TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| In Cold Blood, half a century on Fifty years ago, Holcomb, Kansas was devastated by the slaughter of a local family. And then Truman Capote arrived in town . . .River Valley farm stands at the end of an earth road leading out of Holcomb, a small town on the western edge of Kansas. You can see its pretty white gabled roof floating above a sea of corn stubble. The house is famous for the elm trees which line the drive, giving it the tranquil air of a French country lane. The trees are in poor shape though, and desperately in need of pruning; their branches, leafless now, protrude at wild angles.There's something else not quite right about the setting. There is a large "stop" sign at the entrance to the road, backed up by a metal barrier and a hand-written poster in red paint proclaiming: "No Trespassing. Private Drive." The warnings seem belligerent for such a peaceful spot.The explanation for these warnings lies about half a mile away in Holcomb's local park. A memorial plaque was unveiled there two months ago in honour of the former occupants of River Valley farm: the Clutter family, who lived in that house at the end of the elm drive until one tragic night half a century ago. The plaque carries a lengthy eulogy to the family, recording the many accomplishments of the father, Herb Clutter, and telling us that the family's leisure activities included "entertaining friends, enjoying picnics in the summer and participating in school and church events".Towards the end of the inscription it says that Herb, his wife Bonnie, and two of his four children Nancy and Kenyon, "were killed November 15 1959 by intruders who entered their home with the intent of robbery".That is a very minimalist way of describing a multiple murder that devastated the town of Holcomb, inspired one of the great books of American 20th-century literature and spawned a stack of Hollywood films on that fateful night exactly 50 years ago this Sunday."Four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives." That was how Truman Capote summed up the murders with somewhat greater drama, referring to the four Clutter victims and their two attackers who died later on the gallows. After reading a short newspaper account of the killings, he decided to make the 1,700km journey from his home in New York to Holcomb to chronicle the impact of terrible violence on a small community. The result, six years later, was In Cold Blood. It propelled him to household fame and fortune, and in the process ensured that Holcomb was put on the map, and changed forever, in ways that many of the townspeople did not – and still do not – appreciate.It is hard to think of any murder case involving six relatively unknown individuals that has captured so many imaginations. In Cold Blood has sold millions of copies and been translated into 30 languages. It was made into a black-and-white film of the same name in 1967 and there was a colour remake in 1996. The story of how it came to be written became the 2005 movie Capote, followed by Infamous the following year.Kevin Bascue, the sheriff of Garden City, Holcomb's neighbouring town, is well used to the attention. He spreads out on his office table a set of files relating to the Clutter case, one of which records recent visitors who have come on a sort of In Cold Blood pilgrimage from Italy, Japan and all over the US. Next week Bascue will host a producer from Boston who wants to turn the book into a musical."The fact that someone from New York like Truman Capote felt compelled to come out all this way to tell the Clutters' story I suppose means it's forever going to be ingrained in people's minds," the sheriff says.There are many reasons why In Cold Blood has become so ingrained. There is the precision of Capote's writing, which resonates from the first sentence: "The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there'." There is the depth of his research, which he carried on to the end as a witness at the killers' hanging in 1965.There is also something monumental about the timing of the book. America in 1959 was at a crossroads. It was still bathing in the victory of the second world war and ensuing economic boom. The country was confident and secure, and the body blows of Vietnam still lay ahead.Nowhere was this sense of purpose more evident than in the US heartlands, with their hundreds of tight-knit communities, like Holcomb, scattered along railway lines across the Great Plains. Capote noted with satisfaction that Holcomb itself lies almost in the exact middle of the continental US.If Holcomb was representative of that small-town rootedness that defined 1959 America, then the Clutters were representative of Holcomb. "Of all the people in all the world," Capote quotes a local detective, "the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered."Herb Clutter was an upstanding, dependable character. As the memorial plaque notes, he was involved in the local schools, hospital, church, and was president of the National Association of Wheat Growers – a title that meant something in those days before the advent of mass-production farming."He was a big influence in my life – when you know somebody like that it tends to kind of inspire you," says Holcomb resident Bob Rupp. "He could see above what most people could see, and visualise how things should be."It was Rupp's idea to erect a plaque for the Clutters. He knew the family well. So well, in fact, that In Cold Blood's first chapter heading implicitly refers to him: "The Last to see Them Alive."Rupp was 16 at the time of the killings. His childhood sweetheart of the same age was Nancy Clutter. "She was just a beautiful, outgoing person who had many, many friends. She was just a stand-out individual," he says now.Rupp was indeed the last person to see the Clutters alive – other than the killers – having gone over to River Valley farm on the Saturday night. "Herb was in his study, but Nancy, Kenyon and I sat and watched TV. When the news came on at 10 o'clock it was time for me to leave."He had planned to go that night with Nancy to a midnight movie but Herb had persuaded them to go the night before. Had they gone after all, things might have been different, at least for Nancy. "You never know . . ." Rupp says, then tails off.A few hours after he left the farm to walk home, in the early hours of Sunday, tragedy arrived at River Valley farm in the form of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, recently discharged thieves who had driven 400 miles expressly to rob the Clutter home, expecting to find in it a safe containing $10,000.In Capote's telling, Smith and Hickock were the other, dark side of Herb Clutter's America. They were everything he was not: impetuous, profane, rootless, lost. All Herb's striking moral strength was just as strikingly absent in them.Sheriff Bascue's files contain the killers' confessions. Smith's statement, typewritten on faded yellow paper, is particularly chilling. "That's when I cut Mr Clutter's throat," he tells the officer leading the investigation, Alvin Dewey. "I says, 'Should I shoot him?' and Dick looked at me and he says, 'Yeah, go ahead; go ahead.' I raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger."Hickock's statement, written in the third person, describes the shooting of Nancy. "Before Dick shot her, Nancy said, 'Oh please don't, please don't.'" Another file contains the police forensic photograph of Nancy's body. She is curled up in a foetal position, her hands tied behind her back, blood splattered on her bedroom wall.When they left the farmhouse, leaving behind the bodies of the Clutter parents and their two younger children, Smith and Hickock took with them all the cash that Herb had on him – the princely sum of about $40.Capote doesn't shrink from exploring the brutality of the killers, but he also forces us to consider their wounded humanity. In Perry, in particular, he captured an extraordinarily complex character, one capable of placing a pillow beneath Kenyon's head to make him more comfortable minutes before shooting him dead.If the moral clash between Herb Clutter and his killers lies at the core of In Cold Blood, a clash of a cultural kind lay behind its writing – between Capote and the farming folk of Holcomb whom he came to live among. Capote was 5ft 4in, openly gay, with a squeaky voice and flamboyant fashion sense, as portrayed brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman in his Oscar-winning role in Capote, and Toby Jones in Infamous.Holcomb men, by contrast, dressed then pretty much as they do now. When I meet Rupp he is wearing a baseball cap, blue denim shirt and jeans, and cowboy boots. "The type of person Capote was threw me off right away," Rupp says. "He wasn't the kind of person I wanted to spend time with – he was very, very strange."Nelle Harper Lee, Capote's friend and fellow writer who came with him to Holcomb, once said: "Those people had never seen anyone like Truman – he was like someone coming off the moon."Capote's first few days in town were difficult. Everyone gave him the brush-off. Harper Lee was crucial in overcoming the initial hostility. She had just finished writing To Kill a Mockingbird, and was awaiting publication. She agreed to accompany Capote to act as what he called his "assistant researchist". Her affable southern manner – she and Capote were childhood friends from Monroeville, Alabama – made for a much happier connection with the plain-spoken inhabitants of Holcomb. Rupp recalls that in the one interview he granted Capote, most of the questions were asked by Harper Lee, so much so that "sometimes I wonder who really wrote that book".Delores Hope, who in 1959 was a columnist for the local paper, the Garden City Telegram, also noted Harper Lee's vital role. "Nelle sort of managed Truman, acting as his guardian or mother. She broke the ice for him."Delores and her husband, Cliff Hope, were also crucial ice-breakers. Hope was the Clutters' family lawyer, and arranged for Capote to look around River Valley farm so he could describe firsthand the murder scene. He is one of the few people acknowledged by Capote at the start of the book.As Christmas approached in 1959, Delores took pity on Capote and Harper Lee, imagining them sitting in their hotel rooms with nowhere to go. So she invited them to Christmas lunch. "We asked them to come over at one o'clock," recalls Cliff. "Truman said: 'We'll be there at two.'"Capote arrived at the Hopes' doorstep clutching a bottle of J&B whisky for his own consumption, and from the minute he stepped indoors, as Delores puts it, "he pretty well took over the conversation".While Capote held forth, Harper Lee accompanied Delores into the kitchen, where they bonded over cooking a goose. They became great friends, and remain in touch to this day, despite Harper Lee's reputation, at the age of 83, for being reclusive.The Hopes still live in the same house where they welcomed the odd couple. The simple wooden home, with its postwar furniture, has changed remarkably little, as if stuck in 1959. As they describe Capote's effervescent monologue, you can almost see him sitting on the beige cloth couch, legs crossed, waving his arms around as if starring in his own movie.With the help of the Hopes, Capote and Harper Lee went on to inveigle themselves into the lives of other key figures in town, notably the Deweys with whom Capote became lifelong friends. He and Harper Lee were at the Deweys' house on the night when news came through that the killers had been arrested in Las Vegas. The extent to which Capote won over key figures of the community was such that when he left to return to New York in January 1960 after his first tranche of research, he told a friend: "At first it was hard. But now I'm practically the mayor!"Yet there are few visible relics of of Capote's time in Kansas. In Holcomb, there is River Valley farm that still looks on the exterior largely as he described it. It now belongs to its third set of owners since the Clutters, the Maders; they used to give tours of the property but grew so bothered by the endless stream of In Cold Blood pilgrims that they posted the "stop" sign.In Garden City, the Wheat Lands motel where Capote and Harper Lee stayed, is still there, though a photo of Capote posing in front of the building has been stolen from the foyer. The courthouse where Smith and Hickock were put on trial still stands as imposing as it was then. In the cemetery there are three neat tombstones, all bearing the date 1959: Herb and Bonnie together in the centre, Kenyon on the right and Nancy to the left. Someone has left a vase of blue cloth flowers; it has tumbled over.Those signs apart, the local community is barely recognisable 50 years on. The family farm as the prime social unit, of which the Clutters' was the epitome, has declined and given way to huge mechanised operations producing animal feed. Holcomb, population 270 in 1959, has grown tenfold and is now dominated by one of the world's largest meat-packing factories. It is the last sad irony of Herb Clutter that just a few years after his own violent death, his way of life died too.For Truman Capote the outcome of his sojourn in west Kansas was decidedly mixed. In Cold Blood, which he immodestly heralded as a new form of non-fiction novel, was received with delirious approval; Norman Mailer dubbed Perry as one of the great characters in American literature. The book earned its author more than $2m, which he used to buy homes in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Palm Springs and Switzerland. But by all accounts such heavenly success also went to his head, and contributed to his downward spiral in a haze of lavish parties, drink and drugs. He failed to write another substantial work, and died in 1984.In Holcomb and Garden City, some of the residents welcomed his book. Alvin Dewey, the chief police investigator, championed it to the end. The Hopes too remain fans, cherishing the first-edition copy that Capote autographed for them. But many in the town continue to resent its intrusion, and refuse to talk about it or any of the subsequent films. Cliff Hope puts the ongoing hostility down to Capote's unblinking portrayal of the killers. "Many people thought he should have written about the Clutter family, rather than the murderers."Delores's theory is that some local people have closed minds. "There will always be people who think it's none of anybody's business to come out here and write about their affairs. You will never change their opinions."Bob Rupp has a third view. He says he has never read In Cold Blood, nor seen the movies, and never will. But he believes that Capote was unfair to the Clutters, because he left to posterity a memory of them that is dominated by the gruesome manner of their deaths rather than the wonderful accomplishments of their lives. He still thinks about the Clutters often, hence his idea for the memorial. But he has moved forward. He married in 1963 and now has four children and eight grandchildren.So does he think that Capote's fateful arrival in Holcomb all those years ago has in the long run damaged the town? "I don't know it's really been damaging. I don't think he did the Clutter family justice, is all."Dewey, who nailed the killers and became Capote's good friend, was asked the same question before he died in 1987. "What happened, happened," was his answer. "Four good people were murdered. An author came and wrote a book about it. In all communities, things happen. Good and bad. Those are the facts."Truman CapoteUnited StatesHarper LeeEd Pilkingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: A Springsteen Band Mate Tells Stories, True or Imagined, Out of E Street There’s not much that’s positive to say about this memoir from Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen’s colossal saxophone player. feeds.nytimes.com |
John Edwin Smith, Philosopher and Author, Dies at 88 The author’s work tackled large questions about the nature of truth from a pragmatic, pluralistic and specifically American perspective. feeds.nytimes.com |
Return of the King A biography of Charles II, the Restoration monarch, that resonates in the present. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Romantic poets: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt by Lord Byron This week, the Guardian and the Observer are running a series of seven pamphlets on the Romantic poets. To coincide with it, I'm blogging daily on one of each day's selected worksIt was the publication in 1812 of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that brought the young Lord Byron the success he needed to pay off his debts ("I awoke one morning and found myself famous"). Written in the nine-line stanza of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, this account of a young aristocrat's Grand Tour in Europe and the Middle East flirts self-consciously with an archaic genre, the Romance, or, as Byron subtitled his poem, 'Romaunt'. It hardly mattered to his admiring readers that Harold made an unconvincing young pilgrim-knight in an under-plotted script. They were in on the autobiographical secret, and Harold attained immediate notoriety as the "Byronic hero". The presentation of an attractive, fashionably disillusioned personality in a series of fascinating foreign settings is successful, and such a ploy doesn't need much of a plot-line.The first part of the "Pilgrimage" is colourful, panoramic, politically impassioned. As an appealing, and revealing, innovation, Byron adds informative and sometimes witty footnotes about the places and people he encounters, ensuring that the reader participates in the tour: it's almost the equivalent of a TV documentary at times, with the poem giving us the pictures and the prose notes the explanations. But as verse-writing, to be frank, a lot of it is fairly unexceptional. The full potential of the writer, uniting all the disparate parts of his genius – his ruthlessly comical social insight as well as his romantic agonies – would perhaps only be fully consolidated in his great masterpiece Don Juan. But the Childe Harold "concept" is still to undergo important developments, when, around eight years after the first instalment, while living in Italy, Byron writes the two further Cantos that complete the project. The genre of the personal/celebrity travelogue is still intensely popular, and has produced some great imaginative prose-writing, as well as some truly crap TV. It doesn't matter how fascinating the places visited, if the protagonist is more fascinated by his own ego. Byron excels both as an observer of himself and his surroundings, and in combining each level of perception to enhance the other. He drops the mock-Tudor diction and the posturing, and the feeble attempts at establishing Harold as an independent persona. Byron the rigorous thinker "comes out" as himself – and his writing discovers fresh nuance and depth as a result. There are many great set-pieces in Canto III: one of the best is the account of the Battle of Waterloo, which is brilliantly contrasted (that televisual imagination again) with the revelries and seductions of the grand ball held by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels the night before. Then there are meditations on Napoleon himself, on Rousseau and the French Revolution and the grandeur of the Alpine landscape. Byron brings history and historical ideas alive. He also becomes a bit of a Wordsworthian, positing the splendours and spirituality of nature against the human world. Is this a genuine conversion to the philosophy of the Lake poet he so frequently mocked? The quality of the writing suggests that Byron's disbelief has at least been successfully suspended.But it's Canto IV that reveals the full mastery of Byron's control. If we'd imagined at the beginning of the narrative that the goal of pilgrimage was Greece, this Canto disabuses us: it's Italy ("The garden of the world, the home/ Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree") and, ultimately, Rome. The poet's visit to the Coliseum inspires particularly charged description. Byron is a fantastic painter of sea and mountains, but he comes into his own when working with an admixture of manmade and natural material. His ivied tombs and sky-framed ancient columns are never vulgarised by an excess of Gothic shadows. He registers horror where appropriate, as in that brilliantly curbed allegorical image, "Murder's bloody steam", and releases a few darts of stinging sarcasm about the mob and "the bloody Circus' genial laws", but he is also a modern-minded conservationist concerned about the effect of "the brightness of the day" on the excavated fabric.The passion for political liberation goes on flaring, conscious, now, of tragic paradox in a context of shattered empire. Revolutionary fervour is tempered by a sense of the cyclic nature of history: "The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,/ These sepulchres of cities, which excite/ Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page/ The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage." The poet's emotional cycles harmonise more happily: hope and despair, emotion and objectivity, balance each other out. Byron is a great Romantic poet, but this greatness owes much to the Augustan quality of his intellect.The poet, like Yeats, pursues "the quarrel with himself" in the company of an immortal pantheon. He has been brooding on personal betrayal, a gamut of "mighty wrongs" and "petty perfidy". Now, as he resists his drive to self-pity, he conjures a mysterious "dread power" that might perhaps relate to the "soul of my thought" liberated by a meditation on artistic creation in Canto III (stanza VI). But, if artistic immortality is on his mind, it is on an unnamed figure that his eye rests and lingers - the sculpture of the dying Gaul, previously known as "The Dying Gladiator". There is never the least whiff of the museum about Byron's ekphrastic writing, and the statue is quickly transfused with flesh and blood. Byron shows us, with a novelist's imaginative empathy, how the arena "swims" and fades from the consciousness of the dying man, and makes us share his last, fondly domestic memories. The scene is all the more moving for modern readers, aware of how Byron himself will die.With hindsight, we can see in the "Pilgrimage" a poem that has grown up with its hero: as he becomes more emotionally and intellectually complex, so does the poem, while still maintaining a lively momentum as travelogue. It is in the company of a sombrely reflective poet examining his life, rather than a boyishly posturing Byronic hero, that we enter Rome's ruined corridors of power, to thoughts of the ultimate human matter – dust. From Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage  CXXXVIIBut I have lived, and have not lived in vain:My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,And my frame perish even in conquering pain;But there is that within me which shall tireTorture and Time, and breathe when I expire;Something unearthly, which they deem not of,    Like the remember'd tone of a mute lyre,Shall on their soften'd spirits sink, and moveIn hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.  CXXXVIII The seal is set. -- Now welcome, thou dread power!Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which hereWalk'st in the shadow of the midnight hourWith a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear;Thy haunts are ever where dead walls rearTheir ivy mantles, and the solemn sceneDerives from thee a sense so deep and clear    That we become a part of what has been,And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen. CXXXIX And here the buzz of eager nations ran,In murmur'd pity, or loud-roar'd applause,As man was slaughter'd by his fellow man.And wherefore slaughter'd? wherefore, but becauseSuch were the bloody Circus' genial laws,And the imperial pleasure. -- Wherefore not?What matters where we fall to fill the mawsOf worms -- on battle-plains or listed spot?    Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot. CXL I see before me the Gladiator lie:He leans upon his hand -- his manly browConsents to death, but conquers agony,And his droop'd head sinks gradually low --And through his side the last drops, ebbing slowFrom the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,Like the first of a thunder-shower; and nowThe arena swims around him -- he is gone,Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won.                     CXLI He heard it, but he heeded not -- his eyesWere with his heart, and that was far away:He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize,But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,There were his young barbarians all at play,There was their Dacian mother -- he, their sire,Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday --All this rush'd with his blood -- Shall he expireAnd unavenged? -- Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire! CXLII But here, where Murder breathed her bloody steam;   And here, where buzzing nations choked the ways,And roar'd or murmur'd like a mountain streamDashing or winding as its torrent strays;Here, where the Roman millions' blame or praiseWas death or life, the playthings of a crowd,My voice sounds much -- and fall the stars' faint raysOn the arena void -- seats crush'd -- walls bow'd --And galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud. CXLIII A ruin -- yet what ruin! from its massWalls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear'd;    Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd.Hath it indeed been plunder'd, or but clear'd?Alas! developed, opens the decay,When the colossal fabric's form is near'd:It will not bear the brightness of the day,Which streams too much on all years, man, have reft away. CXLIV But when the rising moon begins to climbIts topmost arch, and gently pauses there;When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,  And the low night-breeze waves along the air,The garland forest, which the gray walls wear,Like laurels on the bald first Caesar's head;When the light shines serene but doth not glare,Then in this magic circle raise the dead:Heroes have trod this spot -- 'tis on their dust ye tread. PoetryLord ByronCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |