Authors: Gerald Clarke
In Cold Blood
is a remarkable book, but it is not a new art form. Like the picture on the cover of
Other Voices
, Truman’s claim that it was obscured rather than spotlighted his achievement. Indeed, the term he coined, nonfiction novel, makes no sense. A novel, according to the dictionary definition, is a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length: if a narrative is nonfiction, it is not a novel; if it is a novel, it is not nonfiction. Nor was he the first to dress up facts in the colors of fiction. Although literary historians could refer to examples as far back as the seventeenth century, there were several of more recent vintage, including John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
, Rebecca West’s
The Meaning of Treason
, Lillian Ross’s pieces for
The New Yorker
, and Cornelius Ryan’s
The Longest Day.
The trend in both journalism and history was to tell real stories through detail and anecdote, to relate not only what characters did, but also what they ate for breakfast on the day they did it. “Field Marshal Rommel carefully spread a little honey on a slice of buttered bread,” wrote Ryan, for instance, as he described the activities of the German commander just before D-Day.
Yet Truman did have a case, though it might have been better if he had let someone else make it for him. He had written something original, perhaps even unique.
In Cold Blood
was not a new species, but to many readers it seemed like one. Others had used fictional techniques, but no one else had actually written a book of nonfiction that could be read as a novel. He was the first novelist of stature to chance his time, talent and reputation on such a long work of reportage, and to many of his peers,
In Cold Blood
was the pioneer that opened up a new territory. In the years to come there was the literary equivalent of a land rush as they followed his lead, searching for equally engrossing material in the day’s news. Many of the titles that have jumped onto the best-seller lists since then, from Norman Mailer’s
The Armies of the Night
to Bob Woodward’s
Veil
, probably would not have been written, or would not have been written in the same way, if he had not come upon his interesting thing in the fall of 1959.
During its long history
The New Yorker
has printed many important and influential pieces, but never, before or since, has it printed one that has been as eagerly anticipated as
In Cold Blood.
The excitement that had been building for five years was finally to be satisfied. As always, the magazine’s cover offered no hint as to what was inside; readers had to know when and where to look.
In Cold Blood
was not even listed in its skimpy table of contents. But people found what they wanted; the four issues broke the magazine’s record for newsstand sales. Searching for precedents, some reached back to the time of Dickens, when California gold miners sat around campfires, listening to the latest chapters of
The Old Curiosity Shop
, and crowds waiting at a pier in Manhattan shouted to a ship arriving from England, “Is Little Nell dead?”
Perhaps the hardest place to find the magazine, ironically, was where interest was most intense: Finney County, Kansas. For the first issue,
The New Yorker
’s sleepy circulation department had not considered shipping more than the customary five copies. “They evidently didn’t give it a thought back there in the inner sanctum in New York City,” said the
Dodge City Globe
, which ran an editorial assailing the condescending ways of city slickers. Worse still, even those few copies were lost in transit. “Drug stores say they are being besieged with customers wanting the magazine,” reported the
Garden City Telegram.
“Those who have read Capote’s first installment praise it with great enthusiasm. One local reader, who happened to get a copy while in Kansas City on a business trip last week, said he started to read the article and ‘couldn’t put it down until I finished.’”
“Couldn’t put it down until I finished” is beautiful music to any writer, and it was a tune Truman heard endlessly in the weeks to come, from friends and strangers alike, who often added, in some embarrassment, that it was the first time they had ever been moved to write a fan letter. “My wife read each
New Yorker
as it came, tearing it out of the postman’s hand,” wrote a Lutheran minister from Fresno, California. “Now we will re-read all of them; the first time we gobbled them down, glub-glub!” A woman from Massachusetts said that she was glad when it was all over, “so that ordinarily reasonable people can go to bed at an ordinarily reasonable hour, instead of reading slowly and late on the day
The New Yorker
arrives. I am glad that I was able to resist the temptation to fly to New York to be able to read it two days earlier.”
Knowing either the author or the facts did not diminish the suspense. “It’s tremendous,” said Harold Nye, one of the K.B.I. agents who had worked on the case. “Now I can appreciate the painstaking effort you have given to this little murder scene in Kansas. I found myself caught in the web of the story to the point that I couldn’t stop to eat. At the end of part one, I told the wife, ‘By God, the old boy has really got something here.’” Leo Lerman grumbled that it was “exhausting to wait a week. I have never before seen people glued to anything—on buses—as they are to
The New Yorker.
” In her house, said Truman’s Greenwich High School teacher, Catherine Wood, there was a tussle over each copy: “
Who gets it first
? That is the big question as the second installment comes out today. I have made myself stop a few minutes to say a word to you. It seems to me this is a perfect accomplishment. I think I have never read anything so
visual.
I
see
the area, the people and I hear them.” A few weeks later, after she had finished Part Four, she added, “I suppose you will have imitators; all I can say is: Let them try! I am immensely proud of you.”
The panegyrics went on and on. “I would never have believed such a wild, mongrel subject could be brushed and groomed to give off such beautiful glints and inspire such tenderness,” stated the poet James Merrill. Anita Loos adjudged that he had written “a Homeric poem as terrifying as the awful age we live in.” Noël Coward, who confessed that he was “in a state of dithering admiration,” revealed why at generous length: “Before any of the clever boys have a word to say,
I
should like to say that in my—not particularly humble opinion—you have written a masterpiece. The suspense is almost intolerable & your compassion infinitely moving. There is not one character who does not emerge complete and true. I, who love form and shape in writing, was unable to find one moment of overemphasis or underemphasis. It is a long book without one moment of ennui or one slipshod phrase. I have been haunted by it ever since I put it down so the only thing to do obviously is to take it up again. I will not apologize for the effusiveness of this letter. Praise from fellow writers is always gratifying and this, believe me, comes from the heart.”
When the book itself was published in January, 1966, the modern media machine—magazines, newspapers, television and radio—became a giant band that played only one tune: Truman Capote. He was the subject of twelve articles in national magazines, two half-hour television programs, and an unparalleled number of radio shows and newspaper stories. His face looked out from the covers of
Newsweek
,
Saturday Review
,
Book Week
, and
The New York Times Book Review
, which gave him the longest interview in its history.
Life
ran eighteen pages, the most space it had ever given a professional writer, and advertised its huge spread by continuously flashing the words
In Cold Blood
on the electronic billboard in Times Square. “Such a deluge of words and pictures has never before been poured out over a book,” observed a somewhat dazed-sounding reporter for
The New York Times.
The downpour would have been even greater if he had not refused many interviews, including an offer to become the first writer to appear on television’s
Meet the Press
, which usually favored politicians and statesmen.
By a peculiar stroke of luck, even a bloody fight at the “21” Club became part of the campaign. Movie director Otto Preminger accused Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar, who was handling the book’s film rights, of reneging on a promise to sell it to him as a starring vehicle for Frank Sinatra. (It was never explained what part Sinatra wanted.) Harsh words were exchanged, and Lazar abruptly ended the argument by smashing a water goblet on Preminger’s bald head. Until they saw pictures of that battered dome, which required fifty stitches to repair, some were tempted to imagine that “L’Affaire ‘21,’” as one newspaper dubbed it, had been a clever stunt to grab the headlines.
The
In Cold Blood
Express was thundering down the tracks. Jean Ennis, director of publicity for Random House, happily acknowledged that she was only a passenger on the Capote Special. “I would like to take responsibility for this publicity windfall, but I can’t,” she said. “What has happened, has happened.” How could she say otherwise when one of Random House’s fiercest competitors had pitched in to help? “I’m mad about the new Capote,” said Kenneth McCormick, the editor-in-chief of Doubleday. “His new book has upgraded the entire publishing industry. He believes that reporting is more interesting than fiction, and he’s proven it.” Truman did his best to keep the engine fueled. “A boy has to hustle his book,” he joked, and the story behind the book became as familiar as the book itself. He told the tale of his nearly six-year ordeal so often that it almost became part of the national lore, like Washington’s chopping down the cherry tree.
Americans do not expect serious books to make money. When they do, as
In Cold Blood
did, they become news. Even before it was published, New American Library had bought paperback rights for an unprecedented half-million dollars (of which Random House had taken a third), Columbia Pictures had paid a record half-million more for movie rights, and foreign publishers and other sales had all but guaranteed another million. “A Book in a New Form Earns $2-Million for Truman Capote,” declared a headline in
The New York Times
, which reckoned that he would make fourteen dollars and eighty cents a word. Truman’s impatient reply caused more head-shaking: “When you average it out over six years, and consider the taxes, any small-time Wall Street operator gets at least that much.”
Sometimes, when a book, a play, or a movie is preceded by so much praise and hyperbole, critics become tetchy, making it a point of honor to show their independence by finding fault. That was not the case with
In Cold Blood
, and most reviews were all that Truman could have hoped for. The smart boys—and the smart girls too—were just as excited as everyone else. “
In Cold Blood
is a masterpiece,” proclaimed Conrad Knickerbocker in
The New York Times Book Review
, “agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy. There are two Truman Capotes. One is the artful charmer, prone to the gossamer and the exquisite, of
The Grass Harp
and Holly Golightly. The other, darker and stronger, is the discoverer of death. He has traveled far from the misty, moss-hung landscapes of his youth. He now broods with the austerity of a Greek or an Elizabethan.”
He had recorded “this American tragedy in such depth and detail that one might imagine he had been given access to the books of the Recording Angel,” said Maurice Dolbier in the
New York Herald Tribune.
In a critique for
Harper’s
magazine, Rebecca West, who had produced some extraordinary nonfiction of her own, described him as “an ant of genius” who had crawled over the Kansas landscape in pursuit of his story. “Nothing but blessing can flow from Mr. Capote’s grave and reverent book,” she said. Writing in
The New York Review of Books
, F. W. Dupee, like most of his colleagues, genially dismissed the notion of the nonfiction novel—“to this claim the only possible retort is a disbelieving grin”—but went on to say that “whatever its ‘genre,’
In Cold Blood
is admirable: as harrowing as it is, ultimately, though implicitly, reflective in temper.”
One of those who wanted to derail that speeding train was Stanley Kauffmann, who had not liked what he had read and who was incensed that so many others had. “It is ridiculous in judgment and debasing of all of us to call this book literature,” he declared in
The New Republic.
“Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty that merely because a famous writer produces an amplified magazine crime-feature, the result is automatically elevated to serious literature just as Andy Warhol, by painting a soup-carton, has allegedly elevated it to art?” But his diatribe was itself assailed by several of his readers, whose letters, mostly in defense of Truman, took up five columns of a succeeding issue. “Stanley Kauffmann has himself created a new genre,” complained one correspondent, “the Non-Review of the Non-Fiction Novel.”
Most of the critics in England were also warm with praise when the book appeared there in March. For Truman the congenial atmosphere was ruined, however, by a bitter and rather cheap personal attack in
The Observer
from an old friend, Kenneth Tynan, who argued, among other things, that Truman probably could have saved Perry and Dick from the gallows if he had spent the time and money to prove that they were insane. “For the first time,” Tynan wrote, “an influential writer of the front rank has been placed in a position of privileged intimacy with criminals about to die and—in my view—done less than he might have to save them…. It seems to me that the blood in which his book is written is as cold as any in recent literature.”
Tynan’s thesis was based on a sloppy reading of the book and false assumptions about Kansas law, which would not have permitted the psychiatric defense he was suggesting. Truman set him straight in a lengthy reply, during the course of which he charged him with possessing “the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly.” The victory was Truman’s, but Tynan’s accusation stung more than it otherwise might have because it hit an exposed nerve. Truman could not have saved Perry and Dick if he had spent one million dollars, or ten million, but Tynan was right when he suggested that Truman did not want to save them.