This year marks the centenary of Truman Capote’s birth (and my father’s, too!), so it seems like a good time to reflect on his legacy. And this is especially the case since he’s as much in the news now as when he died in 1984, what with the hubbub surrounding a new book, “Capote’s Women” and the series based on it, “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” This current revival centers on the fallout from Capote’s “La Cote Basque, 1965,” the second chapter from his unfinished novel, “Answered Prayers.”
The novel was a conceived as a roman-a-clef and intended to be a second-half-of-the-century rival to Marcel Proust’s monumental “In Search of Lost Time.” But the fallout from the publication of “La Cote Basque” in Esquire magazine in 1975 was swift and devastating. The “Swans,” a group of high-society women who had befriended and confided in Capote, excised him from their lives for what they saw as a betrayal of their secrets, which were only thinly veiled in “La Cote Basque.”
Interesting as this current renaissance may be, I want to turn to another major Capote work, “In Cold Blood,” which, as George Garrett aptly notes, “Now it is a matter of memory, but then it was an experience,” one that I certainly remember growing up in western Kansas in the 1960s. I think most everyone knows the story by now, sparingly set forth on the dust jacket of the book:
“On Nov. 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime and there were almost no clues. Five years, four months and 29 days later, on April 14,1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged 33, and Perry Edward Smith, aged 36, were hanged on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.”
Despite our familiarity with the tale, I think it’s worth a fresh look, as central figures in the murder investigation continue to pass (e.g., Duane West, the prosecutor in the trial of Hickock and Smith, died at the end of 2023).
Capote called “In Cold Blood” a nonfiction novel, and his central insight was that the sort of facts that journalists collect can be passed through a novelistic lens and thereby present a “factual” narrative imbued with the characterizations, plotlines, and style associated with fiction. In this respect, Capote—although it’s an overstatement to give him sole credit for inventing a new genre (Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” leaps to mind)—certainly popularized a form that has influenced a couple of generations of writers creating police and legal procedurals.
Many investigators have concluded that even many of Capote’s facts are really fiction. For as critic Jack De Bellis showed—in comparing the serialized New Yorker version of “In Cold Blood” to the Random House version published shortly thereafter—Capote made close to 5,000 changes, a good many factually substantive. The point is that Capote’s narrative is a compendium—a selective appropriation—of evidence that was subject to his authorial editing and hindsight revision.
I think David Galloway aptly describes how Capote built his story: “’In Cold Blood’ … is a careful and artful selection of details, calculated to evoke a variety of moods, to establish character, to produce suspense, and to convey a number of intricately related themes.” And as S. Almog concludes, Capote’s “poetic selection” of facts reveals his “authorship,” a state of affairs that Capote acknowledged: “It is true that an author is more in control of fictional characters … But in the nonfiction novel one can also manipulate.”
To my mind, this suggests a parallel to what lawyers do in closing arguments, which—though free with respect to many particulars—must hew to generic expectations of what a closing argument should look like. As I’ve argued before, closing arguments tend to have a recognizable spine: praise for the jury’s dedication and diligence, a few personal touches designed to show a common history and shared values, a selective appropriation of the evidence ordered into story form, and scattered commentary casting doubt on the opposition’s case. But it’s the storytelling aspect that’s most important—the narration of carefully chosen and edited “facts” that will carry the day (limited by, of course, ethical boundaries that do not constrain novelists).
Great summations by great lawyers—from Daniel Webster to Gerry Spence—have all the hallmarks of fiction: pacing, colorful diction, effective use of tropes and other rhetorical devises like alliteration, and—above all—a recitation of “facts” (internal states of mind, sweeping generalization) that could not be (despite protestations to the contrary) “clearly in evidence.” Each lawyer’s story of the trial (that is, the packaging of snippets of testimonial and physical evidence into a form likely to be recognized by jurors as one of guilt or innocence) is a story of evidence highlighted or erased, emphasized or edited. Simply put, as Capote said of the nonfiction novel, “one can also manipulate.”
Capote, in a slightly modified form, took a bit from Henry James as his motto: “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Isn’t that what we do, too, as lawyers?
Reprinted with permission from © ALM Media Properties LLC. All rights reserved.
