The Sharp Side

In Cold Blood (1966) is the most compelling book I’ve encountered since reading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Though it’s at the opposite end of the style spectrum. Whereas McCarthy writes a cool, minimalist stripped-down prose, Capote uses densely figurative language. His prose is engorged with adjectives. Example: “the heat gathered inside the room was like a sudden, awful hand over her mouth”. Often this type of writing can seem flashy, synthetic and empty, as in John Updike at his worst, and Updike’s imitators. But Capote gets away with it: there is a profundity and intensity in the writing that is truly impressive. As in, say: “grief had drawn a circle around him he could not escape from and others could not enter”.

It’s a perfect book. The prose is beautifully calibrated. Every word has been carefully chosen, with the scrupulousness of a Flaubert. This book really is a modern classic. And it’s a book about that most central aspect of life: death. The book is dense with the vitality and colour of life, but at the same time it is suffused with melancholy for what’s gone.

In Cold Blood describes the murder in 1959 of an affluent farmer, his wife, and his two teenage children, in a quiet part of Kansas, by a pair of petty criminals. In the first part of the book, Capote reconstructs the last day of the victims, as they go about their mundane tasks, unaware that in a few hours time they will, one by one, be shot dead. Intercut with this is the journey of the two killers, moving slowly closer toward their victims. What Capote withholds from the reader is the men’s motives: why, exactly, are they going to descend on this family and murder them?

The reconstruction of the family’s last hours is powerful and compelling. They don’t know they are going to die; the reader does. The Clutter family are the kind of wholesome, hard-working family idealised by adverts and politicians. They represent one version of American life. But the killers represent a different sort – the rootless uneducated underclass, embodied in a pair from broken homes in whom any moral sense has been dampened down and more or less extinguished. In Cold Blood is, in large part, a study in evil – but evil in Hannah Arendt’s sense of it, as something banal, flat and lacking in any kind of Shakespearean grandeur.

In Part Two Capote describes the aftermath of the crime: the first discovery of the bodies, the funerals, an investigation which goes nowhere. In Part Three we learn how the crime was solved; Part Four describes the trial and execution of the killers. (There’s a terrific tension in the narrative up to the point at which the two killers are apprehended; after that I thought it grew a little slack, so far as compulsive readability is concerned.)

In Cold Blood is subtitled “A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences”. Which raises a large question as to what “true” means. That the book is factually accurate I don’t doubt. But much of it consists of conversations reconstructed months afterwards. These cannot possibly be authentic. For example, the chief investigator, perplexed by his initial failure to find any likely suspects for the killing of the Clutter family, says to an associate: “The real thing is I’ve come to feel I know Herb and the family better than they ever knew themselves. I’m haunted by them. I guess I always will be. Until I know what happened.”

To my ears, that doesn’t ring true. That’s Capote giving a neat shape to his material, creating meaning for the reader. Even more dubiously, Capote takes us inside the minds of the central figures, spelling out their thoughts in lush, highly-wrought figurative language. Yet, reading it, it becomes hard to suspend disbelief. Capote seduces the reader with style. It all feels horribly plausible.

In the end, In Cold Blood comes across as a curious hybrid. It’s where journalism at its most polished and creative meets the realist novel. The book rests on historical foundations, but is as highly wrought as any work of fiction. The mixture works brilliantly.

It’s also a very self-contained book. I don’t think you need to know anything at all about Truman Capote’s life and personality or about his other writing in order to appreciate and understand In Cold Blood. All the other stuff – the new, acclaimed biopic (which does look very good indeed, from the clips I’ve seen on TV), Capote’s bizarre high-pitched squeaky voice, his sexuality, his flamboyantly camp persona, the extravagant social life and excess – is a distraction; it’s something other than literature; it’s of no real lasting significance or relevance.

There is no ideology in In Cold Blood. Capote leaves judgements up to the reader. He juxtaposes the two Americas with a detached irony. At one point we learn that the killer Perry has kept a long letter from his sister Barbara, sent to him during an earlier spell in jail. In it, Barbara describes her own respectable family life and urges her brother to reform his way of life. Capote gives us the complete text. Then he comments: “In preserving this letter, and including it in his collection of particular treasures, Perry was not moved by affection. Far from it. He ‘loathed’ Barbara…” So much so that he regretted his sister had not been present with the Clutter family, to be shot dead. “Dick had laughed, and confessed to a similar yearning: ‘I keep thinking what fun if my second wife had been there. Her, and all her goddam family.’ ”

Capote takes us into the minds and motives of the killers, probably as far as it was possible to go. But there are no moral judgements made on them by the author. Nor does he judge the Kansas establishment which tried and executed them. The title perhaps secondarily alludes to Capote’s own icy detachment from the killers, their victims and the values of American society. In his own way he resembles the killers in standing aloof from the homely values of Middle America. He steps outside those values, and he lets those outside them have their say. As a criminal acquaintance of one of the killers mockingly remarks of polite society, “It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat.”