256
DIANA TRILLlN6
to stand trial for the Clutter murders. True, they had been "driven"
to commit these terrible killings
by
forces beyond their control, and
they had none of the emotions appropriate to wrongdoing. Under
psychiatric examination they exhibited a wide range of symptoms of
severe mental disorder. But there is no doubt that they were intellec–
tually capable of telling right from wrong, and knew they had done
wrong in killing the Clutter family; the awareness of wrongdoing may
in fact have given added zest to their criminal acts. None of this com–
plicated pathology could of course be introduced into a court which
abides by the M'Naghten Rule, or certainly not without clinical evasion
or imprecision.
Nor is the Bazelon Rule, which substitutes for the M'Naghten Rule
in
the District of Columbia, a useful advance on the older test for criminal
insanity. According to the Bazelon Rule, a criminal need not stand trial
if he can be proved to be mentally
ill.
But at least one wing of psychiatric
opinion holds it as self-evident that the mere commission of a crime is
indicative of mental illness. The Bazelon Rule, no less than the M'Nagh–
ten Rule, fails adequately to meet the central question of criminal re–
sponsibility-to trace, that is, if only for legal purposes, the chain of
causality in the life of the individual in order to discover in what sense
he can be said to be responsible for the way he is and acts.
By his equal emphasis upon the life stories of Smith and Hickock
and of the family they killed, so that it is in the glaring immediate light
of the
outcome
of the pathologies of the two murderers that we examine
their personal histories, Mr. Capote gives an unusual stringency to the
enterprise of socio-psychological understanding. The presence of the
Clutters within the same pages as the men who so vagrantly murdered
them denies us, or should, recourse to sentimentality; it restrains us, or
should, from sliding too smoothly into the grooves prepared for us by
our present-day preference for the deterministic view of society. Perry
Smith, to be sure, has a life story so casebook as to be a cliche of the
environmental explanation of mental disease and crime. So awful were
the circumstances of his early life---a brutish incompetent father, a
raging alcoholic promiscuous Cherokee mother, a vicious Catholic orphan–
age, ignorance, poverty, degradation-that the question in our minds
is not how did this man come to be as he was but, rather, how did his
sister manage to salvage herself, if we can think it salvation, for her life
of tortured respectability? But the Hickock story is different; Hickock
is not at all the social victim, or at least not in the sense of being a
product of gross want, mistreatment and neglect. While he was disad–
vantaged economically,
it
was in circumstances which according to old–
time fable are supposed to make for the peculiar American heroism
of
