In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

Convention requires us to discriminate between the writer and the writing but it is particularly difficult to extricate Truman Capote from In Cold Blood. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, the events depicted are changed by his observations and involvement. The relationships he develops with the characters and the influence he has over their destiny can’t be denied their place in any review. The recently released film ‘Capote’ – which tells the story of how the author came to write his most famous book - makes it timely to review the ‘nonfiction novel’ that made the Capote’s fortune and altered the landscape of non-fiction publishing.

When Helen Garner writes of “the dangerous and exciting breakdown of the old boundaries between fiction and non-fiction”, it is easy to imagine that Capote would have taken those words to heart had they been written prior to November 1959. Back then, the boundary wasn’t old at all but Capote had taken it upon himself to destroy it completely. A brief story in The New York Times reporting the brutal murder of a family in Kansas caught his eye and set him on the difficult path that would end six years later with the publication of In Cold Blood. This landmark book was a bestseller upon publication and cemented Capote’s place in American literary history. It was a departure from his accomplished but decidedly less ambitious fictions: prior to the publication of In Cold Blood his most famous work was Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

The story of the murder of the Clutter family would seem like an unlikely topic to interest Capote. Although he was born to small-town America by 1959 he was every bit the sophisticated urbanite. Decamping from his Brooklyn Heights home to the western Kansas village of Holcomb seems a strange move for the petite and effete Capote. He was searching for something to write about that would be more truthful than his fiction. Biographer Gerald Clarke quotes Capote as saying, ‘I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it’. Clarke goes on to write that Capote was restless and unable to concentrate on his work and had realized he was ‘in terrible trouble as a fiction writer’. The convergence of this artistic stalemate and the brutal slaying in Kansas spurred Capote into action and he set forth for Holcomb practically immediately.

Time hasn’t blunted the impact of the violent murders of the Clutter family nor has it made Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the perpetrators, seem any less monstrous. It is, unfortunately, a timeless story of greed and murder and the search for comprehension. Viewers of popular crime and forensics TV shows will appreciate Capote’s investigative skills and eye for detail both of which illuminate the crime and it’s consequences for the survivors and the murderers facing the hangman’s noose. Readers of modern crime fiction will enjoy the non-linear narrative that convincingly constructs the crime and its aftermath, as well as getting a more visceral experience knowing that the events portrayed were real.

The ascendance in popularity of non-fiction over fiction shows that readers are interested in narratives that purport to tell a truth. Scandals in recent years involving non-fiction works being uncovered as either exercises in stretching the truth (James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) or almost entirely fabricated (Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love) may have dented the confidence of some readers. But now, forty-odd years after the events portrayed, it’s not hard to see why those readers will be drawn to In Cold Blood.

Capote coined the term ‘nonfiction novel’ for his book. He wanted to write a book that was reportage told with the flair of fiction. While the term itself is illogical it is clear what Capote meant and how he achieved his goal. From the opening lines the symbiosis of factual reporting and the tools of fiction are evident: “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’.” We are simultaneously given the hard, geographic facts of where Holcomb is and the unsettling impression that what we are about to read is out of the ordinary. It’s a technique that doesn’t always work: “And Perry, hanging up, had felt ‘dizzy with anger and disappointment’.” The necessary use of quotation marks jolts the reader out of the narrative, reminding us that this isn’t a work of fiction. Perhaps that is Capote’s intention: to use the techniques of fiction to lull us into a false sense of understanding of his purpose only to shock us back to the truth, the reality of his story.

It’s hard to quibble with the blurring of that boundary between fiction and non-fiction when Capote seems to be so in command of both aspects of his narrative. And besides, some of what he writes seems so beyond the reach of any fiction writer that we have no choice but to accept Capote’s version of events. When Perry describes his victim thus, “I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”, it is a moment of stunning authenticity and one we suspect no writer could have concocted.

One of the most interesting and successful aspects of In Cold Blood is Capote’s ability to invoke a type of sympathy for his protagonists. The horrific nature of their crimes and other perversions is never glossed over and never explained away as aberrations. They are hardened criminals with little or no remorse and yet Capote never dehumanizes them. When the narrative finally reaches the hangings of Perry and Dick, Capote assumes an omniscient voice and enters the mind of Detective Alvin Dewey:

“…he had never had much use for Hickock…But Smith, though he was the true murderer, aroused another response, for Perry possessed a quality, the aura of an exiled animal, a creature walking wounded, that the detective could not disregard.”

The intrusion works solely because of Capote’s skill with his tools. He turns what could have been an error into a triumph of lyricism and language, of image and intent.

The major flaw of In Cold Blood is its final section. Years of trials and re-trials left Capote with no ending. The immediacy of the murders faded and nothing happened for years at a time. Capote, his biographer reveals, knowing he had a bestseller in his hands felt tortured by these delays. In this section he is left to reproduce pages and pages of correspondence and statements. Capote’s voice all but disappears from the narrative. He becomes trapped by his own hubris and it’s not interesting reading.

Capote may not have achieved his stated aim of creating a new genre – as Clarke puts it: ‘In Cold Blood is a remarkable book, but it is not a new art form’. What he did achieve was an intriguing treatise on the nature of crime and the search for truth. Perry, Capote’s ‘dark shadow’, is a fully realised creation and his making and breaking, like the author’s, is owed to the events of November 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas.