258
DIANA TRILLlN6
stands
Mr.
Clutter-and was anyone ever more the head of his family,
more the whole source and apex of its authority? Certainly there was
never such a man of policy,
in
formulated control of every minute and
act of his life, even---or so he would have hoped-of every secret terror.
He not only took
nO
stimulants himself, not even tea or coffee, but
contracted his employees to total abstinence. He disbursed money only
by check, so that every penny could be accounted for to whatever still
higher authority might probe his affairs. He permitted himself no rage,
even kept a dog that was gun-shy. He was a pillar of. his community,
himself so fashioned for respect that he could even depend upon it for
his "nervous" wife, who, after the birth of each of her children, had
wandered always further ' into sadness and uncertainty. But this pillar of
strength was a murderee---or so at least I read the story.
From Mr. Capote's detailed reconstruction of the night of the
murders, Mr. Clutter was not only himself unable to meet the aggres–
sion directed against him by this invasion of his home, he would seem to
have incapacitated
his
grown son and daughter for any self-defense, even
by effective guile. Smith and Hickock were of course armed. But it was
an hour between the time they arrived in the Clutter farmhouse and
the killings. In this period, which included an interval when the family
was locked, untied,
in
a bathroom and several intervals when the two
intruders were separated from each other in different parts of the house,
no one screamed, no one fought, no one tried to drop out of the bath–
room window to run for help.
It
was apparently inconceivable to Mr.
Clutter, and therefore to his obedient son and daughter, that the two
men might do worse than rob them, harm them. Only the poor neurotic
Mrs. Clutter was available to this kind of imagination. Her "fantasy"
was quickly countered by Mr. Clutter's "realism"-it would, one can
suppose, have been a familiar situation as between this husband and
wife.
Indeed, for me, by far the most interesting aspect of Mr. Capote's
book as an American story lies not in the gratuitous violence of the crime
it describes-this
is
not an American invention, though it is as ready to
hand for us as if it were-nor in the dreary circumstances of the lives
of Smith and Hickock---of this we already have some knowledge-but
in the curiously ambiguous personality of Mr. Clutter.
If
Mr. Capote
is
at all a novelist
in
this book, it is, paradoxically enough, as an accident
of his entirely literal reporting of this highly "masculine" character un–
done by his passivity and by-if you will-his lack of actual identity. One
is reluctant (it seems like chic) to draw so exemplary a citizen, a success–
ful teetotaling Republican devout progressive farmer, into the circle of
self-alienated Americans. Yet manifestly this was a man without con-
