The Country Below the Surface

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. 343 pages. Random House. $5.95.

One November night in 1959 two ex-convicts named Perry Smith and Richard Hickock entered the Holcomb, Kans., home of Herbert Clutter, a well-to-do wheat farmer, and killed everyone in it: Clutter, his wife, his 16-year-old daughter and his 15-year-old son. Murder was only incidental to the design, which was theft. But murder was also essential: the visitors intended to leave no witnesses. Within two months the killers, who had collected a tabletop radio, binoculars, and less than $50 in cash from their victims, were captured and condemned to death. Last April, after five years of legal delays, Smith and Hickock went to the scaffold in the Kansas State Penitentiary.

On this brutal and senseless real-life event Truman Capote has built his latest book. It would be hard to imagine a more implausible crime reporter. Though Capote had ventured into non-fiction before, his reputation had been secured by short novels (The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's) and stories of such delicacy that their wispy author has been called, among many other things, "the last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers."

Diminutive Presence. Now 41, Capote has executed an "esthetic experiment." He calls it a "new literary form" --a "nonfiction novel." It is an unfortunate term, as contradictory as it is pretentious. Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, a reconstruction in novel form of the Allied Normandy landings, Lillian Ross's Picture, a book-length study of the making of the film Red Badge of Courage, and John Hersey's Hiroshima are numbered among the creditable jobs of journalism that antedate Capote's esthetic experiment. Not to forget that old master, Ernest Hemingway, who did a lot of reporting in his day, but bemoaned the fact that for a novelist "it blunts the instrument you work with." But however Capote wishes to define it, In Cold Blood drains an event of its content as few events have ever been emptied before.

Shortly after the murders, Capote was propelled to Kansas, a region that is as alien to his spirit as Mars, by the scarcely original premise that any truth exhaustively explored can furnish better story material than fiction. He dogged the story off and on for six years. A diminutive, eccentric and lisping presence on Midwest territory, whose citizens at first scarcely knew what to make of him, Capote commanded the attention and ultimately the respect of everyone he approached, including the killers. His memory stored scores of interviews, which he set down later in 6,000 pages of notes. His ear and his eye caught everything: Perry Smith's sudden confession in a police car bearing him from capture in Nevada to trial in Kansas; the look of a wintry prairie sky; the chilling, offhand comments of the prisoners--"It's easy to kill," muses Smith --the juror surprised by spring fever into a yawn so cavernous that "bees could have buzzed in and out."

The result is a thoroughgoing work of journalism that also deeply penetrates what Capote calls "the country below the surface." On the dark eddies that led to the fatal surface conjunction of events in Holcomb, In Cold Blood plays a light that illuminates the interior climate of murder with intense fidelity. Capote has invested the victims with a dignity and reality that life hitherto had confined only to the closed circle of their friends, and he has thrust the act of violence itself before the reader as if it were happening before his very eyes.

Lofty Future. The assignment spent the reporter physically and emotionally. At the gallows, Perry Smith called for Capote and kissed him goodbye. For three days afterward, Capote cried. Later, he paid for the headstones that mark the killers' graves in a private cemetery in Leavenworth. "I had to live all of it to get all of it," he says.

The book may not break new literary ground, but it seems assured a loftier future and a longer public reign than most crime stories enjoy. It is already a popular success; serialized last fall in The New Yorker, it broke the magazine's record for newsstand sales. New American Library has paid $500,000 for reprint rights, Columbia Pictures $400,000 for film rights. In the hardcover edition, a first printing of 100,000 is selling at a bestseller clip. If nothing else, In Cold Blood justifies another Capote conviction: that when reportage commands the highest literary skills, it can approach the level of art.

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