«The town of Holcomb is in the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonely area that other Kansans call “over there.” More than sixty miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its clear blue skies and desert-pure air, has an atmosphere that is more like the Wild West than the Midwest. The local accent has a prairie scent, a nasal whiff of farmhand…»
Thus begins In Cold Blood (1966), a book about the brutal murder, in 1959, of an American family – the mother, the father, and the teenage daughter and son – at the hands of a pair of killers, eventually caught and sentenced to death, who had hardly any motive for the massacre.
The author of the volume, Truman Streckfus Persons (New Orleans, September 30, 1924 – Los Angeles, August 25, 1984), had seen the news in the newspapers, and from that moment on he became involved in an extensive investigation into the events, over several years, even before the criminals were caught.
By then he was already Truman Capote – a surname taken from his stepfather, a Cuban businessman – and thanks to his short stories, journalistic works and novels such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s he had an unquestionable place in American literature and also in high society.
“No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took from me, sucked the marrow from my bones,” he wrote about the arduous process, during much of which he was accompanied by his friend, the writer Harper Lee.
After interviewing neighbors and friends of the victims, authorities, and even the killers, Truman created a devastating non-fiction novel that quickly became a literary success. Using elegant and austere prose, literary devices, and the technique of reporting, he created a story that was truly frightening, especially because it exposed the human capacity to gratuitously become monstrous.
Although other writers, such as the Argentine Rodolfo Walsh, had already effectively combined fiction and journalism with Operación Masacre, there is no doubt that Capote established himself with this text as one of the fathers of new journalism.
He had been an extremely lonely child, who began to write to cope with isolation: “Words have always saved me from sadness.” He lived his homosexuality openly and reflected in successive works the darkest sides of American society, often in a scathing manner. Even writing about the secrets that some of the most elegant and richest women in the United States had confided to him, earned him in his later years the marginalization of that world of tinsel, which fascinated him.
He was also a writer of scripts and plays, and despite his wonderful “style of seeing and hearing”, throughout his life he was marked by addiction to drugs and alcohol, which ended up causing his death.
Eccentric and controversial – he called himself a genius – Truman Capote was, many times, his own character. There is no doubt that he is one of the great authors of the 20th century, nor is there any doubt about his influence on literature and journalism, whose boundaries he blurred. Reading him implies not only finding testimony of an era and its social classes, but also understanding human nature better, being horrified by it and feeling pity for it.
