ARGUMENTS
253
to report and his own sensibility. Just as Mr. Capote went West for
The New Yorker,
Agee had gone Sputh on commission from
Fortune
magazine. But Agee's "assignment" had at once yielded in importance
(perhaps perversely, but this is of only tangential, chiefly biographical,
interest) before the imaginative possibilities of the material which
presented itself to him. He comprehended only subjectively the world he
had set out to describe--in splendid lyrical bursts, he castigated, and
eventually celebrated, himself for being a well-fed man, a middle-class
man, a writer (of all improbable human apparitions!) daring to spy
upon lives this remote from
his
own.
It
turned out that this subjectivity
was so intense that it largely dominated the object under investigation;
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
implicates us much more with its
author than with the sharecroppers. Its bias also distorted the social
actuality on which Agee was supposed to be reporting-surely people
are not, as
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
would have it, innocent
in proportion as they are miserable and poor, nor can one readily sup–
pose that sharecroppers are the superlative instance of humankind that
Agee, in his impulse to self-abasement before suffering, makes them out
to be. Nevertheless, by licensing his consciousness to prevail over external
fact, Agee was able to create an artistic reality, that of his own felt
experience. His book intensified our capacity to feel acutely about some–
thing,
if
not about sharecroppers.
Truman Capote's method is exactly the opposite. It was Mr. Capote's
decision to report the Clutter case wholly objectively, in as much as
possible of its manifest social and personal complication, and to give us
both the Clutter family and their murderers without permitting himself
any partisanship to either of the extreme oppositions embodied in the
two sets of characters. Now on first glance this seems an acceptable
enough intention. But, not too surprisingly, it develops that in his sub–
mission to actuality, or factuality, and his abrogation of the artist's right
to emphasize or even to suppress or distort reality for his own purposes,
Mr. Capote prepared for himself an almost inevitable artistic defeat.
The neutrality of his posture announces itself even in his prose, whose
indistinctiveness is of a sort with which we are familiar in popular
writing, where communication is believed to be impeded rather than
created by an author's presence on his page. The social object of Mr.
Capote's investigation remains intact. And the dramatic impact of his
story
is not diminished by the impersonality of his approach. On the
contrary, it is reinforced, but this only makes for a sensationalism propor–
tionate to the horror of the actual events which are being described.
The overtones of
In Cold Blood-if,
in a book so lacking in literary
