Nathaniel Popkin

Urban Library

"Summer Crossing"

from Urban Library

27 February 2008

Truman Capote, mid-late 1940s
Unpublished until 2005
Around the world in New York, 1940s

In this Modernist story of a person apart, Capote sends up the trope of rich girl searching, swerving off course. What does her in? Landing in the “exotic,” “intimate” worlds of Brooklyn Jews and Harlem blacks.

But first Grady McNeil sets herself free. Her parents have usefully left on the summer’s crossing to the house in Provence (pillaged by German soldiers) and Grady, age 18, is left to haunt Broadway, where she’s fallen in love with a parking lot attendant. Sounds brutal, doesn’t it?

Capote himself may have thought so; he wished that the novel, possibly his first, would remain forever in a box. But imagine the crime of self-censorship: post-war New York—bristling, sweating, piercing—denied the lush, New Orleans telling. For this early work is really the reckless city exposed at once to its antithetical bard. Forget plot—though even that is well-paced and restrained—here is the voice accompaniment to the Life photographer Andreas Feininger’s steam-soaked pictures of the era. Here is neon drawn across a face and heat wave-struck bodies strewn across the Central Park lawn. Here is languor and speed, expectation and the brutality of sensation.

It was wilting out on Lexington Avenue, and especially so since they’d just left an air-conditioned theater; with every step heat’s stale breath yawned in their faces. Starless nightfall 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 pavement was wet with a rain of electric color; passerby, 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.

Grady had never spent a summer in New York and so had never known a night like this. Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing. It wasn’t that Grady was unfamiliar with the kind of accelerated desperation a city can conjure, for on Broadway she’d seen all the elements of it. Only there it was something she’d known vicariously, and she had not, as it were, taken part. But now for her there was nowhere an exit: she was a member.

New York, restrained by claustrophobic heat, pours forth, Grady herself pitched overboard. The rest of us might as well engorge on the prose. —-NRP

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