The grass harp
The Grass Harp (Original title: The Grass Harp ) is a 1951 published novel by Truman Capote .
action
A small town in Alabama in the 1930s: after the death of his parents, the eleven-year-old Collin Fenwick has to stay with his father's very different cousins. The younger sister Verena is an enterprising woman and is considered the richest person in town, but she is at the same time lonely and not very sociable; the older sister Dolly has a reputation for being a little crazy and unfamiliar, but she is gentle and friendly. When the sisters for many decades, the African-American housekeeper Catherine, who is a close friend of Dolly, but cherishes a violent aversion to Verena and they always only as the as designated.
Aunt Dolly collects herbs and roots, which she processes into medicines together with Catherine and sends them to a small but loyal customer base. Verena is increasingly interested in her sister's employment and sees it as a new source of income for herself. Together with Doctor Morris Ritz, a windy businessman from Chicago , she wants to mass-produce Dolly's medicine in a factory. There is speculation in the village whether Verena has a relationship with the much younger Jew Ritz. Dolly, who received her secret recipe a long time ago from an old gypsy , thanking her for a kind act, refuses to reveal the recipe. For the first time there is an open argument between the sisters, whereupon Dolly moves into a tree house on a paternoster tree with Catherine and the now 16-year-old Collin .
Verena calls on the city authorities, including the Sheriff Junius Candle and the Reverend Buster, to get the group out of their tree house. Dolly, Catherine and Collin defend the tree house. Among other things, the Reverend's wife is accidentally hit with Dolly's lemonade jug and gets a bump. They receive unexpected help from the old, free-spirited judge Charlie Cool - who no longer has access to his bourgeois sons and is bored in retirement - as well as from the youngster Riley Henderson, who has to raise his younger sisters on his own and at the same time leads a boisterous, rebellious life what Collin admires him for. The two join the group on the tree house. Little by little, the outsiders become friends with each other and confide in secrets. At dawn, Riley and Collin swim in the nearby river, but when they return they watch as Catherine is brutally dragged away by the sheriff's men and then locked in jail. Collin can knock down a sheriff's man, but ultimately do nothing.
Dolly and Richter Cool were able to hide in the treetop in time and continue their resistance. Meanwhile, Riley has stayed in the small town and reports to the others that Morris Ritz has left and previously stole a large sum from Verena. The group on the tree house is growing by Sister Ida, a traveling preacher without a husband and with 15 children, who is to be expelled from the city after an intrigue by Reverend Buster. Riley is hostile to the sister at first, but becomes friendlier when he hears her life story full of privations from Ida. When the sheriff and his men approached again, this time accompanied by Verena, Ida's children throw stones out of the tree top at the attackers. One of the sheriff's men shoots Riley, who is hit in the shoulder, falls out of the tree and has to be carried away injured. Verena finally asks Dolly personally to return home and admits that she was always jealous of her dreamy sister. Dolly then gives in. The judge who fell in love with Dolly and proposed marriage to Dolly has to let her go.
The adult Collin, who tells the story from a first-person perspective , notices that the few autumn days in the paternoster tree were a milestone for everyone involved. Soon after her return, Dolly develops pneumonia and has to stay in bed. Judge Cool visits her every day. No sooner had she recovered than she made a Halloween costume for Collin, and died of a stroke in the process. After the death of her best friend, Catherine withdraws from people. Verena has become more vulnerable, but also more human and gentle as a result of the events. Riley Henderson, who has since recovered, becomes an aspiring businessman and marries Maude Riordan, a talented violin player, whom Collin had also fallen in love with. Nevertheless, the friendship between the two does not break.
Collin leaves town to start his law degree , but first goes for a walk with Judge Cool. They go to the grass field near the cemetery, which Dolly always said that it kept the stories of the deceased and when the wind blows over the grass they tell: “And then I wish the judge would know what Dolly once told me : It was this, the grass harp that kept everything, that told everything, the harp of voices that brought everything to our minds. We listened. "
characters
- Collin Fenwick , an orphan boy who grew up with his father's cousins
- Aunt Dolly Talbo , the older sister who makes medicines
- Aunt Verena Talbo , the younger sister, a successful business woman
- Catherine Creek , Talbos' African-American housekeeper and Dolly's friend
- Judge Charlie Cool , a wise old judge, Harvard graduate, widower with two sons
- Riley Henderson , a rebellious youth who befriends Collin
- Sister Ida , a widowed revival preacher with 15 children
- Doctor Morris Ritz , a seedy Jewish businessman from Chicago who is courting Verena
- Sheriff Junius Candle , the young sheriff under the influence of Verena
- Reverend Buster , the strict and moral pastor of the small town
- Maude Riordan , a talented violin player who is courted by Collin and Riley
- Elizabeth Henderson , the elder of Riley's two younger sisters and a friend of Maude
- Amos Legrand , the effiminated hairdresser in whose salon the city's rascals converge
- Mr. and Mrs. County , owners of the town's grocery store
- Collins late parents , a refrigerator salesman and a housewife, dies shortly after his wife when his car crashes off a cliff
background
Truman Capote worked on The Grass Harp between June 1950 and May 1951, and completed the novel while on vacation in Taormina , Sicily . Truman Capote originally wanted to give the book the title Music of the Sawgrass (in German, for example: "Music of the Sauergrass "). His publisher Bob Linscott, however, decided on the title The Grass Harp . The novel was published by Random House on October 1, 1951 and developed into a sales success; the German first edition appeared the following year. The novel was translated from the American by Annemarie Seidel and Friedrich Podszus , and Birgit Krückels reviewed this translation in more recent versions.
The novel is shaped by memories from Capote's childhood in Alabama in the early 1930s. Similar to his main character, Capote grew up in part with relatives because his parents neglected him. A cousin of his owned a large tree house in a walnut tree behind her house, including stairs, roof and a sofa inside the tree house. This is where Capote spent a lot of time with childhood friends like Harper Lee . Another cousin of his, Sook Faulk, served as a model for the figure of Dolly: The eccentric Sook made a mysterious medicine for edema every year , the recipe of which she took in her grave. Her sister suggested to Sook to patent the medicine and turn it into a business, but she refused. About the work on the novel, Capote of Italy wrote to his publisher at Random House:
“Satisfactory as it is, it keeps me in a painful emotional state: memories always break my heart. I cry - it's strange, I don't seem to have any control over myself or what I'm doing. "
In the novel, Capote creates a “nostalgic meditation on self-knowledge and love”, but the novel also casts a look at materialism, the constraints of social conformity and the search for freedom. On the tree house, as in many of Capote's outsiders' works, the figures escape society for a short time and open up by telling each other secrets. The fact that Aunt Dolly rejects the judge's proposal and Riley becomes a businessman also shows that the experience in the tree house is only temporary. Compared to his dark predecessor Other Voices, Other Rooms , in which he also processed his youth in the southern states, Capote also strikes comedic and playful tones here.
Adaptations
After the success of his book, Capote processed The Grass Harp into one piece on behalf of Broadway producer Saint Subber. It premiered on March 27, 1952 at the Martin Beck Theater , starring Mildred Natwick as Aunt Dolly and Jonathan Harris as Morris Ritz , among others . A musical version of the piece was later created, which premiered on November 2, 1971 at the Martin Beck Theater. Among others, Barbara Cook as Dolly Talbo and Ruth Ford as Verena Talbo played. Kenward Elmslie and Claibe Richardson were responsible for the music and lyrics for the musical version.
In 1953, a radio play version with a length of 81 minutes was produced on the Northwest German Radio , directed by Fritz Schröder-Jahn . The text was edited by Friedrich Forster , and speakers include Wolfgang Wahl , Gisela von Collande and Inge Meysel .
In 1995 the film Die Grasharfe was released , directed by Charles Matthau , whose father Walter took on the role of judge. Other prominent actors in the film include Jack Lemmon , Piper Laurie , Sissy Spacek , Edward Furlong, and Mary Steenburgen .
expenditure
- The grass harp . Suhrkamp, 1952, 232 pages (German first edition)
- The grass harp . Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1990. 208 pages, ISBN 978-3-518-38296-7
- The grass harp . Edited by Anuschka Roshani: Kein & Aber Zürich, 2006, 168 pages, ISBN 978-3-0369-5160-7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas Fahy: Understanding Truman Capote . Univ of South Carolina Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-61117-342-0 ( google.de [accessed April 13, 2019]).
- ↑ Thomas Fahy: Understanding Truman Capote . Univ of South Carolina Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-61117-342-0 ( google.de [accessed April 13, 2019]).
- ↑ Thomas Fahy: Understanding Truman Capote . Univ of South Carolina Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-61117-342-0 ( google.de [accessed April 13, 2019]).
- ^ Robert Emmet Long: Truman Capote-Enfant Terrible . A&C Black, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8264-2763-2 ( google.de [accessed April 13, 2019]).
- ^ The Grass Harp (1952) at the Internet Broadway Database
- ^ The Grass Harp (1971) at the Internet Broadway Database
- ↑ The grass harp on Deutschlandradio
- ^ The Grass Harp at the Internet Movie Database