In Cold Blood (1965). Summary and Description

Constructed out of his investigation of the horrific Clutter family murders and the events surrounding the capture, incarceration, and execution of the two men responsible for them, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was first published in four installments by the New Yorker in late 1965. In Cold Blood is an episodic narrative broken into small chapters of varying length—some are only a paragraph long, others relate many details in journalistic exposition—and divided into four parts: “The Last to See Them Alive,” “Persons Unknown,” “Answer,” and “The Corner.”

The chapters are mostly chronological but are interspersed with lengthy flashbacks and intrusions of purportedly factual accounts, such as the psychological evaluations of Dick and Perry that are placed in the courtroom scene. Such techniques keep the reader’s interest in lieu of the desire for a revelatory and unexpected ending: Nearly all of Capote’s readers knew exactly what happened to the Clutter killers from reading numerous newspaper accounts.

By presenting the story from different perspectives— the townspeople’s, the detectives’, the killers’, and the victims’—while adhering to the chronology of a chase, Capote keeps his narrative moving at a quick pace (especially if compared with a piece of conventional journalism). By slowly revealing the grotesque and shocking nature of the crime, and the equally grotesque childhood of the novel’s antihero, Perry Smith, Capote substitutes the full disclosure of every “journalistic” detail—the “why”—for the usual questions a novel might be said to answer—the “what” and the “who.”

The literary protagonist Capote constructs out of his many interviews and records is a pitiable and tragic figure. Perhaps the most unexpected development in Capote’s narrative unveiling of journalistic facts is that Perry—who, we eventually learn, did all of the shooting—seems to be much less callous than his fellow murderer, Dick Hickock, whom he ironically scolds for his lapses of moral fortitude. Whether factually correct or not, Capote’s masterful characterization of Perry yields the most disturbing contradictions of the book.

Cajoling his readers into empathizing with such a despicable character by vividly describing his childhood and demented dream life throughout the novel—a harrowing tale of poverty, abandonment, abuse, bad luck, and psycho - logical degeneration—Capote forces us to confront and make sense of a killer’s mind. Capote tricks us into sympathizing with a mass murderer by carefully omitting the most disturbing details of the killings while also retaining the chronological arrangement of a quest narrative, of a detective story where the culprit is not a person but the varied ingredients of a life plagued by frustration, disappointment, delusion, and a desire for righteous vengeance. And in many respects, Capote was well-equipped to write such a biography because of his own familiarity with adolescent distress: Both author and character had parents who drank too much, seemed always to be on the verge of walking out the door, and denied their children a loving environment in which they could flourish. Such similarities have provoked many critics to claim that Capote not only bended facts and imagined new ones in his supposedly nonfictional account but also partially wrote himself into Perry’s character.

Regardless of this question (which, in all honesty, we can never answer if Capote followed through with his claim that he was going to destroy his notes), the result is affecting and disturbing. Like the citizens of Holcomb, who first looked within their community for the sinner, we as readers are forced to question our own motivations and sentiments after being seduced by Capote’s composite psychobiography of a cold-blooded murderer who has been a victim his entire life.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Capote clearly empathized with Perry, if not Dick, in his deviation from the facts of the case, as Philip K. Tompkins notes in his fact-checking review of In Cold Blood (Malin 44-58). How might this deviation affect the reader’s view of the work and its significance? Does it make the book seem more sensational? Do Capote’s alterations of fact make In Cold Blood a more profound meditation on the darker side of human nature? Just as the townspeople of Holcomb looked within their community for the cause of disaster, turning inward to confront the sinful and evil side of their natures, so do readers when they are tempted to empathize with a murderer. Write a well-developed essay on the strategies Capote uses to seduce readers into empathizing with Smith.

2. Capote was often at odds with his contemporary novelists, especially those who were experimenting with creative nonfiction. New York Magazine, for instance, describes one of these critical volleys: “In 1980, Capote told an interviewer that while [the writer Norman] Mailer called Capote’s In Cold Blood a ‘failure of the imagination . . . now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I’m glad I was of some small service to him’” (http://nymag.com/arts/books/ features/26285/). Read Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s literary account ofGary Gilmore’s incarceration on death row. In light of Mailer’s comments and Capote’s response, write a well- developed essay that compares and contrasts each author’s treatment of such a similar subject. Do Mailer’s criticisms apply to his own attempt at a “true crime” novel? Does Mailer seem to take less liberties with the “truth” or fictionalize even more than Capote?

Further questions on Capote and his work. 1. Many have remarked that Capote did more than empathize with Perry in In Cold Blood. In his sympathetic portrait of him, these critics claim that Capote read much of his own childhood troubles and familial conflicts into the life of his subject. Read a biography of Capote’s early life (for example, Gerald Clarke’s 1988 effort) and then write a well-developed essay that examines the similarities between Perry’s fictionalized biography and Capote’s early life. Do such claims make sense? Does Perry’s character evoke aspects of Capote’s own traumatic past? Should such issues be considered when evaluating In Cold Blood? Should we consider Capote a journalist or a novelist who drew from his own experiences to enrich his creative retelling of facts?

2. For a significantly different account of Capote’s time in Kansas, view the 2005 film Capote, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. How does Miller’s presentation of events differ? The time, for instance, after the Clutter murders and preceding Dick and Perry’s capture accounts for a large chunk of In Cold Blood. Capote, on the other hand, focuses attention on the period Capote spent interviewing the prisoners. Other points of divergence abound, including the prominent role Capote’s friend and accomplished novelist Nelle Harper Lee had in the genesis of the novel. Write a well-developed essay that assesses these differences and explores the questions that they present. What difference is there, for instance, between the characterizations of Perry and Dick in the film? Are our sympathies for them diminished by Miller’s retelling?

3. In this passage from his 1976 essay “Pornoviolence,” Capote’s fellow “New Journalist” Tom Wolfe offers an explanation for the American public’s increasing fascination with violence, both real and imagined. According to Wolfe, stories like In Cold Blood betray a shift in taboos among a culture that is now partially immune to shock:

Pornography cannot exist without certified taboo to violate. And today Lust, like the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins—Pride, Sloth,vEnvy, Greed, Anger, and Gluttony—is becoming a rather minor vice. The Seven Deadly Sins, after all, are only sins against the self. Theologically, the idea of Lust— well, the idea is that you seduce some poor girl from Akron, it is not a sin because you are ruining her, but because you are wasting your time and your energies and damaging your own spirit. This goes back to the old work ethic, when the idea was to keep every able-bodied man’s shoulder at the wheel. In an age of riches for all, the ethic becomes more nearly: Let him do anything he pleases, as long as he doesn’t get in my way. And if he does get in my way, or even if he doesn’t . . . well . . . we have new fantasies for that. Put hair on the walls. (Wolfe, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, 185)

After reading “Pornoviolence,” write a well- developed essay that evaluates Wolfe’s comments and explores their relation to Capote’s novel. Is Wolfe justified in grouping In Cold Blood with titillating, shock-provoking tabloids such as the National Inquirer? Does our fascination with violence and “true crime” really signify a shifting moral consciousness?