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Truman Capote and the World He Made

Matthew Ricketson February 01

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – the chilling account of a multiple murder in rural Kansas – is by now a well-established classic. First published in the New Yorker in 1965, it left a huge impact on world of longform journalism. Yet how accurate can such literary non-fiction ever hope to be, especially given the powerful urge to empathise and understand? In the September 2010 edition of Meanjin, Matthew Ricketson explores Capote’s legacy, and discovers what is left in the gap between precision and rigour. A brief extract is below, and you can now read the full essay on our editions page.



In Cold Blood has been adapted for film twice, and the writing of the book has been picked over in two recent films, Capote and Infamous. Among literary critics, In Cold Blood is generally seen as Capote’s most important work, and in journalism it has been canonised. It sits twenty-second on the New York University’s list of the top 100 works of twentieth-century American journalism, and is reverently passed around in newsrooms from one generation of hacks to the next as the exemplar of gritty, on-the-ground reporting and words that sing on the page.

Jonathan Harr, author of a fine 1995 journalistic book later adapted for film, A Civil Action, has said he tried to imitate Capote’s opening description of Holcomb that is ‘so vivid and clean, with no characters other than the town itself’ but despite re-reading the scene a dozen times ‘I didn’t come close to him.’ Another leading American journalist interviewed by Robert Boynton for his 2005 book The New New Journalism, Alex Kotlowitz, says: ‘You read that book and have to remind yourself constantly that this is all true. What better, more gripping way to write non-fiction?’ Helen Garner, one of Australia’s leading literary journalists, describes it as ‘a sensational book’.

And here we come to the nub of the problem: first, it is not all true, and, second, how does a journalist of Kotlowitz’s calibre turn a blind eye to the problems with In Cold Blood that were documented as early as the year of its release? These need to be looked at in some detail, because while questions about the book’s accuracy were raised early, it is only in recent years that Capote’s real views have been revealed through publication of his letters by his biographer. And it is only when all this material is laid out that you can see how seriously Capote deceived his readers and his principal sources, the two convicted murderers.

Capote certainly opened the door to misunderstandings by describing his book as a ‘non-fiction novel’ but the subtitle ‘A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences’ and the numerous media interviews in which he attested to the book’s factual accuracy show he was not echoing the approach of early eighteenth-century writers such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding who described their novels Robinson Crusoe and Joseph Andrews as a ‘just history of fact’ and ‘copied from the book of nature’; nor was his subtitle playful, as is novelist Peter Carey’s title of his recent reimagining of the story of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, True History of the Kelly Gang.

Phillip K. Tompkins challenged the accuracy of In Cold Blood in an article written for Esquire magazine in mid 1966 after he visited Kansas to re-interview several of Capote’s sources and examine the court record of the case central to the book. Tompkins’ most serious charge is that Capote altered facts and quotations to substantially skew his portrait of one of the killers, Perry Smith, making him look less like a cold-blooded murderer than a victim whose considerable potential had been crippled by a miserable childhood. A number of literary critics have cited Tompkins’ article and to my knowledge none has seriously contested its factual grounding, but that does not necessarily diminish Capote’s book in their eyes. One, Melvin Friedman, writes that he believes Capote ‘cheated’ but the consequences are unimportant: ‘Despite the convincing claims of unreliability … we must still believe in the essential authenticity and integrity of Capote’s account,’ but Friedman does not say why he or we should.

What is puzzling about the way many literary critics read In Cold Blood is the gap between the rigour and precision they apply to even the smallest details of their scholarship (and that of others), while appearing to have little interest or understanding of the importance of parallel practices of verification in book-length journalism or, to use their term, literary non-fiction. In no way am I suggesting precision in scholarship is unimportant, but am asking: if scholars believe it is important in scholarship, why would they take a different attitude towards representing actual people and events in journalism?

There are, in my view, particular issues that arise when journalists extend their practice beyond daily reporting to book-length works, as Capote did with In Cold Blood. (He may have come to journalism from a background as a novelist but he was engaged in journalistic work). For instance, how do practitioners balance their need to maintain editorial independence with the closeness to key sources that comes from gaining a deep level of trust? Are there any limits to the kinds of narrative approach practitioners can take when representing actual people and events? And, how do readers read journalism in books as distinct from in newspapers and magazines? If journalists present their book not in the standard hard news format but in a narrative style, is their work read as non-fiction or, because it reads like a novel, is it read as a novel?


 

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