Patrick Radden Keefe on Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”
In 1972, on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson asked Truman Capote about capital punishment. Capote had written, in disturbing detail, about the hanging of two killers, Dale Hickock and Perry Smith. Carson said of the death penalty: “Until people have to do it, see “They seem to be in complete agreement”; if executions took place “in the public square”, the Americans could stop carrying them out. Capote wasn’t so sure. His hands intertwined like a teacher, he murmured, in his baby drawl, “Human nature is so peculiar that in reality millions of people would look at it and feel some sort of vicarious sensation.”
Capote’s book “In Cold Blood,” which began in 1965 as a four-part series for this magazine, was concerned both with the particularity of human nature and with the vicarious sensations that particularity can arouse. By browsing the Times In 1959, Capote noticed a story: “Rich farmer, 3 family members killed“, about the seemingly random murder of Herb and Bonnie Clutter and their two teenage children in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote left for the High Plains.
He was fascinated, as he later explained, by “the homicidal mentality” and was convinced that readers would share his interest. Grim stories of real-life murders were a staple of pulp magazines. But Capote wanted to elevate this sordid genre to art, using careful reporting, subtle characterization and (in his own shameless explanation) his “20/20 eye for visual detail.” He announced (with even more shamelessness) that “In Cold Blood” marked the advent of a new form, the “non-fiction novel,” which employed “the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless perfectly factual.”
As the brags go, this one was poorly judged. By his own admission, Capote was inspired by Lillian Ross’s 1952 account of the making of a Hollywood film, “Picture”, also from The New Yorker and exemplifies the kind of narrative reporting he now claims to be pioneering. Worse still, “In Cold Blood” was not “perfectly factual.” This included not only imagined dialogue, but also invented scenes. One problem was that Capote disdained notebooks and tape recorders, relying instead on his memory, which he said was also 20/20 — or close to it. “Sometimes he said he had a ninety-six percent total memory, and sometimes he said he had a ninety-four percent total memory,” George Plimpton joked. “He could remember everything, but he could never remember what percentage of recall he had.”
Capote’s transgressions were serious, but there is no denying the impressive influence of “In Cold Blood,” which encouraged readers and writers to rethink the possibilities of nonfiction. Capote had not visited Kansas before arriving in Holcomb, and his book is imbued with a rich sense of place: the unforgiving weather, the vernacular music of local voices (“It’s about time no one here was my relative”). With the structural precision of a suspense novelist, he crosses paths with the Clutters during their final days and the ex-cons who are going to rob their house. Sixteen-year-old Nancy writes in her diary that last night. Capote quotes the entry—it is moving in its banality—but also notes that Nancy changes her writing throughout the journal, “leaning it to the right or to the left” as she tries to decide what kind of person to be.
The most surprising aspect of “In Cold Blood” is its nuanced portrayal of criminals. Covering the case for five years, he got to know both men with disconcerting intimacy, particularly Smith, the more emotional of the two. Capote returns again and again to Smith’s strange physique: his bulky upper body, refined by weightlifting, atop stunted legs and feet so small they could have “fitted into a delicate lady’s dancing slippers.” Like Dostoyevsky, Capote does not depict his assassins as demonic ciphers, but rather captures their messy complexity. The real horror is that the murderers are deeply human.
A story that begins with a series of violent deaths ends with another, in the execution chamber. Capote finds little justification in this. “Nice to see you,” Hickock said to the onlookers, as if “welcoming guests to his own funeral.” It seems sad that no one close to Clutter was present, as if “the protocol surrounding this revenge ritual was not properly observed.”
Alvin Dewey, the Kansas lawman who apprehended the killers, is present. He remembers the first time he saw Smith, in a chair at a police station, his little feet “not really touching the ground.” As Smith’s body trembles on the rope, Dewey sees those “same childish feet, slanting, dangling.” ♦
An unspeakable crime in the heart of the country.
