Truman Capote - Salem Press

evening. He soon learns that Holly plays host to a
wide assortment of mostly male friends, ranging
from soldiers to Hollywood agents to an occasional
gangster. Holly also is a regular visitor to Sing Sing
Prison, where she is a paid messenger for a gangster
named Sally Tomato. Holly is a vivacious blond
who speaks in a kind of butchered French-English,
which is her attempt at city sophistication.
Holly fascinates everyone who meets her: the
young writer, her former agent, the bar owner, a
rich playboy named Rusty Trawler, and a handsome
Brazilian, Jose Ybarra-Jaegar, whom she
hopes to marry. Holly is, in effect, a kind of freespirited
earth goddess, the kind of myth men tend
to worship, a myth suggested by the wooden carving
in the story’s opening. The freedom to love as
one desires is one of Holly’s obsessions. She tells
the narrator that she believes people should be allowed
to marry as they like, either male or female.
In another conversation, she expresses her openminded
attitude toward lesbians and even considers
taking in a lesbian roommate. She further reveals
that she is attracted to older men (such as
Wendell Willkie) but that she could as easily be interested
in, ideally, Greta Garbo.
The novella is a slowly unfolding character study
of Holly through a series of episodic events: her
parties; her free lifestyle; her taking in a model,
Mag Wildwood, as a roommate; the visit of her
older Texas husband, Doe; her aspirations to
marry the rich Brazilian Ybarra-Jaegar; and her arrest
and scandal because of her associations with
Sally Tomato. Most important of all these casually
related events is the sudden death of Holly’s
brother, Fred, killed in overseas combat. Faced
with scandal and the end of her planned marriage,
Holly, at the end of the story, leaves New York,
abandoning her only commitment—the pet cat
with no name—and heads to South America to
seek further that glamorous place of safety for
which she yearns.
The book’s title is a symbol of that search; Holly
likes the environment of Tiffany’s jewelry store in
New York, because nothing bad (she thinks) could
happen to anyone there. A quiet, assured place of
the security, wealth, and glamour—a place of calm
belonging—that Holly so desperately seeks, she
sees it as an alternative to the despair that grips
her, the depression she calls the “mean reds.” Although
frivolous and exasperating to those who
know her, Holly Golightly (her name obviously suggests
her attitude toward life) captivates all who
meet her so that, in their minds, she takes on the
substance of an elusive mythic dream, her appeal
carved in their memories just as it was in the African
wooden figure.
In Cold Blood
First published: 1966
Type of work: Nonfiction novel
Truman Capote
A Kansas farm family is mysteriously
murdered by two ex-convicts who flee the scene but
are eventually captured, tried, and executed.
In Cold Blood was created as a work of deliberate literary
experiment. Having written extensive journalistic
coverage in his account of an opera company’s
tour of the Soviet Union (The Muses Are
Heard) and in various travel writing, Capote desired
to combine the reportorial techniques of
journalism—the gathering of detailed factual material
by observation and interviewing—with the
narrative and dramatic scene devices of fiction.
The grisly, senseless murders of a Kansas farm family
(Herbert W. Clutter, his wife, and two children)
on November 15, 1959, in Holcomb, Kansas, provided
the opportunity for the writer to try his experiment.
In Cold Blood is a documented record of those
murders, but it is also a documentation of the backgrounds,
motives, attitudes, and perspectives of
hundreds of local townspeople as well as those of
the two killers, ex-convicts Richard Eugene Hickock
and Perry Smith, who are arrested eventually
for the crime, tried, and executed. Shortly after the
crime was committed, Capote went to Kansas to
begin the massive accumulation of material that
forms the substance of the book. At the outset, the
murders were baffling because of the lack of any
apparent motive for the slayings. There also were
few clues.
Initially Capote envisioned his work as a short
one in which he would explore the background of
the murders and the reaction of the town to them.
With the discovery, capture, and confession of the
two killers, however, Capote’s concept changed fo-
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