Terror among the Wheatfields

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.

Still, I thought, it’s a classic. My new-mother status meant that I had limited time to read, so I decided to listen to a large portion of it on audiobook. I grimly pushed my daughter to the park in her stroller, listening to the Midwestern drawl of the actor Scott Brick: ‘The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there”.’ Within a few minutes, I’d been reminded that nothing good ever happens in places where no one can hear you scream. In his first chapter Capote takes us through the final day of the Clutter family’s lives on their prospering Holcomb farm, a day that is ‘ideal apple eating weather’. The Clutters are, at least on the surface, the perfect family: churchgoing, adored by their community, well-off, loving. Though the father, Herb, is a ‘man’s man’, broad-shouldered, morally upstanding and deeply sensible, he’s also a keen bread-maker: ‘no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf’. His wife Bonnie suffers from an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder, so their 16-year-old daughter Nancy does much of the cooking and the household chores. Nancy is a delightful, big-hearted, straight-A student who chews her nails and doesn’t know how to break up with her boyfriend when she goes off to college. Her younger brother Kenyon is shyer, spending his time tinkering with woodwork projects in the basement, but he gets into terrible moods. With my headphones on, nauseous with dread for what I knew would happen to these people, Capote’s character nuance felt like cruelty. Capote tells us on the third page that the Clutters will be murdered, and then he builds his loving portrait of them as we await their deaths. Tom Wolfe called this ‘pornoviolence’. When we know the ending, our reading is compelled only by a desire to see the gruesome details unfold. But with my compulsion came revulsion and anger – partly at myself, but mostly at Capote. I did not want to read, as one of the killers describes it, about ‘hair all over them walls’. I did not want to know that Nancy’s aunt had, in the harrowing clean-up after the murders, found the girl’s watch, a cherished gift from her father, hidden in a slipper – proof that Nancy had heard the killers coming for her. Yet I had to give Capote full credit for making me weep for the fear she must have felt. One of the ways Capote creates his sense of foreboding and almost mythic inevitability is by intercutting his depiction of the Clutters going about their day with scenes of the two killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, moving towards them. This is one of the book’s most celebrated achievements, and at the time it was released – drip-fed in four instalments by the New Yorker in 1965 before being published by Random House in 1966 – it must have felt ground-breaking. By providing us with Smith and Hickock’s own tragic backstories and complex characters, Capote makes us invest in them just as much as the virtuous family they are soon to murder. The state of Kansas uses the death penalty, so we know too that these men are moving inexorably towards not only their victims’ but also their own early deaths. With typical hyperbole, Capote claimed that he’d created an entirely new genre: the non-fiction novel. Although Norman Mailer described him as ‘the most perfect writer of my generation’, many critics thought his prose overwrought and self-indulgently detailed: ‘This isn’t writing, it’s research,’ wrote Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic. Yet no one could deny the book’s impact. It heralded both the durable popularity of true crime, and increasingly sympathetic portraits of criminal anti-heroes. It also showed mid-century America that the American Dream was not accessible to all. As the murderers drive through the Midwest and the Southern states, the book draws a picture of unrelenting economic, cultural and spiritual desolation in which even the most senseless murder starts to seem like a natural outcome. Capote had noticed the story of the Clutter murders in the New York Times – it was a one-column article that didn’t even make the front page. After his success with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he wanted to try something new. He was intrigued by the effect such an inexplicable tragedy would have on a small town, and he wanted to elevate non-fiction to the aesthetic level of poetry. He was accompanied on his first trip to Holcomb by his childhood friend Harper Lee, who was at a loose end having just finished To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s affable Southern manner was crucial in securing the interviews Capote needed. With his camp mannerisms, fashionable clothes and childlike voice, Capote was to Kansas locals, Lee said, ‘like someone coming off the moon’. The more I worked on the radio documentary, the more Capote’s strange voice became like that of a friend. I recommend watching a short film the Maysles brothers made about him in 1966. Capote was a master of self-promotion, and his straight-faced declaration that ‘every word [in his book] is true’ is impressively bold, given that it records conversations between people who were all dead by the time he started writing. His curious mixture of confidence and vulnerability, his constant amusement at his own jokes and his profound belief in the merit of his work are somehow both unnerving and endearing. In one interview, shouted above the chatter of a glamorous party, he talks about the need for the writer to feel deeply for their subject, but then, he says, waving a glass in the air, the author must maintain an ‘emotional upper hand’. Although this is fine in theory, in practice Capote ended up spending more than five years researching and writing the book. Lee and Capote became such fixtures in Holcomb that they spent a Christmas there. They were in the chief investigator Alvin Dewey’s house when he received the phone call telling him that Smith and Hickock had been arrested. It was at this moment that Capote’s original plan to write a story of a small town’s response to tragedy morphed into something bigger, and decidedly more ethically dubious. In the killers, Capote had two fascinating characters who, unlike the Clutters, were still around to be interviewed. The motivation for the murders was still not known. It was ostensibly a robbery, but the murderers had left with only a radio, a pair of binoculars and fifty dollars in cash. To find out why they had done what they’d done, Capote ended up visiting Hickock and Smith on Death Row half a dozen times and corresponded with them regularly. He became friends with them – ‘an intense sort of friendship’, he says in the Maysles documentary – particularly Perry Smith, who In Cold Blood he depicts as a complicated, misunderstood product of a cruel upbringing. Smith stops Hickock from raping Nancy and places a pillow under Kenyon’s head to make sure the boy is comfortable before he shoots him in the face. Smith’s sweetness in the midst of his compulsively brutal rampage is captured in his oft-quoted description of Herb Clutter: ‘I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.’ In Smith, Capote saw not only a great character but also a vision of what he himself might have become. Both men had absent fathers and alcoholic mothers, spent time in foster homes, were the victims of bullying at school, and had symptoms of childhood anxiety (Smith was, Capote tells us with significant pathos, a bedwetter). In Capote, Smith saw a lifeline. This wealthy New York celebrity would not only tell his story sympathetically, he hoped, but also, perhaps, secure further stays of execution. The two men grew so close that, when he was finally hanged, Smith left everything he owned to Capote. These days, as the fashion for first-person non-fiction grows, Capote would probably tell the story from his own point of view. It’s possible that an explanation of Capote’s ‘process’ might have made the whole book feel less morally cowardly. I believe in artistic freedom, and the ability of ‘fictionalized history’ to illuminate universal truths. I have no real problem with the fact that Capote’s ‘immaculately factual’ (his words) account of the story is heavily embellished. But I find the book’s disregard for the wishes of its very real characters more unsettling. The Clutters had two older daughters, who had already left home when the murders occurred. They and their now grown-up children continue to resent the publicizing of this most horrific of personal tragedies. Capote could not have predicted the scale of interest In Cold Blood sparked – a film came out just a year after the book, followed by endless think-pieces and further films, and a tourism industry in Holcomb – but he did everything he could to generate it. As I was making my documentary, I felt uneasy that it would also be contributing, albeit modestly, to the book’s still blazing afterlife. Nevertheless, I do think this is a book worth reading, if only as a warning to other writers about the lines it’s not worth crossing in pursuit of their art. ‘No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,’ Capote told his biographer. ‘It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.’ Capote was being dramatic, of course: he liked the image of himself as a tortured artist. But there is no doubt that, despite his intention to remain detached, In Cold Blood took an enormous toll on him. His editor Joe Fox said that, on the flight back to New York after witnessing the murderers’ execution, Capote could not stop sobbing. Although the author lived for nearly twenty years after its publication, it was the last book-length project he finished. Many consider In Cold Blood a masterpiece, and certainly there is a lot in it to admire. It is an unforgettable book, one perhaps that everyone should read once. But I think the best books can be returned to repeatedly, as comfort and through a desire to be moved by them once more. The non-fiction in Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’ makes this harder work. George Steiner asked in his review in 1966: ‘Will any man want to read it twice?’ As I took my headphones out on the final lines of the book – ‘the whisper of wind voices on the wind-bent wheat’ – and adjusted my daughter’s blanket, I knew that this woman, for one, was done.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Corin Throsby 2025