Capote's Non-Fiction Novel

Two typical Americans, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, methodically shotgunned a family of four to death for no apparent reason, on November 14, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Five years later in Manhattan, for even less apparent reasons, the New Yorker sustained an equally violent, scattershot attack by teddy-boy journalist, Tom Wolfe.

Both incidents were bizarre but not unmanageable. Kansas Investigator, Al Dewey, apprehended the murderers and a grateful public had them hanged; Establishment representative Dwight MacDonald exposed the status drop-in and a literate public saw him ridiculed. As in all senseless episodes, only epilogues were wanting: for the Clutter family murder, an explanation of such infrequent violence; for the New Yorker's reputation, unequivocal proof of current literary merit. The publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" on the Clutter affair, recently serialized in the New Yorker, triumphantly answers both needs.

A New Kind of Saga

Much more than the "verbatim" document it was first announced as, In Cold Blood is a new kind of saga, and a unique landmark in American historiography. Its impact and brilliance, the result of a six-year quest after every person and detail involved in the murder, mark the demise of Capote, the literary mannerist. He has abandoned the mellifluous language honed for his previous work, and discovered a new diction--based on listening to a staggering amount of mental transcription taken from the entire cast of a protracted drama--to handle the lives, minds, and language of those directly and indirectly implicated in the Clutter affair.

There will be much discussion of just where to file this event in American letters, and even more speculation on the legitimacy of the pre-publication million dollars Capote has earned for his pilgrimage to Kansas. The outstanding fact of the achievement is, however, that Capote read the newspaper clipping years ago and without hesitation took the considerable step from Manhattan to Holcomb to record and explore the phenomenon of inexplicable and unpredictable violence. This project was to be the test of his self-training in listening--not to areas and people familiar to him--but to total strangers. The killers, lawmen, relatives and acquaintances had to be charmed out of hostility, diffidence, and suspicion so that a new blend of reality, fiction, and implication might suggest the truth, rather than the sensationalism, behind such an incident.

He faced the tasks of presenting the respected and emulated Clutters in their farmland environment; graphing the individual backgrounds of the two parolees who systematically murdered then, for the actual sum of about fifty dollars; blending the many moods of the aftermath, and its ramifications; and recording the meaning of it all in the final confrontation between the murderers and the gallows. Not only did he have to create a simultaneity of tone and narrative in which the many active threads, biographical themes, and local vignettes would be balanced but evocative; he also had to discipline himself to a new kind of detachment--not merely because it was his duty to remain aloof from the questions and emotions raised by the tale he had appointed himself teller of, but because he had become dangerously intimate with the lives involved.

Hickock and Smith requested his presence at their joint hanging, and Capote was faced with the fact that he had reached them as a friend as well as artist and biographer; that his trust and warmth, especially for Perry Smith, was the very thing their lives had lacked. When you hear Capote accused of capitalizing on the results of that lack, bear in mind that it was the most extreme test of his objectivity. As a friend of the killers he suffered privately and had their graves marked; as artist and craftsman he raised a public monument to the questions posed by the Clutter affair.

Unanswerable Questions

They are unanswerable questions--on the nature of any great society, on the role of the public as willing and biased spectator to such incidents, on the intricacies of cause and effect, sickness and punishment. That the questions are raised is sufficient testament to the mood created by an objective narrative framework; that the ponderous weight of available answers is avoided speaks as eloquently for Capote's tone as he does through it. In speaking largely through biographical discursions, which balance and pace the actual story, he has given the speculators on crime and criminal processes much more than an abused rhetoric about society's chickens coming home to roost. Subtly but tellingly, In Cold Blood dispassionately surveys the roost itself: a society in which men such as Hickock and Smith, with IQs of 130, will continue to destroy themselves and others. It is the sort of survey which makes the Police Gazette, criminologists' case histories, liberal weeklies' temporiz- ing, and the babbling reportage of slicksters such as Tom Wolfe, seem like very shallow voices.

The central impact of the mass murder lies in a double mischance; first, that Hickock and Smith should ever have found one another, each being the perfect complement in a mutuality predicated on a "big score"; second, that the Clutter family should have been chosen as victims, so incongruous a happening that it made Holcomb, Kansas, feel "like being told there is no God."

If Capote had only presented a bare history, colored with reportorial irony, In Cold Blood would be merely suspenseful and provoking non-fiction. But it is a novel, for Capote, with singular grace, hovers between profound irony and melodrama--the irony of collision and the drama of a not inconsiderable sense of fate. The central impact of the amassed documentation derives from the compelling personality of the central figure, Perry Smith, and his belief in fate. By the time we have come to know Perry and his fated family, for whom the "solution" to life has frequently been violent suicide, we do not scorn this belief. We share Perry's fantasies, his superstitions, his sense of "destiny" (especially for his victims), and learn a real sympathy for the "fate" of the outsider in this society. If this fate is to have any meaning, our sympathy and interest must be distributed widely among the outsiders and insiders, and this is precisely what Capote has accomplished.

In Cold Blood is a minor national epic, illuminating many affecting portraits--allowing to share young Nancy Clutter's poignant diary: "Summer here. Forever I hope"; to witness the shock of her boyfriend's agony, by which an adolescent learns adult numbness; to be harassed by the posturing gruffness of Holcomb's postmistress: ". . . the sane thing to do is to shut up. You live until you die and it doesn't matter how you go--dead's dead": to appreciate Mr. Clutter's Midwest-pastoral dream: "an apple-scented Eden"; to wince before the senior Hickock's A History of My Boy's Life submitted to a parole board. One could fault Capote for lingering on certain settings and phenomena dear to his heart; but the substantive backdrop of In Cold Blood is classic Americana on an encyclopedic scale, rendered with the compassion, grace, and humor expected of a writer who has dared to embrace his country.

Against this backdrop moves the spirit apostrophized in Perry's diary: "What is life? . . . It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." For Capote, the movements in the shadows that produced the lightning tragedy of the Clutter murder are the tremors of a nation. Smith and Hickock are neither judged for what they did, nor vulgarly presented as anti-heroes. With courageous and incisive honesty Capote focuses on the dynamics of the two personalities, but never lets the tensions and momentum of the killers' relationship obscure the outward drama their characters trigger.

Caught up in the balance between that relationship and the story of the murder, at the same time conscious of the ambivalence inspired by Capote's structural framework and tonal detachment, the reader finds himself stripped of objectivity. He is forced to participate intensely, not vicariously, in the public phenomenon of impersonal terror; and allowed to share in the private world of personal fantasy--where a childhood symbol such as Perry Smith's avenging parrot "flying overhead, red and green/green and tangerine" becomes a vision that enobles a headline terrorist.

It is heartening, to say the very least, that the literary year which forced the inanity of Tom Wolfes tangerine-flakes on us has given us In Cold Blood as well. The America that Capote has suggested in his immortalization of Hickock and Smith engulfs the America which Wolfe and others have so stridently proclaimed as, indeed, it engulfs us all; those, who like a bright-eyed Capote in Holcomb, respond to this fact with interest and humility, will find In Cold Blood one of those rare documents which irrevocably focuses our attention on the facts and fate flying overhead