Capote (53 page)

In Verbier, waiting out events, he decided not to go back to America for the execution in February, working out an arrangement by which Sandy Campbell would cable him, word for word, the story in the
Kansas City Star.
“Hope this doesn’t sound insane,” he wrote Sandy, “but the way I’ve constructed things, I will be able to complete the entire ms. within hours after receiving [the] cable. Keep
everything
crossed.” At the last moment the hangings were postponed once again. Desperate for information, he made a transatlantic call to one of the defense lawyers, who infuriated him by suggesting that Perry and Dick might not only escape the noose, but actually gain their freedom. “And I thought: yes, and I hope you’re the first one they bump off, you sonofabitch,” he told the Deweys, who shared his frustration. “But what I actually said was: ‘Is that really your idea of justice?—that after killing four people, they ought to be let out on the streets?’”

The lawyer’s optimism was unfounded, and the hangings were rescheduled for the early hours of April 14. This time Truman could not stay away—Perry and Dick had asked him to be with them—and he returned to America. Accompanied by Joseph Fox, who had replaced Bob Linscott as his editor at Random House, Truman arrived in Kansas City a day or two early. “He was incredibly tense and unable to really talk to anybody for more than two or three minutes at a time,” recalled Fox. “Tears rolled down his cheeks at the thought of what was going to happen. Alvin came to call, along with a couple of the other K.B.I, agents, and Truman would pace around our suite at the Muehlebach Hotel. At night we went to the movies or strip shows and transvestite shows—Kansas City is one of the six or seven biggest transvestite centers in the country.”

For some reason, Perry and Dick thought that Truman might help them obtain another stay of execution, and they tried desperately to reach him. Perry telephoned the hotel two or three times, and an assistant warden, acting on their behalf, tried seven or eight times more. But another delay was the last thing Truman wanted. Rather than say no, he let Fox answer the phone and make his excuses. Finally Perry telegraphed the Muehlebach. “
AM ANTICIPATION AND WAITING YOUR VISIT. HAVE BELONGINGS FOR YOU. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE BY RETURN WIRE WHEN YOU EXPECT TO BE HERE
.” Truman cabled back: “
DEAR PERRY, UNABLE TO VISIT YOU TODAY, BECAUSE NOT PERMITTED. ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND. TRUMAN
.”

Perry was aware, of course, that he was lying—that he would have been permitted to visit. At 11:45 that night, one hour and fifteen minutes before the noose was put around his neck, he sat down and wrote a joint letter to him and Nelle. “Sorry that Truman was unable to make it here at the prison for a brief word or two prior to [the] neck-tie party. Whatever his reason for not showing up, I want you to know that I cannot condemn you for it & understand. Not much time left but want you both to know that I’ve been sincerely grateful for your friend[ship] through the years and everything else. I’m not very good at these things—I want you both to know that I have become very affectionate toward you. But harness time. Adios Amigos. Best of everything, Your friend always, Perry.”

In a heavy rain, Truman and Joe drove to the prison, and Truman was able to say a few last words to each of them. Dick was hanged first. “I just want to say I hold no hard feelings,” he said. “You people are sending me to a better world than this ever was.” Less than half an hour later he was dead. Just after 1
A.M.
Perry was brought into the warehouse where the gallows had been set up. “I think it’s a helluva thing to take a life in this manner,” he said. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something…” He stopped, and in a lower voice, added: “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.” The rope was placed around his neck, a black mask was put over his eyes, and at 1:19
A.M.
he too was pronounced dead.

Crying, Truman later called Jack to describe the terrible scene he had witnessed. Jack was unsympathetic. “They’re dead, Truman,” he said. “You’re alive.”

A
ND
so at last the wait was over. Truman flew back to New York, tightly gripping Joe Fox’s hand all the way and carrying with him a forty-page essay in which Perry had set down his thoughts on life and death. “
De Rebus Incognitis
” (“Concerning Unknown Things”), Perry had titled it, ending with a sentiment that may or may not have consoled him when the rope was placed around his neck: “Did we not know we were to die, we would be children; by knowing it, we are given our opportunity to mature in spirit. Life is only the father of wisdom; death is the mother.”

Reading those unexpected words from the grave only prolonged Truman’s distress, and in the next few days he made many more tearful phone calls to friends and relatives. “Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday,” he wrote Donald Cullivan. “I was there. I stayed with Perry to the end. He was calm and very brave. It was a terrible experience and I will never get over it. Someday I will try to tell you about it. But for the moment I am still too shattered. Over the years I’d become very devoted to Perry. And Dick, too.” Then, as if to assuage his guilt for refusing to talk to them until the hour before they were hanged, he added: “
Everything possible was done to save them.
” Days later, at a cost of seventy dollars and fifty cents each, he ordered simple granite markers for their graves, which were placed side by side in a cemetery near the prison:

By the middle of June he had completed the pages describing their last night, when the rain, rapping on the high warehouse roof, sounded “not unlike the rat-a-tat-tat of parade drums.”
In Cold Blood
was finished. “Bless Jesus,” he exclaimed to Cecil. “But incredible to suddenly be free (comparatively) of all these years and years of tension and aging. At the moment, only feel bereft. But grateful. Never again!”

Everything he had set out to do Truman succeeded in doing. He had gambled and he had won. On a superficial level,
In Cold Blood
is a murder story of riveting vitality and suspense. On a deeper level, it is what he had always known it could be, a Big Work—a masterpiece, in fact, that he has infused with the somber energy of Greek tragedy. With stately, even majestic confidence he sets his scene in the first paragraph. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”

Employing the skills he had learned as a screenwriter, he presents his main protagonists in short, cinematic scenes: the Clutters, unsuspectingly awaiting their fate in the shadows of those dignified grain elevators, and their killers, racing across Kansas to meet them, Nemesis in a black Chevrolet. Going about its peaceful pursuits in Holcomb is one America—prosperous, secure, and a little smug. Along with his many good qualities, Herb Clutter is rigid and self-righteous; he promises to fire any employee caught “harboring alcohol,” and he refuses to let Nancy even consider marrying her boyfriend, whose only offense is that he is Catholic. Speeding across the plains is the other America—poor, rootless and misbegotten. “Transient hearts,” Randolph prophetically named such people in
Other Voices;
envy and self-pity are their only legacies, violence their only handiwork. Together, victims and killers are America in microcosm—light and dark, goodness and evil.

Truman had long maintained that nonaction could be both as artful and as compelling as fiction. In his opinion the reason it was not—that it was generally considered a lesser class of writing—was that it was most often written by journalists who were not equipped to exploit it. Only a writer “completely in control of fictional techniques” could elevate it to the status of art. “Journalism,” he said, “always moves along on a horizontal plane, telling a story, while fiction—good fiction—moves vertically, taking you deeper and deeper into character and events. By treating a real event with fictional techniques (something that cannot be done by a journalist until he
learns
to write good fiction), it’s possible to make this kind of synthesis.” Because good fiction writers had usually disdained reporting, and most reporters had not learned to write good fiction, the synthesis had not been made, and nonfiction had never realized its potential. It was marble awaiting a sculptor, a palette of paints awaiting an artist. He was the first to show what could be done with that unappreciated material, he insisted, and
In Cold Blood
was a new literary species, the nonfiction novel.

By that he meant that he had written it as he would have a novel, but, instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could have affixed a moustache under Washington’s nose or shaved off Lincoln’s beard. He was fenced in by the barbed wire of fact. Yet within those boundaries, he believed that there was far more latitude than other writers had ever realized, freedom to juxtapose events for dramatic effect, to re-create long conversations, even to peer inside the heads of his characters and tell what they are thinking. “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” said Flaubert. And so, in the universe of
In Cold Blood
, is Truman’s presence felt in every sentence.

One by one, he repeats the themes, images, and leitmotifs that permeate his novels and short stories: loneliness, the death of innocence, and the danger that lurks in every shadow. In an uncanny way, his true-life chronicle is the culmination of his fiction, the logical extension of all that he had written before. From a multitude of facts he presents only those that interest him. Or, in his words: “I built an oak and reduced it to a seed.” Another writer might have laid emphasis on Holcomb’s small-town closeness and the warmth and good-heartedness of its citizens. Truman chooses instead to pick up a thread from his fiction and to dwell on its isolation. Though one sits on arid plains and the other is surrounded by swamps, his Holcomb sounds very much like the Noon City of
Other Voices
—lonesome is the adjective he applies to both. Finney County becomes Capote country, and the people who move through his pages become Capote characters.

In Cold Blood
may have been written like a novel, but it is accurate to the smallest detail—“immaculately factual,” Truman publicly boasted. Although it has no footnotes, he could point to an obvious source for every remark uttered and every thought expressed. “One doesn’t spend almost six years on a book,” he said, “the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.”

Challenged by such a flag-waving declaration, several out-of-town reporters made trips to Garden City, hunting for mistakes that would force him to eat those words. A man from the
Kansas City Times
assumed he had found one when he talked to Myrtle Clare, one of the book’s most colorful bit players. Dressed in a stylish purple suit, she did not at all resemble the dowdy woman Truman had described. But she had looked every bit that bad, she assured the reporter; she had been postmistress when the Clutters were killed, and she had worn old clothes to drag around seventy-pound sacks of mail. If some people objected to Truman’s account, she said, it was because he described Holcomb “as a broken-down place with hicks, but that’s the way it is and if the shoe fits, wear it, that’s what I say.” Inevitably, a few slips were uncovered. After the murders, Nancy’s horse Babe was sold to a local man, for instance, not to an outside Mennonite farmer, as Truman had said. But in the end, none of those who dogged his tracks unearthed any errors of substance.

Although the newspaper sleuths did not know it—Alvin and Marie Dewey were careful not to contradict him—Truman did give way to a few small inventions and at least one major one, however, and
In Cold Blood
is the poorer for it. Following his usual custom, he had anguished over his ending, suffering so much from indecision that his writing hand froze and he was forced to compose on a typewriter. Should he end with the executions? he wondered. Or should he conclude with a happier scene? He chose the latter scenario. But since events had not provided him with a happy scene, he was forced to make one up: a chance, springtime encounter of Alvin Dewey and Susan Kidwell, Nancy Clutter’s best friend, in the tree-shaded Garden City cemetery, an oasis of green in that dry country. The Clutters are buried there, and so is Judge Tate, who sentenced their killers. Susan is now completing the college that she and Nancy had planned to attend together, Nancy’s boyfriend has recently married, and Alvin’s older son, who was just a boy on that murderous night, is preparing to enter college himself. The message is clear: life continues even amidst death.

It is almost a duplicate of the ending of
The Grass Harp
, which brings together Judge Cool and young Collin Fenwick in a similar reunion in a cemetery. But what works in
The Grass Harp
, which is a kind of fantasy, works less well in a book of uncompromising realism like
In Cold Blood
, and that nostalgic meeting in the graveyard verges on the trite and sentimental, as several otherwise admiring critics obligingly pointed out. “I could probably have done without that last part, which brings everything to rest,” Truman admitted. “I was criticized a lot for it. People thought I should have ended with the hangings, that awful last scene. But I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace.”