Summer thieves

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Sommerdiebe (original title Summer Crossing ) is Truman Capote's (1924–1984) first novel . It was published posthumously in 2005 .

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The story in six chapters is told by an independent narrator . It is set in New York one hot summer after the end of World War II .

Grady McNeil is a green-eyed, red-haired and short-haired attractive young woman from the East Coast upper class, for whom her parents Lament and Lucy will give a debutante ball on her eighteenth birthday in October . The parents want to escape the summer heat in New York, as they do every year, and this June they travel to Europe on the Queen Mary ship , where they own a house in Cannes that they have not seen for a few years due to the war. Grady steadfastly refuses to travel and remains alone in the town apartment on the Upper East Side to try out her own life and a recent love affair. In addition to her married sister Apple, who is eight years her senior, who lives in East Hampton , Peter Bell, a student from a family that has been friends with the McNeils for ages, also wants to look after her. He takes her out to the restaurant "Charles à la Pomme Soufflée" and has to admit that he has fallen in love with the growing woman. When a society photographer asks him, the unknown companion of the young lady from the well-known McNeil family, for his name while dancing to Just One of Those Things by Cole Porter in the club “Bamboo” , Peter jokes that he describes himself as a descendant of Walt Whitman . Grady needs Peter as a best friend, but he is not let in on all the secrets, like almost two years ago when she first fell in love with a married business partner of her father.

Now she had met the 23-year-old Clyde Manzer, who had been working as a parking lot attendant near her family's city apartment since April when he accepted her Buick convertible for repair. She is impressed by his manliness and drives him to remote places. Both of them visit Central Park Zoo in their spare time and picnic with Clyde's friends. Grady takes Clyde to her parents' storm-free apartment. He hangs his few things in Lucy's closet and does the shopping. You burn the breakfast bacon and the waffles in the kitchen and you also fail the chocolate cake, while Clyde hears a baseball broadcast on the radio and while reading the newspaper discovers the photo of Grady and Peter in the gossip column . After a trip to the cinema, they drive to the town of Red Bank in a reconciliation mood and get married there at 2 a.m. On a Sunday visit to Clydes' family in Brooklyn in late July, Grady discovered how big the differences were between her permissive lifestyle and what she perceived as petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness in the Jewish Clydes family. She sees herself rejected by Clyde's mother and his sister Ida, because they would rather see him with Rebecca, with whom Clyde became engaged from afar during his military service in Germany. When Becky stands in the door, he blurts out to state that he is married. The resulting family row also brings Grady and Clyde apart for some time.

For the next few days after work, Clyde goes to stay with his friend Bubble. Grady registers the mess they both made in their parents' apartment. Each waits impatiently for a sign from the other. Grady gets a visit from Peter Bell and feels that he is in love. When Clyde still doesn't answer, she stays with her sister Apple in East Hampton. There she found out that she was six weeks pregnant.

Clyde becomes restless and jealous in New York, finds out where Grady is and gets on the train to East Hampton with his friend Gump . Grady is out in the Hamptons dunes pondering her position. Apple has received a letter from its mother, who says that they will start their return journey on September 16, stating that the debutante's gown had been tailored by a Parisian couturier . Meanwhile, when Grady returns from the beach, Clyde and Gump were at the front door, and Clyde had asked about his wife. Grady asks the angry sister, who is considering whether she could save the situation, since Grady is not yet of legal age to marry, just not to reveal anything, and finds the two men in a bar nearby.

Grady, Clyde, and Gump drive the hundred miles back to New York without a word in Grady's car, smoking hash in their heads as they drive against the desert . In a dance hall, Peter meets the stoned trio. Clyde beats up the jealous Peter. Then the quartet sits in the Buick, and on the Queensboro Bridge Gump can't prevent Grady from grabbing the wheel of the fast moving car.

History and publication

Truman Capote at the time the novel was written (1948)

Capote had started his first novel in 1943 when he was working as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker . However, he put the manuscript he had started when he was in 1944 at the place of his childhood in the southern states. With the short stories written in this world he was successful in 1946 and achieved a resounding success in 1948 with his second project Other Voices, Other Spaces . In the spring of 1949 he was encouraged by his editor Robert Linscott at Random House for the resumed Summer Crossing project . In May a third was finished, and on August 30, 1949 he announced that he was traveling from Tangier , two thirds of a first draft of 80,000 words had been completed and could be presented by the end of the year, and he could imagine June of the following year as the publication date. But he probably didn’t send more than a few very first pages, which the editor, who didn’t encourage Capote any further, rejected. The existing manuscript finally fell victim to the author's harsh self-criticism and was "torn up" by him, he said in 1953.

“I think it's well written and it's got a lot of style, but I don't really like it. And so I tore it up. "

In the period that followed, the manuscript was rarely mentioned in interviews with him. In 1982 he made contradicting statements about the quality of the manuscript he had "destroyed". Since the work did not exist, it did not play a special role in the literature on Capote and in the biography of Gerald Clarke . The first novel was therefore Other Voices, Other Rooms from 1948, after Capote had already drawn attention to himself with the short stories Miriam (1946) and Shut a Final Door (1948).

In 2004 the auction house Sotheby’s was offered a box from the estate of a janitor in which he had collected photos, manuscripts of publications, notes and letters when Capote asked him in 1950 to clean up his household garbage from his former apartment in Brooklyn Heights . This included four exercise books with the Summer Crossing manuscript . However, the find could not bring in a large amount of money for the auction house and the owner, as the "Truman Capote Literary Trust" asserted the copyrights for a possible publication. The find, including the manuscript, was sold to the “Truman Capote Collection” in the New York Public Library . Although Capote's administrator, Alan U. Schwartz, judged that Capote would not have published the novel, he decided, weighing legal, ethical, and aesthetic arguments, to publish it. The literary decision was supported by David Ebershoff , John Burnham Schwartz , Robert Loomis and Gerald Clarke .

filming

Scarlett Johansson is to direct the planned film adaptation, the commission for the script lies with Tristine Skyler .

expenditure

literature

  • Alan U. Schwartz: Afterword , in: Truman Capote: Summer Crossing . Penguin, London 2005, pp. 127-138
  • Gerald Clarke: Capote: a biography . Ballantine Books, New York 1989 ISBN 0-345-36078-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Anuschka Roshani: Editorial note , in: Sommerdiebe . 2006, pp. 141-146
  2. ↑ Gerald Clarke: Capote: a biography , 1989, pp. 79-80
  3. ↑ Gerald Clarke: Capote: a biography , 1989, p. 202
  4. ↑ a b Gerald Clarke: Capote: a biography , 1989, p. 218
  5. ↑ Roy Newquist: Truman Capote (1964), in: M. Thomas Inge (ed.): Truman Capote: Conversations , University Press of Mississippi, 1987, pp 38-46
  6. ↑ a b Alan U. Schwartz: Afterword , in: Summer Crossing . Penguin, London 2005, pp. 127-138
  7. ↑ Summer Crossing in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  8. ^ John Hopewell: Berlin: Aldamisa Launches First Sales on Scarlett Johansson Directorial Debut, 'Summer Crossing' , at: Variety , February 3, 2015