Whatever its merits, In Cold Blood is already more than a book: it is a happening. It represents a fantastic publishing operation, an example of the technology of assured success at its most sophisticated. First printed in four instalments in The New Yorker, Mr Truman Capote╒s reportage has since been sold to the films and for publication in fifteen languages. Pre-publication earnings have been estimated at somewhere in the region of two million dollars. The American publishers reckon that Mr Capote is being paid some fifteen dollars a word. Book clubs, world serialisations, literary awards are swinging into line. This is the ╥big one,╙ the year╒s masterpiece; it cannot fail, for it has behind it the brilliant, tough-minded manipulation of those who pre-package so much of our sensibility.
As almost every man, woman and child literate enough to wade through a Sunday supplement knows by now, In Cold Blood is the exhaustive account of the murder of the Clutter family on their farm in Holcomb, Kansas (pop.270) on November 15, 1959, a sickeningly slow, aimless butchery for four ordinary human beings which netted the two murderers forty dollars and a small portable radio set. Mr Capote╒s eye chanced across a brief newspaper report of the crime; he felt intrigued by the seeming motivelessness of so black a deed in the heart of rural, Eisenhower America, and he went to have a look. For five years he immersed himself in the life of a small community on the far edge of the Middle West; he came to know more about the affair than anyone else, dead or alive, bending over the evidence as if to test how far the mind of an observer can empty experience of its minutiae, of its secrets and brusque oblivion.
Stendhal found the donnÄes of The Red and the Black in a crime story reported in the press; two of Dostoevsky╒s major novels sprang from an obscure grain of literal violence. But with a signal difference, Mr Capote has not written a novel. He has described In Cold Blood as a ╥nonfiction novel,╙ as a ╥fact fiction╙ whose narrative imposes fictional techniques on rigorously documentary material. ╥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 other words, In Cold Blood is probably the most deliberate, the most powerfully thought out product of a movement towards high-reportage, towards fiction-documentaries which a number of us first identified as emerging in the United States about twenty years ago (though it had its precedent in, say, Rebecca West). Sensing the increasing staleness of the prose novel, equipped with the tools and unblinking eye of the sociologist, often overwhelmed by the sheer complexity and shapeless barbarism of modern experience, a whole group of novelists or near-novelists have turned to montage. They dramatise and give psychological order to a piece of implacably authentic, documented life. It is no accident that Truman Capote thanks the editor of The New Yorker for backing the project; for it is with Hersey╒s Hiroshima, with the ╥romantic documentaries╙ of Rachel Carson╒s writings about the sea, with the dramatised high journalism of Mary MacCarthy, Richard Rovere, and Edmund Wilson ╤ all first published in The New Yorker ╤ that fact-fiction or the post-novel is more closely linked.
The utter banality of the Clutter murder, the fact that it was resolved not through some acute feat of detection but by a facile indiscretion ╤ one of the assassins had discussed the family with a cell-mate before leaving
prison ╤ make Truman Capote╒s radical point. Looked at minutely enough, filtered through the lens of a highly professional recorder, caught by the tape recording ear in its every inflection and background noise, the most sordid, shapeless of incidents, take on a compelling truth. Exhaustively rendered, the fact is richer than any fiction.
Truman Capote╒s career has been a long ripening towards this feat of total yet imaginatively governed recall. For all their delicate, macabre craft, his novels seemed to lead to a dead end. A reporting assignment for The New Yorker (╥The Muses are Heard╙) and collaboration with Richard Avedon in a book of photographs ╤ the essence of the documentary ╤ put him in possession of his superb journalistic skills. In Cold Blood is a classic of mid-century Americana. There is nothing Capote does not seem to know and to have realised in language of the sounds, speech-patterns, manners of Holcomb, and of the men both lonely and gregarious who build the clap-board houses and drive the straight highways under the big sky. Every detail tells; the authority with which Capote introduces a physical object (the ╥two hundred homemade pies, two hundred and fifty pounds of hamburger meat, and sixty pounds of sliced ham consumed at the auction of the Clutter homestead╙) is uncanny. Only a writer who had gone through the school of the novel could so beautifully render the feel of a pair of cheap shoes, the dead smell of road-house linen, the strident silence of Death Row in the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men where Perry Smith and Dick Hickock waited almost two thousand days until every slow cog in the machinery of American legal appeal had ground to a stop. ╥I am a camera,╙ proclaims In Cold Blood, ╥but behind me lies a school of sight which leads from Defoe to Hemingway.╙
Not that Capote is absolutely neutral. Perry Smith, the actual killer, engages his sympathies a good deal more than does Hickock. And often the sheer virtuosity of the novelist cuts across the dead-pan scruple of the reporter; at which moment we hear ╥the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.╙
The effect of the book, moreover, goes far beyond the sordid fascination of the case. In Cold Blood says that America is perhaps the saddest place on the wide earth, that a civilisation which is today the most prosperous, energetic, and productive in the world is also full of great stretches of nothing, that it wastes human possibilities on a formidable scale. Following Smith and Hickock on their erratic, haunted runs across America into Mexico and back (episodes strangely reminiscent of the motel Odyssey in Lolita), the reader is overwhelmed by the sense of an undifferentiated limbo of highways and drive-ins, garages and main streets, vandalised landscapes and faceless towns. If a man falls off the escalator of American economic and social achievement, there is a grey turbulence of petty crime, illiterate sex, and aimless drifting waiting to absorb him. It is a queer half-hell, a slumbelt to Eden, ╥neon-lit╔ with its air full of the scent of popcorn╙ and the juke box on so loud and incessant that a man can╒t hear himself die.╙ Truman Capote╒s observance has left the night-roads of America a little more inhuman, the automobile grave-yards a little more sinister than he found them. This is a masterful book.
Will any man want to read it twice? Like any first-rate piece of crime-reporting, it holds one spellbound. But to reread? Does this ╥nonfiction novel╙ have its own element of self-destruction built into it as do certain Dadaist or pop-sculptures? I don╒t know the answer. But I suspect that Porfiry╒s interrogation of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment will remain inexhaustible to the imagination, where Police Officer Dewey╒s grilling of Smith and Hickock is dead mutton, glittering, brilliantly anatomised, but stone dead.
Perhaps that is Capote╒s inward purpose: to write about emptiness and violence less than human in a book that will itself be a single happening in the mind, that mocks the pretensions to timelessness implicit in the classic novel. In Cold Blood is a significant title: it cuts several ways.
