The opening words are not quite there, but the essence Truman Capote is striving for already soars from the page as he conjures up the vision of a small community in the heartlands of America where terrible events are soon to unfold.
“Holcomb is a very visible village,” the passage begins, captured in the author’s tight, almost crabby handwriting, “located on high wheat plains of western Kansas, where the air is Swiss-clear and the flat views lonesomely, awesomely extensive.”
Millions of devotees of the book that emerged from these musings will instantly recognise how the sentence differs from the opening line of one of the great books of American 20th-century literature: “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’.”
So begins In Cold Blood, Capote’s account of the November 1959 murder of a local farmer, Herb Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and two of his four children, Nancy and Kenyon. Its publication in 1966 propelled Capote overnight from bestselling novelist – author of Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – to international stardom.
It would spawn the true crime genre that has since grown into a global industry. In his own estimation, Capote, never one to undersell himself, suggested that it marked the birth of the non-fiction novel.
Now, a selection of the mountain of handwritten notebooks, investigative ponderings, courtroom doodlings and sketches of the Clutter family farm which Capote amassed during five years creating In Cold Blood has been published in manuscript form. Drawn from the Library of Congress in Washington and the New York Public Library, the 390-page selection offers insights into the painstaking efforts that lay behind Capote’s seemingly effortless storytelling.
“What struck me was that everything is there,” said Jessica Nelson, a publisher with SP Books, who together with colleagues filtered through almost 200 of Capote’s notebooks in the Library of Congress and six boxes of documents in New York. “Though we know he worked for many years on the book, you can see all of its important moments, all the striking passages, in his notes.”
If the first page of In Cold Blood is there in its initial draft, so too is the last page in abbreviated form.
“Toward trees leaving behind him the big sky, the wind-voices in the wind-bent wheat,” he wrote on one page of notes, laying down the shell of the book’s cheerfully mournful final words.
Another searing scene from the book is enshrined in the notes, in which Perry Smith, one of the two murderers, has been arrested and is riding passenger in a car being driven by Alvin Dewey, the lead detective in the case. An investigator in the back seat asks Smith how much money he and his accomplice Dick Hickock stole from the Clutters. Though it is left unstated, this is in effect the price of four human lives.
“Between forty and fifty dollars,” he said.
It was Smith with whom Capote formed the closest bond during the intense months leading up to the trial, continuing through to the hanging of the two men in April 1965 which the writer witnessed in tears. In a page of notes that do not make it through to the finished book, Capote is candid about his feelings towards the two killers.
“Smith most definitely does not look like a clean cut kid: he couldn’t in anyone’s book,” he writes. “And yet, though in appearances he is less typical than Hickok [sic], is more obviously outré, eccentric, he is not, at least to me, quite as chilling: seen full-face Hickok plunges one’s temperature down to zero – Smith to about 20 above. It is because he is less relentless, more feminine – in fact, very feminine.”
Capote would describe in the book the extraordinary complexity of Smith’s character, a man capable of placing a pillow beneath Kenyon’s head to avoid the boy feeling discomfort before shooting him dead.
In Cold Blood does not shrink from the gruesome violence of the murders. But Nelson was struck by how Capote appears to have softened his language a little between notes and the final book.
“Maybe he toned down the horror?” she said.
In his notebooks, he wrote about the peace of the village being shattered early that morning in November when “sudden savage sounds intervened with the other nightly Holcomb noise”. In the final version, he muted that to “certain foreign sounds”.
In other notes, he described the scene of Nancy’s killing in explicit terms that were also excised from the finished book: “The blast that killed her had splattered the wall with blood, with bits of hair, brain-tissue, and the more [the cleaners] scrubbed the more it spread.”
The new volume gives a taste of the exceptional lengths to which Capote researched his subject and his reporting techniques. He often made sketches in his notebooks to help him visualise the narrative.
One page bears a sketch of Smith dated March 1960. The killer is portrayed in profile with a black hole in place of his eye.
Capote also sketched the Clutter farm. He annotated its lane of Chinese elms leading to the house, “lawn-grass turned brown”, livestock pens and the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad just behind.
He also mapped out the floor plan of the Clutter farmhouse in meticulous detail, showing the bedrooms where the murders happened.
The dual-track nature of Capote’s research is laid out in the manuscripts – part detective, part novelist. He asks himself questions with the tenacity of the police investigator.
What was the estimated time of death, he asked himself. Was the telephone cut outside or inside? What kind of gun was used. Is this a duck-hunting area? “No, pheasant,” he answered himself.
He also itemised the possible motives for the killings:
“1) Teenage thing.
2) Psychopathic pure and simple
3) Psychopathic with gain motive
4) Hatred of anyone in the farm.”
He added: “Possibility disappointed seeker? Someone in debt to Clutter?”
In the end, the $40-$50 answer to his question was more cruelly quotidian than he could have imagined.
All the notes are written by hand, which is how Capote preferred it. He would complete all his drafts by hand – no typewriter in sight.
Many of the pages carry copious revisions and deletions, with some completely scratched out. That gives a clue to his legendary attention to detail.
As he told the Paris Review in 1957, two years before he began work on In Cold Blood, he thought of himself as a stylist. “And stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.”
In Cold Blood, the manuscript by Truman Capote, is published by SP Books and available here.
