In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood
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Truman Capote on In Cold Blood
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A theory twenty years in search of a vesselBefore he ever opened The New York Times to that small item about a Kansas farm family, Capote already had the idea. The crime, when it came, was the occasion, not the origin. He spelled out that distinction to George Plimpton in January 1966.
The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary. The decision was based on a theory I’ve harbored since I first began to write professionally, which is well over 20 years ago. It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.
The specific shape of the project took years of frustration to define. Writing about his creative quandaries in a 1979 Vogue essay, he named both the gap he saw in contemporary prose and the exact ambition he set for himself to fill it.
I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of fiction, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.
He found the Clutter case in the paper one November morning in 1959 and spent two days deciding whether it was the right subject. What settled it was less about the crime itself than about the subject’s staying power, its resistance to obsolescence over the years the project would inevitably consume.
The human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.
He could not have known, reading that small headline on a deep-inside page, that the project would consume six years and leave him, by his own account, permanently changed.
How he wrote it
Becoming the tape recorderCapote trained his memory for two years before he trusted it to carry the book. The method was deliberate and systematic: he treated recall as a skill requiring practice drills, not a natural gift he could simply rely on. He described the regimen in full to F. Lee Bailey in 1968.
I have the auditory version of a photographic memory, and I have it naturally anyway. But even so, when I began experimenting in journalism, I perfected it by practicing. I would use a tape recorder and have someone read into it while I listened. Then, I would go into the next room and repeat into another tape recorder, a half hour later, precisely what they had just said. We would then match the two tapes to check for accuracy. It took about two years to really perfect this method.
The trained memory served one specific purpose: keeping recording equipment out of the room. Capote believed any visible documentation tool instantly narrowed what a subject would say, and with sources as guarded as the people of Holcomb and the two killers in their cells, the narrowing would have been fatal to the book.
A journalist interviewing a person must never make notes or use a tape recorder because it automatically sets up a stilted situation — especially with people not used to being interviewed. You must always be right inside the scene and the action of it, and you yourself must become the tape recorder.
The structural problem Capote named as the hardest was one that runs against every instinct of literary journalism: vanishing from his own work. Writing in Vogue in 1979, he described the technical choice as essential to the book’s tone, even though it inverted the standard method reporters use to establish credibility.
From a technical point, the greatest difficulty I had in writing In Cold Blood was leaving myself completely out of it. Ordinarily, the reporter has to use himself as a character, an eyewitness observer, in order to retain credibility. But I felt that it was essential to the seemingly detached tone of that book that the author should be absolutely absent.
In the 1997 documentary Great Writers, Capote described the different demands each killer placed on him. Dick Hickock was straightforward; Perry Smith cost far more. The distinction mattered because the depth of the Smith relationship was what the book’s moral weight finally depended on.
Dick is very easy to get along with and easy to know, because he was like somebody you’d meet on a train who would just start up an instant conversation... But Perry was a strange and difficult boy... we became very, very close to him, very intimate sort of... some kind of very intense relationship, having to do with his total loneliness, and my... feelings of pity for him, and even a kind of affection. [paraphrased from audio]
The book could not be written until the executions in April 1965, which meant six years of accumulating material without knowing whether it would cohere. Capote had collected so much research that even a fraction of it would have produced a two-thousand-page volume. The waiting, not the writing, was the sustained ordeal.
Yes, indeed, it was like playing poker; for six nerve-shattering years, I didn’t know whether I had a book or not. Those were long summers. Freezing winters.
The personal thread
What six years inside the story actually costBy the time the book was finished and celebrated, Capote had already said something in private that cut against the triumph. He told Plimpton what success could not resolve: the project had lodged in him in a way publication did not dislodge.
I’m still very much haunted by the whole thing. I have finished the book, but in a sense I haven’t finished it.
In later years the reckoning he described to Plimpton hardened into something more final. The book that made his reputation became, in his own account, the event that ended the writer who made it.
It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me. [paraphrased from audio]
He had told Plimpton in 1966 that if he’d known what was coming he would have driven straight past Garden City without stopping. By the time he said it was killing him, the distance between those two statements had closed.
What he wants us to sit with
Actions come from somewhereCapote consistently refused to frame the book as advocacy or argument. In a 1968 Italian television interview he located his commitment elsewhere entirely, in a way that insulated the work from the capital-punishment debate that surrounded its publication.
I feel and consider myself committed only to art. What interests me is my art, the quality of my art. That’s why I choose the subjects that interest me. [paraphrased from audio]
Within that frame, the book still makes a specific claim. In the same 1968 interview, speaking about Perry Smith, Capote stated it without qualification. The claim is not a defense of what Smith did; it is an insistence on tracing what made him capable of doing it.
if Perry Smith had received encouragement, help, love, or affection in his life, he would not have become the psychopathological type he was. [paraphrased from audio]
Capote attended the executions. He did not argue that Smith should have been spared. He argued that nothing about Smith was inexplicable, which is a harder and more uncomfortable position than either simple sympathy or simple condemnation.
The warning he gave Plimpton in retrospect was his most honest statement about what the project demanded of anyone who entered it fully. He made it knowing exactly where the book had taken him.
If I had realized then what the future held, I never would have stopped in Garden City. I would have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.