Reporting: In a Novel Way

Rare is the reporter who does not dream of some day writing a novel. Novelist Truman Capote, on the other hand, yearns to report. For a long time he wanted to raise reporting to an art by re-creating some event with a novelist’s insight, sympathy and exactitude. The trouble was, he could not find the right topic. Then one day in 1959, he was leafing through the New York Times when he noticed a headline, EISENHOWER APPOINTEE SLAIN. He read the story of the senseless killing of Wheat Farmer Herbert Clutter and his family, and he suddenly realized that he had his theme. Why not do a crime from beginning to end? “A crime would not date, and it would provide an enormous range of characters.”

Hardly was the Clutter family funeral over when Capote arrived in Holcomb, Kans., scene of the crime. He stayed for six months and immersed himself in the life of the community. With his light, lisping voice and his blue Jaguar, he looked out of place in that flat corner of the Middle West, but he made friends easily. “He was just as quick as any man afoot,” says Mrs. Myrtle Clare, a onetime postmistress, who figures briefly in his story. “Just like a flash of lightning, he was here, there, everywhere.” The result of all Capote’s footwork is a report, “In Cold Blood,” now being serialized by The New Yorker. In January, it will be published in book form by Random House. Either way, it fulfills the novelist’s ambition: it turns a routine police-beat job into a stunning study of the criminal mind.

Tale of Two Worlds. The work is all the more successful because it is the most suspect kind of journalism: almost a steady stream of dialogue re-created largely after the event. In this instance, the dialogue rings true. All the conversations, Capote insists, were either taken from legal transcripts or from exhaustive interviews of his own. He did not take notes, much less use a tape recorder; instead, he depended upon his ability to recall interviews lasting two or three hours. He interviewed people again and again, entering the death house more than 200 times to talk to the killers. Eventually, he saw them hanged.

In his reporting, Capote contrasts the stolid, generally sunny life of the murdered farm family with the eerie twilight world of the two killers. He limns the small-town Midwest of homemade pies, 4-H meetings and simple pieties. By dramatically re-creating the Clutter family—Father Herbert, who served on the federal Farm Credit Board under Ike; his diffident, withdrawn wife Bonnie; their sturdy teen-age son Kenyon; their engaging teen-age daughter Nancy, the “town darling”—Capote makes clear why a neighbor exclaimed after the murder: “That family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them—well, it’s like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless.”

Out of Focus. Capote devoted just as much care to delineating the killers. The criminal personality, as he develops it, is not so much different from or less developed than others; what is wrong is that it is slightly out of focus. There was Dick Hickock, the more prosaic and masculine of the pair, who was forever passing bad checks and chasing nymphets but constantly reassuring himself: “I’m a normal.” Effeminate and dandyish, Perry Smith collected cartons of books, poems, maps and assorted memorabilia, while he dreamed of making fabulous voyages. His most vivid childhood memory was of brutal beatings for bedwetting. He had a recurring dream of a great bird, “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” which would blind all his enemies with its beak and fly him out of this sordid world to paradise.

Released from prison, where they were serving time for robbery, the pair headed for the Clutter home. Neither before nor after the event were they able to articulate any plausible motive for their crime. After binding and gagging the family, Perry went out of his way to make them comfortable. He put a pillow under Kenyon’s head, chatted with Nancy about horses, art and music. “I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman,” he said later. “I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Significantly, at the moment of the murders, both youths recalled detested members of their families. “The Clutters never hurt me, like other people have all my life,” Perry told Capote. “Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”

It makes chilling reading. Capote insists, however, that any event, not only a sensational crime, lends itself to this kind of reporting. The reporter, the novelist explains, must not observe from the outside but must relive the event with its participants. The experimental novel, Capote says, has gone just about as far as it can. “Reportage is the great unexplored art form of the future.”