Truman Capote’s Nonfiction Novel "In Cold Blood" and Bennett Miller’s Biopic "Capote"

Table of Contents

1  Introduction  1

2  Genre  4

2.1  Capote s Literary Development toward the Nonfiction Novel  4

2.2  The Nonfiction Novel an Altogether New Concept  6

2.3  The Nonfictional in the NONFICTION Novel a True Account  9

2.4  The Novelistic in the Nonfiction NOVEL  13

3  Style  18

3  1 S t r u c t u r e 1  8

3.2  Language  23

4  Setting  31

4  1 T h e R u r a l H o m e s t e a d 3  1

4  2 T h e R o a d 3  2

5  Character  35

5  1 P e r r y 3  8

5  2 D i c k 4  5

5  3 T h e C l u t t e r F a m i l y 4  7

6  In Cold Blood and the American Dream  53

6.1  The Portrayal of American Society in In Cold Blood  54

6.2  The American Dream  56

6.3  The American Nightmare in In Cold Blood 5  8

6.4  Society s Reaction the Trial  60

7  In Cold Blood on Film  64

7.1  Miller s Biopic Capote 6  6

7.2  Capote s Two Sides  72

7.3  Capote and Perry  77

8  Conclusion  87

9  Works Cited  88

10  Appendix  94

10.1  Segmentation Capote 9  4

  II  

1 Introduction

When In Cold Blood was first published, critics had a hard time categorizing the book. Capote himself held that he had written a “nonfiction novel (Capote in Plimpton 1966: 2)” and that he had thereby created an altogether new genre. In the subtitle, Capote stresses his central claim regarding this new genre, assuring the reader that what she is about to delve into is “a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (Capote 2000 [1966]).” As will be seen in the opening chapter, criticism of In Cold Blood has therefore to a great degree revolved around Capote’s and the book’s adherence to this assertion of truth. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (SOED) lists as the three first entries under the head word “true”:

true /tru:/

1 Steadfast in allegiance, loyal; faithful, constant (…).

2 Honest, honourable, upright, virtuous; straightforward, sincere (…).

3 Of a statement, report, etc.: consistent with fact; conforming with reality (…).

The following investigation of In Cold Blood and of the biopic based on Capote’s work on the book, Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005), will proceed along the lines of these three aspects of the definition, questioning Capote’s claim of rendering a “true account.” The genre chapter and large parts of the ensuing discussion of In Cold Blood will be especially concerned with the definition’s third aspect, In Cold Blood’s consistency with fact and its conformity with reality. The question will be raised as to whether or not a true account of real events is possible at all, and in what ways Capote and other writers of New Journalism, as the genre is most frequently called today, have tried to achieve such true accounts.

The bulk of this paper will then deal with the way Capote sets up and brings across what he calls the truth. In a close reading, In Cold Blood will be analyzed with regard to its structure and language, followed by a close look at the book’s predominant opposition of two prototypically American settings: the Clutters’ rural homestead and the road. The road’s promise of freedom is reversed by Capote, who presents it as an involuntary home for the Clutters’ murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, two “refugees of the American Dream (Zavarzadeh 1976: 122).” Capote’s way of portraying these central protagonists, namely the Clutter family and the two criminals, will be a further matter of discussion. It will be pointed out that Capote’s failure to include himself as a character in the story is an obvious shortcoming of the book, considering

that the author himself was one of the main protagonists of the story that unfolded in the aftermath of the Clutter killings, and especially in regards to his prodigious claim of truth.

The analysis of the individual characters of the Clutter family will also go into the question whether their apparently ideal life is as perfect as it seems at first glance. Special emphasis will be laid on the characters Nancy and Bonnie Clutter – on Nancy, because she seems to be the epitome of the all American girl, and on Bonnie, because she is the only family member who does not quite seem to fit into the society that surrounds her. It will be seen that both characters have come to be and stay the way they are because they are aware of the various constant gazes that rest upon them. The analysis of Dick and Perry will illustrate and compare their underlying motives and reasons for the killings in close connection with an analysis of their character traits and their lives prior to the killings as presented in In Cold Blood. Animal and garden imagery will be identified as themes and important tools for the author’s modeling of his characters.

The American Dream is a further pervasive theme of In Cold Blood that will be investigated. Although they do not necessarily realize it, for both the Clutters and their murderers the pursuit of the riches the American Dream seems to have in stock is a decisive driving force. It will be shown that the Dream keeps the Clutter family and Dick and Perry maximally apart, leading to a catastrophic clash when the two ends of the scale created by the Dream collide. Capote’s portrayal of the “truth” behind this Dream, aspects of which have shaped much of American literature, will close the discussion of In Cold Blood.

While questions regarding the truth value of In Cold Blood will be chiefly concerned with the SOED’s third entry under the head word “true”, the analysis of Bennett Miller’s biopic Capote will investigate in how far Truman Capote manages to stay true to himself and other characters, especially Perry Smith, in the first and second sense of the SOED definition. In other words, it will assess to what extent Capote is “loyal” to the people around him and to what degree his methods of retrieving crucial information for his book project are “honest”, “straightforward” or “sincere”. Capote’s relationship to Perry and his behavior in connection with him are most important in an attempt at answering these questions and will therefore be analyzed in great detail. However, Capote’s behavior towards other characters will be scrutinized as well in order to gain an insight into the two sides that shape Truman Capote: Capote the author and Capote the private man. The extreme conflict of interest that arises for Capote as a

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result of these two sides that pull him in opposite directions will be laid open, very much in relation to the question whether Capote, as he is presented in the biopic, actually has a chance of being true to himself, of living without betraying one of the two sides that define him.

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2 Genre

2.1 Capote’s Literary Development toward the Nonfiction Novel

In Cold Blood was not Capote’s first attempt at the nonfiction novel genre. There had been four nonfiction or travel sketches prior to In Cold Blood: Local Color (1950), The Muses Are Heard (1956), The Duke in His Domain (1957) and the posthumously published Portraits and Observations (2007) (cf. Hollowell 1977: 65). Hollowell (Hollowell 1977: 66) contends that especially Capote’s work on The Muses Are Heard, an account of his tour through the Soviet Union as a reporter with an all African American cast of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and his work on The Duke in His Domain, a biographical sketch of Marlon Brando, who was still a young actor at the time, constituted important phases in Capote’s professional life. During this time, Capote strove to find the precise technique and style that would allow him to realize his idea of the nonfiction novel, an idea he had harbored for more than 20 years (cf. Capote in Plimpton 1966: 2). Much the way he would later handle In Cold Blood, Capote pays close attention to the physical setting of the scenes he writes about in Duke and Muses; he uses flashbacks and chapter overlapping; and while adhering to novelistic style, his goal is to keep only to the facts (cf. Hollowell 1977: 66f.). His own definition of the nonfiction novel would later state: “I was attempting to write a journalistic narrative that employed all the creative devices and techniques of fiction to tell a true story in a manner that would read precisely like a novel (Capote quoted in Dörfel 1973: 28).” In a recent evaluation of In Cold Blood’s contribution to New Journalism, Nuttall summarizes the state of American literature prior to the middle of the 1960s:

[The] post-World War Two American novel […] was caught between the twin poles of neo- fabulism and pulp fiction. […] In 1966, the year In Cold Blood was published, these twin poles might best be exemplified by, on the one hand, Thomas Pynchon’s reality-disconnection tour de force The Crying of Lot 49, and on the other hand Jacqueline Susann’s raunchy extravaganza Valley of the Dolls, a tale with little literary or other merit that ended up as the second biggest-selling novel of all time. (Nuttall 2007: 130)

Capote seems to have shared this impression. Long after the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote himself, in his foreword to Music for Chameleons, would also state as one of the reasons for being drawn towards journalism: “it didn’t seem to me that anything truly innovative had occurred in prose writing, or in writing generally, since

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the 1920s (Capote 1980: xiv).” The second reason he gives is that “journalism as an art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism, and when they did, it took the form of travel essays or autobiography (Capote 1980: xiv).” In prior interviews, Capote had maintained that “one of the reasons [he] wanted to do reportage was to prove that [he] could apply [his] style to the realities of journalism (Capote in Friedmann 1968: 164),” and that “[it] seemed to [him] that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘non-fiction novel,’ as [he] thought of it (Matuz 1990: 84).” Capote saw the nonfiction novel as result of a “need to escape [his] self-created world” in exchange for “the everyday objective world we all inhabit (Plimpton 1966: 2f.).”

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2.2 The Nonfiction Novel – an Altogether New Concept?

Upon In Cold Blood’s entrance onto the literary scene few reviewers acknowledged Capote’s creation of an entirely new genre. Dupee, for example, finds that “[if] anything, Capote has perfected an old form of journalism and done so by virtue of qualities peculiar to his subject and to himself (Dupee 1968: 71),” and Garrett agrees that “[there] is nothing whatever new about the devices of fiction for ‘non fiction’ (Garrett 1968: 90).” In fact, Capote’s claims would initially invite some very harsh criticism. Bucco finds the term “nonfiction novel” to be “unfortunate,” “contradictory” and “pretentious (Bucco 1966).” Others compare Capote’s new form of art to “those special 3-pound weight classes which are staked out in boxing from time to time to fatten the take: junior lightweight; senior bantham weight (Yurick 1968: 77)” or ridicule it by saying that it is “[about] on the level of the ‘new, improved ingredients’ […] in advertisements for toothpaste, detergents, deodorants, etc. (Garrett 1968: 91),” the main reason being that there are a vast number of important works which predate In Cold Blood and which are based around real events, often even based around real crime stories. Hollowell, for example, denies that In Cold Blood establishes a new genre because “it follows a well-established tradition (Hollowell 1977: 84).” Among his list of antecedents are Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Levin’s Compulsion, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Parallels to the latter two, above all to An American Tragedy, turn up in numerous discussions of In Cold Blood (cf. Kazin 1971, Phillips 1966, Pavlov 1967, Galloway 1968, Hollowell 1977, and especially McAleer 1972). Others add more “immediate examples (Phillips 1966: 77)” of true stories to this list: The Possessed, Sons and Lovers, or Poe’s Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Bucco names Lillian Ross’s Picture, Ryan’s The Longest Day, and Hersey’s Hiroshima as instances of other “creditable jobs of journalism that antedate Capote's esthetic experiment (Bucco 1966).” But, of course, Capote intends to offer more than just a creditable job of journalism. Referring to Dreiser, Farrell and Algren, Yurick launches a harsh attack against Capote, accusing him of not letting anyone else’s work count (cf. Yurick 1968: 77). While all of the authors cited by the critics do base their accounts on real events, none of them, as opposed to Capote, claim to adhere only to the facts or to present the reader with nothing but the truth.

In Capote, the most important biography on the author, Gerald Clarke expresses his belief that with his claims of having invented a whole new genre Capote “did have a case, though it might have been better if he had let someone else make it for him

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(Clarke 1988: 359).” In Dörfel’s view, the reception of Capote’s claims was problematic because “scholarly criticism was prejudiced against the extravagant author (Dörfel 1973: 37)” who hosted lavish parties (cf. Rosenthal 1966: 72), whose works were published with glamorous cover images 1 , and who was already a fully-fledged celebrity after the enormous commercial success of his short novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1959. Galloway comes to a similar conclusion: “For many critics […] stardom and seriousness were an incompatible combination (Galloway 1986: 143).” Critics observe that “[this] book [made] its appearance with all the rockets, whistles, and fireboat fanfare usually reserved for the welcome of a brand new ocean liner on its maiden voyage (Garrett 1968: 81),” and that “[people] talked about [the book] with excitement in the way that people only talk about good new movies nowdays [sic] (Garrett 1996).” Indeed, In Cold Blood was an immediate bestseller garnering more than two hundred reviews in 1966 alone (cf. Stanton bibliography 1980). However, a good portion of them called Capote’s success and his entire career “a product of the publishing industry’s public relations machine (Kramer 1966: 18).” Crosby, a contemporary who was working for the Observer, summarizes the critics’ scepticism in an ironic comment:

[F]our year ago, this book was already being acclaimed a masterpiece. […] Time and again at parties I met people […] who would tell me this book was the greatest masterpiece of reporting since Thucydides; that the human heart was laid bare in a manner unknown since Shakespeare. I would sit there hushed with admiration. ‘When did you read it?’ I’d ask. Then I’d get a wounded look. ‘I haven’t read it.’ ‘Why not?’ I’d ask. ‘Well, it’s not written. I mean Truman’s still working on it.’ […] [The] fame of this then unwritten and unnamed book rose and rose until everyone was talking about how marvelous it was and what a breakthrough in literature. (Crosby 1966: 40)

One thing that becomes clear is that In Cold Blood is not easily classifiable. Dupee simply dismisses the genre discussion and states that the novel is in a class of its own; as are “certain of anyone’s favorite books – A Sentimental Journey, Walden – are sui generis (Dupee 1966: 3).” On most bestseller lists, In Cold Blood was listed as nonfiction (cf. Phillips 1966: 77). In the Library of Congress system, it is placed under nonfiction, in a category of “social pathology” including murder case histories. Yet Levin’s remarkably similar Compulsion (1956) about a murder in the 1920s is placed 1 On the cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms, for example, Capote poses in a posture that has been described as “reclining on a couch, fastidiously attired in a tattersall vest and black bow tie, blond bangs dangling over his forehead, full lips moist and pouting (Norden 1987: 112).”

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under fiction (cf. Hollowell 1977: 83). Hollowell and Nance think that Levin, who calls his book a historical or documentary novel, is more forthright about the genre problem. Both critics say that Capote could have easily placed his book in similarly less provocative categories (cf. Hollowell 1977: 84, Nance 1973: 178).

Currently, however, In Cold Blood is in fact considered one of the seminal works in the development of New Journalism, a widely recognized genre that evolved in the 1960s and peaked in the late 1960s and 70s. Not only does Tom Wolfe, one of the most important scholars on New Journalism and author of some of the genre’s principal works, hail In Cold Blood as the “harbinger of New Journalism (Wolfe in Nuttall 2007: 130).” Galloway also sees in In Cold Blood the “catalyzing experience (Galloway 1986: 153)” for a generation of novelists, and Hollowell, in his Fact & Fiction, one of the most important works on New Journalism, claims that “more than the political reportage of Norman Mailer, or more than Tom Wolfe’s new journalism 2 , In Cold Blood stimulated a critical debate about a new form of literature that continued throughout [a] decade (Hollowell 1977: 63).” This new form or genre, which is now most frequently called New Journalism, has also been referred to as nonfiction literature, literary nonfiction, factual fiction, faction or journalit (cf. Tonn 1994: 197). Apart from Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night (1968)) and Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) or the recent I am Charlotte Simmons (2004)), the most important representatives of New Journalism are John Hersey (The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)), Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)) and Hunter S. Thompson with his “Gonzo Journalism” (Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966)).

When Capote started challenging genre conventions, he and other New Journalists were not the only ones to do so. Galloway sees the nonfiction novel as part of a larger artistic movement that dismantled George Orwell’s “Geneva conventions of the mind” (cf. Galloway 1986: 148). 3 Other examples of genre boundaries that are broken down in the 1960s are Andy Warhol’s soup can or books based on film instead of the other way around (cf. Galloway 1986: 148). Although defining the genre boundaries of In Cold Blood is a matter of some difficulty and certainly a matter of importance, Fremont-Smith does have a point when he observes that, as will be seen below, “this very fine work raises questions and offers insights that are far more important and, God knows, more interesting than technical debates over the definition of a new or possibly not new literary form (Fremont-Smith in Hickman 2005: 474).”

2 The term “new journalism” was only applied to the Wolfe’s work at first.

3 In his Geneva conventions of the mind, Orwell “ratifies” genre classifications (cf. Galloway 1986: 145).

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2.3 The Nonfictional in the NONFICTION Novel – a True Account?

In In Cold Blood’s subtitle, Capote makes the aforementioned claim that would be subject to a lot controversy. It reads: “A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences [own italics].” In the acknowledgments that precede the main body of the text, he elaborates on this claim: “All the material in this book not derived from my own observation is either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the persons directly concerned.” In a widely discussed interview with George Plimpton, he repeats that in In Cold Blood there is no fictionalization whatsoever, not even minor distortions (cf. Capote in Plimpton 1966: 41), apart from the ones he was forced to make for legal reasons, such as name changes: “There are only three people in the book whose names I’ve changed – his [Mr. Bell’s], the convict Perry admired so much (Willie-Jay he’s called in the book), and also I changed Perry Smith’s sister’s name (Capote in Plimpton 1966: 38).” Consulting again the SOED definition in the introduction, we can say that he claims that his account is “consistent with fact” and “conforming with reality.” A number of critics put Capote’s claim to the acid test, and do so quite successfully. Garrett notes that “[when] pictures of the people involved appeared in the magazines, it was clear how much of Capote's descriptions and judgments was subjective, literary. The people did not look much like the people he described (Garrett 1996).” Nuttall quotes friends of Capote who questioned his adherence to the truth in his nonfiction writing, saying that “Truman had absolutely no respect for the truth” or that “[i]n Truman’s mind, he doesn’t lie, he makes things the way they should have been (Nuttall 2007: 137).” The two most detailed and most revealing close looks at the quality of the truth in In Cold Blood are studies by Tompkins and De Bellis. Tompkins went to Kansas for nine days to look for external evidence that would support or refute Capote’s claim. In this short period of time, he found out that as opposed to how he had been portrayed by Capote, Bobby Rupp, Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend, was not a basketball star but really just an average basketball player who visited the Clutter home only every now and then, not virtually every day as Capote suggests (cf. Tompkins 1966: 127). Tompkins records a host of such details which in the reality of the documents he inspected differed from how Capote describes them. While it may seem insignificant that the auction of Nancy’s horse Babe is falsely presented in In Cold Blood, “[the] significant point about this rather minor interpolation is that it provides the flourish Capote needed to complete

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short story number seventy (Tompkins 1966: 127).” 4 Such findings create a certain hesitation in the reader and she starts to wonder what other concessions Capote might have made in order to achieve the structure and effects he wanted to achieve. The major and most decisive differences between reality and In Cold Blood presented by Tompkins directly concern the crime around which the book revolves: he shows that in reality the killers’ confessions went quite differently; Perry also never apologized to the family before he was executed; he was neither very eloquent nor an artist but nearly illiterate; and Hickock probably killed the two Clutter women, while Capote repeatedly suggests that Smith killed all four victims (cf. Tompkins 1966: 127, 166). Tompkins is right when he concludes that “[by] insisting that ‘every word’ of his book is true [Capote] has made himself vulnerable to those readers who are prepared to examine seriously such a sweeping claim (Tompkins 1966: 171).” De Bellis takes a different approach: he inspects two different versions of In Cold Blood: the book had first appeared serialized in The New Yorker, and then ten weeks later in book form, published by Random House. During those ten weeks, Capote and his editors made nearly 5,000 changes. While many changes only involve spelling, punctuation or choice of vocabulary, De Bellis also presents a considerable number of changes that concern official records, interviews and letters (cf. De Bellis 1979: 520). A number of factual changes were made as well; brand names and names of places were altered (cf. De Bellis 1979: 522f.). The fact that Capote misrepresents the sides of the body on which the killers had their tattoos suggests that Capote must have simply been unaware of some mistakes (cf. De Bellis 1979: 532). Capote’s awareness of the errors is not an issue, however. De Bellis is quite right when his observations lead him to the conclusion that “[when] a breach of trust is created with the reader over such confirmable matters, his doubts begin to gather about other matters of plot, characterization, symbolism, and theme of In Cold Blood (De Bellis 1979: 529).” Quoting Thoreau’s words “I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic,” Tanner attests Capote to be continuing an American tradition and to be trying to get at the “mythic significance” of the facts by simply stating them. But he also finds “something just a shade suspicious in this maintained illusion of objective factual presentation (Tanner 1966: 331f.).” Emerson also made a statement along that vein: “pleads for itself the fact (Emerson in Tanner 1966: 332).” He was aware, however, that facts do not “sing themselves (Emerson in Tanner 1966:

4 Tompkins regards In Cold Blood as a collection of nearly independent short stories (cf. Tompkins 1966: 127).

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332).” Facts alone “are silent, as Conrad said, and any singing they do depends on their orchestration by a human arranger (Tanner 1966: 332).” Tanner also paraphrases Goethe who “insisted that there is no such thing as pure objectivity” and the critic goes on to say that “[the] way Capote ‘establishes connections’ reveals his subjective feeling about the worlds he presents (Tanner 1966: 332).” Capote indirectly admits this, when he says in an interview that “if I put something in which I don’t agree about I can always set it in a context of qualification without having to step into the story myself to set the reader straight (Capote in Algeo 1996: 78).” Frus charges Capote that with his repeated claim of absolute truth, he “is expressing the positivist belief that there is a world which can be reproduced in language, that facts have inherent meaning, and that language is a neutral instrument for recording them, and thus denies the ideology of language and of the form of In Cold Blood (Frus 1994: 71).” In Armies of the Night, Mailer compares the historian and the novelist to an astronomer who is working with faulty tools:

the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—

history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower.

(Mailer 1968: 245)

Capote denies this metaphor, and accordingly Galloway rightly observes that “[what] we can never know about [Capote’s] view of Holcomb, Kansas, and its citizens is the degree to which their responses to him as a lisping Easterner/intellectual/homosexual colored their response to his tireless questionings (Galloway 1986: 150).” A number of scholars criticize Capote for his apparent assumption that he would get closer to the truth if he simply denied the impact he himself had on the very reality he was recording. Tonn summarizes that “[observer] and observed are inextricably wound up in the reality they both share and shape (Tonn 1994: 204, also cf. MacDonald 1966: 46)” and Yurick explains in more detail that “there is always a subconscious effort to please the questioner, to give him what he wants. Guidance comes in the form of subliminal hints: facial gestures, hand movements denoting approval or disapproval, the very diction of questioning conditions and cues (Yurick 1968: 79).” Capote’s own comments support the view that he heard and tried to hear only what he wanted to hear: “Funnily enough, I seldom had to look at my notes after [the interviews]: I had it all in my head (Capote in

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Tompkins 1966: 170).” It does not take a psychologist to assume that Capote the involved observer and Capote the author who is out for effect influenced the truth, and it comes as a surprise that Capote does not seem to be aware of the fact that there is no reality apart from the reality every individual constructs for himself; that there is always only subjectivity, at best intersubjectivity when there are competing accounts, but never objectivity.

In the discussion of his search for mistakes Capote made in the process of transferring reality onto paper, Tompkins deduces that “art triumphs over reality (Tompkins 1966: 171)” and that all or at least part of In Cold Blood should simply be read as fiction. In response to Tompkins, Heyne remarks that “the result is not a triumph of ‘fiction over nonfiction,’ but of lying over truth-telling, or blindness over insight (Heyne 1987: 485),” because Capote’s intentions cannot simply be ignored. He summarizes Searle’s argument that the reader’s (or listener’s) response depends on the type of story he thinks he is being told, fact or fiction (cf. Heyne 1987: 480), and adds one of Searle’s exemplifications: “the concept of literature is a different concept from that of fiction. Thus, for example, ‘the Bible as literature’ indicates a theologically neutral attitude, but ‘the Bible as fiction’ is tendentious (Searle in Heyne 1987: 485).” As is “the bible as fact,” one might add. Zavarzadeh suggests that the fact/fiction distinction should be abandoned altogether because the modern reader in search of narrative truth cannot trust newspapers, must weigh competing historical accounts, and often ends up deciding that a story is more or less true, rather than just true or false (cf. Zavarzadeh 1976). Heyne credits this as an interesting approach, but says it is not what we commonly do: “we commonly depend on distinguishing between fact and fiction, employing our ‘factual competence,’ as it were (Heyne 1987: 485).” Whatever Capote’s intentions may have been, introducing the nonfiction novel at the time he did, he struck a nerve and started an intense discussion. The 1960s were “a decade of a lot of uncertainty (Tonn 1994: 198)” in which the American reading public, which, according to MacDonald, was mostly “obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts [sic], in love with information (MacDonald in Tonn 1994: 198)” eventually became confronted with “a deluge of factual reports, oral histories, documents, investigative journalism, anthropological field work and experiential hyper- realism (Tonn 1994: 198).” With In Cold Blood, Capote contributed one of the seminal and most influential works in this deluge.

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2.4 The Novelistic in the Nonfiction NOVEL

The harshest and most frequent criticism In Cold Blood has been faced with is of a type quite contrary to the criticism that has been presented in this paper so far. Essentially, this criticism moans that Capote fails to take a stand on his material and that In Cold Blood cannot claim to be a nonfiction novel, because the essence of the work of a novelist is a lack of objectivity. These critics would have never wanted Capote to take a stab at “the truth.” Tanner laments that Capote “does not comment, he presents; he does not analyse, he arranges. This means […] that he cannot approach the profound inquiring psychological insights into the psychopath and his victims attained by Musil (in his study of Moosbrugger) or Dostoevsky (Tanner 1971: 346).” Due to his “self- imposed limitation to the ‘facts’ he can extract from other people,” Capote’s book has been called “[at] best […] a virtuoso triumph like a chess master playing twenty opponents blindfolded or a fighter with one hand tied behind his back (MacDonald 1966: 48).” Accordingly, Dick and Perry are not granted the status of novelistic figures, because, as opposed to Camus’ treatment of Meursault or Dostoevsky’s treatment of Raskolnikov, they “are simply reconstituted” and Capote does not “superimpose” any “morbid idea” on them, such as Camus’ idea that “moral will is the content of freedom (all Phillips 1966: 80).” In this understanding, Dostoevsky and Camus could invent what they needed to express their ideas about the meaning of their fiction, while Capote denies himself this possibility. In an extensive comparison between In Cold Blood and An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s important novel that also treats a real murder case, but is only based on it, again Capote’s reluctance to make functional use of his facts is seen as the point at which the two books cleave apart, and essentially why An American Tragedy is the “better” of the two novels. McAleer writes:

[In] his preoccupation with form, Capote did not give enough thought to what conclusions his materials would lead to. […] By fictionalizing his material Dreiser gained vastly more in truth of nature than Capote did when he deployed his material without creative intervention. […] Capote lacks the invented characters Dreiser added in order to let them affirm his message. Capote fails to show his, the author’s, understanding of the human condition founded on genuine responsiveness to the universe. Capote’s facts adorn him like leg irons. […] They stare out at us like bugs in amber. (McAleer 1972: 577ff.)

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It is true that despite Capote’s fantastic language in In Cold Blood, he could have made more of his material, could have further explored his characters, and could have indeed suggested a “larger truth” if he had made his work frankly fiction.

In addition to adding characters, settings etc., a novelist can do the opposite to achieve a similar effect. He can leave out and eliminate parts of the world he uses as a model to suggest a larger truth. Capote chooses to leave himself out of the world he describes, although he is by no means an unimportant character in it. One of the most interesting aspects of In Cold Blood is the way Capote worked on the book. Initially, he had wanted to travel to Holcomb just for a few days in order to write a contribution for The New Yorker. In the end, Capote would spend almost six years, the time that passed between the Clutter killings and the execution of Smith and Hickock, frequently traveling back and forth between New York and Kansas. He would interview virtually everybody who had anything to do with the case: police, neighbors, townspeople, friends and family of both the Clutters and Smith and Hickock. He retraced the killers’ several thousand mile long odyssey by driving it all the way himself and became friends with numerous people he would later report on, among them detective Alvin Dewey and especially Perry Smith. He paid for the killers’ lawyers and got them extended stays. 5 When he finally started writing, “[his] files would almost fill a whole small room, right up to the ceiling (Algeo 1996: 79).” Yet in the novel itself, “[what] is missing […] is an awareness of its process of production. […] [We] are liable to presume an omniscient author of an invented tale (Frus 1994: 70).” Yurick is by far not the only one to ask why Capote leaves himself, “one of the prime actors,” out of the novel. In his opinion, it is “nonsense” that the author does not intrude anywhere, and he notes that “[one] of the most studied omissions of the history is the role Capote played in the life of the killers (all Yurick 1968: 79).” As a matter of fact, the only times Capote presumably does appear in the novel is in a handful of ghostly appearances of “a journalist.” Some critics express the view that Capote should have not covered his tracks completely, that he should have appeared in the book, if only in an appendix (cf. Dupee 1966: 3). But most critics go one step further. They would have liked to find the character “Truman Capote” in the book, preferably as its central character (cf. Garrett 1968: 89). As Frus puts it: “most of the text’s reflexivity – its accounting for itself – has been repressed by the sections that use third-person ‘omniscient’ narration (Frus 1994: 71).” Accordingly, other authors, aware of the discussion around In Cold Blood, choose a different path: “Mailer place[s] himself at the vital center of his work

5 cf. Nance 1973 for more details about Capote’s research.

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(Galloway 1986: 149),” and Hersey does the same thing: “As a specimen for interrogation he has preferred to concentrate on his own consciousness, which he dissects in his writing in its various complementary and antagonistic facts (Tonn 1994: 200).” Hersey “consciously sought to distance himself from the two-headed beast known as ‘the nonfiction novel’ (Galloway 1986: 148)” and shows himself aware of the phenomenon described above: “There is no such thing as objective reportage; […] the moment the recorder chooses nine facts out of ten he colors the information with his views (Hersey in Tonn 1994: 200).” The general development of New Journalism followed along these lines as well. In Sims and Kramer’s Literary Journalism collection, published in 1995, only two of the fifteen stories are third-person accounts (cf. Nuttall 2007: 142). Later in his career, in an apparent attempt to revive the celebrated success of In Cold Blood, Capote also takes to this approach, putting himself at the center of Handcarved Coffins (Capote 1980). In the foreword to Music for Chameleons, the collection in which Handcarved Coffins was published, he admits that “from a technical point, the greatest difficulty I’d had in writing In Cold Blood was leaving myself completely out of it (Capote 1980: xvi).” Now, in Handcarved Coffins, Capote appears as “T.C.,” and once more, this time in the story as well, becomes friends with a detective who is losing his sleep over the investigation of a brutal murder case (cf. Capote 1980). 6 While he puts forth different reasons for this departure from his original concept of the nonfiction novel, it seems that he acquiesced to the genre’s awareness that leaving out an essential part of the “facts” does not help if the walls between fact and fiction are to be broken down.

One further aspect of Capote’s refusal to enter into direct communication with the reader has been cause for criticism. Trilling summarizes her colleagues’ negative response and concludes that there is one common denominator: a “sense shared in some dim way by virtually all of Mr. Capote’s audience of having been unfairly used in being made to take on the burden of personal involvement pridefully put aside by Mr. Capote himself (Trilling 1966: 254).” McAleer is also of the opinion that “creating for the reader a veritable solve-it-yourself packet [...] gives head to chaos (McAleer 1972: 576).” This criticism must surely be rejected. The audience’s responsibility to judge for itself can by no means be regarded as negative. As in the case of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or other classics, it is one of the great strengths of In Cold Blood to refuse to offer one definite solution and instead create moral ambiguity and leave the

6 Siegle 1985 offers an interesting discussion of Handcarved Coffins in the context of the nonfiction novel.

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responsible reader with a number of ways to interpret the material. Employing a metaphor, Capote reacts similarly to this accusation: “[instead] of presenting the reader with a full plant, with all the foliage, a seed is planted in the foliage of his mind (Capote in Hollowell 1977: 71).” A second, opposed camp of critics believes that In Cold Blood actually is a novel precisely because the author does use his imagination, he does “suggest and extend,” and In Cold Blood does manage “a major moral judgment without the author’s appearance once on stage (Knickerbocker 1966: 37).” Langbaum and others explain how Capote does this: “the author […] creates meaning through the placing of details and […] repetitions, […] the process of selection was a creative act (Langbaum 1968: 116).” Galloway also attests that “[it] is in the selection of […] details and in their arrangement that the technique of the novelist is vividly apparent (Galloway 1968: 156).” This is clearly Capote’s intention. Asked whether he found it difficult to present his point of view, he says: “Of course it’s by the selection of what you choose to tell (Capote in Plimpton 1966: 38).” In Cold Blood certainly “transcends the here and now […] of journalism (Hollowell 1977: 85)” and suggests a “larger truth.” It must be considered on one level with Crime and Punishment, which exemplifies Russia’s feverish soul-seeking, or An American Tragedy, which exemplifies the social thinking of an era (cf. Hollwell 1977: 80). In Cold Blood exemplifies effects and side effects of the American Dream, as detailed below.

Many critics have granted In Cold Blood the status of a novel less for its ability to suggest and extend but for the dramatic power created by Capote through novelistic techniques and stylistic devices. There are countless omniscient interruptions in In Cold Blood. Just as Dickens creates narrators who are the omniscient Gods of his universe, Capote installs an omniscient narrator. However, Capote’s “omniscient” narrator is only seemingly so. The big contrast to truly omniscient narrators is that Capote’s narrator’s omniscience remains what Zavarzadeh calls “empirical omniscience (Zavarzadeh 1976: 127).” The narrator always knows what at least one character is experiencing. This results in the perceived “successive centers” described below. Similarly, Capote’s use of irony must remain empirical (cf. Zavarzadeh 1976: 127). He has to make use of real world situations such as when shortly before Herb Clutter’s death the life insurance salesman assures him: “Why Herb, […] [you’re] a young man. Forty-eight. And from the looks of you, from what the medical report tells us, we’re likely to have you around

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a couple of weeks more (ICB: 46).” 7 Capote has the novelist’s concern for character analysis, “[observations] are made […] that go beyond documentary necessity to create an explicit sense of place (Galloway 1986: 147),” Capote makes use of leitmotifs, and “[the] narrative reads ‘like a novel’ […] because of the use of scene-by-scene reconstruction instead of historical narration (Hollowell 1977: 70).” According to Wolfe, the latter fictive quality constitutes one of the four distinct characteristics the New Journalists’ work has in common with that of other fiction writers. Apart from scene-by-scene construction, these are: realistic dialogue; third-person point of view; and the recording of people’s status life (cf. Wolfe 1990: 46-50). By status life he means anything that “involves noting such things as people’s habits, gestures, manners; styles of clothing, furniture, travel, eating; ways of relating to children, workmates, bosses, inferiors (Nuttall 2007: 141).” All these characteristics are most apparent in In Cold Blood and clearly make it a novel – or at least much rather a novel than a mere piece of journalism.

7 Quotes from In Cold Blood (Capote 2000) will be abbreviated “(ICB: page)”.

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3 Style

3.1 Structure

Keeping in mind Galloway’s claim that “[it] is in the selection of […] details and in their arrangement that the technique of the novelist is vividly apparent (Galloway 1968: 156)” in In Cold Blood, it is important to take a close look at the structure of the book. On the surface, the way the story details are arranged in In Cold Blood is relatively straightforward. The book consists of four titled parts, all of which are approximately 75 pages of length and contain around 20 unnamed chapters. Capote assembled these chapters in a process of montage. Therefore, he had to think of form and formal relations in advance (cf. Plessen 1971: 80). Altogether, In Cold Blood consists of 85 typographically separated 8 but unnamed and unnumbered chapters. They read like short stories and many of them could be read independently by themselves (cf. Tompkins 1966: 125). This mosaic structure creates an impression of the case being pieced together. The reader finds herself in a position similar to the one the detectives, all of Holcomb and Capote himself were in. All parties gradually dig up more details of a mysterious case and follow it all the way to its unsatisfactory conclusion. In Cold Blood is not a detective story, however, since the detectives, including Alvin Dewey, play only a minor role.

In Cold Blood is narrated in an almost rigidly chronological way. Only at one point does the plot itself move back in story time. After the “evening of Wednesday, 30 December (ICB 205)” has already been told, during which the Dewey family learns of the arrest of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the chronological order is given up and the plot moves back to “[at] five that afternoon (ICB 207)” in Las Vegas, the place where the killers are apprehended. This lends suspense to the capture of the two fugitives, because the reader learns about the Deweys’ reaction before he learns about the details of the arrest, which, as she knows, must already lie in the past.

The plot takes the reader from the Clutters’ last day alive to the killers’ execution six years later and eventually to the graveyard encounter of Dewey and Susan Kidwell. It often pauses for flashbacks, and there are a few instances of repeating narration. One such instance is a dialogue between Perry and Dick when they have reached Mexico and are stopping for a picnic. This scene is told twice in its entirety (ICB 103-105, ICB 105- 108). First it is told from Dick’s, then from Perry’s perspective (although both views are 8 One blank line separates two chapters.

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