April 10, 1966

London Letter

By WALTER ALLEN

ithout question the book of the day here is Capote's "In Cold Blood." It reached us with the biggest fanfare of publicity that has accompanied any American book since "By Love Possessed." This alone guaranteed it the full critical treatment, in the most fundamental sense, since it is the inevitable tendency of reviewers--of English reviewers at least--to believe that no book can be as good as it is said to be on the other side of the Atlantic. They will be ready and waiting, with their wits well honed. And with Capote's book there's the further compliclation that it came flanked with a whole panoply of statements from and interviews with Capote about it. "The nonfiction novel": what reviewer is going to fail to rise to that one?

Well, "In Cold Blood" has had the full treatment. At the center of it has been Kenneth Tynan's page-length review in The Observer. Having said that Capote's book "is certainly the most detailed and atmospheric account ever written of a contemporary crime," he goes on: "...we must pose the two central questions: Is it art? and is it morally defensible?"

He doesn't, in fact, waste much time on the first question. It is the moral issue that engages him. He states it like this:

"We are talking, in the long run, about responsibility; the debt that a writer arguably owes to those who provide him--down to the last autobiographical parentheses--with his subject matter and his livelihood.... For the first time an influential writer of the front rank has been placed in a position of privileged intimacy with criminals about to die, and--in my view--done less than he might have to save them.

"The focus narrows sharply down on priorities: does the work come first, or does life? An attempt to help (by supplying new psychiatric testimony) might easily have failed: what one misses is any sign that it was ever contemplated."

It is on the psychiatric question that Tynan concentrates. He writes:

"When the verdict was appealed, three Federal judges declared: 'There was no substantial evidence then and none has been produced since, to substantiate a defence of insanity.' (My italics.) And they were right; none was produced; although Capote, who investigated so much else, had five years in which he might have unearthed it. He could surely have faced that expense. In cold cash, it has been estimated that 'In Cold Blood' is likely to earn him between two and three million dollars."

Tynan ends: "It seems to me that the blood in which his book is written is as cold as any in recent literature."

Capote replied to Tynan, again in a full-page article in The Observer. He described Tynan's piece as a "knotted cat's-cradle" created by "egocentric ignorance," called Tynan a bully and a coward and accused him of using McCarthy-like smear-tactics.

To the charge that he did not seek out psychiatric evidence on behalf of the killers, he retorts that neither Dr. Joseph E. Satten nor Dr. W. Mitchell Jones, the only psychiatrists who "knew at first hand anything about it whatever...ever thought either Smith or Hickock was more than a severely pathological personality; neither they nor any other competent observer considered them 'insane' in the sense Tynan means."

He asserts: "If 50 world-famous psychiatrists had trooped into court prepared to swear that Smith and Hickock were 'paranoid schizophrenics' (which they weren't, though apparently that point is irrelevant to Tynan), it still would not have done a damn bit of good, because Kansas courts abide by the M'Naghten rule* and would not have allowed any testimony that deviated from its confines."

Tynan's review is the only one I have seen in which the moral issue was made explicit, but it could be felt not far below the surface of others. Anthony Curtis asked, in The Sunday Telegraph: "Is it right to turn hideous life into beautiful (and profitable) art in this way?" He answered: "I do not see what standards of taste or conscience Mr. Capote has violated by applying artistic method to historical fact." Jonathan Miller in The Listener was obviously less happy. He concluded: "It is a crushing irony that in a country hell-bent on fame and fortune Capote should have won through tepid print what they (Hickock and Smith) tried to get by spilling cold blood. I hope he's satisfied."

Of the reviewers who did not raise the moral issue the most perceptive, in my view, was Tony Tanner, in The Spectator. A leading British authority on American literature, he set Capote's intention in its American context. Capote "is continuing an old American tradition when he tries to get at the 'mythic' significance of the facts by simply stating them," and he buttresses his argument with quotations from Emerson and Thoreau. He denies the validity of the notion of a "non-fiction novel," as do all the English reviewers whom I've read, except Curtis, but he does not deny the book's brilliance, which has indeed been acclaimed everywhere.

Before the arrival of Capote's book the big event of the publishing season was the appearance of Graham Greene's "The Comedians." It was greeted generally with enthusiasm mingled with relief, for no one had forgotten that after "A Burnt-Out Case" Greene had said he had reached an age when "another full-length novel was probably beyond my powers." But one formidable voice was raised in dissent: V.S. Pritchett's, in The New Statesman. In "The Comedians," he said, "Greene is parodying himself."

Early on, too, we had Kingsley Martin's autobiography. "Father Figures." I think no book in recent years has met with such universal praise; and, on the face of it, this may surprise. As editor of The New Statesman from 1931 to 1960, Martin has been one of the most controversial figures in English public life, adored by his followers as a great liberal, pilloried by his opponents as a leading figure in what has been called "the stage-army of the good," and not always loved by his fellow- Socialists.

On this occasion, Tory and Socialist reviewers alike united to praise his book, for what emerges from it is a portrait, executed with modesty, humor and self-knowledge, of a representative English type that has been with us at least as far back as the Roundheads--the nonconformist for whom religious dissent goes hand in hand with political dissent.

At the moment of writing, the first reviews of Kingsley Amis's new novel, "The Anti-Death League" (to be published in the U.S. in August) are coming in. It is getting enormously respectful, slightly puzzled attention. There is a general feeling that this espionage-cum-love story with religious overtones represents a new phase in Amis's development. According to Frederic Raphael, in The Sunday Times, "Mr. Amis has discovered love." Simon Raven, in The Observer, announces that "Mr. Amis has turned querulous and shrill." My own belief is summed up by Anthony Curtis, in The Sunday Telegraph: "In the 1930's Graham Greene took the current melodrama plot of the man-on-the-run and rejuvenated it with a moral seriousness. Mr. Amis has now done the same with the modern obsession with espionage and no one interested in the vitality of fiction can afford to ignore his attempt."

There have been two sequels to the spate of novels by leading women writers that was a feature of publishing here last fall. The first, a spirited article, "Love's Labours Exposed," by Storm Jameson in The Spectator, deals with the problem of the "interest, pleasure, satisfaction" some women novelists find "in writing at dreadful length about their or their characters' erotic needs...." To my knowledge no one has ever accused Miss Jameson of being a prude or mealy-mouthed. She ends her piece:

"I am inclined to think that the energy and impressiveness as an erotic figure of the Baron Charlus, let us say, rests in large part on our not being shown him crudely in the act. Just as I am sure that if Tolstoy had offered me news about Natasha's vagina I should have yawned."

The second article, "Women Beware Women, or, Cows on a Dark Hillside," by Janice Elliott, appeared in The Sunday Times. Why, Miss Elliott asks, do novels by women today "leave one with the sensation of having swallowed a pleasant snack, but rarely a square meal?" Her answers include female narcissism and female self-disgust. She concludes by quoting a character in Iris Murdoch's "The Red and the Green": "I think being a woman is like being Irish.... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same." Janice Elliott, who is rather less than half Storm Jameson's age, has a first novel, "The Godmother," coming out in the summer. Her article suggests it will be worth looking at.

*The rule in the M'Naghten Case is: "To establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong."

Mr. Allen, biographer and critic, is the author of "The Modern Novel in Britain and the United States."