Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Capote, Truman (Vol. 19) - Richard Hayes

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RICHARD HAYES

There is pleasure in reporting how very fine [The Grass Harp] is, how admirably and even brilliantly accomplished—instinct with vitality and humor and a tenderness which never curdles into sentimentality. One's pleasure in this case has little to do with literary actualities: it rises, rather, from satisfaction at the confirmation of a talent….

The Grass Harp represents [Capote's] first serious experiment in major fiction. (p. 73)

Within the slim compass of this work, Truman Capote has achieved a masterpiece of passionate simplicity, of direct, intuitive observation. Without any loss of intensity, he has purified the clotted prose of Other Voices, Other Rooms, producing a luminous reflector for his unique visual sensibility…. But the real wonder of The Grass Harp—the major advance over the earlier novel—is revealed in its awareness of a larger reality. Capote has sunk a shaft more deeply into...

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1. Introduction
2. Carlos Baker
3. Leslie A. Fiedler
4. Virginia Bennett
5. Granville Hicks
6. Richard Hayes
7. Eric Bentley
8. Henry Hewes
9. Paul Darcy Boles
10. William Goyen
11. Gordon Merrick
12. John Hollowell
13. BENJAMIN DeMOTT
14. Stefan Kanfer
15. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
16. Helen S. Garson
17. Copyright

1. Truman Capote