"Summer Crossing" didn't fix me
my Truman Capote obsession and feeling like a literary failure
Dear readers, I’ve been in a bit of a rut.
I realized just how much of a rut today when I finished Truman Capote’s early manuscript Summer Crossing.
The posthumously published piece was discovered by Capote’s lawyer, friend, and estate manager Alan Schwartz in 2004. The novel had been handwritten in four black and white school notebooks and was never intended for public consumption. When Capote moved out of a New York apartment in 1950, he asked an uncle to toss everything he’d left behind. The uncle kept his papers, and when another descendant brought them to Sotheby’s half a century later, they provided the gift of new work from a lost talent.1
Alan Schwartz writes a very moving afterword in my edition of Summer Crossing about his internal debate on whether to publish the novel. He mentions the irony and poignancy of finding this manuscript years after Schwartz and other close friends fruitlessly searched for Answered Prayers. Answered Prayers was the novel that Capote often flouted as his magnum opus. In life, he claimed the book was nearly done or in the process of being edited, even though no one had the chance to read anything more than the few chapters he published in Esquire. Schwartz writes:
“I shall never forget the hours and hours and hours spent by me, Joe Fox,2 and Truman’s biographer Gerald Clarke trying to find the rest of this momentous manuscript. We searched Truman’s apartment, his house in Bridgehampton. We asked the people he had lived with. We tracked down the theories of well-meaning friends, all to no avail. And then we understood. There was no more. The great dissembler had simply fooled his closest friends and allies. There was no more because he simply could not write any more.”
Truman Capote is one of my Roman Empires.3 I think about him all the time.
I haven’t read a biography (yet!), but I get caught up in his persona as much as I do his language. I think Capote’s best is In Cold Blood, but my love affair began with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I never remember the plots of novels years after reading them, but I can remember with complete clarity laying in bed with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the awe it inspired in me. I was surprised a movie I liked but by no means loved could stem from a story with so much depth, wit, and sharp edges.
When I read Answered Prayers, I was impressed by Capote’s catty quality. The pieces we have of the would-be epic are often cruel. They’re also smart and funny. I waffled back and forth, sometimes enjoying his pettiness sometimes scorning it. There’s some undeniable perverse pleasure in reading scathing things I’d never have the gall to put in print, even when his pen is directed at figures I admire.4 Answered Prayers is deeply flawed, but the collection of four essays is full of diamonds in the rough. Glimpses of genius not even the fog of severe alcoholism could completely suppress.
All this had me excited to sink my teeth into Summer Crossing. Clocking in at only 120 pages, the novel’s brevity emboldened me. As the end of the year approaches, I am attempting finish my Goodreads “Reading Challenge Goal” by matching or exceeding the number of books I’ve read each year since 2020. This seemingly meaningless challenge began to feel very weighty to me in October when I realized I was ten books behind.
During the past five days, I read Summer Crossing in doctor’s offices, on subways, and while falling asleep in bed. I put it to my to-do list. I was determined to finish it before the holiday, so I could log it, add it to my bookshelf, and move onto the next item. Only today, once I finished the novel, I realized I hadn’t absorbed it in the slightest. On my bus to the pool, I’d been surprised by a description of outdoor heat, forgetting that the book was set in summer. The title is quite literally “SUMMER Crossing.” It shows how much I was paying attention.
On one hand, Summer Crossing is far from Truman’s best. It serves more as an indication of things to come than a stand-alone classic. It has a similar plot to Summer by Edith Wharton, which I read earlier this year. Both follow naïve, impetuous young girls who fall in love and must pay the consequences. I’ve grown a little tired of the not-so-unexpected consequences, but there was still plenty of material I wish I’d lingered over. One passage that struck me reads:
“For minutes, like a circulating presence, the sour sweet sweat smell of him stayed in the air, but a trifling breeze passed through the room, taking him with it: so she opened her eyes, lonely. She stopped by the window and rested on a cold radiator. Screeching roller-skates rubbed the street like chalk squealing on blackboard; a brown sedan cruised by its radio loudly playing the national anthem; two girls carrying bathing suits tripped along the sidewalk.”
My favorite part of that paragraph is the cold radiator. I love it because that detail allows me to picture the scene perfectly, and I would never think of it. I would never come up with that idea even though there’s a cold radiator in the corner of my apartment next to the window five months out of the year.
In the days I read Summer Crossing, I spent a lot of time waiting for answers out of my control. Some professional, some personal, and a few medical.5 I took it all as an excuse to be unproductive. This led to feeling lousy alone in my apartment. I indulged morbid thoughts about how long it would take someone to find me if an organ burst in the middle of the night. When I had roommates in college, we agreed we would be fine with our cats eating us if we died. They’re our children, and we wouldn’t want them to starve! Now, I live alone, and the joke lands slightly different. I bought my cat an automatic feeder.
I turned Summer Crossing into a symbol of productivity. An achievable sense of accomplishment to combat all the things I was avoiding doing. I reduced it to a task instead of viewing it as literature to enjoy, and I regretted it the moment I reached the novel’s final page.
How could I breeze through a book by one of my favorite authors? The action made me question what my love of Capote has become. Does my obsession stem from another morbid place? Simple fascination with squandered talent and a tragic end. Reveling in an author’s misery. Or is it still what it started as: admiration for his words?
To find out, I intend to do something quite rare for me. I will be rereading a book. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Even though I am overwhelmed by how much I have waiting to be read (for research, for my career, for friends, to stay informed), I would like to return to Breakfast at Tiffany’s simply to experience the pleasure of it a second time.
I find it takes work to find pleasure in the process of things. The process of reading, writing, or waiting for answers. It’s far easier to fixate on endings and outcomes. Conjuring every possibility so one can feel at least a little prepared. Filling the days with mindless tasks for some sense of achievement. I consume pop culture in excess like it’s a job when I’m avoiding creating something myself. Then, I berate myself for being a coward and fear for all the time I’ve wasted. I am constantly googling the ages of people I admire to see how far behind them I am. Afterwards, I sit there with the knowledge uninspired and unmotivated it.
By the time Truman Capote was 24 he’d already published his debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms and had a truly iconic, cunty author photo to match.6 For some reason, with him the knowledge doesn’t make me panic. It’s comforting to have an idol who at times failed to live up to his own legacy. Capote is someone who makes my failures and inactivity feel minor by comparison. His legacy is one of greatness, genius, destruction, wasted potential, popularity, and a fall from grace. In it, I see a certain freedom to fail. He was limited later in life, but he still finds love. The love of so many readers, for whom what he could give remains more than enough.
But it’s time I trade Capote’s half-baked works for one of his best. If only, to remind myself what is possible when one doesn’t scrap their composition notebooks or abandon the page. When the writing “works out.”7
It’s also time I escaped my rut. I’ve made the resolution so many times, yet here I am again. Dedicating myself once more to the momentous effort of trying. Not just to fill time but to savor it and use it to make something I’m proud of.
What is the alternative?
As fascinating author once said, “I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn’t fulfill something in me, if I don’t honestly feel it’s the best I can do, then I’m miserable.”
It’s too true, Truman.
Recommendations for this Era:
“A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote
Wicked
The song “Kissing in Swimming Pools” by Holly Humberstone
Gladiator II
You Are What You Read Podcast with Adriana Trigiani
Going to a friend’s birthday party
Suffs on Broadway - a great show and it’s closing in January!
The Wicked press tour memes and Hunter Harris’s brilliant Friday post “_________ (Holding Space for “Defying Gravity”)”
Access All Areas by Flo (what a fantastic album!!!)
Go see Wicked again
Afterword for this Era:
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end of this issue! Your support of “preface to my memoirs” means the world.
I’m curious what kinds of things you all would like to see more of: recommendations, movie analysis, personal stories? Let me know in the comments below!
Also, the next one will be silly, I promise.
Wishing you all the happiest of Thanksgivings!!! ❤️
The discovery is now part of the NYPL Archive collection, reunited with the rest of Truman Capote’s surviving papers.
Capote’s editor.
Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) is another.
Tennessee Williams, who Capote betrayed in Answered Prayers but later dedicated his final book Music for Chameleons to, possibly as a form of penance.
Everything is okay! It’s all getting resolved.
Recently heard Margaret Atwood describing this phenomenon on You Are What You Read Podcast, and it really struck a chord.
"dedicating myself once more to the momentous effort of trying" 💓 loved this read!!