Always a pleasure to read an old classic for the first time with an older eye. The Grass Harp (1951) by Truman Capote wasn’t at all what I expected. It is a charming and whimsical slice of a bildungsroman in the voice of a young orphan, Collin Fenwick, who lives with two spinster cousins. Due to a misunderstanding between the sisters, Colin and Dolly escape to a treehouse in a nearby Chinaberry tree and take up temporary residence there, as a couple other memorable characters join them. As the narrator later says . . . “we could have divided history along similar lines; that is, in terms of before and after the tree-house. Those few autumn days were a monument and a signpost.” The tree was based on an actual treehouse in Capote’s childhood that he played in with childhood friends, including his lifelong pal,
Harper Lee. Considered Capote’s favorite work, it is a lyrical and at times sentimental tale about the characters’ adventures in the treehouse, even as search parties come to find them and talk them down, hysterical skirmishes happen, rocks go flying, jars get inadvertently dropped, someone gets shot in the shoulder, though from the light tone we are assured from the get-go that it won’t be fatal. I was swept through the novella in a couple of sittings and then was drawn back to several passages for their beauty and wisdom—
“When was it that I first heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp…
Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices.”
And then, a ways on, so much poetry in the prose:
“We sipped the wine in silence; a smell of leaves and smoke carrying from the cooling fire called up thoughts of other autumns, and we sighed, heard, like sea-roar, singings in the field of grass. A candle flickered in a mason jar, and gipsy moths, balanced, blowing about the flame, seemed to pilot its scarf of yellow among the black branches.”
Then one of Dolly’s friends, Judge Cool, joins the party in the treehouse:
“The judge, too, he caught a leaf; and it was worth more in his hand than in Riley’s. Pressing it mildly against his cheek, he distantly said, ‘We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it—I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.’”
The treehouse comes to represent different things for the various characters; for Colin, it serves as escape, or sanctuary; for Dolly, a kind of personal freedom and reclamation of her childhood; and for Judge Cool, a way to be himself.
Funny, poignant, lyrical, and often playful, there’s a smile and wink-wink at the end of every carefully-crafted sentence. What an odd place for grown-ups to escape to when the going gets tough—a tree house! But in the context of the book, it makes perfect sense. As Wordsworth would have it, the child, after all, is father of the man.
