In Cold Blood

   

In Cold Blood as a FoundationText for AP Language

By:Dr. Betty Moss

San Antonio College

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In Cold Blood

CONTENTS

Teaching Skills with In Cold BloodNews ReportsEpigraphCharactersGroup AssignmentsClose Reading PracticeCompositionStyle Analysis

InformalFormal

Exposition/ArgumentationCreative/Evaluative

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Teaching Skills with In Cold Blood

Close ReadingReading StrategiesLiterary ElementsFigurative LanguageSound DevicesLiterary FormsElement of Research

GrammarPhrasesClausesSentences for Rhetorical EffectSyntax Technique

CompositionMultiple Modes (intent and in student assignments)ProcessStructural ElementsOrganizationStyle and Voice

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News November 15, 1959:

“Well, it was pretty bad. That wonderful girl—but you would have never known her. She’d been shot in the back of the head with a shotgun held maybe two inches away. She was lying on her side, facing the wall, and the wall was covered with blood. The bedcovers were drawn up to her shoulders. Sheriff Robinson, he pulled them back, and we saw that she was wearing a bathrobe, pajamas, socks, and slippers—like, whenever it happened, she hadn’t gone to bed yet. Her hands were tied behind her, and her ankles were roped together with the kind of cord you see on Venetian blinds. Sheriff said, ‘Is this Nancy Clutter?’—he’d never seen the child before. And I said, ‘Yes. Yes, that’s Nancy.’”

--Larry Hendricks, upon viewing the murder scene

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EPIGRAPH

A translation of the Medieval French of Francois Villon (The French poet François Villon (1431-c. 1463), the greatest writer of 15th-century France, was the first creative, modern French lyric poet. His work is remarkable for its rare inspiration and sincerity.)

L’Epitaphe Villon: Ballade Des Pendus My brothers who live after us,Don’t harden you hearts against us too,If you have mercy now on us,God may have mercy upon you.

François was born into a poor family. His mother was pious but illiterate; his father died when François was very young. The child's lot would have been miserable had not Master Guillaume de Villon, the canon of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné, taken him to rear. He attended to François's early education, and the child affectionately referred to him as "more than a father." Later the poet adopted his name and rendered it imperishable. From this time on, most information about Villon derives from documents of the University of Paris, the prefecture of police, and his own poems.

In March 1449 Villon was received as a bachelor of arts at the Sorbonne, after which occurred his first involvement in civic disorders in the winter 1451/1452. His studies continued, however, and he received the licentiate and the degree of Master of Arts later in 1452. In short, Villon was a well-educated man, and incidental allusions in his works show considerable knowledge.

Brawls and Disappearance

In June 1455 Villon killed Philip Chermoye, a priest, in a brawl, and he immediately fled from Paris. But the murder was well provoked, and in January 1456 Villon was granted two official releases, one in the name of François de Montcorbier, Master of Arts and the other in the name of Master François des Loges, also known as Villon, an indication that Villon was then known by all three names. Perhaps Villon's status as a man of learning or perhaps the later intervention of Charles d'Orléans influenced judicial leniency. Later in the year Villon completed his Lais.

About Christmas, 1446, Villon participated in a burglary at the College of Navarre. He fled to Angers, and then he wandered for more than 4 years. During this period he probably sojourned at the court of Charles d'Orléans, himself a first-class poet, and was in jail twice. At Orléans he escaped a death sentence by pardon; and at Meung-sur-Loire, where he was imprisoned by Thibault

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d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orléans, he was released, according to a merciful custom, by the passage of King Louis XI through the town in October 1461.

Villon's intense experiences inspired the Grand testament, which he completed in 1461. In 1462 he was confronted with the affair of the College of Navarre; he was imprisoned at the Châtelet but released on a bond of restitution for his share in the theft. Involved in a fight in which François Ferrebourg was wounded, Villon was sentenced to be hanged. He appealed the decision, and Parliament by an edict on Jan. 5, 1463, annulled the sentence and reduced his penalty to a 10-year exile from Paris. After that date nothing is known of him.

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Principal Characters of In Cold Blood

1. Herb Clutter: Head of the Clutter household. Herb is a well-liked and respected member of the Holcomb community. Fairly prosperous, he is not thought to have any enemies until his savage murder on November 15, 1959.

2. Bonnie Clutter: Wife of Herb Clutter. Bonnie is a recluse, due to fainting spells and severe depression that force her to stay inside of the house most of the time.

3. Nancy Clutter: Daughter of Herb and Bonnie Clutter. 11th grade. As her father, she is well-liked throughout town and popular among her peers. She is a bright, energetic girl, devoting time to her family, her schoolwork, her activities, and her boyfriend, Bobby Rupp.

4. Kenyon Clutter: Son of Herb and Bonnie Clutter. 10th grade. Kenyon, less social than his sister, Nancy, he is not known to have any enemies.

5. Perry Smith : Convicted thief sentenced to Kansas State Penitentiary. After his parole, Perry is convinced by his friend from jail, Dick Hickock, to rob and kill the Clutter family, a family neither had ever met.

6. Dick Hickock: Friend and former cellmate of Perry Smith. Hickock is the second conspirator of the murder. Although he did not pull the trigger, he conjured up the whole plan with help from fellow inmate Floyd Wells.

7. Floyd Wells : Past employee of Herb Clutter. It is Wells who tells Hickock that the Clutters are wealthy. It is also Wells who connects Hickock and Smith to the deaths of the Clutters.

8. Alvin Dewey: Main detective of the Clutters’ investigation. Dewey receives the call from Wells about Smith and Hickock, and he plays a prominent part in their conviction.

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GROUP ASSIGNMENTS FOR IN COLD BLOOD

After we have established groups and assignments, begin taking notes in your bluebooks on your topics. Do not forget page numbers. Be prepared to discuss them for the class with passages cited for evidence. Each person is responsible for all aspects of the group assignment. In addition, write a brief analysis/response to each section of the text. One consideration—why give it its title?

1. Perry: Is he a prisoner of his past? Nature? Nurture? A tragic figure?

2. Dick: Same questions. Creative non-fiction, motif of tragedy.

3. The important settings: Pay attention to how Capote uses the creation of place to create tone, to characterize, and to delineate themes.

4. The victims: How and why does Capote characterize them so fully? Postmodernism, the American Dream.

5. The investigators: How and why does Capote characterize them fully? Garden of Eden, loss of innocence.

6. Structure of the text: Explore the sections, transitions, rhetorical strategies, and how they contribute to Capote’s concerns. The New Journalism.

At the close of the book, EACH GROUP WILL GIVE A BRIEF PRESENTATION—INCLUDING A VISUAL—TO EXPAIN WHY THEIR TOPIC(S) ARE CRUCIAL TO THE TEXT’S THEMATIC DEVELOPMENT.

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 .

Herbert and Bonnie Clutter, Nancy and Kenyon

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CLOSE READING PRACTICE

Excerpted from In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Copyright © 1994 by Truman Capote.

The Last to See Them Alive

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see--simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign--DANCE--but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window--HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "apartment houses," the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches.

Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do--only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a café--Hartman's Café, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses

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sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is "dry.")

And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and ably staffed "consolidated" school--the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away--are, in general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers, most of them, they are outdoor folk of very varied stock--German, Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets. Farming is always a chancy business, but in western Kansas its practitioners consider themselves "born gamblers," for they must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and anguishing irrigation problems. However, the last seven years have been years of droughtless beneficence. The farm ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made not from farming alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and swollen grain elevators.

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life--to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises--on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them--four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again--those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.(1-3)

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Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

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Alvin Dewey

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Garden of Eden Motif

However, as Mr. Clutter remarked, “an inch more of rain and this place would be Eden—heaven on Earth.” The little collection of fruit-bearers by the river was his attempt to contrive, rain or no, a patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden he imagined.(2-3)

Other than a housekeeper who came in on weekdays, the Clutters employed no household help, so since his wife's illness and the departure of the elder daughters, Mr. Clutter had of necessity learned to cook; either he or Nancy, but principally Nancy, prepared the family meals. Mr. Clutter enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it--no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at charity cake sales--but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts. That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach….(9-10)

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Dr. Betty H. Moss

Style Analysis – InformalYou are to choose two different sections of the text that show Capote’s diverse style. For each section, answer the following questions:

1. What is happening at this point in the text?2. What is the overall impression of the section? Select at least two tone words from

your tone list to describe the overall tone. Be as precise as possible in choosing tone words.

3. What impresses you most about the passage?4. Discuss the dictions: List examples of words that are abstract or concrete. Which

dominate the section? What kind of verbs or verbals does Capote use here? Are there notable adjectives or adverbs?

5. Discuss the sentence length. Discuss the kinds of sentence and the use (or non use) of clauses, phrases, sentence openings, etc.

6. What poetic devices are used? Is there alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, personification? What images are created?

7. Discuss any other style elements from your notes that apply to your chosen passages.8. Choose one of these passages and write your style analysis essay.

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Dr. Betty H. Moss

Style Analysis – FormalStyle Analysis:

I. Locate your passage—approximately 500 words—in the text and explain WHY it is SIGNIFICANT in terms of narrative/theme/structure/character revelation.

II. Establish the tone and point of view of the passage by examining the following rhetorical strategies (choose those pertinent to your passage): diction, syntax, imagery, rhetorical devices, and narrative strategies. Do not forget to look at the verb tenses.

III. Tie the specifics of the passage to the broad concerns you identified in #I, and provide additional insight into its importance within the context of the whole text.

HAND IN: A copy of the passage--annotatedComplete process

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IN COLD BLOOD COMPOSITION ASSIGNMENTS

1. Whose tragedy is it? Argue your thesis with specific references to the text.

2. Is the book an implicit argument against capital punishment? Decide and argue your position by examining the text rhetorically.

3. You are the defense attorney for the murderers. Write the plea you will deliver to the judge asking him to spare their lives. 4. You are the district attorney. Write the speech you will deliver asking for the death penalty.

Hand in complete process. Dates for parts of the process are on your calendar. Use your text for evidence—references properly cited.

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Biblio/Webliography

For further biographical and critical background on Capote and In Cold Blood, refer to:

Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood": A Critical Handbook, ed. by Irving Malin (1968)The Worlds of Truman Capote by William L. Nance (1970)Truman Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (1988)Truman Capote's Southern Years by Marianne M. Moates & Jennings Faulk Carter (1996)Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton (1997)Critical Essays on Truman Capote, ed. by Joseph J. Waldmeir (1999)The Critical Response to Truman Capote ed. by Joseph J. Waldmeir (1999)The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote by Marie Rudisill, James C. Simmons (2000)

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