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Friday, August 18, 2006
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Bloody Good What makes Truman Capote's prose in In Cold Blood supremely good?  Let's hitch up our pants and mosey over to the first page. The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Capote knows how to set a scene and set a mood at the same time. Throughout the book, he's going to find ways to infuse an extremely plain location housing extremely plain lives with the human oddness and spiritual eerieness that underlie all earthly locations if you dig deeply enough. Much like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Truman Capote in In Cold Blood will raise the lives of ordinary people to a high nobility, to an intense aesthetic and moral value. He will honor them - and the country whose heartland they inhabit - in a way only the greatest writers can. He will intuit and express their profoundest and most beautiful truths, and make them immortal. Notice he's already compared their grain elevators to Greek temples, and called their landscape awesome. In the next paragraph, he'll describe the buildings of their town as a "congregation." These words and phrases hint at the holiness of the place, the slow pensive nature of the pious lives there. His narrative eye now focuses more intently on Holcomb itself: Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see -- simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - DANCE - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold in a dirty window - HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches. There are strange antiquities among the words Capote has chosen to describe this Kansas town: words like "hamlet." Certain phrases, too, have a classical or Shakespearian echo to them: "the dancing has ceased," "unnamed, unshaded, unpaved." His diction, we begin to see, is strangely elevated for so lowly a place. He will play on this paradox throughout: The plainest of plain American towns will be transfigured, through the sympathetic depth perception of the great writer, into a lofty and sacred space. Third paragraph, and his writer's eye moves in yet more closely: Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling, sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy, the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do - only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a cafe - Hartman's Cafe, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is "dry.") Now the language is not so much classical as baroque. Capote will not uncritically admire this place and its people: he will note its grotesques when they come along. And again, he'll note them through this disjunction between formal language ("presides," "melancholy," "proprietress") and a setting most of us would consider the very opposite of baroque. We are being eased not merely into the underlying nobility of this place, but also into its shadows, where things resemble Kafka's Metamorphosis, with its mix of the dully real and the terrifyingly surreal. (The epitome of this mix will be the Kansas murderer Lowell Lee Andrews, who shows up toward the end of the book -- he shares death row with the Clutter killers. Capote's at his spectacular best evoking the bizarre disposition of Andrews, "an enormous, weak-eyed boy of eighteen who wore horn-rimmed glasses and weighed almost three hundred pounds. [He] had been a sophomore at the University of Kansas, an honor student majoring in biology. Though he was a solitary creature, withdrawn and seldom communicative, his acquaintances, both at the university and in his home town of Wolcott, Kansas, regarded him as exceptionally gentle and 'sweet-natured' (later one Kansas paper printed an article about him entitled: 'The Nicest Boy in Wolcott'). But inside the quiet young scholar there existed a second, unsuspected personality, one with stunted emotions and a distorted mind through which cold thoughts flowed in cruel directions." A farcically pure nihilist, Andrews reads the last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov and then shoots his whole family to death while they're watching tv. He confesses to his minister, "The Reverend Mr. Virto C. Dameron, a Dickensian personage, an unctuous and jolly brimstone-and-damnation orator...") Capote's introductory paragraphs take us closer and closer in to the town of Holcomb, all the while maintaining their odd eloquence of address (the farmers "must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation," the last few years have had a "droughtless beneficence," in their lives preceding the "somber explosions" of the guns that killed the Clutters, the townspeople had been "theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors"). This complicated dance between ordinariness and surreality, plainness and nobility, niceness and nihilism will sustain itself throughout the book, until, in its last pages, we join the consciousness of the lead Holcomb investigator of the Clutter crime, a man who has had to admit and contend with these forces throughout. He watches Perry Smith hang and thinks: "[He] possessed a quality, the aura of an exiled animal, a creature walking wounded, that the detective could not disregard." The empathy of the detective, the empathy of the writer, extends even to this surpassingly vicious man. And then we follow the detective to the Clutter grave as the book ends. We are told that, though a "Spartan people," the founders of the nearby town where the cemetery is located decided to make the graveyard as beautiful as they could, "a dark island lapped by the undulating surf of surrounding wheat fields." We began with the wheat, and we end with it, as the detective leaves the graves: [S]tarting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. |