Real Gardens with Real Toads

...His early books were the work of a writer with a gift for surfacesof language, of feeling, of life itself...

...They are the observations of a reader who has been through the story twice...

...No, the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms and A Tree of Night was no master...

...There was shock of an altogether different, more delightful, more sheerly literary kind, too, in the wonderful talk of these figures-that living mid-Western American speech for which our writers of the '20s, so many of them mid-Westerners themselves, had an expert and sympathetic ear, and which they coaxed so successfully into forming a new fictional instrument...

...Capote has filled his book with this talk-has, one may say, cut and pasted his book out of that living speechand not the least of one's pleasure in reading his dreadful narrative was the sense it gave one of what, after all the calculated artifice of recent fiction, that speech could mean again for the art of the novel...

...But it is, all the same, the prose rhythm of a superior reporter...

...For a time, the atmosphere was quite thick with a kind of literary wisteria, behind which one could just barely discern some evidence of the real world-mainly pederasty in various forms of decorative disguise...

...I had never before appreciated the force of Miss I. Compton-Burnett's remark that "Real life seems to have no plots...

...His fiction gave one the sensation of reading something serious and artful while exacting very little in the way of cerebration or even involvement...

...Its detailed accounts of the lives of the murderers-the only lives we are given in any depth-are explanations in a void...

...Capote himself, though he now writes a markedly less florid prose than formerly (the beneficent influence of the New Yorker perhaps...

...Rereading the story now in book form, it is this last deficiency that stands out on every page, that not only renders Capote's claim to have created a new form of the novel mere highfalutin, but clarifies something central to his whole sensibility...

...It is not, of course, that one believes fiction alone to have the requisite moral specifications...

...Reading the story in installments in the New Yorker, alternately impressed and aghast, and certainly too pained and absorbed to question the subtleties and deceptions of craft involved, one accepted the awful tale on its own terms-or what then seemed, in the magazine, to be its own terms-and accepted them completely...

...Admittedly, there is something ungrateful about these strictures...

...It leaves one removed, distant, even a little cynical...

...The vignettes of minor characters were sharp and memorable, yet even their humor and surpassing corniness served to distend still further the shock one felt on first reading the bloody details...

...We are made to feel that, not only in the case of Nancy, the teenage daughter of the house, but with the entire Clutter household, it was a case of virgin blood being ruthlessly and senselessly shed: a slaughter of the innocents, American-style...

...WRITERS & WRITING Real Gardens with Real Toads By Hilton Kramer The belief, apparently widely held, that Truman Capote is a "master" of the art of fiction is not one that critical scrutiny can sustain...

...The narrative is already too familiar to bear retelling here...

...still reaches for something fancy and elevated wherever circumstance permitsand succeeds, too, I think, in effecting a beautiful prose rhythm in this orchestration of plain and fancy styles...

...Still, it is worth insisting that both Capote's real accomplishment in In Cold Blood and its limitations do not exactly correspond to the transcendent object described by this army of heady publicists for whom Capote himself, tirelessly granting interviews, issuing directives, and otherwise overstating his case ad nauseum, has served as both field commander and chief strategist...

...It is not enough that it has something to tell us about our own time, but must be promoted as if it were a work for all time...

...Such works have, first of all, a voice that never feigns innocence, that refuses to separate itself from the events passing before us, that openly acknowledges its own stake in the issues under scrutiny...

...one gave oneself up to his shattering tale, and waited impatiently, week by week, for more...

...But slight as it was, Capote's fiction enjoyed a considerable vogue...

...it is because the press campaign surrounding the publication of Capote's extraordinary new book, In Cold Blood (Random House, 343 pp., $5.95), is so patently designed to suggest that a major novelist has succeeded in turning some kind of literary handspring...

...A writer whose imaginary garden-to borrow a term from Marianne Moore-had never contained a toad one could believe in was, astonishingly, giving us a real garden with toads all too real...

...Capote exploits this counterpoint-first of all, between the enormity of the act and its meager reward, but even more, between the uprightness of the murderd and the lowdownness of the murderers-for all it is worth...

...rereading In Cold Blood, the remark cuts deeper, for Capote has written a book that puts that observation to a crucial test, and ends by confirming its wisdom...

...At a time when news of Faulkner and Henry James was just beginning to get through to a larger reading audience, he brought enough syntactical glitter, Gothic distortion, and simulated intellectual density to his work to make it seem somehow related to the accomplishments of these newly discovered figures...

...It is not enough, apparently, for this book to be very good...

...Capote's fiction was never as meretricious as Tennessee Williams', but, like Williams', its interest lay primarily in its being an episode in the history of taste...

...And from this particular author, the work seemed a miracle of specification about an area of American life no longer written about with much literary intensity, or even with much accurate observation...

...So successful has the author been in keeping himself "out" of the tale that one closes the book mentally searching him out, suspecting at last that there is a far more revealing story to be told in his own involvement with the characters and events whose fate is so icily recounted...

...A work like Henry James' The American Scene or, at a somewhat lower altitude, the reportage of Rebecca West or the essays of James Baldwin-these shed, not only on the subjects at hand but on experience at large, precisely the kind of light one finds missing from Capote's painstaking journalistic reconstruction...

...Capote's craft is designed to have quite the opposite effect...

...What nonsense...

...Through the miracle of modern publicity, we are invited to take a job of inspired reportage as a new and superior form of fiction...

...and he shows it to be worth, in terms of its power to haunt our minds, a great deal...

...The reader's initial stunned response was kept raw and unresolved by its reflection and extension in the "real" response registered by these minor figures, whose actual lives-one had to remind oneself-had been so exacerbated by the real villainy...

...Much of Capote's skill has gone into rendering this moral contrast of the victims and their executioners with exceptional pictorial vividness...

...Still, Capote has not written a novel, and it remains to be seen whether his brilliant journalistic use of this virtually rediscovered language will lead to anything significant in the fiction of the future...

...The crime itself had an almost folk-tale simplicity in its moral counterpoint...

...At the same time, Capote was careful not to tax his readers with anything like Faulkner's or James' moral complexities...

...it is not what the language of fiction, the medium of a significant art, always is: the refraction of a serious moral imagination...

...Capote's sense of evil, so extravagantly praised, turned out to be mainly a sense of interior decoration...

...And to the extent that the writer feels himself implicated, not as a mere observer but as a moral agent, so the reader too feels himself drawn into the moral vortex of the experience being portrayed...

...But he was an interesting literary and publishing phenomenon...

...The first time around one was perfectly pleased to have the author out of sight...

...Or so it seemed...

...If one feels compelled to underscore this point now...

...To penetrate those carefully wrought surfaces was to find oneself, not in a credible world of the author's creation but in a very stylish void...

...Here is the world of a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving Day poster invaded by two evil spirits out of Dostoevsky by way of Sherwood Anderson-the homely odor of clean linen and the savory smells of the country kitchen overcome by the stink of the lower depths...

...All those exquisite symbolic situations resembled nothing so much as beautifully decorated, elaborately wrapped boxes gotten up for display: Upon examination, they proved to be perfectly empty...

...it must be thought great...

...As Capote's whole career has been, to a large extent, a product of the publishing industry's public relations machine, it would have been expecting too much to think his best bookactually rather modest in design, but powerful in its detail-could be launched with anything less than a campaign that might have been a little overdone for the emergence of a new political personality...

...The irony on which the book closes-the hapless murderers themselves murdered by judicial decree-is too pat, too easy, too abstract...

...The murder of the Clutter family by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had about it more than the requisite horror for holding our interest-and not for holding it only, but for exciting and aggravating it, like an exposed nerve stretched taut...

...And until that story is revealed-a real novelist would, of course, have found in that connection his moral crux-everything else remains only brilliantly delineated evidence placed before a jury disabused of its pieties...

...Its acclaim prompted a succession of imitations...