Originally published in four instalments in The New Yorker (1965), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood established a new genre of creative non-fiction, which he coined the “non-fiction novel” (Plimpton, p. 2). In Cold Blood recounts the 1959 murders of a prosperous farming family and follows the pursuit, capture, and execution of the murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.
Since its initial success, In Cold Blood has spawned a host of imitators, the most celebrated being Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979), Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994).
While each tells the story of killers and their crimes, In Cold Blood holds a unique position in American literary history. It was the first conscious attempt to blur journalism with novelistic devices to create a new literary art form. It was also the first to exploit the conventions and motifs of the Gothic to tell a “True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences.”
Origins of In Cold Blood
In an interview with The Saturday Review, Capote claimed to have had no interest in crime per se but that once he had settled on the subject for his non-fiction novel, he would “half-consciously, when looking through the papers, always notice any item that had a reference to a crime” (Frankel, p. 37).
The headline that ultimately captured his imagination appeared in the New York Times on November 16, 1959: “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain”. According to Capote, when he saw the title, it was “sort of as though one had been sitting for a long time watching for a certain bird - if you were a bird watcher - come into view, and there it was” (Frankel, p. 37). Within a few days of the murder, Capote was off to Kansas with his friend, Harper Lee.
Critical Reviews of In Cold Blood
While reviews of In Cold Blood were mixed, contemporary analysis repeatedly linked Capote’s work to the Southern Gothic tradition. In Tree of Night (1949) for example, Eisinger notes that “one feels the presence of Poe everywhere in this volume, in the ubiquitous threat of death and in the easy familiarity with madness, in the exploitation of the abnormal, in the calculated striving for effect” (p. 240). For others, Capote was simply an “ephebic purveyor of Gothic extravaganzas, the fashionable opportunist of a mid-century madness” (Hassan, p. 5).
While none of these critics had the opportunity to consider In Cold Blood in their analysis, subsequent commentators forged a connection between Capote’s earlier Gothic work and his new “non-fiction novel”. Stanley Kaufmann's review in The New Republic derides Capote’s claim to have founded a new form of literature and links it instead to his earlier writing: "What it all amounts to is the puffery of an artistically unsuccessful writer of fiction pursuing his love of the Gothic…into real life” (Critical Handbook, p.63).
Tony Tanner claimed that “behind the mask of the dispassionate reporter we can begin to make out the excited stare of the Southern Gothic novelist with his furbile delight in weird settings and lurid details” (Critical Handbook, p. 101). Others questioned Capote's claim to objective reportage in light of the preoccupations of his early work, in particular, “its nostalgia for states of innocence together with its fascination with deformed or precocious or odd-ball types of human creepiness” (p. 71).
Not all critics dismissed In Cold Blood as true-crime trussed up in modern Gothic machinery. If the arc of the plot and the characterization of the novel evoke the Gothic, for others it also employed history and myth as its organizing modes. Tanner noted that Capote continues “an old American tradition when he tries to get at the ‘mythic’ significance of the facts”, which, in the case of In Cold Blood, was to “extract a black fable from contemporary reality” (p.99).
Similarly, Melvin Friedman writes that Capote was “now entering a more authentically American tradition of story-telling than any revealed in his earlier work…We can now begin using such literary catchphrases as 'Adamic myth' to explain Capote, just as we’ve used them up to now to explain the 'great tradition' in American fiction from Cooper to Hawthorne through William Styron” (Critical Handbook, p. 155).
However Capote’s text was viewed, what remains clear is that he told a quintessential American story in a new literary form that, for better or for worst, critics could not and will not stop talking about.
Sources
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Bristol: The Reprint Society, 1965, rpt. 1967).
Eisinger, Chester. Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963).
Frankel, Haskel. "An Interview with Truman Capote." Saturday Review. Vol.XLIX (1966), 36-37.
Hassan, Ihab. "The Daydream and Nightmare of Narcissus." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. Vol. 1, No. 2 (1960), 5-21.
Malin, Irving. Ed. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1968).
Plimpton, George. "The Story Behind a Non-Fiction Novel." New York Time Review of Books (January 16, 1966), 2-3.
Marilyn Michaud - Marilyn Michaud teaches English Literature and writing in Toronto. Her research interests include American history and culture, Gothic ...
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