Truman Capote and the Canon

Abstract

When I had a phone call a few weeks ago to say that Revenge Tragedy had won the Truman Capote Award, I experienced a rush of elation only slightly tem pered by the doubt that the man at the other end of the line?who did sound like my idea of an eminent American writer?might not really be Frank Conroy but a transatlantic hoaxer. A fax from Connie Brothers at the Writers' Work shop convinced me of my good fortune, but, once I'd got used to that, I found something else to worry about: why did my big study of literature and violence since antiquity make no reference to Truman Capote, my benefac tor? He was, after all, the author of a famous book about multiple murder. As I quickly discovered, that factual novel of 1965, In Cold Blood, is a remarkable work?psychologically penetrating and brilliantly written. On the face of it, the murders which it deals with aren't about revenge at all. Though cruelly planned they were arbitrary: the work of a couple of drifters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who got it into their heads that the Clutter farm stead, in rural Kansas, was a good place to steal cash from, and who, in their frustration at not finding the money they expected, committed a series of killings which left most of a family dead. Interestingly, though, as so often in representations of violence, the principle of retribution significantly struc tured events. For many of those involved, including Hickock, the executions which ended the story were a form of legitimate revenge. And as Capote searched for motives, he found himself examining the traumatic early life of Perry Smith. Like one of the psychologists on the case, and like Smith him self, he concluded that, in killing Mr. Clutter?the murder which triggered off the carnage?Smith was paying back all the people who had treated him badly in life, especially his own father. By the time I'd finished In Cold Blood, the paradoxes and perplexities which had prompted me to write Revenge Tragedy were clamoring for attention again. What penalty (as Hamlet wonders) can adequately punish murder without