Use of Verisimilitude, Factual, Detached
Verisimilitude: It Sounds Like He Was There
Verisimilitude is a literary tool used to make a story, even if it is real, seem more real. Your grandfather used it when he talked about walking a mile in the snow to school every day and then added "past Abe Lincoln's house." Well, he might not have walked to school in the snow, but Abe Lincoln was real, so that added a ring of truth to the story. (This was before you learned that Abe Lincoln did not, in fact, live in Vermont.)
If you had opened the pages of the September 25, 1965 issue of The New Yorker magazine, you would've seen this Editor's Note at the top of the first installment of In Cold Blood:
All quotations in this article are taken either from official records or from conversations, transcribed verbatim, between the author and the principals.
Capote claimed that the book was a completely true account of the Clutter murders. He therefore knew that his style had to have a realistic, journalistic feel to it. Verisimilitude, or the art of making a thing sound real, was going to be essential to backing up his claim. "Art" is the operative word here.
Sure, after the publication of In Cold Blood, the citizens of Holcomb and those involved with the investigation rushed to point out that parts of the book were inaccurate and flat-out dishonest. But we're talking about style here, not truth, and Capote does a convincing job of making us feel we're getting the real deal.
Detail, detail, detail. Know how your English teachers are always bugging you to support your conclusions and observations? Capote convinces us to believe his story by his constant use of detailed description. And he's brilliant at it. His gift for description lets us see the town in all its dusty glory; it makes us think we've seen Perry and Dick's faces up close; we lose sleep thinking about the bloody corpses in the Clutter house. You can almost hear that lonesome whistle of the train passing through.
His extensive use of quotes from townspeople, investigators, family, and the killers also lends the book a strong sense of realism. Of course, it's true—we heard it firsthand.
Factual—He Was There.
The book is written in a factual, unemotional way, which has a startling effect in places, given that it's about a slaughtered family and their killers. "Less is more" definitely applies to Capote's writing style.
Capote's description of the Teacherage, for example, manages to get across to the reader more than the look of the building, while doing no more than giving you the facts:
The Teacherage [. . .] is an out-of-date edifice, drab and poignant. Its twenty-odd rooms are separated into grace-and-favor apartments for those members of the faculty unable to find, or afford, other quarters. (1.264)
We're bombarded with facts about the population and history of the town and backgrounds of the people who live there. We're practically handed a copy of Herb Clutter's resume. We learn the number of murder cases Dewey worked on; the places Perry and Dick lived and jobs they held; the legal statutes relevant to the insanity plea. We get a detailed description of Death Row. It's easy to feel we were there, too.
I Just Wrote It Like I Saw It
A final, yet extremely effective, aspect of Capote's style is the author's stylistic detachment from the story. He keeps himself out of the story completely. He's totally non-judgmental about the range of views and opinions expressed by his characters. The author's seeming aloofness from what he's reporting allows him to report/repeat the most disturbing description and dialogue with no analysis, commentary, or anything else, which makes it even more creepy. One example of this is how he allows Larry Hendricks, a teacher who accompanies the sheriff to the Clutter home, to tell the details of the gruesome crime scene. Later, Larry says,
[Mrs. Kidwell] kept saying—but it was only later that I understood what she meant—she kept saying "Oh, Bonnie, Bonnie, what happened? You were so happy, you said it was all over, you said you'd never be sick again."
Capote is able to use the authorial remove of another person's voice to bring home the terror and hysteria.
George Plimpton asked Capote: "Being removed from the book, that is to say, keeping yourself out of it, do you find it difficult to present your own point of view? For example, your own view as to why Perry Smith committed the murders. Capote's answer? Simple. "Of course it's by the selection of what you choose to tell [Italics Shmoop's]. I believe Perry did what he did for the reasons he himself states—that his life was a constant accumulation of disillusionments and reverses and he suddenly found himself (in the Clutter house that night) in a psychological cul-de-sac. The Clutters were such a perfect set of symbols for every frustration in his life." (Source.)