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Mar. 26--SUMMER CROSSING. By Truman Capote. Random House. 142 pages. $22.95.
More and more, we're becoming a nation of art voyeurs.
We'll sneak a peek at a painter's unfinished canvas. We'll watch TV bloopers. We'll listen to a musician's studio outtakes as well as his bootleg recordings. We'll view film scenes that had hit the cutting-room floor, now that many of them are brought into our living rooms as special DVD features.
And what about those unpublished manuscripts by famous authors? Yes, from Ernest Hemingway to other writers, we feed our appetite with those kind of books, too.
But it's a hunger for what, exactly? Process instead of product?
In Summer Crossing, the literary voyeur gets something: A glance at teenage Truman Capote's easy-on-the-eyes prose and his budding talent years before he wrote classics such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood.
But that's about it.
The novella, which many scholars believe Capote never wanted to have published, is what polished writers generally describe as a good setting and not much else.
Written by Capote at an age when many of today's would-be writers are just setting their sights on their first college-level creative writing class, Summer Crossing centers around socialite Grady McNeil's quest to come of age one summer in New York, shortly after World War II.
Capote, a mere 19 when he wrote Summer Crossing, tells what happens when Grady's parents leave her alone in their upscale penthouse for weeks. She strikes up a relationship with a Jewish war veteran from Brooklyn who is employed as a parking lot attendant. But the relationship -- and the plot -- never develops into a tale of forbidden lust or a statement on bigotry or class struggle.
The prose is good. But the storyline is flat. That may explain why Capote struggled with it.
So what value is there in peeking at his less-than-developed skills?
Capote died in 1984, just shy of his 60th birthday. He started writing Summer Crossing in 1943, but had set it aside in favor of what would become his acclaimed literary debut, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Over the next decade he tinkered with Summer Crossing from time to time.
He literally abandoned it for good in 1966, when he abruptly moved out of his Brooklyn apartment and asked that all of his belongings -- including the unpublished manuscript for this book -- be set out at the curb for garbage haulers.
The manuscript, written in four old school notebooks, was rescued by his former house-sitter. Last year, it turned up with other Capote memorabilia at Sotheby's in New York, although it was never auctioned. The New York Public Library bought it. Random House recently published it.
The timing, of course, is more than coincidental, given all the buzz that the recent Oscar-nominated film Capote generated.
Alan Schwartz, Capote's lawyer, friend, and a trustee of the Truman Capote Literary Trust, takes full responsibility for the decision to publish Summer Crossing. He said it caused him some angst because he recognized Capote's abandoned work was both an "imperfect" book by the writer's standards, yet one with some historical significance.
"While not a polished work, it fully reflects the emergence of an original voice and a surprisingly proficient writer of prose," Mr. Schwartz wrote in Summer Crossing's afterword.
Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com or 419-724-6079.
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