Truman Capote, one of the great bon vivants of American letters, gave the Library a trove of his early works in 1967, including some of the notebooks, manuscripts and drafts of “In Cold Blood.” These come from his reporting of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Going through these files today, you can see Capote working in the field, building his masterpiece.
Capote has been justly skewered over the years for his claim that the book was completely factual — more on that in a minute — but it’s still a stunning book, more than half a century later, as beautifully written as it is emotionally disturbing. And time after time, details in the notebooks translate directly into finished prose.
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plans of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ ” That’s his famous opening sentence. The book’s next two sentences refer to the nearby Colorado border and that the local men tend to wear boots and Stetson hats.
This is pulled from three scrawled lines from his first notebook: “Western Kansas and eastern Colorado ought to be one state. The town – remote, what the rest of Kansas calls ‘out there.’ Stetson hats.”
His notebooks reveal a sturdy, Journalism-101 approach that shows his careful, deliberate technique. In one passage, he lists questions about the crime: “Where were Kenyon’s glasses? Bloody footprints? Who shot who?”
In another, he makes a sketch of a room in the Clutter’s house, indicating furniture positions. (All of these turn out to be key plot points.) The last morning of teenage Nancy Clutter’s life, she helped a little girl in town bake a cherry pie. Capote’s interview with the little girl’s family is in the notebooks. Over and over again, you can look from notebook to published page and see how it came together.
Gerald Clarke, whose 1988 “Capote: A Biography,” is still the definitive volume on the man, spent years interviewing Capote, researching at the Library, the New York Public Library (which has the most of Capote’s materials) and in other collections. In a recent interview, he spoke about the copious nature of Capote’s research. “I myself have boxes and boxes (of Capote’s files), much of it, such as the letters from the killers, relating to ‘In Cold Blood,’ ” he wrote in an email.
But Capote’s notes also belie the licenses he took that made the book so controversial. He insisted the book was completely factual and that all of the book’s quotes were “transcribed verbatim” from conversations he had or that were related to him, In reality, he invented at least two scenes, including the poignant end of the book, which recounts a mythical graveyard conversation between one of the murdered girl’s friends and the detective who led the investigation. Further, rereading of the book now, while going through his notes from those days, shows that the long quotes that give the book its disquieting verisimilitude are suspect. They may be true to the sentiments people expressed, or to the general thread of their thoughts, but certainly are not set down “verbatim.” (There is an entire cottage industry built around debunking Capote’s claims of total accuracy, including contradictions from detectives who worked on the case and Clutter family relatives.)
For example, in one notebook, there’s a circled quote about the fear that swept through the tiny town after the slayings: “All we’ve got out here are our friends, there isn’t anything else.” In the notebook, it’s disembodied, tied to no one. But in the book, it appears, word for word, on page 70, buried in a half-page quote from waitress Bess Hartman, at Hartman’s Café, attributing it to a diner she overheard. In the notebook, the rest of her lengthy quote is nowhere to be found.
Capote, a novelist, screenwriter and staff writer at the New Yorker when he went to Kansas, took along one of his best childhood friends, Nelle Harper Lee, (who had just written, but not yet published, “To Kill a Mockingbird”) to help him report. On the inside back page of that first notebook, Capote, like many a roving reporter, kept an on-the-fly tab of his expenses. “Miss Lee, salary – $900” reads one line; another reads, “Advance to Nelle, $250.” It’s not a small sum; today, those sums would be be nearly $10,000, an extravagent sum for a reporter filing notes to a colleague.
And on the same page, two unsettling lines indicate he also paid the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, far more than a couple of bucks for jailhouse cigarettes: “Payment Perry Smith $100 Hickock $100.” That’s no joke, either – that’s $900 each today, and a huge ethical line to cross.
It’s jolting lines like that which make the notebooks to “In Cold Blood” as fascinating a read as the book they support.
The post is reprinted from the September/October issue of LCM, available in its entirety online.
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Comments (13)
As always, fantastic article Neely!
Thank you!
Thanks for this essay. The cottage industry devoted to Capote’s deceptions is entirely justified. Nonfiction that isn’t factual, or that doesn’t disclose its author’s inventions, is fiction.
Hi Jack,
Thanks for writing. I loved “The Lobotomist.” On this, I agree. Capote really created his own monster with his claims of “total accuracy” and so forth. Rereading ICB for this piece, I expected to find huge gaps of fact. Instead, on top of the scenes already known, I only found slivers. Still on my list is to watch “Coldblooded,” the 2017 documentary in which the Clutter family relatives apparently say, among other things, that he completely overstated Mrs. Clutter’s depression, etc.
Best,
Neely
A smart overview of Capote’s ITB notebooks—thanks for sharing. Capote knew, as many other popular writers of the day did, that entertainment, publicity, and gossip were the keys to helping books become quick best sellers. His celebrity became a dominant factor in his success. Watch him on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or on The Dick Cavett Show. Capote always knew how to play an audience. That said, I’ve always enjoyed reading his books, seeing him cleverly direct a conversation, and listen to him narrate A Christmas Memory for the ABC telefilm. He was a sublime storyteller.
Hi Stephen,
I agree. Capote was a marvelous storyteller (until the drugs & drink capsized him) and one of his art forms was the conversation. Lawrence Grobel’s “Conversations with Capote” is worth the price if you haven’t already read it. One of the tragedies of the age is that Twitter did not come along until Capote had passed. He would have owned it.
Best,
Neely
Great article, Neely. I’m having my Nonfiction students read In Cold Blood this semester, and plan to send them this right now, to provide a little nuance to our conversation later this month about Capote and what he did! Stay in touch!
Thanks, and will do! Let me know if you’d like any more images, info, etc, about his notes that we have here.
Best,
Neely
Any interest in some autograph letters to a German publisher?
Best
Andreas W Mytze London
Discrepancies
Capote said Harold Nye an investigator visited Hickock’s parents by himself
Real life: only Dick’s mother was home and did the investigation with three investigators
Capote left out evidence to narrate story
Ironies
Capote paid killers
Weird and ironic
The killers robbed and killed people
Why did Capote pay people who did this
Literary Archives in ICB
Capote’s notes and letters had a lot of importance to case because they were unbiased
In the story they were all twisted and then they were very bias
At first he scribbled unclear facts and tidbits about the case and the town it took place but then from those was able to write pages and pages from these small and unintelligible facts
He twisted facts and details to make the readers of ICB feel and certain way
I’m not a huge reader. There was a time when I did show a glimmer of promise in writing. As “not much of a readerl” I wanted to say that this was so enjoyable it drew me in. I was originally looking up something involving reptiles. I had a flair for drama and that’s where my writing talent began and ended. I feel like Capote had a similar flair and perhaps should have used the word honest rather than accurate. I believe he knew he’d be telling the truth and had 100% faith in his own honesty or integrity as a person but found a few crossroads where using his artful flair for words prevented the reader from missing the point. Verbatim may have equated to just enough boredom to miss something relevant. I imagine he felt he was still being accurate about the story, maybe got a bit too fancy with the whole verbatim thing but at the end of the day thought as long as his art didn’t tarnish the truth or make it any less factual that he was coloring just inside the lines. I’m no Capote expert. I’m not sure how famous he was when he made the claims about his accuracy. This is strictly from my unknown not at all famous perspective.When your famous you have to be careful.
I really enjoy facts that are artfully written. Learning something true that I can repeat with confidence all while being entertained enough to do so, well that’s my favorite kind of writing. I’m saying that about this article although it sounded like I was still on Capote. Thank you for this comfortable and entertaining learning experience and the morsels of knowledge which will aid ME in the art of conversation. I really enjoyed the commentary as well, particularly the part about Capote missing out on twitter!
While Capote did not attribute the quote, “All we’ve got out here are our friends, there isn’t anything else” to any one person in his notes yet in the book to a specific cafe waitress does not mean he wasn’t being factual. With his intellect, it’s quite possible he remembered the speaker’s name accurately or thought he did. It would be more concerning if he knowingly altered facts.
What has always disturbed me far more than these questions about minor and trivial details is Capote’s claim that he wrote the first non-fiction novel. Those who read “Compulsion” by Meyer Levin, published in 1956, would probably agree that this true story of two highly gifted University of Chicago students who murdered an innocent boy to see if they could get away with it reads just like a novel. I always wondered if Capote had read this book when he made his claim of being first.
Judith Lindgren: I think the reason Levin’s book “Compulsion” can’t be considered a nonfiction novel is that he uses alternate names for the principal actors, which violates the rules of writing nonfiction, however accurate the rest may be. You are absolutely right that both Capote’s and Levin’s books belong to a much older tradition, one that dates back to earlier Naturalistic novel such as Frank Norris’s “McTeague,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” William Faulkner’s “Light in August,” James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” and Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” All of these narratives have basis in fact, although non can be considered nonfiction, as all these authors change names and other details.
But they did typically strive for some resemblance of the facts. Wright, for example, went to Chicago to learn more about the crimes of Robert Nixon (the model for Bigger Thomas) and, while there, took himself on a tour of locations significant to the Leopold-Loeb case (a sort of true-crime tourist!). He also had his friend Margaret Walker Alexander sending him newspaper clippings of the Nixon case.
Dreiser went to Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, where Chester Gillette murdered Grace Brown in the crime on which “An American Tragedy” was based. He even rented a boat and rowed out into the middle of the lake (as Gillette did in real life and Clyde Griffiths, his fictional stand-in, does in Dreiser’s novel). I have often wondered if Helen Dreiser, who accompanied her husband on that trip, worried that he might attempt to re-stage the crime! On the same trip, he visited the Auburn Penitentiary, where Gillette was executed in 1908.
But, again, in order to claim nonfictional status, an author can’t disguise identities and locations with fictional names.