Animals in Exile: Criminal and Community in Capote's "In Cold Blood"

Animals in Exile: Criminal and Community in Capote's "In Cold Blood"Author(s): George R. CreegerReviewed work(s):Source: Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, Bd. 14 (1969), pp. 94-106Published by: Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbhStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41155637 .

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Animals in Exile: Criminal and Community in Capote's In Cold Blood

George R. Creeger

As an epigraph for his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote uses four lines from François Villon's "Ballade des pendus." The lines, which are an explicit plea not to harden our hearts against the wretched, but rather to show pity, address us directly as "Frères humains." The expression, although difficult to translate, may be ren- dered as "brothers in humanity," and it insists on the intimacy of the relationship between us who may die peacefully in our beds and those "poor ones" about to be hanged. We are, in fact, the hanged men's brothers, and we partake, or so the poem insists, of their humanity. It is, I believe, precisely this intimate relationship between the criminal and his "brothers in humanity" that Capote explores in the novel.

The terms of the relationship are intricate, as Capote (like Jean Genet) knows full well; and even at a primary level we encounter psychological difficulty, for most of us might deny that we are the brothers of those who deserve hanging. Rather, we wish to reject the criminal and can readily understand that indomitable spokesman for the community, Mrs. Hartman, when she pronounces the Clutter murderers "varmints."1 We understand with equal ease the attitude of Alvin Adams Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent chiefly responsible for tracking down the killers: poring futilely over the "twenty blown-up glossy-print pictures" of the dead bodies, he hoped that

he might "suddenly see something," that a meaningful detail would declare itself: "Like those puzzles. The ones that ask, 'How many animals can you find in this picture?' In a way, that's what I'm trying to do. Find the hidden animals." (p. 83)

If "animals" is a less brutal term than Mrs. Hartman's "varmints," it is no less generic, and its function remains the same, for by it the speaker deprives the killers of their humanity and effectively exiles them from the community in which he lives.

Perhaps the principal community in Capote's book (at least at a symbolic level) is Garden City, Kansas, a town of some eleven thousand people and more than twenty churches, (p. 266) By no means unfamiliar with animals, it possesses "a big, rambling park complete with a small menagerie ('See the Polar Bears!' 'See Penny the Ele-

phant!')" and "placid residential streets where animals and children are safe to run free." (p. 33) Yet not all the animals running free in the streets of this Garden confirm the idyl, for among them is a pair of gray tomcats.

. . . thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight . . . [when] they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scruti- nize the engine grilles of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travellers from

1 Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, New York, 1965, p. 230. (Hereafter page references will be given, as often as possible, within the text of the article itself. Occasionally, where quotations are taken from the same page of the book, I shall let a single reference do double or even triple duty.)



Animals in Exile: Criminal and Community in Capote's In Cold Blood 95

afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds - crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle.2

The slaughter of these birds takes place on the plains surrounding Garden City, pre- sumably where a different kind of slaughter took place during the early history of the town: founded soon after the Civil War, Garden City owed much of its subsequent growth to the activities of one C. J. (Buffalo) Jones, who late in life spent his time "haranguing street groups against the wanton extermination of the beasts he himself had so profitably slaughtered." (p. 32) Holcomb, on the other hand, where the Clutter family lives, has a somewhat less dramatic history: called originally Sherlock, it took its permanent name from a stranger, a "lhog raiser,'" according to Mother Sadie Truitt. Having made a lot of money raising hogs for slaughter, he "'decided the town ought to be called after him. Soon as it was,'" Mother Truitt continues, "'what did he do? Sold out. Moved to California.'" (p. 66)

The buffalo, of course, are gone, and we hear nothing further of hogs; but pheasants still abound. Every autumn, when the grain fields around Holcomb spread "lion-colo- red" (p. 12) under a declining but beneficent sun, great flocks of the birds come to feed. The time of year is, in fact, called "pheasant weather,"3 a kind of Indian summer that gives the region its only true taste of seasonal glory. Such weather greets Mr. Herbert W. Clutter, "Master" of River Valley Farm, when he steps outside his large, forty- thousand-dollar home on a quiet Saturday morning, an apple in his hand. Having eaten the apple and fed its core to Babe, a fat work horse and family favorite, he moves toward a small grove of fruit trees. He is accompanied by Teddy, his son's dog - a stray, part collie, and gun-shy.4 Passing through the orchard, the Master walks beside the river, where he encounters a party of

five pheasant hunters from Oklahoma. The pheasant season in Kansas, a famed Novem- ber event, lures hordes of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past week plaid-hatted regiments had paraded across the autumnal expanses, flushing and felling with rounds of birdshot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds. By custom, the hunters, if they are not invited guests, are supposed to pay the landowner a fee for letting them pursue their quarry on his premises, but when the Oklahomans offered to hire hunting rights, Mr. Clutter was amused. "I'm not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you can," he said.5

2 P. 246. Cf. the explicit connection Capote draws between them and Perry Smith: "Mrs. Meier explained that the cats were hunting dead birds caught in the vehicles' engine grilles. There- after it pained him to watch their maneuvers: 'Because most of my life I've done what they're doing. The equivalent.'" (p. 264) For a somewhat comparable use of imagery, cf. the description (p. 54) of the windshield of the murderer's car, filthy with "the slime of battered insects."

3 P. 77. Cf. Also pp. 13 and 58; and for the remarkable Indian summer that lasts through Christ- mas, pp. 113 and 204.

4 P. 12. Capote, who makes a good deal of the representative power of the animals belonging to the Clutters (notably Babe, and Nancy's cats), lets Teddy suggest one of the most enigmatic aspects of the murders - the passivity of the strong father and of the larger, if less well-coordinated son (cf. pp. 13, 65-66, 82, and 236). For Dewey 's perplexity on the subject cf. pp. 82 and 240.

6 P. 13. Capote permits himself a few additional (and comparable) ironies involving pheasants: for example, his account of Mr. Clutter's insurance agent hearing the news of the murder just



96 George R. Creeger

We do not think of Mr. Clutter as a hunter, but his son Kenyon is. While yet a boy, Kenyon had, with a friend, and for both pleasure and profit, conducted "rabbit round- ups," killing as many as "half a hundred rabbits" to be delivered "to the 'rabbit fac- tory' - a Garden City processing plant that paid ten cents a head for the animals, which were then quick-frozen and shipped to mink growers." Still better ("what meant most to Kenyon - and Bob, too") was duck hunting, for it provided the sweet pleasure of "swaggering homeward with a dozen duck dinners swinging from their belts." (p. 39) No less intoxicating were coyote hunts, in which the varmints were pursued in an "old truck with a Model A engine - the Coyote Wagon" :

Not far from River Valley Farm there is a mysterious stretch of countryside known as the Sand Hills; it is like a beach without an ocean, and at night coyotes slink among the dunes, assembling in hordes to howl. On moonlit evenings the boys would descend upon them, set them running, and try to outrace them in the wagon; they seldom did, for the scrawniest coyote can hit fifty miles an hour, whereas the wagon's top speed was thirty- five, but it was a wild and beautiful kind of fun, the wagon skidding across the sand, the fleeing coyotes framed against the moon - as Bob said, it sure made your heart hurry, (pp. 38-39)

A hurrying heart and hounded coyotes. Kenyon knows something about both: as a young boy, in whom the devil lurked (p. 17), he had ridden his horse to death, "a beautiful horse, a strawberry stallion," whom Kenyon had loved so much he ceased to regard him as an animal and was even accustomed to kissing him, although the sight of his sister kissing a cat filled him with disgust, (p. 40) But his father had warned him about riding the horse too hard: u<One day you'll ride the life out of Skeeter.' And he had; while Skeeter was streaking down a road with his master astride him, his heart had failed, and he stumbled and was dead." (pp. 40-41) Of course, a horse is not a varmint, like a rattlesnake or a coyote; and the death of such a horse as Skeeter may evoke pity and grief. The deaths of coyotes are a different matter: true varmints, they are not only pursued by excited young boys on moonlit nights in Coyote Wagons; they are also shot by Western ranchers as pests. On the long drive that is to bring two captured animals, Dick and Perry, back to Garden City from Las Vegas, the small caravan of cars passes through bleak country where there is little to see and less to do, except "to read Burma- Shave doggerel, and to count the carcasses of shotgunned coyotes festooning ranch fences." (p. 232)

All of this attention paid to "real" animals is, of course, part of Capote's narrative strategy: in detailing the attitudes assumed toward animals (and frequently the violence done them) by his characters, he prepares us for understanding more fully the relationship between the criminal-animal and the community. Put discursively, this relationship may be defined as follows: in denominating the criminal an animal,6 the community effectively separates him from its own conscious self-image - that of a group of human beings. The category then permits the community to think of the criminal-animal in rather hermetic ways and to use action against him for which there

as he "was plunging a knife into the roast pheasant" (p. 70) and his description of the murder weapon, a 12-gauge Savage shotgun on whose stock was a "delicately etched scene of pheasants in flight." (p. 171); cf. p. 22.

« As not only Dewey does, but also his wife (p. 213) and Mr. Clutter s brother (p. 280). Cf. note 8.




would otherwise be fewer sanctions. The criminal becomes the quarry in a hunt; or, to change the metaphor, an animal in exile - whether that of flight, hiding, incarceration, or ultimately of death. By the kind of grim logic permitted by the category, the principle of violence is violently repressed. Thereupon the rational consciousness of the community may congratulate itself on its triumph and return to the feeling it cherishes so much - that of security. The fatal concomitant of rational consciousness is, however, pride, which often finds metaphoric expression in blindness. One of the nice ironies of the book is the often affirmed and severe myopia of Mr. Clutter;7 another is the set of circumstances surrounding the return of the animal-criminals to Garden City for the trial that will lead to their final exile: as the crowd awaits the arrival of the caravan, the two gray tomcats make one of their disquieting rounds of the Courthouse Square; yet because the interest of the crowd is now on a more interesting pair of animals, the cats are largely unnoticed. Nothing daunted, they proceed about their business, extract- ing with surgical precision the dead birds that have been slaughtered by vehicles speeding toward Garden City - and perhaps the trial.8

If the relationship here defined is complex, it is also ambivalent, as Capote suggests in a brilliant summarizing paragraph:

On an Arizona highway, a two-car caravan is flashing across sagebrush country - the mesa country of hawks and rattlesnakes and towering red rocks. Dewey is driving the lead car, Perry Smith sits beside him, and Duntz is sitting in the back seat. Smith is handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached to a security belt by a short length of chain - an arrangement so restricting his movements that he cannot smoke unaided. When he wants a cigarette, Dewey must light it for him and place it between his lips, a task that the detective finds "repellent," for it seems such an intimate action - the kind of thing he'd done while he was courting his wife. (p. 232)

If the actions that link criminal to captor are less tangible than the handcuffs and chain that define his captivity, they are nevertheless equally strong; and the relationship between the murderer and the detective stands defined as both intimate and faintly perverse.

The extent to which this intimate and perverse relationship permeates the book is everywhere clear, not only in the controlled use of animal imagery but also in various aspects of Capote's narrative technique. For example, there is a heavy reliance, particularly in the first three books, on a calculated, perhaps even naive, alternation of chap- ters, in which one devoted to the world of the Clutters (or of their community, whether Holcomb or Garden City) is followed by one devoted to the killers and their world (usually that of flight or hiding). The function of this alternation is not only to provide the narrative with a strong sense of motion but also to confirm the intimacy of the relationship between the criminal and the community. Thus Book I, Chapter 3, ends with the honk of a horn from Dick to summon Perry; Chapter 4 begins: "'Good grief, Ken- yon! I hear you.'" (p. 17) At the end of Chapter 5 Capote describes the satisfaction Dick feels with the tune-up job he has given the 1949 black Chevy that is to carry him and Perry on their trip to murder the fflutters; Chapter 6 begins: "Nancy and her protégée,

7 Cf. in particular p. 63; for Kenyon's parallel myopia, cf. pp. 38 and 62-63. 8 P. 248. The crowd had much of the appearance, Capote writes, of "expecting a parade, or

attending a political rally" (p. 247), and when it finally "caught sight of the murderers ... it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped." (p. 248)

7 Amerikastudien Bd. XIV




Jolene Katz, were also satisfied with their morning's work." (p. 24) Perry himself is dramatically juxtaposed with Mr. Clutter: in the middle of Chapter 2 we learn that Mr. Clutter drinks neither tea nor coffee (p. 10); Chapter 3 begins: "Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a café called the Little Jewel never drank coffee." (p. 14) At the end of Chapter 12 Capote describes, with somewhat heavy irony, Mr. Clutter's making out a check as "the first payment on a forty- thousand dollar policy that in the event of death by accidental means, paid double indemnity." He then begins the subsequent chapter by having Perry sing a stanza from a familiar hymn:

"And He walks with me, and He talks with me, And He tells me I am his own,

And the joy we share as we tarry there, None other has ever known . . ." (p. 48)

Such juxtapositions abound, and although they are occasionally mechanical, even contrived, they do remind us that no absolute demarcation exists between the world of Perry and Dick and that of the Clutters - or of any other good bourgeois citizens. Some- what comparable but more subtle as a narrative technique are the parallelisms embed- ded in the texture of the story itself. For example, Dick Hickock's constant boast to Perry is that when they do the job at the Clutters, they will "'blast hair all over them walls'" (p. 22) - hair, and blood, too. One of the rooms thus to be plastered and bloodied is that in the basement where Kenyon is shotgunned to death. It is the same room in which he and his sister "had made a paint-splattered attempt to deprive . . . [it] of its unremovable dourness." (p. 38) Of a somewhat different order is the parallelism between the dream of Al vin Dewey's wife, Marie, and the words of Dick Hickock's father: in her dream Marie thinks that Bonnie Clutter has returned to cry aloud: "To be murdered. To be murdered. No. No. There's nothing worse. Nothing worse than that. Noth- ing.'" (p. 154) The father's words are: "They'll hang them both. And . . . having your boy hang, knowing he will, nothing worse can happen to a man.'" (p. 259)

Such parallelisms, though indisputably effective as a means of confirming the relationship between the killers and their victims, are on a small scale, fleeting touches not without their fleeting sharpness, but less powerful, even in their aggregate, than the single sustained parallel that Capote established between Mr. Clutter and Mr. ("Lone Wolf")9 Smith, father of the murderer: both men are loners, partly by inclination, partly because neither seems able fully to love or to elicit love. Mr. Clutter's failure is measured briefly in his opposition to Nancy's suitor, Bobby Rupp - nominally because the boy is a Roman Catholic; but as Nancy confides to Susan Ki dwell on the phone, "'whenever I start to say something, he looks at me as though I must not love him. Or as though I loved him less.10 And suddenly I'm tongue-tied, I just want to be his daughter and do as he wishes.'" (pp. 20-21) A stronger, more enduring measure is that of Mr. Clutter's effect on his wife, who during her marriage with him has been reduced to a profound sense of incapacity, "her voice to a single tone, that of apology, and her personality to a series of gestures blurred by the fear that she might give offense, in some way dis- please." (p. 25)

9 So called a number of times: by Perry's sister (p. 141) and by a mail clerk in Las Vegas (p. 179). 10 The ambiguity of Capote s syntax here I take to be deliberate.




There are many comparable aspects to Lone Wolf Smith's personality: he shares Herb Clutter's independence and competence; and if he does not achieve the remarkable success characteristic of Mr. Clutter, he nevertheless proves himself a talented man, who can build and construct, who can even, like Mr. Clutter, bake,11 but who cannot evoke the love of his children. Each man has a strong sense of absolute law, but for both it comes close to being simply an extension of their private wills.12 Both fathers are also, as the novel seems to suggest, the begetters of killers; it is, after all, Lone Wolf who has taught his son how to trap - and how to hunt. (p. 128) One must assume that the same is true of Mr. Clutter. Of course the form that killing takes with Kenyon is, in ordinary terms, a fairly trivial manifestation of the "satanic kink"; but it is not crowd- ing the book too hard to suggest that perhaps Kenyon dies before his capacity for killing develops and swerves toward victims more serious than rabbits, ducks, and a beloved horse. Confirmation of this possibility I find in the presence, at the end of the book, of two young killers, one of whom at least is clearly a Doppelgänger for Kenyon. To death row, where Perry and Dick await their execution, come Ronnie York and Lowell Lee Andrews. The former is the eighteen-year-old son of a "well-known, well- paid deep-sea diver" (p. 322); together with a nineteen-year-old companion named Latham, he has killed seven people in less than a fortnight. The latter, another eighteen- year-old boy and more precise alter ego for Kenyon is, like the Clutter boy, a loner - brilliant, myopic, physically ill-coordinated, and estranged. Filled with fantasies, "the secret Lowell Lee, the one concealed inside the shy church-going biology student" (p. 312), having locked himself in his bedroom one bitter November night to read the last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, emerged to kill his sister, his mother, and his father with slugs from a .22-caliber rifle and a Ruger .22-caliber revolver, (p. 313) The episode forces one to reconsider Kenyon, in whom the devil lurked, and to wonder if from him too that power of so many names and disguises might not ultimately have leapt to do violence on more than varmints - or Skeeter.

The figure of the father, in any case, dominates not only the life of the true murderer and exiled animal but also that of the scion of the eminently respectable family that is to become the murderer's victims. Yet however respectable the Clutters may be,13 they are also a strange family, for beneath the surface of their lives lie hidden energies - like animals exiled by rational consciousness or repressive fear. The case of Kenyon we have already observed. Perhaps more poignant is that of his mother, most miserably mis- named Bonnie ("For the child that is born on the Sabbath Day . . ."). Her childhood, it is true, had been blithesome and gay; and even following her marriage to Herbert Clutter and the advent of her children (ultimately to number four) there had been moments of happiness. But gradually she had succumbed to a melancholy so profound that it made of her a nearly total recluse. One successful mode of therapy had been to leave home and husband, go to Wichita, and work in a Y.W.C.A. For the pleasure gained, however, guilt took its sure toll, driving her back to the husband whom she both loved and feared (p. 28) and to the family where, as she put it, no one needed her.

11 For Mr. Clutter's baking prowess, cf. p. 9; for Mr. Smith's, p. 128. 12 For Mr. Smith, cf. p. 128 and passim in his long letter (pp. 125-130); for Mr. Clutter, p. 8. 13 So much so that they possess almost the representative power of figures in an Aristotelian

version of tragedy; for this power, cf. pp. 6 and 10 (Mr. Clutter) and 70, 85, and 88 (the family).

7*




(p. 25) Capote recognizes, of course, the complexity of her state, and as the book begins, with Thanksgiving just ahead and Christmas and the marriage of an older daughter not far off, there is a kind of resurgence of hope appropriate to the spirit symbolized by those festival days:

. . . returning from two weeks of treatment ... in Wichita, her customary place of retire- ment, Mrs. Clutter had brought scarcely credible tidings to tell her husband; with joy she informed him that the source of her misery, so medical opinion had at last decreed [italics mine] , was not in her head but in her spine ... a matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and afterward - well, she would be her aold self again. ... If so, then Mr. Clutter could, when addressing his Thanksgiving table, recite a blessing of unmarred gratitude, (p. 7)

But Bonnie's life is snuffed out before we can discover whether the hope had substance, and we are left with the image of her as one whose vitality has fled and who lives a wraith. The cause, Capote clearly suggests, is not only the inadequacy that she feels when matched against her resolute and successful husband but also the fear that he generates in her. Thus, decisions necessary in his absence are impossible for her to make, and she becomes desperate: "What if she made a mistake? What if Herb should be displeased? Better to lock the bedroom door and pretend not to hear, or say, as she sometimes did, T can't. I don't know. Please.'" (pp. 28-29) And to an intimate friend, she wails that shortly her son "'will be grown up - a man. And how will he remember me? As a kind of ghost, Wilma.'" (pp. 29-30)

About Nancy, her daughter, there is apparently nothing but radiant happiness - no darkness, no repressed energy, no hidden animals: she is the "town darling" (p. 7), as Capote reports; but the phrase is somewhat too close for comfort to one used in describing Perry's sister ("everybody's sweetheart"),14 so that it stands ironically qualified. Still, Nancy's only immediate source of distress is Mr. Clutter's opposition to her going steady with Bobby Rupp. (pp. 20-21) This cloud aside, her world is as bright as that of a prelapsarian idyl; or at least as that of Becky Thatcher, whom she plays in a school performance of Tom Sawyer. We think of her as the instructress of a younger girl in the mysteries of baking cherry pies, or as an equestrienne, riding with her friend Susan on the broad back of Babe, the family work horse.15 How pleasant, on hot summer evenings, to guide the horse into the river, while the two girls play their flutes like young pagans in a Golden Age, and the water laves their bare limbs, (pp. 94-95) Yet it is Nancy who, talking to Susan on the phone the day before her death, is forced to confess that she is "eating" her nails: "Much as Nancy tried, she could not break the habit of nibbling her nails, and, whenever she was troubled, chewing them right to the quick." (p. 20)

About Nancy's father there is also no apparent darkness: a man without vices, he is a superb provider and one who can respect such an embodiment of charity as Mrs.

14 P. 185. Originally named Fern, she decided at fourteen to change her name to Joy (loc. cit. and p. 273) - itself a felicitous and mocking parallel to Mrs. Clutter's "Bonnie."

15 Nancy is particularly devoted to animals (p. 84), not only to babe (cl. pp. 94-95, 207, 27 lj but also to a number of cats, including Evinrude (p. 19) and Boobs, who had died under mysterious circumstances (cf. pp. 84 and 102). The pink and white teddy bear in her room (cf. pp. 56, 60, and 78) is part of the images attributed to Perry's recollection of the murder (p. 110).




Ashida, wife of a local tenant farmer. Yet if he is open and candid, he is also rigid, a man whose "self assurance" sets him apart and "while it created respect, also limited the affections of others a little." (p. 36) He is a man for whom "laws were laws" (p. 8), as we discover in his relations with his children, whom his wife once accuses him of lov- ing less than his precious fruit trees, (p. 13) His rigidity is even more clearly revealed in his attitude toward drinking: totally abstemious himself, he refuses to take on hands who admit to drinking. A more than ordinarily bold neighbor once said to him: "'You've got no mercy. I swear, Herb, if you caught a hired man drinking, out he'd go. And you wouldn't care if his family was starving.'" (p. 10) Yet this failure of caritas, though it may run deep, is finally a less serious flaw than a second - namely, a kind of limitation of his imagination. Significantly it is Mrs. Ashida who puts her finger on the weakness (although she herself thinks it is a strength): "'Just nothing scares you . . . I can't imagine you afraid. No matter what happened, you'd talk your way out of it.'"16

This failure of the imagination, if not also of the intellect, is one which Mr. Clutter, as a representative figure, shares with the community at large, whose members, no more than he, can believe in murderous violence as a fact relevant to themselves. The failure is, furthermore, complete: beginning with the inability to perceive (or at least with a desire to deny) the potentiality for murderous violence within the self, it proceeds, by a fatal and perverse logic, to accept, as normal, expressions of violence toward those

(whether in fact or metaphor) whom the community has defined as animals or "varmints." Furthermore, without being conscious of so doing, it powerfully desires the very violence it pretends, in some forms, to abhor; thus it invites the hunters (the killers, the

murderers) into the Garden with the bland but ambivalent remark: "T'm not as poor as I look ... get all you can.'" How pervasive this failure of the imagination is may be tested by examining the major mythic pattern of the book - that of the Garden.

How fortunate Capote is in the matter of names! That he should have at his disposal a city, and a county seat, named Garden City is superbly apposite to his purposes. To demonstrate the ways in which the town represents on a fairly large scale the myth of the Garden, the attempt to recapture Paradise, to fulfill the American dream, would not be difficult; yet finally, in the economy of the book, it is less important than those smaller

gardens that several characters either create for themselves or dream of creating. Per-

haps the most significant one is that of Mr. Clutter, who is reported early in the book as having said, with reference to the aridity of western Kansas, "'an inch more of rain and this country would be paradise - Eden on earth.'" (p. 12) Even without the additional inch of rain, Mr. Clutter has gone a long way toward establishing his private Eden - less in his vast holdings and wealth than in the small grove he has planted and tended so carefully. It stands, significantly, on the banks of a river and consists largely of peach, pear, cherry, and apple trees. It is his attempt, Capote writes, "to contrive, rain or no, a patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden, he envisioned." (pp. 12-13) A pathetic parallel to Mr. Clutter's garden is that of his wife, Bonnie. It lies just outside and beneath her bedroom window (p. 40), and although she is rarely well enough to work in it herself, the hired man and her son tend it carefully, so that

16 P. 36; cf. a repetition of the remark (p. 117). That Mr. Clutter is also, like the murderers, maimed is a fact Capote does not overlook: cf. his description (p. 6) of the mangled remains of Mr. Clutter's ring finger.




when she looks out through the hard transparent glass (the window is always shut, even on the hottest summer day), she can see the small cultivated patch at her feet.

If the Clutters have their gardens, so too have the Smiths: Perry's exists largely in his dreams and daydreams, as we shall see; that of his father, who says of the family that

they've always been "'outdoor folks'" (p. 126), is more substantial: under grim conditions, he fosters a kind of rude Eden in the hostile cold of Alaska (p. 130) complete with Garden of Memories and Wishing Well. (p. 135) If the reality falls short of the dream, it is nevertheless a partial success. More clearly so is the garden of Perry's married sister (not Joy, but a woman called Mrs. Johnson) : lying behind her tidy ranch house in San Francisco, it is a small back garden surrounded by a white picket fence (p. 180), where her children may play, as she hopes, in safety.

Yet another garden is that of Alvin Dewey, who in 1951 had bought two hundred and forty acres

several miles north of Garden City. If the weather was fine ... he liked to drive out there and practice his draw - shoot crows, tin cans - or in his imagination roam through the house he hoped to have and through the garden he meant to plant, and under trees yet to be seeded. He was very certain that some day his own oasis of oaks and elms would stand upon those shadeless plains: "Some day. God willing."17

Apparently, however, it is not the will of God that Eden shall be regained through such efforts: Herb Clutter's Paradise is no sooner established than it is violated by a small plane that crashes into it ("'Herb was fit to be tied! Why, the propeller hadn't

stopped turning before he'd slapped a lawsuit on the pilot"* [p. 13]); and it is through his once violated garden that he walks to the edge of the river and invites the pheasant hunters to come in and get all they can. His wife's garden, separated from her by the

transparent hardness of glass, has already fallen into autumnal decay when her children meet there toward the end of the last day of their lives: "The chill of oncoming dusk shivered through the air, and though the sky was still deep blue, lengthening shadows emanated from the garden's tall chrysanthemum stalks." (p. 40) Out of the flowers themselves darkness seems to spring, as though the principle of violation were not

merely external to the garden but actually inherent. "Crows cawed, sundown was near." (p. 41) Darkness of a different sort descends on Mrs. Johnson's garden, once the detectives (come to ask about her brother) have finally departed:

The front door was locked, but not the door to the garden. The garden was white with sea-fog; it might have been an assembly of spirits: Mama and Jimmy and Fern [Joy]. When Mrs. Johnson bolted the door, she had in mind the dead as well as the living, (p. 187)

And Dewey 's garden is destined to die stillborn; for once the knowledge of murderous violence intrudes directly upon the life of him and his wife, he discovers that

she no longer shared [his dream] ; she had told him that never now would she consider living all alone "way out there18 in the country." Dewey knew that even if he were to snare the murderers the next day, Marie would not change her mind - for once an awful fate had befallen friends who lived in a lonely country house.19

17 P. 105; cf. p. 150. 18 Capote capitalizes both on the central position of Garden City and Holcomb and on the fact of their being "out there."

19 P. 150; cf. p. 341.




Only one garden in the whole book seems immune to violation; it has a name -

Valley View: The pioneers who founded Garden City were necessarily a Spartan people, but when

the time came to establish a formal cemetery, they were determined, despite arid soil and the troubles of transporting water, to create a rich contrast to the dusty streets, the austere plains. The result, which they named Valley View, is situated above the town on a plateau of modest altitude. Seen today, it is a dark island lapped by the undulating surf of surrounding wheat fields - a good refuge from a hot day, for there are many cool paths unbrokenly shaded by trees planted generations ago. (p. 341)

Here, rather than in the dreary storage shed at the State Prison where the killers are

hanged, Dewey is finally able to experience "a sense of climax, release, of a design justly completed." The hanging had proved merely an anticlimax - or worse, almost an

injustice, particularly in the case of Perry. But in the cemetery, whose symbolic function is like that of the one overlooking Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, Dewey finds not

just the memorials of death but also a sense of life's continuing. Here, for the first time since the trial, he encounters Susan Kidwell, who tells him of how life has gone on for her, murder or no murder. Surrounded by death, Dewey nevertheless feels in her presence a reaffirmation of vitality, just as the garden cemetery, by an ancient paradox, asserts itself as an everpresent refuge from the vastness of space, the remorselessness of light - and the loneliness of exile.

But no comparable sense of "climax, release ... a design justly completed" is granted to the killers, and not quite for the obvious if perhaps only pseudo reason that, having turned the final hours of the Clutters' lives into terror, they deserve a comparable measure of terror; although one of them (Dick) does assert that the desire for revenge is the State's only legitimate excuse for execution, (p. 335) Throughout the book Capote's sympathy for the murdered family remains strong; yet it is not, I believe, outrageous to insist that their ghastly fate is not the central issue; rather, it is the question that lies at the heart of the novel: what makes a man a murderer?

The book contains a number of answers, explicit as well as implicit: one supposes that however different Mrs. Myrtle Clare may be from the prison chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Post, they stand in essential agreement about one fact - innate depravity. "Var- mints" is the former's term not only for the murderers but also for mankind in general,20 for whom, under stress at least, she has a pretty profound contempt. The chaplain, on the other hand, is somewhat more charitable, and he quotes with approval "old Doc

Savage," a fictional character who held that evil sprang from a part of the brain that held "wicked thoughts" and believed that if that part could be excised by surgery, all the world's criminals would be transformed into decent citizens, (p. 306) Yet if

pressed, the clergyman might well have to confess that all human brains possess such a

"part" and that in consequence an enormous amount of surgery seems necessary, if wickedness is to be abolished.

On one level Capote treats the idea of healing through surgery jocosely; yet it is clear that there are forms of violent human behavior that have a physiological cause. Dick Hickock is the principal case in point: having suffered a head injury in an auto- mobile accident as a young man, he possesses a face, Capote writes, that

20 Both "varmints" and "rattlesnakes" refer rather often to the lawabiding members of the community (cf. pp. 69, 113, and 191).




seemed composed of mismatching parts. It was as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center . . . with the results that the lips were slightly aslant, the nose askew, and his eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size, the left eye being truly serpentine, with a venomous, sickly-blue squint21 that although it was involuntarily acquired, seemed nevertheless to warn of bitter sediment at the bottom of his nature, (p. 31)

Here the fall of man is presented as a kind of confirming accident, one which is asserted often in the novel, most notably by the young man's father ("'He just wasn't the same

boy'")22 and by the psychiatrist not permitted to testify in detail at the trial, although he had written: "'It is important that steps be taken to rule out the possibility of organic brain damage, since, if present, it might have substantially influenced his behavior

during the past several years and at the time of the crime.'" (p. 295) The case of Perry Smith is of a different order, however, and one that clearly inter-

ests Capote far more than that of Hickock: for the latter surgery might have been an answer, but not for Perry, who though also physically injured ("maimed"), was hurt about the legs, not the head. Yet he bears profound mental scars which are crippling and, for Capote, more pitiable because somehow less necessary than the organically damaged brain of Richard Hickock. Nothing is more impressive in the book than the detailed analysis Capote presents of Perry Smith's character and its development. We are permitted to see it from many points of view: but though we learn much from Perry's father, his sister, his friends, his appointed lawyers and psychiatrist, to say nothing of his enemies, it is finally from Perry himself that we learn the most.

Like all other human beings, Perry lives exiled from the Garden; unlike most, however, Perry has faced an extraordinarily numerous and brutal series of confirmations of his exiled state. It is small wonder, therefore, that in him the sense of rage should be so great and the desire to gain some "patch of ... paradise" so strong: an incessant conceiver of voyages, an inveterate collector of maps (p. 14), he pores over the latter as

avidly as Dewey does over the murder pictures, hoping to find not hidden animals but

simply a place where, if he can reach it, happiness may be his. His fantasies, fed partly by his reading (pp. 14-15), partly by his dreams, define the content and structure of

happiness, as for example in the following passage:

"Nights [in Alaska] I used to lie awake - trying to control my bladder, partly, and partly because I couldn't stop thinking. Always, when it was too cold hardly to breathe, I'd think about Hawaii. About a movie I'd seen. With Dorothy Lamour. I wanted to go there. Where the sun was. And all you wore was grass and flowers." (p. 133)

In other fantasies, conjured between wake and sleep, Perry extends this somewhat naive vision: he projects himself either as a singing star in "a night-club in Las Vegas" (p. 16) or as a fortune hunter in vaguely tropical, southern paradises. In this second

daydream he has the feeling of

21 Cf. the following passage: "Marie, transfixed by Hickock's eyes, was reminded of a childhood incident - of a bobcat she'd once seen caught in a trap, and of how, though she'd wanted to release it, the cat's eyes, radiant with pain and hatred, had drained her of pity and filled her with terror." (p. 164)

22 P. 292; cf. p. 166.




drifting downward through strange waters, of plunging toward a green seadusk, sliding past the scaly, savage-eyed protectors of a ship's hulk that loomed ahead, a Spanish galleon - a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping caskets of gold. (p. 17)

Such enrichments of the fantasy have an element of the conscious in them, and they are not totally unlike Mr. Clutter's grove of fruit trees, Dewey's two hundred and forty acres, or even his sister's garden - that is, what may be actually striven for and even achieved (if only to suffer ultimate violation). But in Perry's fantasy there is a great deal that comes from levels well below that of consciousness - levels of which Perry becomes aware only in true dreams. Of these, one is particularly recurrent; it concerns Africa:

"A jungle, I'm moving through the trees toward a tree standing all alone. Jesus, it smells bad, that tree; it kind of makes me sick, the way it stinks. Only, it's beautiful to look at - it has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere. Diamonds like oranges. That's why I'm there - to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree. This fat son of a bitch living in the branches, I know this beforehand, see? And, Jesus, I don't know how to fight a snake. But I figure, Well, I'll take my chances. What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I'm afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I'm pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but he's a slippery sonofabitch23 and I can't get a hold, he's crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking. Now comes the part it makes me sweat even to think about. See, he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand." (p. 92)

Thus far the dream is a quasi nightmare, but in the second part of it a restoration occurs, miraculously, through a power not human, but at once animal and divine: it manifests itself as a "towering bird," "a yellow 'sort of parrot'" (p. 92)

"taller than Jesus [and] yellow like a sunflower," a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they "pleaded for mercy," then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to "paradise." (p. 93)

"Thus", Capote continues, the snake, that custodian of the diamond-bearing tree, never finished devouring him but was itself devoured. And afterward the blessed ascent! Ascension to a paradise that in one version was merely "a feeling," a sense of power, of unassailable superiority - sen- sations that in another version were transposed into "A real place. Like out of a movie ... a garden . . . With white marble steps . . . Fountains . . . And away down below . . . the ocean. Terrific! Like around Carmel, California." (p. 93)

If in Perry the primordial snake has preternatural power to thrust itself into consciousness, defile his garden, prevent his gaining wealth, and even start to crush and swallow him, there remains a miraculous avenging power. Represented by the great yellow bird, it can destroy not only the snake but also (and retroactively) all the real sources of misery in his life: the nuns who beat him when he wet his bed, "older children, his father, a faithless girl, a sergeant he'd known in the Army." (p. 93) Rarely, however, does anything like the great yellow bird come to his aid outside the dream. There are

23 The ramifications of this dream throughout the novel are numerous. One of the most pertinent is the parallel between the description of Perry's fight with the snake (in the dream) and that of a real fight with his father (p. 136).



1 06 George R. Creeger

a few euphoric moments, as when Dick catches off the Mexican coast a great sailfish that reminds Perry of the yellow parrot (p. 120) and when he and Dick march side by side down a highway, singing a song that Perry had taught his companion: "'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the

grapes of wrath are stored.' " Then it was, Capote continues, that through the "silence of the desert, their hard, young voices rang: 'Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!'"**

But such moments of glory are rare, particularly for Perry. Dick, the tough boy, the

realist, has had kicks enough: holding a light when Perry shot the Clutters; flashing his smile to dupe tradesmen who clearly want to be duped; running down a ragged dog on the highway;25 or putting it to a Mexican whore and asking breathlessly, "'Is it good, baby? is it good?'" not caring that she makes no reply but only continues to smoke a

cigarette, (p. 147) Perry, on the other hand, recollecting the life they had led between the time of the murder and their capture, says that it was like that of animals, (p. 290) Of animals running. Of animals in hiding. Of animals hunted. Of animals caught. In the experience just past there is nothing to compensate for his present state, in which he comes to increasingly clear knowledge that he cannot possibly transfigure the sordid and mundane into anything beautiful and transcendent. The fact is driven home in a final dream that occurs while he is in prison awaiting execution: Voices shrieked at him, "'Where is Jesus, Where?' And once he woke up shouting, 'The bird is Jesus!'" (p. 319) In the dream he was once again Perry O'Parsons, the famous night-club singer; but his

performance elicited no applause, though there were thousands of patrons in the room

a strange audience, mostly men and mostly Negroes. Staring at them, the perspiring entertainer at last understood their silence, for suddenly he knew that these were phan- toms, the ghosts of the legally annihilated, the hanged, the gassed, the electrocuted - and in the same instant he realized that he was there to join them, that the goldpainted steps had led to a scaffold, that the platform on which he stood was opening beneath him. His

top hat tumbled; urinating, defecating, Perry O'Parsons entered eternity, (p. 319)

Thus the dream of all that Perry Smith yearned to be is annihilated even before he

himself is; and he is left with nothing but a confirmed sense of failure and the sad

knowledge of what he is - a murderer. Yet he is a murderer, the book strongly urges, less of his own making than of ours. Something of this Alvin Adams Dewey, his captor,

perceives at the hanging, when Perry looks not like a ravenous beast of prey, but "an

exiled animal, a creature walking wounded." (p. 341) Although animal imagery has

often been used in the novel to deprive Perry of his humanity, this last image helps restore it to him. Under the circumstances it is ironic that in his final words he should

apologize for an act that society had programmed him to perform; but ironic or not,

Perry's apology has the ring of true humanity and reminds us, his "Frères humains," that we are not to harden our hearts against him, but, in the words of the poem, to have

pity on him.

M P. 155. The word glory is closely related to Hickock as a definition of what it is he desires from life (cf. p. 239 and passim).

25 An episode Capote develops in considerable detail (cf. pp. 110, 112-113, 232, and 290).



Documents

Animals in Exile: Criminal and Community in Capote's "In Cold Blood"