Summer Crossing Page 10

  Gerald Clarke went to see the material at Sotheby’s and had a glimpse of the various items in the collection. There were in fact letters from Truman’s mother and his stepfather (a rarity, and an insight into what we thought had been completely cutoff relationships). There were many, many letters to his beloved friend Newton Arvin, photographs of Truman as a young man, annotated manuscripts of some of Truman’s early works, and, of course, what looked like a full manuscript of a novel entitled Summer Crossing.

  The next step was to get a chance to read it. I asked David Ebershoff, who had taken over the editing chores of Truman’s works at Random House, to arrange with Sotheby’s to make a copy of the novel. While this was happening I had to be absolutely sure that if Sotheby’s auctioned these documents they were to make very clear to all prospective purchasers that the publication rights belonged to The Truman Capote Literary Trust and were not for sale as part of the documents. I also wanted to make sure, if at all possible, that all of these documents and memorabilia ended up in the place where Truman’s other papers, manuscripts, and documents had been placed, namely the New York Public Library. I started a dialogue with the library and asked them to examine the material and hopefully arrange to buy it. Gerald Clarke also urged them to this end. In order to make sure that Sotheby’s was going to clearly indicate that the publication rights belonged to The Truman Capote Literary Trust, I asked them to put flyers on every seat at the auction and also to make an announcement before the auction began that the only things being auctioned were the physical papers and that the publication rights belonged to the Trust. Just to make sure, I asked my son John Burnham Schwartz, a novelist in his own right and someone who knew Truman since he was a little boy, to check at Sotheby’s to see that all was in order. The amazing conclusion to all of this was that apparently no one bid at the auction. This could have been for a couple of reasons. First, the price estimates were too high, and second, they were put off by the publication warnings we had arranged with Sotheby’s.

  Gerald Clarke, David Ebershoff, and I began a campaign to urge the New York Public Library to buy these documents and put them in the permanent Truman Capote Collection. Finally, an agreement was reached between Sotheby’s and the library, and I am happy to say that the documents now safely reside with Truman’s other papers for view by scholars and, in fact, anyone interested in literary history.

  I read the manuscript of Summer Crossing with great excitement and a certain amount of dread. I remembered that it was quite likely that Truman did not want this novel to be published, but I was also hopeful that it would shed some light on Truman as a young author prior to the time he wrote his first iconic work, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Of course, I did not trust my own judgment. I therefore asked David Ebershoff and Robert Loomis, Truman’s senior editor at Random House, as well as my wife, Louise, to read the manuscript and to share notes. It is fair to say that we were all happily surprised. While not a polished work, it fully reflects the emergence of an original voice and a surprisingly proficient writer of prose.

  Of course, it was not for me alone to judge its literary merit. After much discussion, our verdict was that the manuscript should be published. We reasoned that this was a sufficiently mature work that could stand on its own merits and that its intimations of the later style and proficiency that led to Breakfast at Tiffany’s were too valuable to be ignored. Before making a final decision I asked my friend James Salter if he would take the responsibility of giving it one more read. Not only is Jim a good friend but he is generally recognized as one of the most luminous prose stylists of my generation. Jim graciously accepted the task and after a short while told me that he concurred in the verdict of my other three judges more or less for the same reasons. The decision was then up to me.

  As a lawyer, I realize more than most the responsibilities of a trustee of a charitable trust. I am also very conscious of the high standard of care that any fiduciary must apply in reaching his or her decisions. However, it is not often that a trustee or even a literary executor is put into a position where he must decide whether to publish a work of an important deceased author that, very likely, the author would not have published in his lifetime. Truman died in 1984. What would he have thought now? Would he have had the historical perspective and indeed the clearheadedness to decide what was best for the manuscript? After much thought it became apparent to me that in the final analysis the novel had to speak for itself. Although it was imperfect, its surprising literary merits seemed to demand an escape from its previous captivity. It would be published.

  I wish to thank my advisors and everyone else who has helped make this publication happen. At the end of the day, of course, the responsibility for this decision, legally, ethically, and aesthetically, is and must be mine alone. In this I am mindful of the ironic twist of fate that prevented us from publishing a novel Truman believed he had finished (Answered Prayers) but allows us to publish this novel, which most likely he did not want published. As I write this I see Truman with his impish grin wagging a finger at me. “You are a naughty avvocato!” he is saying. But he is smiling.

  ALAN U. SCHWARTZ

  October 2005

  A Note on the Text

  This first edition of Summer Crossing was set from Capote’s manuscript, which was written in four school notebooks with sixty-two pages of supplemental notes, archived in the New York Public Library’s Truman Capote collection. The editors have silently corrected any inconsistent usages and misspellings. In instances when the author’s meaning was not clear, the editors added punctuation such as a comma, and in a few sentences, when a word was missing, the editors have inserted it. The editors’ foremost concern has been to faithfully reproduce the author’s manuscript. They made their corrections solely for the purpose of clarifying the unclear.

  The Truman Capote Papers

  at the New York Public Library

  The manuscript of Summer Crossing consists of four notebooks written in ink and heavily corrected in Capote’s hand. The manuscript is supplemented by sixty-two pages of notes. The manuscript and notes make up part of the Truman Capote Papers housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library. The majority of the papers were donated by the Capote estate to the New York Public Library in 1985; subsequent purchases have been made by the library to supplement the collection, including the manuscript of Summer Crossing.

  The Truman Capote Papers consist of holograph manuscripts and typescripts of the author’s published and unpublished work, notes and other material related to the works, Capote’s high school writings, correspondence, photographs, graphic materials, miscellaneous personal documents, printed material, and scrapbooks.

  The Manuscripts and Archives Division holds archival material in over three thousand collections, dating from the third millennium BCE to the current decade. The greatest strengths of the division are the papers and records of individuals, families, and organizations, primarily from the New York region. These collections, dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, support research in the political, economic, social, and cultural history of New York and the United States. Notable collections include the records of The New Yorker, Macmillan Publishing Company, National Audubon Society, the New York World’s Fairs, and papers of individuals as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Lillian Wald, H. L. Mencken, and Robert Moses.

  BOOKS BY TRUMAN CAPOTE

  Other Voices, Other Rooms

  A Tree of Night

  Local Color

  The Grass Harp

  The Muses Are Heard

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  Observations (with Richard Avedon)

  Selected Writings

  In Cold Blood

  A Christmas Memory

  The Thanksgiving Visitor

  The Dogs Bark

  Music for Chameleons

  One Christmas

  Three by Truman Capote

  Answered Praye
rs: The Unfinished Novel

  A Capote Reader

  The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

  Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote

  (edited by Gerald Clarke)

  Truman Capote

  Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and then fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in Harper’s Bazaar established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties. His novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a Gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as “an attempt to exorcise demons,” and his novella The Grass Harp (1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.

  From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples are “Local Color” (1950) and “The Muses Are Heard” (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954).

  Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death.

  He worked for many years on Answered Prayers, an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once dominated. In his later years he published two collections of fiction and essays, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). He died on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.

  The Complete Stories of Truman Capote and Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote were published in 2004.