Authors: Gerald Clarke
Such a kaleidoscope of contradictory emotions fascinated Truman and all those who were to read his narrative. Norman Mailer went so far as to call Perry one of the great characters in American literature, and there is a pathetic irony in the fact that the twisted little man who hungered for education, who constantly corrected Dick’s grammar and who peppered his speech with large and ungainly words, has achieved a kind of immortality as a literary darkling. But there he stands, alongside such other native Iagos as Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, Claggart in Melville’s
Billy Budd
, and Flem Snopes in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga.
When Perry sat down in front of the judge to be arraigned, Truman nudged Nelle. “Look, his feet don’t touch the floor!” Nelle said nothing, but thought, “Oh, oh! This is the beginning of a great love affair.” In fact, their relationship was more complicated than a love affair: each looked at the other and saw, or thought he saw, the man he might have been.
Their shortness was only one of many unsettling similarities. They both had suffered from alcoholic mothers, absent fathers, and foster homes. At the orphanages he had been sent to, Perry had been a target of scorn because he was half-Indian and wet his bed; Truman had been ridiculed because he was effeminate. A psychiatrist could have been speaking about both of them when he said of Perry: “He seems to have grown up without direction, without love.” Finally, both had turned to art to compensate for what had been denied them. Perry was convinced that with a little encouragement, he could have made his mark as a painter, a singer, a songwriter.
In Joel Knox, the thirteen-year-old hero of
Other Voices
, Truman had projected his fictional alter ego. In Perry, it is not too much to suggest, he recognized his shadow, his dark side, the embodiment of his own accumulated angers and hurts. When he looked into those unhappy eyes, he was looking into a tormented region of his own unconscious, resurrecting the nightmares and fears that had found form and body in such early stories as “Miriam” and “The Headless Hawk.” Reversing the coin, Perry perceived in Truman the successful artist he might have been. “He saw Truman as someone like himself,” said Donald Cullivan, an Army buddy who visited him in jail. “He thought Truman also had been kicked around, and he thought Truman had spunk.”
Like the good folk of Garden City, Perry had never encountered anyone like Truman. He was fascinated by him and quizzed him endlessly. “After I had known him a couple of years, he wanted to know whether I was homosexual,” Truman said, “which seemed to me to be quite ludicrous—it should have been perfectly clear to him by
that
time. He was a very sophisticated boy on that level, and I don’t know what he thought. I think somewhere in the back of his mind he thought I was living with Harper Lee. He was one of those people who think if you’re living with a girl, you can’t be homosexual, and if you’re living with a guy, you can’t be heterosexual. Everything has to be black and white. He wanted to know who I lived with and whether I was promiscuous, and I was very frank with him.”
From the beginning, theirs was a confused, uneasy, but unremittingly intense relationship. Although Truman knew he needed Perry’s trust and goodwill, he could not restrain himself from objecting to Perry’s ever-moist self-pity. When Perry blamed his unhappy background for all that he had done, Truman indignantly interjected: “I had one of the worst childhoods in the world, and I’m a pretty decent, law-abiding citizen.” Perry answered with a shrug.
Perry was in only slightly less need of Truman, who listened to him and gave him books, magazines, and small amounts of money—items worth more than all the treasure of the Sierra Madre to a man behind bars. Nonetheless, Perry was often sulky and quick to take offense. “He was suspicious, like many people in prison, and uncertain as to whether Truman was using him,” said Cullivan. “He waffled back and forth.” Flexing his weight lifter’s muscles during one interview, he pointed out to Truman that he could kill him in a minute, before a guard could come to his rescue. “I’ve half a mind to do it,” he said. “It would give me pleasure. What do I have to lose?”
Perry was deeply offended by Truman’s inscription in a gift copy of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“For Perry, from Truman who wishes you well,” Truman had scrawled in his small and distinctive hand. But in Perry’s outraged opinion, those few words were cold and unfeeling. “Is that all!” he had exploded when Truman handed it to him. On the opposite page, in the beautifully formed script he had learned from a book on handwriting, he later wrote: “Capote, you little bastard! I wanted to call you a name at the time, I was getting angered. It’s not to [sic] late yet—‘You little Piss Pot!’”
By the middle of January, 1960, Truman had spent hours with both Dick and Perry, and he felt that he had done all he could for the moment in Kansas. In a driving snowstorm he and Nelle boarded a Santa Fe sleeper for the trip home. “An extraordinary experience, in many ways the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me,” he wrote Cecil a few days later from Brooklyn Heights. How had he been greeted on the lone prairie? asked Glenway Wescott, who met him at a Manhattan party. How had those hardy Kansans reacted to such an exotic species as a Truman Capote? “At first it was hard,” said Truman. “But now I’m practically the mayor!”
H
E
was not exaggerating by much. When Truman and Nelle returned to Garden City for Dick and Perry’s trial in March, he was so esteemed that there was a competition for his company at parties and dinners. Indeed, as Dick Avedon, who had come along to take pictures, recalled, his conquest of Kansas had made him more than a little cocky. The farmer who had compared him to a banty rooster was not altogether wrong. Avedon was with him when he swaggered into the sheriff’s office one morning and went up to Roy Church, one of the K.B.I, agents waiting to testify. “You don’t look so tough to me!” he sneered.
Church replied by stamping over to the wall, pulling his arm back, and smashing his fist into it. “Oh, my God!” Avedon thought. “What can we do? This is it. Truman’s gone one step too far.” But he had not. Although it had taken him a while, he had learned how to handle those tough Kansans. Putting his hands over his head, he jumped from side to side and, assuming a thick Southern accent, cried: “Well, Ah’m beside mahself! Well, Ah’m beside mahself. Well, Ah’m beside mahself!” Joining in the laughter, Church relaxed his still-clenched fist. “It was one of the most brilliant, physically inventive and courageous things I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Avedon. “Truman would have survived in the jungles of Viet Nam. He won that duel in the same way he had won the town.”
The trial began Tuesday morning, March 22, with Judge Roland Tate presiding. There was never any doubt that the defendants were guilty. Besides their confessions, the prosecution had conclusive physical evidence, including their boots, whose heelprints matched those found at the Clutter house; the knife that had cut Herb Clutter’s throat; and the shotgun that had actually killed him and his family. The question was not guilt or innocence, but life or death, and on March 29, after deliberating for only forty minutes, the jury answered it. Both were guilty and should be executed. As they were led away, Perry snickered to Dick, “No chicken-hearted jurors, they!” No more so was Judge Tate, who pronounced sentence a few days later. Their execution was set for Friday, May 13, 1960, when they were to be hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing.
That was a scene Truman did not want to witness. Shortly after the trial ended, he and Nelle left for home. He realized that he could not write in New York, however, between lunches with Slim and weekends with the Paleys. “Gregariousness is the enemy of art,” he explained to a reporter, “so when I work, I have to forcibly remove myself from other people. I’m like a prizefighter in training: I have to sweep all the elements except work out of my life completely.” Two weeks after his return to New York, he and Jack sailed for Europe, where he planned to stay until his book was finished. He estimated that that would take about a year.
Landing in Le Havre in late April, they picked up a car and drove south to Spain, where they had rented a house in the fishing village of Palamós, on the Costa Brava between Barcelona and the French border. Although he had brought with him trunks full of notes, Truman continued his reporting by mail, bombarding his friends in Garden City with more questions and requests for updates on the news. Bulletins were not long in coming. The Kansas Supreme Court granted Perry and Dick a stay of execution while it reviewed their request for a new trial; but Perry, who did not have much hope, decided to beat the hangman by starving himself to death. “You can wait around for the rope, but not me,” he informed Dick, who occupied an adjoining cell. After neither eating nor drinking for six weeks, he began hallucinating, believing that he was in constant communication with the Lord. “It is really too awful,” Truman wrote Donald Cullivan. “They are only keeping him alive in order to hang him.”
Since that November day when he had learned about the Clutter killings, Truman had been moving so fast that he had not had time to sit back and take stock. In Palamós he did have time, and his thoughts were sobering. When he had begun most of his other projects, he had had a fairly good idea of how long they would take and what the result would be. Almost from the start, however, his murder story had taken its own independent and unpredictable course. Now it had veered again. No one could say how long the appeal process would last or what would happen to Perry. There was no end in sight.
As he sat there in his cliffside house, gazing out at the gentle waters of the Mediterranean, he also comprehended, probably for the first time, the full dimensions of what he was seeking to do.
In Cold Blood
, as he had titled his book, was not just the chronicle of a gruesome crime; it was a tale of a good and virtuous family being pursued and destroyed by forces beyond its knowledge or control. It was a theme that reverberated like Greek tragedy, a story that Aeschylus or Sophocles might have turned into a drama of destiny and fate.
That same fate, Truman was convinced, had sent him to Kansas and had given him an opportunity to write a work of singular power and grandeur. He had a sacred responsibility to his subject, to himself, and to the art he worshiped to create a book that was, as he told Cecil, unlike any other that had ever been written. If
Answered Prayers
would someday be his
Remembrance of Things Past
, then
In Cold Blood
would be his
Madame Bovary.
“[It] may take another year or more,” he declared to Newton. “I don’t care—it has to be perfect, for I am very excited about it, totally dedicated, and believe, if I am very patient, it could be a kind of masterpiece; God knows I have wonderful material, and lots of it—over 4,000 typed pages of notes. Sometimes, when I think how good it
could
be, I can hardly breathe. Well, the whole thing was the most interesting experience of my life, and indeed has changed my life, altered my point of view about almost everything—it is a Big Work, believe me, and if I fail I still will have succeeded.”
What was hidden between those lines was the fear that fate might have entrusted him with too big a task. Imagining how good
In Cold Blood
could be made him realize at the same time how high he had to reach—how much higher, in fact, than he had ever reached before. No one valued his rich gifts more than he did himself: there was no other American of his generation, he felt, who had such a clear ear for the music and rhythm of the English language, no one else who wrote with such style and grace. But the truth of the matter was that until now, he had exercised that style only in small spaces.
Other Voices
, a short novel by any measure, was his longest piece of writing.
His Kansas book, on the other hand, would be not only long, but complicated; he would have to weave together a bewildering collection of characters, facts, legal explanations and psychological studies. It demanded skills he had never demonstrated and was not certain—could not be certain—he possessed. He was like a composer of string quartets who was nervously wondering if he was capable of a symphony. He was trying to scale Parnassus itself, and he could not help but approach the job ahead with awe and dread.
He plunged quickly ahead, nonetheless. In June he flew to London, where he talked with a psychiatrist who helped him unravel the psychology of his two murderers. He did not linger, returning almost immediately to his pencils and pads in Palamos. By October he was nearly a quarter done. “Whether it is worth doing remains to be seen!” he fretfully told Mary Louise Aswell. “I think it is going to be ‘good’—but it will have to be more than that to justify
ALL I HAVE GONE THROUGH
.”
To Donald Windham he expressed the worry that he might be writing too much for
The New Yorker
to digest. “Never thought that I, of all writers, would ever have a length problem,” he said, “but actually it is very tightly written, and really can’t be cut (I’ve tried). Well, if I can’t come to terms with Shawn (and I can see that they might hesitate to devote 4 full issues to this enterprise—especially since it is not ‘pleasant’ reading, and not very ‘entertaining,’ as the word is used) my only regret will be that I have spent over $8,000 on research, which I will not be able to recover. But I shall go right on with the book, regardless. I suppose it sounds pretentious, but I feel a great obligation to write it, even though the material leaves me increasingly limp and numb and, well, horrified—I have such awful dreams every night. I don’t know now how I could ever have felt so callous and ‘objective’ as I did in the beginning.”
Those fierce prairie winds had followed him across the Atlantic, and they howled in his ears through the soft Spanish nights. “Alas, I am rather too much involved emotionally with the material,” he confessed to Newton. “God, I wish it were over.”