ARGUMENTS
257
success. His parents were industrious, honest, clean-living, loyal and
loving. Even after their son had been caught in his crime, they never
deserted
him.
A picture like this controverts our readiest notions about
the genesis of the psychopathic criminal-until we look more closely
and see that, shamed and anguished though they were by what their
son had done, Hickock's parents felt no more actual revulsion (however
mitigated by love) from their son's crime than the son did himself. The
peculiarly awful nature of the Clutter killings reached them only as an
idea-a social idea, so to speak-without an emotional affect appropriate
to the act itself. One is led to conclude that well before Hickock had
arrived on the family scene, the tragic outcome of his life had already
been made emptionally possible for him.
Nor
is
this the only element in the Smith-Hickock story to upset our
too-mechanical psychological assumptions.
If
the two men were unable
to experience guilt for taking human life, this does not mean, as we
might expect, that they were simply lacking in conscience, any kind of
conscience. What someone else might feel about committing murder,
Smith and Hickock would seem
to
have felt about being physically
dirty: washing, shaving, showering, caring for their nails was a major
occupation of their nonviolent hours. Even more demanding was their
concern with language. For Smith, the more literate of the pair, it con–
stituted a measurable and well-exercised superiority
to
Hickock that he
could correct his friend's errors or infelicities of speech, and offer so many
more and better words for communicating the complex life of feeling.
Everywhere on his travels, as far as his last jail, Smith took with him
lists of "beautiful" and "useful" words, obscure bits of information,
poems and literary quotations he had anthologized in substitute for the
education he had missed. He thought of himself as someone who might
have been, who should have been, an artist, and
it
was from his sense
of himself as an artist that he plumbed the depths of his "sensitivity" and
nourished his spirit in self-pity. This was met, on Hickock's side, by a
highly ambivalent respect for so gifted a friend, an envious admiration
which could not but encourage at least his half of their (concealed)
homosexual attachment.
If
we are to say of Smith and Hickock that they
were emotionally incapable of our usual old-established moral valuations,
we must in accuracy add that they were not without other valuations
of a sort
to
which we are accustomed to give moral weight.
But it is not alone Smith and Hickock but the Clutters too, who,
especially as we are shown them confronting their murderers, reveal a
far more complicated personal and social principle than we are
in
the
habit of ascribing to virtuous, substantial, Republican, churchgoing,
civicminded citizens of the Middle West. At the head of the family
