In Cold Blood

Capote at River Valley Farm

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood dramatises one significant battle in the great war between good and evil. On the side of righteousness we have the Clutter family of the small hamlet of Holcolm, lost in the midst of the vast farming plains of Kansas. The Clutters represented a pure kind of American respectability, an honest, hard-working family who loved one another and held a prominent place in the heart of their community. ‘Of all the people in the world,’ a detective told Capote at the time, ‘the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.’ Only Mrs Clutter, the neurotic Bonnie, provided her own small tremor in the midst of all this serene goodness, a gentle hint that one could be well off and settled and accomplished and yet not guaranteed happiness. On the side of evil, magnifying that little thread of instability in Bonnie Clutter to terrifying proportions, were Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, two ex-cons who had teamed up after Dick had received a tip-off in prison about the Clutters and their wealth. They planned a burglary that would leave no witnesses. They left the Clutter household dead, but with a mere $40 and a transistor radio. The safe supposedly containing £10,000 had never existed, except as a fantasy and a lure.

There is so much in this book that is genuinely frightening, even beyond the unsuspecting innocence of the family. As Truman Capote painstakingly recreates the events of that night, there are numerous points when they could have turned back or turned away, left the Clutters alive if scared out of their wits, given up sensibly when the point of the burglary proved illusory. Why did the Clutters have to die? In the end it’s almost impossible to say because the murders were so oddly motivated; they happened because it was the only part of the plan that could be accomplished, they happened through frustration and fear, and out of pride and bravado as it played out between the dysfunctionally attached criminals, Smith and Hickock. And it happened because someone always has to pay for another’s pain. When asked why he had killed the family, Perry Smith replied: ‘I was sore at Dick. The tough brass boy. But it wasn’t Dick. Or the fear of being identified. I was willing to take that gamble. And it wasn’t because of anything the Clutters did. They never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.’

As Truman Capote’s narrative extends beyond the night of the crime, into the investigation and then the capture and trial of Smith and Hickock, it’s the warped personalities of the criminals that begin to dominate. Capote does an extraordinary job of evoking sympathy for Perry Smith while saying nothing that in any way expresses sympathy for him. But Smith is the most comprehensible of the partnership. His was a terrible childhood, his parents’ early divorce leaving him uprooted and poor in the so-called care of a mother who was an alcoholic. Turning early to petty crime, Perry ended up in a series of juvenile reform homes that sound far worse than any adult prison. In one, run by nuns, his persistent bed-wetting resulted in nightly immersion in a tub of cold water, held under until he nearly drowned. He received almost no education, but like many criminals, his intelligence was higher than average and he deeply resented his lack of opportunities. There was clearly a damaged streak running through his family – out of the four siblings, one sister committed suicide, one brother killed his wife and then himself, and Perry was in and out of jail. The psychiatrist’s report on him that was never submitted as evidence at the trial describes him as a paranoid personality, suspicious and mistrustful towards others, believing them to be laughing at him, overly sensitive to criticism, often reading it into innocent remarks, longing for stable love and affection but convinced he will always be betrayed. The strange conflicts in his personality manifested themselves in the way he carefully placed pillows beneath the head of the Clutters’ youngest son before shooting him through it.

Dick Hickock, however, is another problem altogether. Thief, conman and fraudster, the impetus for the Clutter burglary, the driving force of the partnership, and a man with a penchant for young girls, Hickock came from a good, loving family who brought him up in secure circumstances. He did well at school, had a series of reasonable jobs, but when he needed more money to pay for the three children he had by his teenage wife, he turned to crime. It seems that he was unable to tolerate frustration or envy the way most people do, and he possessed no sense of moral responsibility. Even though he knew a thing was wrong, he went ahead regardless. For me, Hickock was the truly terrifying element of the crime, as there is no apparent reason at all for the demonic elements of his character. He had suffered a severe head injury in an accident, and claimed that he had periods of blackout and migraines subsequently that enhanced his antisocial tendencies, although the doctor who assessed them both could not establish any brain damage and could only say with some certainty that he displayed the signs of a personality disorder. Right up until the end, Hickock proudly proclaimed himself ‘a normal’ and believed that he was the victim of injustice, given he had never killed any of the Clutters. Quite what happened on that night remains unclear; Perry Smith changed his statement to say he had committed all the murders because he thought that Hickock’s mother was a good, kind woman who didn’t deserve to spend the rest of her life thinking that her son had been responsible for atrocities. It was clear, however, that Hickock’s mother did suffer terribly for her son’s crimes, despite this gesture.

In Cold Blood is deservedly a classic for the way it takes the reader so deeply into the black heart of criminal behaviour, so unflinchingly into the ease with which lives turn to the bad and horrific consequences result. Small wonder that Capote suffered so in the writing of it. Its meticulously detailed approach from a neutral standpoint makes for a brilliant evocation of the complex personalities involved, as well as the arduous hard work undertaken by the investigators. This was a crime that could so easily have gone unsolved; that a sheer fluke delivered the perpetrators into the hands of the law says…what, I wonder, about natural justice? I’d like it to say something, but in all fairness Capote’s narrative insists with admirable honesty that bad things happen and good things happen and we rarely understand why. I thought this would be a hard book to read, but in fact I was simply engrossed by the action as it unfolded, and I have no difficulty turning out the light at night to sleep. What In Cold Blood really shows, to my mind at least, is the carefully orchestrated randomness of crime; things come together and things fall apart, and there is nothing one can do other than submit to fate. You are as likely to win the lottery as you are to be murdered in your bed, and in the meantime, the far greater dangers lurk only inside your head. As Capote notes: ‘Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.’

If any other bloggers post on this book for the readalong, do let me know and I will link to your review.

Emily’s review – go read it, so interestingly different to mine!

Harpoons and Horcruxes

A young girl is swimming underwater when her hand is harpooned firmly to the seabed. The friend with her, thinking quickly if brutally, cuts her hand off at the wrist, allowing her to float to the surface and to live. This image comes from a Lawrence Durrell novel and was used in a psychoanalytic book I was reading lately to illustrate how the mind splits to cut us off from hopeless attachments, leaving them behind as lost limbs while we struggle back up to the surface of life, damaged and reduced but still breathing. For some reason, I found the image hypnotic; I couldn’t get my head around it, or figure out why I kept returning to it obsessively. It was being used as metaphor for a particular sort of situation in the book I was reading – one in which the love a child gives to its mother is rebuffed or unrecognised. No child can figure out the reasons behind a mother’s behaviour, nor can it simply convince itself that the love given need not be reciprocated. Instead the whole sorry mess has to be cut away, left behind. The therapist offered two types of people who might result from such circumstances: the emotionally distant individual who treats people (probably politely, even charmingly) as interchangeable, and the person who dedicates their life to a cause or an abstract ideal. In either case, belief in a fulfilling, mutual, real human relationship is missing.

I’m sure there are all kinds of other possible outcomes given that the original problem here is described as the experience of  ‘emotional trauma’ and there are all sorts of other ways of undergoing that than with mothers in childhood. I was wondering how many bits of ourselves we leave pinioned to other failed relationships, with siblings, or admired teachers, or former best friends? How much gets impaled on the barren rock of failed dreams and ambitions, when the love we want to give to ourselves gets turned away by awkward, humiliating circumstances? Rather than undertake the hard, tedious work of sorting it out, thinking it all through or just feeling the negative emotions such situations cause, it often seems so much easier to chop it all away, leave it behind, even if something useful and necessary is left behind with it.

This line of thought led me to thinking about the way that Voldemort, in the final Harry Potter novels, turns out to have siphoned parts of his evil vitality off into horcruxes, which have been hidden about the country. This is why Voldemort is so weak in the earlier instalments of the series – he has put parts of himself in safe keeping, locked away in the magical equivalent of mini storage units. I think the real originality of the Harry Potter novels is the brilliant psychological symbols that J. K. Rowling dreamed up: the dementors as the embodiments of depression, the Boggarts, irrational fears that need to be banished by a spell that renders them ridiculous, the ‘howlers’, angry letters from parents that screech and blow up in a puff of flame, startling all the witnesses. The horcrux is another pertinent symbol, of the way in which we lock away parts of the self that we think of as ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ (it’s no coincidence that Voldemort is composed out of their contents). We fear that if we let them out then they may just run rampage – their dark power seems too great to be controlled. Better to put them under house arrest, confined to a small, well-armoured space. And yet without them we are weaker, lacking energy, vitality, resilience.

How easy it is to end up with only a fragment of our former selves available to us! Between the bits that get harpooned and the bits that get locked up in horcruxes, we may find we are left with only a small amount of psychic and emotional space in which and with which to do battle. How easy it is to lose access to all sorts of things that might be essential, good things like confidence, self-esteem, belief in loveability, that are skewered on some old lost cause, and the bad-good things like self-protective anger, stubborn resistance, the sort of guilt that makes us work towards reparation, all imprisoned in a personal Pandora’s box. There is, after all, no quality, no emotion, that is not extremely useful to us; it is fear of not being able to use them properly, or a radical lack of trust in their effectiveness that means we block off the exit routes to them.

But why, I wondered, was I so caught up by these images? And finally the answer came to me: I have always loved the idea of spiritual freedom (the goal towards which we may all covertly be headed) as a beautiful term which, rather like the Adirondacks, sounds wonderful but fails to unite with any clear mental picture in my mind. What harpoons and horcruxes offered me were images of the direct opposite – the forms of psychic imprisonment that hold us away from spiritual freedom. Freedom is the feeling of having our right hands returned to us, of unlocking the contents of those internal safe boxes, letting in the air and the light. We all tend towards integration; we want those bits back, never mind that we try to convince ourselves that it’s hopeless over and over. And all the psychoanalytic theory promises us that we can and do heal, quite easily. It’s pulling the harpoon out, all rusty with age and covered over with barnacles, it’s finding the key to the padlock, thrown carelessly away, that takes the time and the effort. This is freedom, I think, no more and no less than having access to all the parts of ourselves, which sounds easy enough but is incredibly difficult to achieve. It has to be an ideal, which we can at best approximate, but all forms of freedom are so essential, so vital, that it’s worth any amount of effort.

On a slightly different note, the Amnesty International bookstore where I work is holding its own little prize award for the best book about freedom. We’re trying to compile a list of books that our customers can vote on. Problem is, I can think of hardly any books about freedom, other than a) Jonathan Franzen’s novel of the same name, b) Roots, by Alex Haley and c) John Stuart Mill’s book On Liberty. Oh I suppose a possible d) could be Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Women. Surely there must be lots of others! Suggestions most welcome, please.