The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

makes them say what they think you
expect
them to say.” If Capote felt that he had missed some crucial information the first time around, he went back and interviewed the same subjects over and over again, until he had it right.
    Capote for years had claimed that he had taught himself to be his own tape recorder. As a memory exercise, he would have friends read or speak into a tape recorder as he listened; then he would quickly write down as accurately as possible what he had heard and compare it to the tape. Over time, Capote claimed, the differences between what was on the tape and what he had had written became negligible.
    Capote had to tread lightly when, a month after arriving in Kansas, two drifters named Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested for the Clutter murders. Using his dispassionate and gently probing approach, Capote achieved a rapport with the killers that had eluded everyone working on the case. The writer spent hundreds of hours with the killers, who in turn used their jail quota of two letters a week to start a long correspondence with the writer. Capote kept them supplied with books, particularly the works of Thoreau and Santayana, which Perry favored, and they in turn filled him in on their backgrounds, their six weeks as fugitives, and the brutally clinical details of the murders. “It wasn’t a question of my
liking
Dick and Perry,” Capote recalled. “That’s like saying, ‘Do you like yourself?’ What mattered was that I
knew
them, as well as I know myself.”
    In March 1960, Smith and Hickock were sentenced to death for the Clutter murders, but Capote didn’t yet have his story. Three months of appeals would delay delivery of his manuscript to William Shawn at
The New Yorker
, but the wait was well worth it. On the eve of the execution, Perry and Hickock requested that Capote serve as an eyewitness. Thus the writer would be privy to the terminus of both his and the killers’ story—holding up cigarettes for the visibly shaking Perry and Hickock on the gallows, receiving a will from Perry that bequeathed all his possessions to the writer, hearing a final “Adios, amigo!” from Perry right before his neck was snapped by the state.
    Capote now had his ending, and he knew just how he wanted the story to play out. With such a great wealth of material, a mere by-the-numbers retelling of the story wouldn’t suffice; it was just a small-town murder, after all, nothing inherently special or unique about that. What Capote had in mind was a narrative that would burrow deep into the lives of everyone who was touched by the murder—not only the Clutters, but Perry and Hickock, Al Dewey and his team of detectives, the citizens of Holcomb and Garden City. Using John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
as amodel, Capote would re-create the events using the omniscient voice of a novel—or, to use Capote’s memorable phrase, a “nonfiction novel.”
    “My theory,” said Capote, “is that you can take any subject and make it into a nonfiction novel. By that I don’t mean a historical or documentary novel—those are popular and interesting but impure genres, with neither the persuasiveness of fact nor thepoetic altitude of fiction. Lots of friends I’ve told these ideas to accuse me of failure of imagination. Ha! I tell them
they’re
the ones whose imaginations have failed, not me. What I’ve done is much harder than a conventional novel. You have to get away from your own particular vision of the world. Too many writers are mesmerized by their own navels. I’ve had that problem myself— which was one reason I wanted to do a book about a place absolutely new to me—one where the terrain, the accents and the people would all seem freshly minted.”
    Indeed, Capote was venturing into unknown territory for
The New Yorker
, writing about events that he hadn’t witnessed, dialogue that he received secondhand, interior monologues that required a fair amount of creative license on his part. Take as an