp. Both of these early novels dive backwards into the ‘secret spiritual geography’ of Capote’s southern childhood, perhaps the safest place for him, the place of intense private vision from which he could hold reality at bay and to which the lush, lyrical language now treasured as characterizing his authentic voice is best suited. One could argue that Capote threw away a great deal more in his life, with terrific ease. In fact, Grady McNeil’s voyage of no return sketches the temptation to destroy himself that Capote seems to have resisted until near the end of his life when he at last pitched himself down from the pinnacle of his own fame. By the time he was at work on Answered Prayers, his fictional inner world had been drained dry by encounters with real life, with the vulgar, electrifying facts of the newspapers, which came to excite him far more than anything he could invent. Perhaps it was his loss of engagement with his inner world, just as much as his wish to transgress, that led him to use the real names of so many of his rich and powerful friends and acquaintances and to reveal their secrets in its fifth chapter ‘La Côte Basque, 1965’ published in the Esquire magazine in 1975. They never forgave him, and they shut him out of their lives for good.
Summer Crossing seems to prophesy that certain barriers would prove insurmountable for Capote, and perhaps it also foretold as Yukio Mishima did after he met Capote in 1957, that Capote would end a kind of suicide. But down is not much of an opening move career-wise. Though he threw out the typescript, Capote came back to the tale nearly a decade later, putting himself in as narrator and adopting a tougher, brisker, well-travelled and world-weary tone, evidently influenced by his friend Christopher Isherwood’s handling of Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin. Holly Golightly is a brilliant, bright, or as her name would have it, light, revision of Grady McNeil. She is a girl with no discernible ‘background,’ a drifter - winsome, poignant, playful and noble, held aloft by nothing but her own nerve. Capote gives her his best creative energies of subtlety and resourcefulness along with a plangent melancholy floating like a mist over a bedrock of lost-child neurosis. Early in his career, Capote appears to have been more interested in transgressing upwards than in transgressing downwards; downwards was the trajectory of the leftist writers of the 1930s; after the war, the world was on an upbeat, it was a time to aspire. He moved naturally to the more commercial idea - from Grady McNeil who rejects the fruits of the American Dream to Holly Golightly who is determined to get some of them, South American if necessary, and even though she suffers, Capote-like, from ‘not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away’.
Katherine Bucknell is the author of Canarino and Leninsky Prospect
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