Fiction: Demon child, vicious gossip, society creature and writer - Truman Capote was all these things. Sadly for Capote the artist, his bizarre life - culminating in a squalid finale in which he was rejected by his circle for the many personal betrayals contained within the few first chapters of the unfinished Answered Prayers - overshadowed his gifts.
Yet there was always his superb first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which was published in 1948. Acknowledged among the finest literary debuts of all time, it is now about to be supplanted by Summer Crossing, billed as his "newly discovered" first novel, although I suggest that should read as "newly recovered".
Should a work left unpublished by its author when alive be published after the writer's death? Whatever about scholars examining the papers, should publishers be allowed to decide on behalf of a dead author? No writer's career, it seems, is truly over until the last suitcase has been opened, the final floorboard lifted, all maverick trash cans investigated. Capote is unaware he is about to have a new first novel. Other writers have also acquired subsequent "last" novels, added posthumously to their bibliographies.
Luckily for Capote, Summer Crossing, written in four school notebooks - along with, as his literary executor states in an afterword, "62 supplemental notes" - when he was 19, is more than merely promising. It is poised, well-observed, and alludes to the darkness which would make Other Voices, Other Rooms so powerfully assured.
In the years since Capote's death in 1984 before his 60th birthday, his literary legacy has come to rest upon a fine work of reportage, the famous non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood (1966), and the many real-life yarns featuring his wit and high-profile society tiffs.
Yet this most reluctant of Southern writers (the only child of a disastrous marriage, he was born in New Orleans and was the subject of many custody battles) was a consummate Southern writer. His feel for language and understanding of despair and discontent echoes that of Tennessee Williams. Capote's early escape to New York doomed as much as saved him.
Well-removed from the scandal and pathetic squeaky-voiced TV chat show appearances, there was the writing. Before In Cold Blood, which daringly recreated the multiple murders by two escaped convicts of an entire Kansas family, Capote had turned entertainer with the lightweight delights of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), the life and times of playgirl Holly Golightly later immortalised by Audrey Hepburn.
More importantly, a decade earlier, in 1948, the young Capote had shown exactly how good he was with that remarkable first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms. It has a dreamlike quality. The central character, young Joel Knox, drifts into a homosexual relationship with a transvestite. Meanwhile, Joel's paralysed father's decaying house is slowly sinking into the swampland on which it was built. Capote's is a highly specific form of Southern Gothic.
In The Grass Harp (1951) an 11-year-old orphan and one of his three elderly aunts flee the world to seek sanctuary in a treehouse.
No one could accuse Capote of engaging with his characters; he is not sufficiently interested in people for that, but he is fascinated by the situations life creates and certainly enjoyed plotting Holly's routines. Yet Summer Crossing is no romp. It follows Grady McNeil, the beautiful teenage daughter of a wealthy man. She is bored out of her mind. Within this boredom lies self-destruction.
Young Capote surrounds Grady with equally unhappy people: her heartbroken mother, who has given up trying to like her; Apple, her sister, eight years her senior, who is married and already bitter; and the laconically drawn, detached father "who whenever he spoke sounded as though he was bidding in a poker game, but who seldom spoke in any event, partly because his wife did not like to be interrupted and partly because he was a very tired man . . ."
Refusing to accompany her parents to Paris, Grady elects to stay at home. She has her reasons. Although she has a friend in Peter, an attractive failure capable of surviving in society and who loves her, she has other plans. Capote presents her as a girl people look at for obvious reasons of youth, beauty and wealth, astutely adding: "There were a few whose eyes she held for a different reason: and it was because, in her aura of wilful and privileged enchantment, they sensed she was a girl to whom something was going to happen."
A great deal does happen in what is a short book. It is also young person's work. The observations are sharp if at times overly diligent, while the eye and ear are always alert. The character of Clyde, Grady's love interest, is too sketchy and cliched, the social nuance unsubtle. Yet Summer Crossing impresses through its portrayal of an impatient young girl caught between a fear of boredom and a fear of life. Apparently, the 24-year-old Capote who completed the masterful Other Voices, Other Rooms dismissed it as a trial run.
Still, it took a natural writer to evoke the sense of a heatwave in post-war New York: "Broadway is a street; it is also a neighbourhood, an atmosphere." The narrative balances the suffocating lack of air in the city streets against the impending psychological and emotional suffocation of Grady. A good period piece in its own right; admirers of Capote will be intrigued - and relieved.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Summer Crossing By Truman Capote Penguin Classics, 142pp. £12
