252
DIANA TRILLING
CAPOTE'S CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
One can dispose quickly enough of the issue Truman Capote
has
himself made salient in discussion of his
book1-In Cold Blood
is
not a novel, as Mr. Capote would have us think; it is "only" a book, a
work of journalism of an exceptionally compelling kind. Whatever else
it mayor may not
be,
the novel is a literary fOIm in which the writer
is
free to make any use he wishes of material drawn from
real
life. It
was Mr. Capote's decision to stay wholly with the facts of the Clutter
murders; in their presentation he employs various strategies learned in
his
practice of fiction. This does not mean he has discovered a new fic–
tion form nor-for that matter-a new form of nonfiction. Works of
autobiography such as Isak Dinesen's
Out of Africa,
works of
history
such as Cecil Woodham Smith's
The Reason Why,
works of journalism
like James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
are all at least as
close to, or far from, proposing a new nonfiction form as Mr. Capote's
In Cold Blood.
Indeed, a comparison of Truman Capote's report on the Clutter
murders with James Agee's report on the condition of the sharecroppers
during the Depression is useful in demonstrating some of the accomplish–
ments, but more of the shortcomings, of
In Cold mood
even as a work
of nonfiction. That Mr. Capote's prose is flaccid, often downright inept,
and that his narrative is overmanipulated in order to keep things at a
constant high pitch of suspense: these are defects apparent without
reference to Agee's uncommon talent. But it is in the difference in their
approaches to the journalistic enterprise that comparison makes
its
sharp
-but not
simpl~point.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
was conceived not in loyalty to
fact but in
its
author's loyalty to himself as an artist; which is
to
say,
in the interplay between the actuality on which Agee had undertaken
1.
IN COLD BLOOD. By Truman Capote. Random House. $5.95.
