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Kill Your Idols: "In Cold Blood"

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by TheSportsPredictor, Feb 9, 2013.

  1. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Because it's been marketed — by Capote and others — as "immaculately factual," that's why.

    This sounds similar to the inaccuracies that we now know plague Eliot Asinof's "nonfiction novel" on the Black Sox Scandal, "Eight Men Out", which was published a few years earlier than Capote's.

    It's important to note that these new documents don't undermine the fact that Hickok and Smith did kill the Clutters or how they did it.

    But it does change what we know about the KBI investigation of said murders, which is an important part of the story. It also changes what we think we know about the investigators and prosecutors involved in the case. And it changes what we think we know about Capote's "immaculately factual" reporting, too. Not to mention his biases against said investigators and prosecutors.

    Unfortunately, this is just how things were done 50 years ago. Asinof got a lot more basic facts about the story wrong than Capote seems to have done here. But it all matters.

    I'm glad most great nonfiction includes endnotes or sources these days. "In Cold Blood," "Eight Men Out" and other books we consider classics would be very different if proper sourcing had been required then.
     
  2. Pilot

    Pilot Well-Known Member

    I went to high school with a girl who transferred in from Holcomb and she swore she watched the movie in the house at one point. She was always a bit full of shit, so I never really knew. I think that'd freak me the fuck out.
     
  3. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    It's definitely in my top five of all-time favorite books...
     
  4. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    Yet, there isn't a single, completely accurate account of anything that has ever happened. Capote's biases seemed pretty evident the first time I read the book.
     
  5. Chef2

    Chef2 Well-Known Member

    I grew up about 6 blocks from the Clutter House. They had thought about turning it into a museum, but had second thoughts about it.

    People still live there today. The grove of trees down the road....still standing. Try and drive down that road at night. Pretty freaky.

    The blood on the walls and floor in the basement.....yep...still there.
     
  6. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    This is true, but I don't think it hits the point. Is any piece of nonfiction inherently inaccurate because it relies on human perception and memory? I suppose that case could be made. But that doesn't excuse intentional mistruth. or mistruth via sloppy or negligent reporting.

    Is every piece of nonfiction inherently inaccurate, on some level? Yes. That said, does each inaccuracy serve to diminish the final product? Yes.
     
  7. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    I can't say that In Cold Blood's noted inaccuracies even begin to diminish the book for me. I felt like I had a handle on Capote's biases in the first reading. Do people understand that the book itself was far more significant than the subject matter -- the murders themselves? Nobody reads "In Cold Blood" to get an historic account of the Clutter murders; they read it to be entertained. There's a difference between an inaccuracy for Capote in a book like this than for genuine historians like Robert Caro or Doris Kearns Goodwin in their books.
     
  8. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Why not just write a novel then?
     
  9. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    It's a problem inherent in new journalism as a whole. I'm a fan of a lot of the work within the genre, but it is more genre writing than it is journalism, history or real nonfiction.

    It also spans a larger period than people consider. People like Gellhorn and Hemingway were experimenting with it before Capote, Thompson, Wolfe, etc.
     
  10. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    It is the genre. And while I'm uncomfortable even with the term "new journalism," because it seems to suggest these writers are able to attain some greater truth, it can be informative entertainment. I'd guess there are a list of inaccuracies in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, too, but it's still a fun, entertaining book that tells the story of the Merry Pranksters.
     
  11. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    Absolutely one of my favorite books. I love Wolfe. Didn't Bernstein accuse Wolfe of taping conversations without permission at the party that led 'Radical Chic'?

    Anyway, I think the idea that one can illuminate things that would be lost through traditional reportage or historiagraphy is interesting as a concept but beyond tricky in execution.
    You might end up with great writing, but is it true?

    It's a problem with historical film making, too. When someone makes a movie like 'Lincoln,' which I haven't seen, or 'Margin Call,' which I did see, where does creative license begin and end? What debt does the moviemaker owe to the factual, detailed truth vs. making a good movie, or vs. trying to illiminate what the moviemaker believes is a larger, more important truth than the factual details?
     
  12. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    http://www.leonardbernstein.com/person_more.htm

    I couldn't find an accusation about taping conversations, but five months after the fact Wolfe captured enough from the evening to write a quote-filled, detailed account in a 29-page magazine story:

    http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
     
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