In cold print

Listener, 17 March 1966⁷⁶

Truman Capote has finally published his famous book on the multiple murders in Kansas. Which all goes to show that time is out of joint. Even before it got into print this book had an almost mythical reputation. It was one of those strange cases, not uncommon in the United States, where advertisements speak louder than words and publicity is as important as publication. The clamour was so cunning that when the book finally did appear it seemed like an aside, a printed summary of what was already known and approved from foregoing hearsay. This was partly due to the economics of modern American publishing where profits are tied to advance paperback sales, but it also says something about the public style of some recent American writers themselves. Capote has fallen victim to the same sort of crazy process which is practised much more flagrantly, perhaps, by his colleague Norman Mailer.77 They seem to be in an indecent hurry to set up copper-bottomed claims to greatness in advance of the due process of literary judgment. In Mailer’s case this takes the form of elaborate stunts – spectacular debates, suicidal showdowns with heavyweight boxing champs, and monstrous self-advertisements in which he announces that he will settle for nothing less than a total revolution in the sensibility of our times. Now Capote, on the edge of an otherwise modestly distinguished middle age, feels pressed to make big claims in advance of his own publication. With In Cold Blood he announces a breakthrough to an entirely new form of literature: the fictional documentary; the non-fiction novel. It would be unfair of course to judge the book in the light of this claim, but, equally, it is hard to ignore it entirely. Precocious manifestos raise the critical dander and make it difficult to consider a work entirely on the basis of its unannounced merits.

Following the outrage of a particularly bloody and apparently motiveless massacre in the mid-western state of Kansas, Capote went to the scene and rummaged out the details of everyone involved in the case. The painful thoroughness has become part of the myth. He filled thousands of pages with minute verbatim notes taken from the friends of the murdered family, the shocked neighbours, the law-men, and finally from the two murderers themselves. Everything was scrupulously scribbled down and from this grotesque potpourri, where sweet incidental triviality jostles with savage psychopathic incident, Capote extracted, by artful recollection, 280-odd pages of engrossing factual narrative.

The form is not entirely without precedent. Nearly half a century ago, Dreiser took the court records of another famous murder and built it up into one of the great American novels. With regard to the use of actual material, An American Tragedy (1925) stands somewhere about half way between Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830), where Stendhal simply used a real case as the occasion for his novel, and Capote’s In Cold Blood where the facts make up the whole book. If Capote’s work is new it is only by standing at the far end of a spectrum within a well-established genre of social literature. In the three examples there is the same ambitious social scope, the same effort to capture through the events surrounding a violent public act the overall tone of a national temperament. And in all three the human vehicle is curiously alike. An obscure, rootless hero (two in Capote’s case), head filled with shapeless and extravagant ambitions, is driven through the middle of an indifferent community and collides with it in a gory climax. It’s rather like the device used by the nuclear physicists in which a charged particle rushes through a sealed vessel of dark vapour, brushing up into brief visibility everything with which it comes in contact. Capote’s work is notable, therefore, more for the contribution it makes to an established form than for any startling novelty of its own. And oddly enough, one could argue at least that the out and out novelists, free from binding obligation to the smallest details of the original case, get nearer to reality than someone like Capote who contracted himself in advance to forswear invention. There is no such thing as verisimilitude anyway, but finally only a choice between more or less convincing fictions. Documentary fiction is a much wider category than the one that Capote claims to have invented for himself, and he must finally be rated in terms of his performance within this recognized form.

The work falls into two rather unequal parts. He is least successful in the early pages, before the murder, minutely embroidering a picture of the doomed family, the mid-western town and the characters of the humdrum neighbours all around. There is a trivial accuracy about all this; true, one supposes, in detail, but sweetly overdrawn in general, rather like Norman Rockwell’s vignette covers for the Saturday Evening Post. And too often this lapses further still into a Crawfie coyness.78 Even in the better parts of the book, where he deals with the crooks themselves, their families, the arrest, trial and Death Row, he falls with unsettling regularity into a touch purple journalese. All this sends up a maddening fog which conceals the book’s virtues. For Capote has caught, like Hannah Arendt with her book on Eichmann, the essential ‘banality of evil.’⁷⁹ Following the pair in their destructive lurch through the south-west of America – cheating, charming, slaughtering, and hitch-hiking – we get the feckless dullness of criminal psychopathy.

He shows too the vapid alternation of moods. The brilliant theatrical improvisation as they pass dud cheques in a Kansas clothes shop, the lotus-eating languor of their après-kill holiday in Mexico, the outbursts of pathological hunger, and perhaps best of all that characteristic swing from callous violence to maudlin sentimentality: the very thing which led the early psychologists to name psychopathy moral insanity. Time and again through the dark glass of this dismal pair we see the features of another killer – the footling, dangerous dafty, Lee Harvey Oswald. They are the hazardous orphans of the Other America. It is a crushing irony that in a country hell-bent on fame and fortune, Capote should have won through tepid print what they tried to get by spilling cold blood. I hope he’s satisfied.