I picked up Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood this summer and slowly worked my way through most of it, only to leave it lying unattended by my bedside for months.
Not that it isn’t a gripping tale. The non-fiction, which details the murder of a family of four in rural Kansas, often has the same appeal as a good horror flick. Before the bloody deed is done, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the suspense: the only question is how the victims, Mr. Clutter and his family, will be snuffed out.
My problem came after Kansas detectives bag Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, Mr. Clutter’s twisted assailants. Perhaps my disinterest can be blamed on having seen Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliant turn as the author in the 2005 film Capote. Unfortunately, I know how this story is going to end.
That aside, I’ve got a bigger bone to pick with Capote, and it has to do with good old-fashioned journalism. Capote’s claim to fame was his ability to conjure vivid, true-to-life scenes from actual events. The author himself called In Cold Blood a “nonfiction novel,” and laid claim to its total veracity.
Yet, as a journalist, some scenes from this true crime magnum opus jumped out at me as impossibly detailed. Take, for instance, the moment when Mr. Clutter’s son, Kenyon, and a family farmhand spend a quiet moment in the garden just hours before the murder.
Capote recounts:
The chill of oncoming dusk shivered through the air, and though the sky was still deep blue, lengthening shadows emanated from the garden’s tall chrysanthemum stalks; Nancy’s cat frolicked among them, catching its paws in the twine with which Kenyon and the old man were tying plants.
You know what got me? That darn cat. I’m no crime reporter, but I’ve interviewed people after tragic events. And believe me, they are not going to tell you about the frolicking cat or the lengthening shadows emanating from the chrysanthemum stalks. At best, Capote had to be filling in a few blanks. It’s called imagination.
I’m not the first to have lodged such a charge. Shortly after Capote published his book, in 1965, Phillip K. Tompkins, noted that parts of Capote’s account conflicted with his own interviews with key sources chronicled in the book. Tompkins made the point clear in a 1966 article in Esquire.
“By insisting that “every word” of his book is true he has made himself vulnerable to those readers who are prepared to examine seriously such a sweeping claim,” Tompkins wrote.
The whole thing makes me wonder if Capote would have gotten away with taking such liberties today. In our post- Million Little Pieces world, readers are more willing to second guess the absolute truth of a work of non-fiction, and publishers are wary of putting their names behind a text that may not withstand the public scrutiny.
But before writing off Capote — and memoir writers for that matter — I’m inclined to keep in mind another important fact. In Cold Blood just wouldn’t be such a good read if Capote hadn’t filled in the blanks.
But are “changing the facts” and what amounts to adding color the same thing?
Maybe.
–CP
It absolutely matters. If a writer says something is true, then it better be true. It’s part of the contract the writer makes with the reader, and it’s a trust that cannot be broken. When a writer “bends” the facts, whether it’s an important topic or not, he/she breaks down the trust readers have in all writers.
As newspaper people we’ve all had the experience of starting on a story and getting excited because we think it’s going some place great, only to find on further reporting that the issue or event isn’t nearly as dramatic as we anticipated. It’s a shame, but it is what it is, and the facts must win out.
I read In Cold Blood a long time ago. I remember being disappointed because of its reputation as being such a revolutionary book that totally changed the game of how journalism could be presented. As I read it, I failed to see what was so revolutionary.
Of course, it eventually dawned on me that, not having been alive yet when the book was published, I wasn’t familiar with how non-fiction was presented pre-In Cold Blood. By the time I came of age, writers had done all kinds of things with non-fiction and journalism. So of course the book wouldn’t seem revolutionary, given the context from which I came at it.
I can be a bit dim at times.
This is something I have long wondered about, especially after reading Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. The details in Bowden’s book are painstakingly footnoted and interviews of accounts are cross referenced as much as possible.
However, in the case of In Cold Blood, which unlike Black Hawk Down, does not have lasting implications beyond the actual events – now long past – does it really matter if he took liberties. It is, afterall, what makes it such a good read.
-CP