Kill Your Idols: "In Cold Blood"

It's a brilliant piece. It was released along with another NYM piece in what was released in book form as 'Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.'

If you've never read it, the second piece is here:
http://teageegeepea.tripod.com/maumau.html

Anyway, I'm a big fan, but the Bernsteins and the Panthers certainly disagreed that Wolfe was illuminating any larger truth.

 

That's because Wolfe was mocking them. Quite effectively.

 

I was fanatical about Wolfe up to and including 'Bonfire of the Vanities.'

When I look back on the new journalism class I took in college circa 1988, I don't think the instructor spoke enough about the opposition of voice/creativity and fact.
I was 18, and I had already read a lot of Wolfe and Thompson. That class exposed me to 'In Cold Blood' as well as Joan Didion and John McPhee's 'Travels in Georgia.'

 

I liked Man in Full, too, but he lost me a little after that ... He's a caricature of himself: the intellectual mocking the intellectual.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2013/01/04/tom-wolfe-tell-me-my-political-agenda0.html

 

So Harper Lee didn't write it?

 

What's funny is how we don't think twice about poetic license in movie versions.

 

I've always heard the opposite rumor, that Capote wrote Mockingbird.

 

This is why I go back to "Eight Men Out" in this discussion (well, OK, there are a lot of reasons I go back to it.)

Would you say the same about your enjoyment of the book if the inaccuracies in "In Cold Blood" approached the level of Asinof's inaccuracies in "Eight Men Out" ... which not only include careless misstatements of fact and harmless conjecture for situations and conversations that could never be documented or replicated, which is bound to happen in any book, but when virtually the entire premise of the book is wrong?

For instance, while Asinof asserted that the Black Sox were 1) underpaid, 2) uneducated and 3) disgruntled against the miserly Comiskey, and ascribed those reasons as to why they plotted to fix the World Series ... we know now that a) the White Sox had one of the highest payrolls in the league; Eddie Cicotte was the second-highest paid pitcher in baseball and was never promised a bonus for winning 30 games nor was he ever held out down the stretch; Joe Jackson was the only player with much of a case that he was underpaid, and even then his case had major holes in it; b) two ringleaders of the fix, Gandil and McMullin, were both high school graduates, while Williams and Weaver also attended high school and Risberg attended school through at least the eighth grade unlike his claims of dropping out at 9 years old; they may have hated and/or resented Eddie Collins but so did most everyone else; c) a few loads of dirty laundry aside, there's little evidence that Comiskey treated his players any different than any other owner; the meal money was low but equal to most teams, there were bonuses promised and paid (not to Cicotte, but to others) and White Sox individual and team salaries were indisputably higher than most; if the Sox were unhappy under Comiskey, they would have been far more angry at the treatment experienced by Connie Mack's Athletics or Phil Ball's Browns at the time; Comiskey was a miser, sure, but that was baseball under the reserve clause.

These are more than author biases. These are basic interpretations of how/why the entire story took place ... and at least in Asinof's case, they're provably, demonstrably wrong.

Is that true for Capote? Doesn't appear to be that way, no.

But how do we know? And what if it were? Is "In Cold Blood" trying to simply tell an entertaining story, which it unquestionably does well, or is it trying to tell an entertaining true story? And what good is a "true" story ... if it's not true?

 

I know, I thought it was a cute twist.

 

Here's the difference for me, which I alluded to earlier. The Klutter family murders were just another spooky crime, really. It was shocking in the community and in the moment, of course, but just that. The NY Times carried a 300-word wire story and that probably would have been the extent of the non-local reporting had Capote not noticed and taken interest in writing about it. It was a vehicle for his art. The book was always far more important culturally than the murders. Asinof, to me, was a historian writing about a culturally important event and therefore owed more to accuracy in his storytelling.

 

But isn't the whole point of "In Cold Blood" that there's more to any given story than the 300 words that the New York Times might devote to it?

I excuse Capote because the form was in its infancy, and it was ground-breaking. I could never attain his heights, but I - and a lot of us - made a career out of digging for the story behind the page 2 brief. Capote was the grandfather of that. We owe it to him, in many ways.

But, as journalism, which it is presented as, it's still a deeply flawed work.

 

I think the controversy over Zero Dark Thirty and torture proves that's not necessarily true.