 My name is James Dattach, I'm a professor of English here. I know a lot of you know me, some of you probably don't. 15 years ago or so, an RWC, Roger Williams College, along named Robert Blaze, gave us money for an endowed lecture series. And he said, I want the first lecture to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Moby Dick. And we said, fine, that's certainly worth celebrating. And thereafter we decided to pick an American literary work that's having a knowable anniversary. 50 years, 75 years, 100 years, whatever. And if you can look at the little bookmark here, you can see the text that we've chosen since Moby Dick back in 2001. And it goes up to 2016. Robert Blaze, our alum, is in Florida. But his daughter, Jennifer, is here. We're happy to have her. Thanks for coming, Jennifer. Robert usually comes to these lectures except that he's frolicking in Florida. And that's what he's doing. So we thank him for his contribution. And we're glad to have his daughter here with us. By all means, take a look at the in cold blood Shulin Kabote exhibit in the library. If you kind of walk out, Christine Fagan, our library collections person has put together the exhibit. It's in glass cases there. And there are newspaper articles and books and photos and all kinds of things. So take a look at that on your way out. Also, we have the film on campus, the in cold blood, the 1960s version, the black and white film, 1967 I believe. And that will be offered on Wednesday the 30th? 31st? Okay, Wednesday the 31st of March. So if you're interested. Wednesday's the 30th of March. It's part of the R.W.U. great film series. So that will be on campus. And that would be an interesting compliment to the book. The book will, at first, this in cold blood, first appeared as a series of articles in New York Magazine in late 1965. And it came out in book form 50 years ago in January 1966. And it was made a big splash. It became a bestseller and has been filmed at least twice. And the film made of Kapote's life, by the Kapote, some of you might have seen. So it's a very interesting book, interesting reading. Today's speaker is Dr. Thomas Feige, and you can see his picture right in the program here. And he's the associate professor of English at Long Island University post-campus. He's the author of this book, Understanding Truman and Kapote. And he also, and has also written a book called The Philosophy of Horror. And his little biographical note also says that he has written several other books, including young adult horror novels. So I guess from cold blood he got to horror novels somehow. I guess there's a connection there. So we're happy to have him here today. And Dr. Feige will address us on what's so dangerous about cold blood. Truman, Kapote, American culture, and the literary canon. Thank you, Tom. I want to thank Jim for coordinating this and inviting me to be here. And of course, the library. They got this request, and they balked at it. They're concerned about teaching a grand story, and it's so violent. Why would we want to put that in the classroom? Our kids today, they see so much violence in American culture. Why should the classroom be a place for their parents? They presented that argument to the parent teacher association, and they agreed with them. They said, yeah, we shouldn't teach that book at all. So think about that for a minute, because what that means is that if this school board of education votes, that this woman can't teach in cold blood, that's a decision for the entire Southern California School District. That's banning the book from high schools in Southern California in 2012. So they have a meeting in September. The board is split 50-50. They have to turn to the vice president of this board for the final vote, and she admits at the meeting she's never read the book. So she's going to need time to read it, and so she has to table the vote and come back a month or so later after she's read it and thought about it. So in that month, faculty members, parents, everybody start talking about this issue, whether or not it should be taught, and a very big local news story, a television news radio station or asking people if they can tweet in whether or not they should talk to the teacher. And then, of course, a month or so is enough time for them to become a national news story. Shouldn't we ban this book in cold blood for the 2012-2013 school year in Southern California? So they reconvene the meeting in October, and vice president agreed that the teacher should be allowed to read it. What I find interesting about that debate, in part, apart from the issue of whether or not we should ban a book like this at all, is the issue of what was it about this book? Because if we're honest, and if you read this book, the violence in this book is far less gruesome and explicit than on most cop TV procedural shows, right? I mean, we've seen the first two detectives look right out loud. I mean, wow. But even take a more tame cop show like Law and Order, which for a long time advertised itself as ripped from the hand lines, where you can very clearly see it's essentially true crime on the show in these certain weeks. And Law and Order, I would say had a comparable degree of violence, but Law and Order spinoffs, like if you've ever seen that horrible show, SVUs, whatever that is, that's a show about serial sexual predators going after women or children. It's horrible. It's much worse than this book, right? And think about video games, films. So what's the deal? Why is this the book that was the target for this particular kind of issue? What is it about this book? It must transcend the issue of explicit violence. So I want to come back to that question of what's so dangerous about it at the end, but to try to kind of work our way there just as a quick review, just as a kind of reminder, I'll show us a picture of the Clutters here. As we know the story in November 15, 1959, Dave Pickock and Perry Smith, they drive about 400 miles to the sleepy town of Holcomb, Kansas, a little after midnight. They break into the Clutter family, the doors were unlocked. They were under the misimpression that Mr. Clutter had a safe for $10,000 in it. Mr. Clutter was awake downstairs when they broke in, and he said, where's the safe? Where's the money? Because not only don't I have cash, I don't have a safe. And they bound him and they gagged him, and eventually Slithers broke, shot him in the head, and killed the rest of the family. Now, so this is an image of the Clutters from the mid-1950s. So this is Kenyan, who on the night of the crime was 15 years old, so he was about five years younger here. His sister Nancy, who was also killed that 1916, Bonnie and her Clutter also victims that evening. The two older sisters, Beverly and Evianna, didn't live at home any longer by 1959, and so they're still alive. And so here are Dick and Perry. And this is one of my favorite photos of these. These are photos that they allowed police to take of them when they were captured. And you can see reproductions of these in the exhibit that we have on display in the foyer there. What I like about this image in particular are the nature of like tattoos themselves, right? Tattoos are often an expression of one chooses to get a tattoo to commemorate a moment, to invite one to ask about a story, to, I don't know, lay some kind of claim to individuality, to seek kind of equality. You put a tattoo on your arm and somebody notices a friend and says, what's that tattoo? What's it about? They're inviting a story, right? Here are two men so oppressed by poverty and horrible circumstances. These are men desperate for acknowledgement. They wanted to be acknowledged. They wanted to be heard. They wanted their story to be told. They wanted a fair shake and always felt silenced and marginalized in American culture. But again, these tattoos are kind of emblematic of this desire on their part to be acknowledged somehow. They want to have, tell a story, right? And have their story kind of heard. So these are the men that they caught within 1959. We'll talk about that in a moment. And Capote read about this story the next day in the New York Times. This was the story as it was covered with garden city telegram. Capote quotes from this newspaper extensively in the book. As with Hutchinson News where we have copies of articles out and one of the cases out there that shows them their coverage of the story from the beginning until the execution of it. But Capote saw a really tiny article about it in the New York Times. And he immediately was interested in investigating the story. He didn't actually care about whether or not they were going to catch these guys. It didn't seem likely that they would at the time. He was really interested in this idea. Here we are in the middle of America. It's a small town. It's supposed to be safe. They're very Christian. It's horrible, horrible things happen. How's the community going to respond to it? Like, how's that going to affect everyday life of people living in Holcomb? Like, he wanted to go out, talk to those people and write an article for the New Yorker about it. Capote had done other journalistic stuff. He had written for the New Yorker and other places before. In fact, he had done a big piece for them when his opera company did this production of Porgy and Vesta traveling to the Soviet Union and all African-American cast. And he went with them and wrote this long, long article about their experiences they had traveling throughout Russia to do this show. And he eventually published that as a book. So he had an amateur at the New Yorker. He called them up. He said, sure, we'll pay for you to go out there. You can start interviewing people. And Capote was smart enough to bring his childhood friend and one of his really close friends, Nell Harper Lee, to Kilimanjimburg, to go with him and do the interviews with him. Which was a critical decision because she was this really down-to-earth, easy-to-get-along person as opposed to this really flamboyant Truman Capote, who alienated a lot of people by being way over the top. So she kind of helped get him access that he definitely wouldn't have had otherwise. And they conducted six weeks of detailed interviews with him. Interviewed people separately and then came together at night, compared their notes, and tried to get the most accurate version kind of possible. But as soon as he was down there, very shortly into this process, he realized that this was not going to be a short article. It was going to be a much bigger project. It was going to be a much bigger, had much bigger potential to examine various aspects of American life and culture, not just the psychology of two killers, the death penalty, the legal system, the nature of violence, all of this stuff, and he realized it was going to be a much bigger project. So let's talk about, just for a second, this is the copy of the cover in the first edition, and there's a copy out there again in the exhibit. And let me talk a little bit about, you know, Jim just mentioned that it was a very popular book, but a lot of that initially had to do with how famous Truman Capote was. He was a superstar celebrity as far as, you know, that with authors very often, but he hobnob with the most famous, the richest people. He was in every major club in New York City. His picture was in the paper all the time. He had his friends at Humphrey and Humphrey, Mowgar, Jackie, on asses. I mean, he was a superstar celebrity. A year before this event happened, he had published Breakfast at Tiffany's and other things. So this is a guy who was a celebrity, and he knew how to market himself. P.T. Barnum would have been so happy with somebody like Truman Capote. He gave interviews. He was doing interviews about this book and looking at it, doing public readings, talking about the nature of crime in America. I mean, he generated so much interest in this story before it came out. And when The New Yorker published it at the end of 1965, they dedicated four whole issues to it. It was the highest sales that The New Yorker ever had in its history. And we have, again, copies of those four out there, in paperback, out there. And then a few months later it came out in book form. But we have to think a lot about Capote and how he managed the publicity of this book. And one way that he did it was through fairly controversial claims that he made about it. And one of them was that he created a brand new literary genre, all by himself. He called it the non-fiction novel. And let me show you his definition of what he meant and what he was going for with that. He described journalism as moving along a horizontal plane, telling a story while fiction moves vertically, taking you deeper and deeper into characters and events, and by treating a real event with fictional techniques, something that cannot be done by a journalist until he learns to write fiction. It's possible to make this kind of synthesis. So immediately people were not so thrilled. They're like, wait a minute. People have written true crime stories before. The Energizer did it in 1925. And what about all of your contemporaries, Capote? We have a bunch of authors writing at the same time. Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, that were labeled the new journalist. Is that really this different from that? So it's been a debated term ever since this book came out thanks to Capote. He set the table on how people were going to talk about this book. One, with that plane. And two, with this one. This book is completely and actually accurate. In fact, the subtitle of the book is a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences. Well, this plane was hotly contested as well. The people in Holcombe, Kansas, they read this book and many of them were furious. They felt that he misrepresented the town and the clutter family was very upset with him. Many of the detectives who worked on the case felt that Capote misrepresented the issues. So this journalist, Philip K. Tompkins, went to Kansas after the book came out in the same year and re-interviewed dozens of people and published an article in Esquire in 1966 called In Cold Fact, where he challenges a bunch of planes, including a big moment in the novel where Perry, right before he's executed, apologizes for the crime. Everyone else at the crime scene said, the execution said that didn't happen and pointed out that Capote was so sick to his stomach he actually left the room where it happened in time. And of course, very famously, Capote, oh, and 15 years later somebody compared, sorry, sometimes for literary scholars, somebody compared the New Yorker version with the book version, every word, every page, found 5,000 discrepancies from back all the way down to Congress. Not how you necessarily want to spend your weekend, but still somebody did. And I mentioned Perry's last words, but the other issue is the ending and Capote acknowledged right away that he made up the ending of the book. He felt that the execution was just too dark of a way to end this story and so he made up this ending where they meet at a cemetery, the daughter, the friend of the daughter, the clever's daughter was killed and things are hopeful again and it gives a nice artistic frame to the book as it would be open with that Kansas landscape with the Kansas landscape, that kind of thing. So, again, just to put it in perspective, these are things that people are still debating about this book and these are based on Capote's claims about it at least in part. In 2012, one of the detectives who caught Dick and Perry, the tech of nine who worked with the tech of doing, his personal notes and his crime scene file which he shouldn't have had, actually, his family put it up for auction because it had the original crime scene photos and stuff that had never been disseminated to the public. It was on some of these. The Clutter family was very upset. They filed an injunction against selling it because they didn't want those pictures and some other materials disseminated. The judge agreed with them and so there was this kind of back and forth negotiation about what they could sell and what they couldn't sell before those materials were allowed to be sold. But what was the media coverage like about that throughout the summer of 2012 and the changes? Is this going to mean that we're going to discover where Capote changed the truth? That was the kind of press line. That was the media line about it. So it's fascinating to me that that's what has kind of preoccupied and an essential interest about this book. It's an aspect about the book that I'm not interested in at all. It's not what I want to focus on today. But I want to focus on the fact that I think this book is very much about the 1950s. The crimes are committed. In 1959, the majority of the interviews were done in 1959. And this is a book that's meditating on American culture, particularly a kind of culture of fear and anxiety that was pervasive throughout the decade. And I think Capote taps into it in really explicit ways and it's one of the things that I think intensifies our kind of fears and anxieties as we're reading it, right? As we kind of get caught up in the story of these two criminals. And so I want to talk a little bit about those things. First, I want to tell you a little bit about even Capote's reaction when he published the novel he received hundreds of letters immediately from people in public responding to this book. And responding very much in a way that resonates with kind of what I just said. He gave this, he said this in an interview shortly after it was published. About 70% of the letters he got said that people felt that the book was intellectual American life. This collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life and the other, which is insular and safe. It struck them because there was something so awfully inevitable about what's going to happen. Every illusion Harry would ever have while they all evaporated. So then on that night he was so full of self-hatred and self-pity, I think he would have killed somebody. But perhaps not that night of the next or the next. He just can't go through life without ever getting what you want ever. And although Dick and Perry might be extreme examples of the consequences of this kind of deprivation what I think is fascinating about this quote is the dichotomy that Capote sets up. There's this impoverished, struggling stagnant group in America, right? They're disenfranchised, they don't have access to anything and they don't have access to this American prosperity. They're like, hey look you can get a job, you can buy a house, you can go up in the socioeconomic ladder. They have so little chance of getting that that they become ruthless and savage and kind of unmoored. And that's Capote sets up that dichotomy in the book and people were responding to that. And so I kind of want to talk about the way in which Capote taps into the fears surrounding that kind of division in America. And I want to focus on three things. The start of HUAC the atomic bomb and delinquency and poverty. I'll mostly focus on the third one. But I just want to briefly talk a little bit about how HUAC really incorporates and alludes to these things in the book again to tap into this kind of culture of fear and anxiety that dominated the decade as a way to make the book comment on it and kind of reflect on it. So just a few quick things about HUAC. It was formed in 1938. You know, and this is your kind of general definition, right? It's about sussing out the subversion on American citizens and organizations. What it really did for the government is it gave them this powerful mechanism for enforcing political and social conformity, right? You're either a good American or you're a traitor, right? So if you've had any contact with communists or socialists, you are you're not a loyal American. And there were eventually severe consequences of that. And so HUAC, in the course of its existence, investigated about 1,400 groups and individuals newspapers, trade unions, things you would expect, right? The labor unions as well as the Boy Scouts and real troubling criminals like Shirley Temple and Lucille Wall, right? So we're talking about a big span, but probably the investigation that put them on the map and I think changed or gave the American public a kind of sense for the scope of their power and the danger of it was the 1947 trials of Hollywood where they dragged out Hollywood producers and asked them what became known as the $64 question, which was an allusion to a radio game show, right? Which is, are you now, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States, right? And so all of these actors and movie producers and directors and writers were not only asked if they were members, but could they name names of other people in the industry that were because you're making films and your films reach millions of people, you could be sending secret communist messages to everybody. We can't have that happen. So 10, famously 10 of these people investigated became known as the Hollywood 10 refused to answer this question. That included Dalton Trumbo, who wrote Spartacus, Ring Lardler, who wrote the film version of Match, and they felt that their First Amendment right to free speech and free assembly meant that they didn't have to answer those questions. They were wrong. They were held in contempt of Congress and they all went to jail. Two of them went to jail for six months and the rest for one year. But that, I think, changed the sense in America of the kind of coward. And this was pre-McArthur. This is three years before McCarthy is in Wheeling, West Virginia, saying there are 293 people communists working in the State Department. So before McCarthy gets on bandwagon and creates fear-mongering and terror in this country, we have who act kind of doing the same thing. And just to try to give you a sense of how bad that kind of culture of fear was, oh I just want to point out that there are just 109 investigations just in this kind of five-year period alone. But here's some stats about just that this is early and I think that people are right. 50% of Americans agreeing at this point that all communists should be jailed. 58% favored binding and punishing all communists. But here's the stat that blows me away every time I see it. 78% of people is a national poll saying that they thought that you should report neighbors or acquaintances to the FBI if you just suspected that they might be communists. That's an incredible amount of fear that you should rat out your neighbor for whatever reason. So this is part of this kind of culture of fear and Capote has characters that really kind of resonate with this type of rhetoric and ideology. My favorite minor character in this novel is Myrtle Clarence. She's the post-mistress. And after the crime everybody in town thinks somebody's killed her. And everybody's freaking out. And so this is probably the post-mistress herself that she said if it wasn't him who killed the Clarence, maybe it was you or somebody across the street all the neighbors are rattlesnakes barman's looking for a chance to slam the door on your face. It's the same the whole world over. For her, anybody's a threat. Anybody's dangerous. And that is very much that kind of Cold War kind of ideology of fear. It was being kind of fueled by Huac, McCarthy, and others. And you get direct illusions to that in the text. The second kind of thing that Capote references are has to do with kind of atomic weapons. You know, in 1949 the Soviets had their first successful test of an atomic bomb and it scared the pants out of the U.S. because they thought they were years away from being able to do it. So this ratcheted up the atomic energy program in the United States. We wanted to be able to demonstrate that we had even bigger weapons. So let's scare the crap out of everybody and that's pretty much what they did. And one of the ways one of the reasons one of the things that terrified so many people about it was that a lot of this stuff was in fact televised in other things. But let me show you what the government started doing was doing highly public tests of atomic weapons again to send an international statement but also a domestic statement about our power. One of them was Operation Castle. This was a series of thermonuclear tests between March and May of 1954 over the Marshall Islands about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. This bomb was a thousand times stronger than what we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean that is inconceivable, right? This Bravo test vaporized an entire island and 7,000 square miles of land would fall out across the Pacific Ocean. That is scary business, right? And this is being widely reported the government wants this information out there and it is terrifying people and if that's not bad enough the government started televising testing of atomic weapons in Nevada. The most famous, oh well there's also the president threatening to use atomic weapons that always makes people feel comfy. And then we have the testing in Yucca Flats where they are arguing that we need to do these tests here and send troops in and see what would it be like at Ground Zero if there were a bomb went off in the United States where our troops would be able to handle it. And on March 17 the atomic energy stage of televised special at Yucca Flats there was another one that had happened in 1952 so 53 wasn't the first one. Walter Cronkite was in attendance. The media were well stationed there about two miles from Ground Zero. They set up a fake town with houses and cars and if you've ever seen the remake of that movie The Hills Have Eyes it's all based on that two town. But here's a photo from 1952 and you can see the public impressed in the military gathered here for this kind of test. By 1956 two thirds of all Americans believed that the next war would use atomic weapons and that an atomic bomb would be detonated in the United States. So what's the impact of all this fear? You've got bomb drills of schools teaching kids to cover their eyes and hide under their desks. You're training more and more medical people to have medical training all of a sudden building fallout shelters became very popular for homes and parking buildings all of these things are just scaring the pants off the public. We're terrified that an atomic war is going to happen. The weapons and mass destruction are going to be used. Now oh yeah and this is as early as 1950 which I think is incredible. 61% of Americans thought the US should use an atomic there's not a war for it. 53% said there was a good chance that their community, no matter how small would be bombed in the next war and most agree that Russia had the bomb so it's going to get used. And this is as early as 1950 that's before those televised things. It's an incredibly scary time and Capote taps into this as well. He presents this clutter murder as a microcosm for these bigger fears. He presents it as this unforeseen kind of destructive devastating event that happens. It destroys this town, all of a sudden people lock in the door keeping their lights on all night long getting away. It has these incredible kind of shockwaves and it causes this incredible trauma of this stuff. How could this terrible thing have happened? And throughout the book he uses languages to allude to this kind of atomic age, right? There's this one woman who says that she used to enjoy at night listening to the prairie wolves like howling in the wind and now it just reminds her of a bomb raid and there's another detail where somebody called into the Kansphere investigation and claimed that no one murdered the cutters after Mr. Clutter created a bomb of his own a grenade with Buckshot and he killed himself and his family with this terrible explosion and this one really gorgeous description of a man by a campfire trying to ponder how is it that a place that feels so peaceful and secure could suddenly just be annihilated and this is his description or Capote's description right about how is it possible that such effort such plain virtue referring to Clutter, right? Could overnight be reduced to this smoke thinning as it rose and was received by the big annihilating sky so again we see this kind of language kind of of the atomic age being kind of utilized throughout the book is again some of the fears that are defining, right? American culture in the 1950s now I want to turn to poverty and juvenile malignancies and how this functions in the book so even though the television was invented in the 1920s it doesn't become the central piece of American life till the 1950s so after World War II it becomes so popular so fast it's kind of startling so by 1954 there are already TV dinners by 1956 81% of Americans have a television Americans are spending more time in front of TV than they are at work and by 1959 we've sold 50 million televisions so if you see those pictures of the 50s the family gathered around the TV like that's what you did at night and that's what you did at dinner time so what were they watching on TV? You had live variety shows a little bit like your late night with Jimmy Kimmel kind of thing you know television dramas were essentially filmed plays usually stuff that had been successful on Broadway already or regional material but probably the genre that was the most popular was the sitcom the 30 minute sitcom and typically if you think like father knows best or leave it to be heard these were set in the white suburbs and there are white pig offenses and kids who are worried about allowance and dad has a Cadillac and he knows to work and mom miraculously takes care of the kids cleans up the house and cooks dinner in high heels and dresses and makeup it's incredible but that's the vision of America television in the 1950s news only constituted 15 minutes a day in the evening that's how much TV news which meant you weren't going to have a lot of deep analysis of what was happening in American culture now why such a positive portrait of America well we can kind of understand for some reasons you got look at this between 1940 and 1955 personal income jumped 293% and these people feel pretty good America's consuming we have a lot of money we're consuming 1 third of the world's goods and services by the mid 1950s home ownership doubles between 1915 18 million people moved to the suburbs in the 50s alone so it's kind of extraordinary however what's not on the news and what's not in your suburban community are poor people between 40 and 50 million Americans are living in poverty in the 1950s at any single year in the 1950s 20 to 30% of the population was in poverty that's extraordinary when you think about it and we'll talk about where this some of these ideas come from in just a second but largely the invisibility of poverty is kind of associated with segregation in schools and slums and the lack of affordable clothing if you start mass producing clothing it's hard to tell what the class you're in same thing's true now if we all buy clothes at the gap that enter a public and old baby it's kind of hard to tell that you're a millionaire and I made $20,000 a year if we're wearing the same kind of clothes it's the same issue that's happening in the 50s and likewise there's really no political influence there's really no lobbying on behalf of poor people the first thing he signed in the White House was to double the amount of food and food stamps to poor people in the country that was the first thing he thought that was important to do so it's a very serious matter in the 50s though it's getting no visibility on television and in the main media and this is just to show you probably a book that was extremely influential in bringing this to people's attention very beginning this book is finished by 1961 so he's really talking about the late 50s this is just one moment of the book the other American a poor feels differently from the rest of the nation they tend to be hopeless and passive yet prone to burst of violence they are lonely and isolated often rigid and hostile to be poor is not simply to be deprived of the material things in the world it is to enter a fatal feudal universe an America type of what strikes me about this passage is the light which is so similar to the Capote passage we looked at there is a ruthless savage part of America out there they are prone to violence they are hopeless, they are passive and they are dangerous something terrible can happen and so what does Capote do in this book is if he focuses he gives us so much attention on the poverty that Perry and Dick experienced to highlight this gap between the rich and the poor and the dangers associated with it and so the first has to do with the issues of criminality Dick Hickok's family was so poor that if his dad ever got sick as is detailed in the book he couldn't go to work and suddenly there was no food and they couldn't pay the rent so they lived at subsistence level and so the fact that Dick eventually starts stealing cars or writing bad checks in the classroom is constantly living in poverty and seeking some way out of it for Dick though had a better often parent whose entire upbringing was defined by poverty alcoholism, sexual abuse the worst possible circumstances for Perry and the Smith family and how he gave up and so what Capote does is he basically presents these men as fully defined by their economic circumstances their poor they are stealing cars and collecting coat bottles and breaking into offices and breaking into cluttered houses because they don't have anything ever they are so desperate because they are so poor and they see that there's this portion of America that can gain prosperity and they never can once get a steady job or get remote access to it and so they become these people who turn to crime out of acts of desperation and at a certain point what Perry recognizes is that this life has turned him into an animal and probably one of the most disturbing kind of moments in the book is his description of him looking outside his temporary cell in Finney County and he's watching these cat scavenged dead birds off the grills of the cars that had just driven off the highway and he realizes that most of my life I've done what they're doing on the equivalent I'm just picking off dead meat stuff from the grills of other people's car that's the kind of state that he's in so you have poverty as a thing that leads to criminality which is dangerous for America but you also have it that kind of leads to violence and you know Dick is the one who whenever he sees somebody who has something there's just one moment up in the book where he sees this guy who's got nice clothes and he has a girlfriend that looks like Marilyn Monroe and he says watch that goddamn bastard and so Dick's way of responding to it is he takes out a knife and he talks to her about I could slit his throat any second if I wanted to and Dick fantasizes about doing violence to others as a way to compensate for feeling for being in this state of kind of abject poverty so he's the one who tells Perry before they go to the clutter we can leave no witnesses but that's how Dick talks throughout his whole life just knowing that he could commit a violent act seems to mitigate to some extent the deaths of his poverty for Perry he experiences the same shame and same anger and his experience the same kind of humiliation associated with poverty and he makes note in the story that when he's in Nancy's room and either the crime she's got a curse and he opens it up and there's a silver dollar in it and he gets down on his hands and he needs to crawl and get it and he feels like an animal and what Capote does that's so clever is he has Perry's analysis of that come right before he kills her clutter so the moment before he slashes her clutter's throat this is what Perry Capote says that Perry says but it's the way Capote times that I think is so interesting but I didn't realize what I had done until I heard the sound like somebody drowning, screaming underwater so Capote links this humiliation associated with poverty to the very second before Perry makes the decision to kill her clutter's and I also think this is a powerful moment because it works so well metaphorically Perry has been drowning and suffocating his entire life because of poverty and so part of this kind of violence Capote is setting up as connected to poverty and so that's one aspect again another aspect of fear that Capote is interested in the last thing that he's tapping into is this notion of juvenile delinquency Hi Marlon basically the issue of juvenile delinquency became this very commonly discussed topic in the news media in the public realm in the 1950s people were concerned that more and more young people were committing not just stealing cars any longer but committing violent crimes the subcommittee on juvenile delinquency was holding televised hearings about the matter where they were even dragging in the makers of comic books and saying look how violent the cover of this comic book is aren't you responsible, aren't you contributing a problem in this country and these are major televised hearings happening over the issue of juvenile delinquency Hollywood taps into it they start making films like Gray was the wild one Blackboard Jungle with Sidney Poitier and Rebels have caused James Dean and Edward these are major successful films and they're tapping into these kind of anxieties about juvenile delinquency are young people running them up and doing dangerous things so much so by 1959 many Americans view delinquency more seriously than open-air testing on atomic weapons school segregation or political corruption so there was a point in time where the anxiety about people dressing like that riding their motorcycles and doing dangerous things became very serious I'll talk about those statistics in a minute but sociologists were publishing very heavily about this matter in very public and widespread forms they were testifying in front of congress and they broke it down as there are two types of delinquents they're your socio-economic or the anomic delinquents and that term comes from Neil Durkheim's 19th century notion of anonomy like kind of lawlessness or normlessness and basically what that just means is you've got a group where there's such a big gap between the personal expectations that they have of what they can have in life versus whether or not they can ever achieve it that that gap since it never closes that they turn to a kind of violence a delinquent culture Alfred Cullen or Albert Cullen one of the sociologists I mentioned up there he said that basically once these young people felt that legitimate channels to upward mobility were denied to them and they felt justified turning to crime and violence as a result so they're not just rejecting middle class values it just became a fuel for justifying the stealing cars and committing violent acts the other theory it's really interesting the psychological delinquent which is kind of spearheaded by Talbot Parsons and basically these delinquents came from you have an absent or an ineffectual father and an overbearing mother like that's what we should blame for this kind of delinquent culture I don't know how many have seen rebel without cause or rebel without a cause is a fabulous example of this because the young man is behaving a little bit like a delinquent though he's back James Dean he wants his dad to be a man his dad is hem-packed by mom and mom has a headache and so the dad puts on her apron locks the food upstairs and spills, he's on his hands and knees cleaning it up and James is like stand up for yourself he wants a masculine role model and what these what this branch of sociologists are saying is not having a masculine role model meant that these young boys were going out to prove their masculinity through crime and violent action and you see that I think that kind of delinquency is what rebel without a cause focuses on so what Capote does is he presents to him as delinquents evolving into violent criminals so Perry, he's a broken family he's abused as a child he's first arrested at 8 years old and he's utterly seduced by delinquent culture it just takes people mentioning something to him like a boy in San Francisco one of his neighbors Tommy Chan gives him the idea, hey let's go steal a women's purses from him and he starts doing that Perry picks up a hitchhiker once who suggests, hey, maybe we should rob that office building over there so they rob the office building Dick is the one who comes along and has the perfect score at the clubhouse, $10,000 so Perry is seduced by delinquent culture he's never had anything and at least provides some sort of things to get something but in this way Dick and Perry are America's worst years realized they're juvenile delinquents that eventually resort to crime and eventually resort to the most extreme case of murder so what is the danger of this juvenile delinquent culture it's crying, it's violence in the United States and I think, again one of the scary aspects of this book is that Capote wants to make sure that we don't just think it's Dick and Perry that this is a much more pervasive problem in America I'll paraphrase this, but there's one sentence in this novel where Capote lists other murder cases happening at the same time and this is the description he gives it includes an African American soldier dismembering a prostitute the bludgeoning of a young boy by an army corporal the drowning of a nine year old girl by a hospital employee 14 year old by a laborer slash pedifier he includes that list in parentheses it's the scariest parentheses in American literature because the implication is it's so common place that it just can be in parentheses it's something you can axe out of the narrative he doesn't give any more airtime to any of those things they're just mentioned in passing he then quotes from the garden city telegraph that points out that during the trial or since the four members of the cloud family were killed last fall several other multiple murders have occurred in various parts of the country just during the few days leading up to the trial these three mass murder cases broke into the headlines as a result of this crime and the trial are just one of many such cases Capote then gives us the back story of several mass teen murderers one of them is on death row Lloyd Lee Andrews who killed his entire family when he was 18 and then he does give us a detailed account of his work and James Layton who killed seven people in cross-country murder screen when they were 18 and 19 year olds respectively so what Capote is doing is he is giving us these other examples of delinquency of teenagers committing the most atrocious crimes that you can imagine and Dick and Harry have done the same thing they're a little older but this is part of what's some of the terror and the fear that's kind of pervasive through America about the atomic ages what are the results of all this poverty what about this communist witch all of these things are part of what I think makes this book particularly terrifying so that brings you back to our question which is what's so scary about this book and we open up talking about the fact that it's not that the crimes are rendered in such a violent way I think it's this broader portrait of American culture as the tears of sudden annihilation the tears of poverty the tears of criminality the tears of young violence and I try to think about what's happening in 2012 when the Glendale School District is looking at this book and rereading it thinking whether or not it should be taught I think these same things that are scary about American culture in the 50 are scary for us now we might not be worried about the Soviet Union dropping a bomb but we're certainly worried about terrorist attacks we are certainly, especially since we're in a economic collapse we are certainly worried about the growing disparity between the rich and the poor and how long can that be sustained how many riots and near-rides do we need to have what's going to give I think parents are always mystified and terrified by teens in some culture and the prospect of good kids going bad and worrying about what the implications of that are for the future so I think that a number of these things that Capote's exploring in addition to issues about the psychology of the issue of his indictment of the death penalty and things like that are important parts of the book I think this portrait of American culture is still chilling and unnerving for us because I think we can find that it still resonates with very powerful concerns we have about today the things that need to be fixed in this country so that's that, thank you very much for your attention I guess if there are questions or we can chat about anything you want to some questions about the book or the meaning of life whatever I'm here for you I'd be curious to know if anyone here read in Cold Blood High School I know I visit some high schools in Long Island and I've seen the book in some classrooms so I know it's taught a little bit but I think it's a rarity to have it here in high school so one I always wonder about we talked about this over lunch perhaps but all of that right here maybe the Clutters deserved some peace they were murdered brutally extinguished from the earth did they have to be dragged up in magazine articles and a book and a film and another film wouldn't they just rest in peace yeah well I mean if they did I wouldn't be here today I mean more seriously whether that's I don't think that's I think that's a legitimate question about what kind of respect that we should show people who experience tragedy I think for Capote when you look at I think some of the thematic concerns and issues that he raises in the book I think he is trying to craft that narrative as a cautionary tale about some of the problems in America more broadly and hoping that that changes the discussion about you remember there are no Miranda rights the book is published right and this book helps influence Miranda rights Capote went on the speaker circuit to vocally condemn executing criminals so I think he wanted this book to speak to broader issues and to help influence discussion and to make change I think he thought he could take that pride and do something meaningful with it so I and those are resonating some of the things he said that still doesn't address as to whether or not this shouldn't have been used in that manner I certainly don't have an answer to that but it's certainly more thinking about like I said the Clouder family when that detective's notes were up for auction file the lawsuit they didn't want that material out there they lived through this their entire lives they didn't want their family dragged through it again and images floating around on the net so that anybody could see what happened their family so I think that was a powerful thing can you tell us about how the book was received when it first came out and did Americans understand at that time that it was about the American culture yeah well it was a best seller almost to me like I said the New Yorker's kind of highest sales ever and that's connected with Capote's celebrity as well as the book itself it was optioned for a movie for half a million dollars almost immediately by Columbia Pictures and then the movie was made and so this generated a lot of attention but even that quote that I showed of the hundreds of letters Capote got where people really felt that this is about America more broadly I think a lot of people did recognize that some of the more unnerving aspects were that this isn't an isolated incident so choosing this incident that happens in the middle of country in the Midwest the heartland like it was supposed to be emblematic to be all aspire to right this is where the danger happens I think that wasn't lost on a lot of people in terms of what was so unnerving about it and still is and I think it's remarkable that this book is still scary to read you know what's going to happen before the first sentence and it's still horrifying and compelling yes if it's true that we're in this sort of second decade of fear German sort of culture do you think we've learned anything since the 50's or do you think there's anything about that do you have a theory on that I mean I don't know a lot of the things you said that were going on those statistics in the 50's I don't know it's that bad now that I'm just wondering if there's a better way to deal with it I mean we haven't yeah I mean I don't want to be a negative Nellie but you look at the persecution of Muslim Americans after 9-11 the protests we're having now about economic inequity and disparity and it suggests to me that we haven't learned anything I mean that's not pleasant to say but I have trouble seeing that we have we have not really addressed the fundamental problems right that still create this economic inequity and we are still just as susceptible to fear mongering yeah so I think you can see a lot of that on display in the current presidential election with a lot of things being said that are incendiary on purpose and are divisive on purpose and so that and I know that there's natural cycles in history where those things happen on and off and it's about getting your name out there in attention but that troubles me about how far we've come and whether or not we do sometimes lapse into old fears and concerns yeah you alluded to prices in American tragedy very quickly a book about Bruce and death in 1925 I can't remember and then people who love murders you're talking 29 deep breaths on Bruce and push your argument that it's really about 50s I guess my first question is like Glendale and other schools were they debating whether or not to read those earlier books or showing suspicion in the movie because it also was so problematic that there are themes that resonated that as you said it's not just about crime it's got to be something else going on was there something going on not only in Glendale but in other school districts where these debates were going off or is about whether or not you should have any book with 50 on violent content well violent content where violent criminals are defined by their economic circumstances which is a remarkably Marxist notion so if that is the case then maybe it's not unique in cold blood it's got a nice long history and tradition of whether you want to use the term banning books or not assigning books let's read fluffy puppies because none of that resonate we don't have to even go with a classic I'm really thinking about has anybody investigated whether American tragedy was often banned or not assigned or debated and other books like it that precede the 50s and then let's move forward to execute your song which maybe has never signed because it's just so long but you want to talk about a book that has themes that we could talk about today oh and I don't want to present in cold blood as you speak to that I just think the makers are very much about those things that are happening in the 50s I think those concerns about economic inequity are pervasive in the 1920s the jazz age you're still talking about 20 plus percent of people in the 1920s living in poverty that's not what we see when Fitzgerald and his wife are in a fountain with champagne glasses so now you're just saying that the book is part of a larger continuum that precedes it and in your today it's just one of the jobs and this is one that I think powerfully deals with it but yeah I think that Drizor's address like John does pass us is doing with his text in the 1920s he is really trying to get to that great underside of American culture that everyone seems to be ignoring there's something that you didn't talk about I'm thinking compote sexuality, psychosexuality the murders and there's I mean you didn't even go there I had an hour the whole book go there we got one more time I think that's part of what people are telling me is the violence this is kind of a psychosexual the homosexual undercurrent is the affection between very dear and honey all the time and compote's own intimate I don't mean physical but intimate relationship with Perry during the process of the book and how that was part of and compote's family flamboyant sexuality it's part of his public image it's part of anything that he writes he's absolutely tapping into the same anxieties that the beats are tapping into with how with explicit censored scenes of sexuality in the same exact time period I think compote's part of that I think the difference with compote is that he wanted to be a great American novels that had the widest audience possible he was afraid to have explicit homosexuality in his books after his first novel he really wanted to touch it and I think that's because he really wanted mass popular kind of access so he's not willing to do what Hinsburg does and even what Gord Vidal the other one Rosa another book that is frequently on that list and I think it's incredibly important in fact I look at his novel The Grass Harp as a kind of reflection of the lavender stare and the persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s and how he's creating a kind of fable about that and so I think there are ways in which compote was trying to write about those things and get them in his text but he also didn't want alien aid it might just give the Glenn Vail School District one more reason to have this permission to have this conversation sure that they wouldn't talk about but they didn't those weren't the answers they gave I agree with that and this goes into the broader issue of you know, Caponi and queer theorists in general like Caponi distanced himself from that kind of movement and did not use his celebrity to my remember he didn't use his celebrity to fight for gay rights at all and so that has positioned him oddly in terms of how critics see his work as well I see some students I went through the 1950s with last year and maybe Dick and Perry have some literary cousins oh yeah, they're Dean and Sal they're on the road there's no open call field maybe not, I mean they haven't generated that kind of violence Dick and Perry hop in that car and they drive across the country, they got the roadmaps out in front of them they go down to Mexico, they come back it's like awful in cold blood it's the same kind of narrative and Holden is living in a land of plenty he's got a rich family and everything like that but he's outside he's distanced from it he doesn't embrace that violence but you know, they're outsiders yeah, absolutely it's in keeping with how that theme runs through 1950s kind of novels but the language that Dick and Perry use is one another, the affectionate terminology and the fact that there are readings of the book that argue that the reason that Perry kills Nancy is because Dick at the evening of the crime is attracted to her and is considering raping her and if we try to understand the psychology of Perry one of the motivations may have been because of his own kind of affection for Dick and so that's been an argument that's been made by some kind of critics as well it's an interesting one other questions? Anything else? I know what St. Patrick says I know there are pubs awaited I know this is a tough sell it wasn't officially banned there where? It wasn't officially banned in Glendale, they were debating it and they eventually proved it I don't know of any instances where it was banned I do not know of any and you have to think also that by the late 60s and the early 70s this is when you have feminist reclaiming previously banned books like K-Chopans The Awakening and things like that the 60s is not the likely time for a book like that to be banned but I'm not familiar with any examples I should investigate that further in case there's some school out there but I did not come across that when I was researching it It would be interesting to see if it were what the arguments were or explicitly and implicitly Thank you very much Thank you for handing Have a good afternoon Have you sent back?