Adventure classics -- The ones who have to pay for it

In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

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Before the death of movie star Sharon Tate and her friends made Charles Manson a household name in 1969, before the My Lai massacre in 1968, before Richard Speck tortured and killed student nurses, or Charles Whitman staked out the University of Texas clock tower with his rifle in 1966, there was In Cold Blood.

“A theory I’ve harbored since I first began to write professionally, (is) that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’” Truman Capote told journalist George Plimpton in 1966. “The difficulty was to choose a promising subject. Then one morning in November 1959, while flicking through the New York Times, I encountered on a deep inside page, this headline: ‘Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain’. . . The human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.”

So, engaging the help of lifelong friend Harper Lee, Capote packed up for small town Kansas to see what real murder looked like. The journey would turn a small town tragedy into the opening act of a blood-drenched decade.

Arrested within weeks of the killings, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith spent more than five years on death row in Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Leavenworth County, Kansas. At the request of Hickock and Smith, Capote attended their hangings in the early morning of April 14, 1965. In Cold Blood was published as a serial in The New Yorker beginning September 25, 1965. Capote had nineteen years to live.

Hickock and Smith seemed unlikely partners in crime. Hickock was outwardly affable, a popular high school athlete and doted-on son. He was a competent auto mechanic who began a career of passing bad checks to support the lifestyle he hoped to become accustomed to. Smith was the half-Cherokee son of itinerant rodeo performers who abandoned him to a series of abusive foster homes, leaving him with “the aura of a wounded animal, a creature walking wounded.”

The two met briefly in prison. Despite Smith’s boast of having killed a “nigger,” a story fabricated to impress “tough brass boy” Hickock, neither had previously committed any violent crime. But Hickock remembered Smith tale. After their release, he would write asking for help with a “sure thing,” the robbery of another cellmate’s wealthy former employer, Herbert Clutter.

Enraged at their failure to locate anything but petty cash in Clutter’s house, Hickock and Smith killed him and his family, one by one.

“I believe that Perry did what he did for the reasons he himself states (in his confession),” Capote said to Plimpton, in the 1966 interview Plimpton would later include in Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. “The Clutters were such a perfect set of symbols for every frustration in his life. As Perry himself said, ‘I didn‘t have anything against them, and they never did anything wrong to me--the way other people have all my life. Maybe they‘re just the ones who have to pay for it.’”

And what did Hickock and Smith think about Capote?

“Perry was always asking me: Why are you writing this book?” Capote said. “So I would say, I had a strictly aesthetic theory about creating a book which could result in a work of art. And then (Perry) would laugh and say, ‘What an irony.’ I’d ask what he meant and he’d tell me that all he’d ever wanted to do in his life was to produce a work of art.”

I had intended to discuss Wilkie Collins’ nineteenth century mystery, The Moonstone, today. But I had hardly typed that intention before Army truck driver Ivan Lopez killed three fellow soldiers and wounded sixteen others before turning his gun on himself at Fort Hood in Central Texas. And started me thinking about the minds of those who kill.

(Next week, Adventure classics will continue an April of mysteries with, yes, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.)

Adventure classics -- When being good isn't good enough

To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

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“I think for a child’s book it does all right” and “well, honey, one thing we know is that she’s been poaching on my literary preserves,” Southern Gothic divas Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers snipped at fellow Southerner Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, proving that great writers can be catty as the ladies of a small town’s church circle.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether another great Southern writer, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), would have wanted to rise from his grave to complain that Lee’s 1960 story of a lonely white child and an imperiled black man was stolen from his saga, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because the issue of race relations is the defining story and defining tragedy of the American South. It’s been told many times, in many ways. And it’s nobody’s private preserve.

I’m not going to say Harper’s version is perfect. The very simplicity of its opening, “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. . . When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident,” sometimes baffles reviewer and librarians who can’t decide whether the narrator is a young child or an adult.

Scout’s hero worship of her lawyer father Atticus similarly baffles those who wonder why serving as a court-appointed attorney for an indigent defendant made Atticus heroic. After all, he only did his job, didn’t he? And how good was he at that, if his innocent client ended by being convicted and dying in an attempted prison escape?

Maybe this year’s celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech will remind us that bad as racial relations are now, they were infinitely worse in the novel’s time. Or maybe next year’s anniversary of the golden anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act will make that plain. Or maybe nothing will.

Lee’s story opens with the apparently idyllic childhood of Scout, Jem and their friend Charles Baker (Dill) Harris, in the safety of the small Alabama town of Maycomb in the 1930’s -- a time when children could play safely on the streets until after dark because everybody knew everybody. Everybody, that is, who was white and middle class.

At first, the children’s main concern is attempting to spy on their reclusive neighbor, Arthur (Boo) Radley. (Lee’s nicknames are among the humorous touches that make her tale go down smoothly.) All seems well until the time comes when Scout and Jem’s father Atticus must defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, and the children are forced to confront Maycomb’s “usual disease” of racism.

Lee has said she didn’t have in mind the notorious 1931 Scottsboro case, in which nine young black men and boys were convicted of raping two white women. All but the
youngest of the defendants, who was twelve, were sentenced to death. The case led to multiple Supreme Court rulings and retrials. However, as the daughter of another small town Alabama lawyer in the 1930’s, Lee would undoubtedly have heard Scottsboro discussed and rediscussed, with the same issues of fabricated evidence and a decision by an all-white jury she used in Mockingbird.

Decades later, some revisionist readings of Atticus Finch criticize him for not taking a proactive stance against racism, the simple answer is that he couldn’t without sacrificing his livelihood, his family, perhaps his life. Martin Luther King learned only too well what Atticus knew -- that when a system is as badly broken as the Jim Crow regime of the South, for the people living in it simply to be good isn’t good enough to fix it.

For a variety of interpretations of Lee’s work, I liked Readings on To Kill A Mockingbird, edited by Terry O’Neill. For more about the Scottsboro case, see “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow,” at
www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_scotts.html/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a September of young protagonists with another Southern Gothic tale, Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding.)