25<4
DIANA TRILLING
resonance, we can call them that-are those of a socially-well-documented
story of crime and detection, not of a work of the imagination.
Still, even as we admit the inadequacy of
In Cold Blood
as a work
of literary
art,
it is hard for us to suppose that this alone would account
for the large, odd, often unformulable, reservations which so many
dif–
ferent kinds of readers have about it. These seem to me to
be
reserva–
tions of a moral, or "hum;an," more than of an esthetic nature, and they
derive, I think, from Mr. Capote's stance as the wholly neutral reporter
of facts-from-life which, while themselves so highly charged, are presented
to us by a mind which refuses
to
be adequate
to
their tortuous meanings
or appropriate
to
their terror. By his unwillingness to
be
implicated in
his story, whether by the way he disposes
his
emotions between the
murderers and their victims or by the way he invests his narrative with
the intensity and anxiety proper to an unresolvable moral dilemma, Mr.
Capote is employing objectivity as a shield for evasion. This is what is
resented.
Certain of Mr. Capote's readers would wish he had thrown his
weight to the Smith-Hickock side of the moral equation; these, of course,
are the readers who believe that psychopaths and criminals, because they
live outside the social order, have a special call on our tenderness. There
are other readers who, though immune to the particular appeal of
psychopaths and criminals, feel that in his unquestioning acceptance of
Kansas farmers, members of 4-H Clubs, even KBI agents, Mr. Capote
by strong implication gives his assent to American society in terms long
outmoded in serious writing. Still others accuse Mr. Capote of having
been seduced by personal acquaintance with Smith and Hickock, of
having let himself forget the hide,ousness of their crime and of portraying
them
too
sympathetically.
If
this diversity of negative response requires
some common denominator of disappointment, it must be found in the
sense shared in some dim way by virtually all of Mr. Capote's audience
of having been unfairly used in being made to take on the burden of
personal involvement pridefully put aside by Mr. Capote himself. An
unpleasant critical charge leveled against
In Cold Blood
is that it
is
itself
written in cold blood, exploiting tragedy for personal gain. One does not
have to concur in this harsh opinion (I do not) ; one can even recognize
that if anyone is misused by Mr. Capote it is not the Clutters or their
murderers but we, the public, and still understand what inspires the
charge of exploitation and, however imprecisely, warrants it.
And yet Mr. Capote's book has virtues which are perhaps not
to
be detached from the objectivity of his method. It is full of well-reported
social detail: here at least Mr. Capote handsomely takes over what
was once, in a less subjective day, an important function of the novelist.
