Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Still in the short-story collection The Grass Harp: Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories
I love the voice of this story. It’s Capote at his rollicking gossipy best. Writing like this is really FUN to read. You can HEAR the voice of the narrator. Also, if you think about the tone of much of Capote’s other stuff – the elegiac, nostalgic, bittersweet, romantic tone – and compare it to the voice below – funny, acerbic, ignorant, chatty – you can see part of the reason why he was so dazzling to begin with. Truman Capote wasn’t just ONE thing, one writer with one kind of voice. He seemed to contain many different worlds – even as a young man. And the confidence! The story below, the voice below, has confidence.
The excerpt below is the opening of the story.
Excerpt from The Grass Harp: Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories
I know what is being said about me and you can take my side or theirs, that’s your own business. It’s my word against Eunice’s and Olivia-Ann’s, and it should be plain enough to anyone wiht two good eyes which one of us has their wits about them. I just want the citizens of the U.S.A. to know the facts, that’s all.
The facts: On Sunday, August 12, this year of our Lord, Eunice tried to kill me with her papa’s Civil War sword and Olivia-Ann cut up all over the place with a fourteen-inch hog knife. This is not even to mention lots of other things.
It began six months ago when I married Marge. That was the first thing I did wrong. We were married in Mobile after an acquaintance of only four days. We were both sixteen and she was visiting my cousin George. Now that I’ve had plenty of time to think it over, I can’t for the life of me figure how I fell for the likes of her. She has no looks, no body, and no brains whatsoever. But Marge is a natural blonde and maybe that’s the answer. Well, we were married going on three months when Marge ups and gets pregnant; the second thing I did wrong. Then she starts hollering that she’s got to go home to Mama – only she hasn’t got no mama, just these two aunts Eunice and Olivia-Ann. So she makes me quit my perfectly swell position clerking at the Cash ‘n’ Carry and move here to Admiral’s Mill which is nothing but a darn gap in the road any way you care to consider it.
The day Marge and I got off the train at the L&N depot it was raining cats and dogs and do you think anyone came to meet us? I’d shelled out forty-one cents for a telegram, too! Here my wife’s pregnant and we have to tramp seven miles in a downpour. It was bad on Marge as I couldn’t carry hardly any of our stuff on account of I have terrible trouble with my back.
