New Eyes Through Which to see Cruelty (Books -Truman Capote's In Cold Blood)

I've finished Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, it's journalism of a heartless and ugly crime written with a sort of dignified grace - as though we sat on the sofa above at the invitation of someone's aunt and ate cake as we watched open heart surgery. The first half was written with a drive that sagged particularly when the murderers were on the lam and there was a good deal of flashback. But I felt that his certainty returned once Hickock and Smith had been apprehended. I felt like the "chase" scene became too extended and the tension flagged - partly because he wanted us to feel how long it was, how long it felt to the town and especially to Dewey - the detective on the case. Capote wanted us to know the almost leisurely progress of the two men, they vacation in Mexico after the crime, so we could see how oblivious they were to what they had done. Mostly, he seemed to want time to set up the backstory of the murderers' - particularly Perry Smith's.

I don't know if I would feel this way if I hadn't seen the movie Capote, but I felt like I was reading it in the book too, Capote seemed in love with Smith. He knew his actions were irredeemable but his heart ached with the shame of who Smith had become as a result of his life. He seemed to look at them as animals, they performed cruel acts out of their nature - and not because it was their nature to be cruel, just because they knew no other way of acting to get what they needed at the time. Like the cats Capote describes:

Among Garden City's animals are two gray tomcats who are always together - thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grilles of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travelers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds - crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along toward Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds - and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square.

With this paragraph, not only does Capote create an extraordinarily detailed metaphor, he also brings us to the Courthouse for the arrival of Hickock and Smith following their confessions in a most unexpected way. He has shadowy lighting - as it is twilight - and blood and feathers littering the scene without ever mentioning the crime. Capote masterfully creates the atmosphere of this moment that would otherwise be a description of a waiting crowd, tension, and a car - and he accomplishes that courtesy of two cats.

Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their excort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped. The handcuffed men, white-faced and blinking blindly, glistened in the glare of flashbulbs and floodlights. The cameramen, pursuing the prisoners and the police into the courthouse and up three flights of stairs, photographed the door of the county jail slamming shut.

No one lingered, neither the press corps nor any of the townspeople. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed too; the year's first snow began to fall.

Now were those cats really there in that square? Was that really the first snow on that precise evening? If not, it sure makes a good story.

There are many other singular touches - the Meiers a couple who are caretakers of the courthouse prison and the relationship that evolves between Mrs. Meier and Perry. A description on the sumptuous meal she makes when an army friend of Perry who has volunteered to be a character witness, visits him in his cell. It is she to whom Perry gives a photo of himself at 16 - the way he wishes to be remembered - before being taken to the penitentiary and the gallows. She tries to feed the squirrel that Perry befriended in his cell, but says "...he won't have anything to do with me. It was just Perry he liked."

Capote write a portrait of another inmate Andrews - a remorseless, bookish psychopath - who becomes Smith and Hickock's neighbor on death row. Through his story, he engages in an interesting analysis of the laws regarding insanity pleas and the doctor's evaluation of these three killers.

In an odd twist at the end, Hickock requests that his eyes be given to a needy recipient upon his execution. One of the witnesses to the execution muses:

Can't say I'd want to be that somebody. I'd feel peculiar with them eyes in my head.

In a way, that's what In Cold Blood is like, being temporarily given a new pair of eyes through which to see a cruel murder, an act about which one has a certain predictable sense of one's expectations. It is still cruel and we can see that, but we see certain things with those new eyes that challenge our usual expectations.

Here are my other posts on In Cold Blood 1, 2, 3

Roberto Bolano and Truman Capote - Poetry and Body Fluids (Books - In Cold Blood and The Savage Detectives)

I just noticed I'm reading In Cold Blood and The Savage Detectives at the same time - such violence in my choices. What's with that? In Cold Blood continues to startle me. I'm half-way through now, reading about the early life of Perry Smith, one of the two murderers, a man with a hard shell encasing an artist's soul. They are about to be caught and I feel kind of sorry. I started reading the Capote to keep up with the Joneses, or to keep up with the O'Malley actually, but I also started it in desperation to get out of reading the Bolano. Can anyone tell me why I'm supposed to be liking The Savage Detectives? I read and enjoyed Last Evenings on Earth - the volume of short stories that served as the wider reading public's introduction to this highly praised Latin American writer, who died a few years ago. Francine Prose and John Banville are hyperbolic on the book jacket, Susan Sontag gushes. I'm 75 pages in, it's 1978 and Juan Garcia, a 17-year-young Mexican boy, stops going to law school to become a groupie with a bunch of underground literary types who publish a subversive magazine and who have decided that novels are heterosexual and poetry homosexual. Poets could be further subdivided into the categories: faggot, queer, sissy, freak, butch, fairy, nymph and philene. Evidently Whitman was a faggot, Neruda, Blake and Octavio Paz were Queer and Verlaine a freak.

Our first-person narrator is a wannabe at literature and manhood - and the translation - particularly the dialogue - reads very stiffly to me:

"Sometimes I dream that I'm in a city that's Mexico City but at the same time it isn't Mexico City, I mean, it's a strange city, but I recognize it from other dreams - I'm not boring you, am I?"

"Hardly!"

"As I was saying, it's a vaguely strange and vaguely familiar city. And I'm wandering endless streets trying to find a hotel or a boardinghouse where they'll take me in. But I can't find anything. All I find is a man pretending to be a deaf-mute. And worst of all is that it's getting late, and I know that when night comes my life won't be worth a thing, will it? I'll be at nature's mercy, as they say. It's a bitch of a dream," he added reflectivley.

The stiffness makes a novel about literature, a chore to read. Adolescent obsession is something I really don't have to live through a second time. I find Juan Garcia's utter lack of self awareness makes it completely uninteresting to read about. At least Holden Caulfield had a sense of humor. And the dream of machismo Juan Garcia is so eager to fulfill in this world of pimps and poets just seems silly and dated. I find nothing to admire in machismo, and am not as drawn to the romance of seedy as I am to some other kind of environments, but I don't think I am limited in this way when the medium compels me - I'm a big fan of the songs of Jacques Brel. I thought that the movie The Beat That My Heart Skipped was great. Both the book and film of Midnight Cowboy, though as seedy as can be, are somehow romantic - it's a real love story. These aren't worlds I want to live in, but they were made accessible to me through works of art. But this endless series of all-night cafes, semen, and a literature that is talked about but that we never see, is wearing thin on me.

Have any of you read this? Does it get better?

Capote's relentless look straight into the sun

I'm a little over one-quarter of the way through In Cold Blood. Capote takes until this point to show us the bodies, and yet refers obliquely to the murder which we all know is the subject of the book from the beginning, which creates incredible tension. I found myself almost wanting it to happen so I could get it over with.

When we finally get to the crime scene, his camera's eye is unflinching. He makes us look right into the sun. I first thought to myself, those poor, 1950s Kansans, they had never seen such devastation and now we're almost inured to it. You can turn on the television any day of the week and watch "real crime" shows, three different flavors of Law and Order, or Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect - all full of grizzly detail. Of course, the readers of the literary New Yorker were probably pretty innocent to this kind of mayhem themselves. And yet, were there never murders with multiple victims? Of course there were. Were there never acts of senseless violence? These happened as well. And those living in the 1950s were much closer to the recent devastation of two World Wars than we are now. Yet, there is something about having an act of senseless violence happen in your midst that no amount of television of reading prepares you for, because these events still send us reeling. He places us right in the center of the community, the shocked voices of the postmistress and the next door neighbor swirling around us. We walk through the house, first with the narrator and later with three friends of the victims who volunteer to clean up (I had to ask myself, would I do it? I honestly don't know the answer).

The men worked from noon to dusk. When the time came to burn what they had collected, they piled it on a pickup truck and, with Stoecklein at the wheel, drove keep into the farm's north field, a flat place full of color though a single color - the shimmering tawny yellow of November wheat stubble. There they unloaded the truck and made a pyramid of Nancy's pillow, the bed clothes, the mattresses, the playroom couch; Stoecklein sprinkled it with kerosene and struck a match.

Of those present, none had been closer to the Clutter family than Andy Erhart. Gentle, genially dignified, a scholar with work-calloused hands and sunburned neck, he'd been a classmate of Herb's at Kansas State University. "We were friends for thirty years," he said some time afterward, and during those decades Erhart had seen his friend evolve from a poorly paid County Agricultural Agent into one of the region's most widely known and respected farm ranchers: "Everything Herb had, he earned - with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man, as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life." But that life, and what he'd made of it - how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this - smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

Capote accomplishes two narrative effects that I really admire. The first is a shift in time and the second in point of view. We first get a narrative view of the men - we read that "they worked from noon to dusk." A wide angle shot - we see the act from a distance, without experiencing much detail at the moment. Then we see them building a fire, and then the camera pulls in as we see it is Nancy's pillows that are being loaded onto the pyramid. Then the match is lit but as the fire starts (which is not mentioned) he pulls the lens even closer - a 'close-up' right on Erhart, with a voice-over - letting the reader travel in memory with Erhart in a different relationship to time, succeeding in placing this reader in precisely the contemplative mood that Erhart experiences, and finally pulling out for a wider shot and returning to real time, encompassing the narrator's view at the end of the paragraph. This creates not just "identification" with the character - it accomplishes a transformation of sorts.

This transformation is beautifully done, but I did not expect Capote, to shift the scene to the rooms where the murderers slept after the crime, so that we continue from their point of view with the same elegance of phrasing and the same detailed depiction of state of mind - that's when things get creepy.

Far off, in the town of Olathe, in a hotel room where window shades darkened the midday sun, Perry lay sleeping, with a portable radio murmuring beside him. Except for taking off his boots, he had not troubled to undress. He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind. The boots, black and silver-buckled, were soaking in a washbasin filled with warm, vaguely pink-tinted water.

It was a brilliant choice to depict the murderer as victim. This whole sequence surrounding the murder evoked Medea or The Orestia. Bloody devastation is all around us as the chorus beautifully comments on the action allowing us to connect it to our own lives.

And for more things Capote, check out Sheila's place for her post today on his last book, Music for Chameleons.

Haunted by Truman Capote's elegant account of a dreadful murder (Books - In Cold Blood)

Sheila has been trying to get me to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood for years. Capote origianlly began writing this now famous journalistic account of the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959 and the two men who committed it, for The New Yorker. I think I've been afraid of it. I bought a copy maybe 15 years ago, and tried reading it several times and it creeped me out. It sat on my shelf taunting me. I finally sold it, probably before I moved back to New York. After seeing the wonderful movie Capote, I bought a copy on line for $1.99 - it still has its sticker. I tried reading it. I found the close scrutiny of all that horror and violence upsetting. I put it back on the bookshelf that faces me when I'm in bed. It bothered me. I moved it to another shelf, so it wouldn't stare at me. Do you have any books that stare you down? I don't like to have Donna Tart's The Secret History on that shelf near my bed. It resides elsewhere. I worked on a biographical play of Virgnia Woolf by Edna O'Brien for about five years before I was able to get it produced. That involved reading every word by and about her that I could find. I had an entire shelf devoted just to Woolf, Sackville West, Leonard Woolf's journals, Roger Fry - the whole gang. After the play was produced and played for the better part of a year, every time I looked at that shelf I felt haunted by her life and her madness to such an extent that I couldn't stand to have them around any more. I packed the entire shelf into two boxes and stuck it in the basement for several years. After I moved I was able to give them a place in apartment again.

Anyway, I read Gerald Clarke's marvelous biography of Capote instead. But Sheila keeps talking about what a marvelous writer Capote is and that this is his best so I'm starting to feel competitive. Yesterday I picked it up while taking a break from the pile of articles I'm reading for work. His descriptions are remarkably clear, his word choices precise and unexpected:

...it was from her that he inherited his coloring - the iodine skin, the dark, moist eyes, the black hair which he kept brilliantined and was plentiful enough to provide him with sideburns and a slippery spray of bangs.

or:

The map was ragged, so thumbed that it had grown as supple as a piece of chamois

But great stories are not restricted to telling, and even though Capote was not actually on the scene until after the crime, he introduces us to both the murderers' and their victims' lives prior to the event with an exactness that makes me feel a voyeur. Creating scenes or dialogue. Rather than describe Mrs. Clutter's state of mind with several sentences (although he does that too), he puts a single line of dialogue in her mouth:

All my children are very efficient. They don't need me.

Does anyone need any clarification?

Finally, I am just admiring the quality of his prose. His sentences can be quite long, but they proceed with such decorum, it's like driving down an elegant avenue lined with trees.

I'm hooked, Sheila.