Today the English PGCE cohort were asked to each present a short text or extract from a text to our peers and explain why we had chosen it and why we might use it in the classroom. It was very interesting to get a broad sweep of the literary tastes of my classmates, and to ‘bank’ some great ideas for lessons and for my own reading.
I came away inspired to bulk up my Kindle with Caitlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman, Brian Turner’s war poetry and Chinua Achebe’s ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ among others.
For my own part, I decided to present an extract from Truman Capote’s true crime bestseller In Cold Blood, because it is one of those books that changed my whole attitude to literature and reading.
Handed it by my rather fantastic GCSE English teacher, who told me it was ‘total masterpiece’ by a ‘tortured genius’, I set off with it on my seven-hour journey home for half term and finished it within two.
In Cold Blood, if you haven’t read it (which a surprising amount of the group hadn’t), is the antithesis of how many people think of Capote, due largely to the fame of his novella Breakfast At Tiffany’s, that Audrey Hepburn immortalised into the cultural zeitgeist.
On November 16, 1959, The New York Times published a short account of the brutal and inexplicable murders of a family from Kansas.
This 300-word article interested New York-based journalist Truman Capote enough for him to travel to Kansas to investigate the murders, along with his childhood friend Harper Lee of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. Capote became obsessed with the crime and compiled over 8000 pages of research for the book. The killers, Perry Smith and Richard ‘Dick’ Hickock, were caught not long after the murders, and Capote interviewed them as well as family, friends and investigators. Much has been made of his rumoured closeness and sympathy with Smith, who is portrayed as a fragile ‘torn and twisted’ creature in the book. In Cold Blood took six years to complete and has been hailed as the original true crime novel.
It is not giving anything away to say that the book is about the murder of a family, indeed the subtitle of the novel is ‘A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences’ and the various covers of various editions show guns, prison fences and other violent giveaways. But In Cold Blood is unique in that it not only details the facts Capote gained from statements and interviews, but also includes richly woven stories about the family and the killers that he could never have known. This 'faction' makes for a compelling read, with a jarring sense of reality throughout.
As readers, we get to know the Clutter family with a full awareness that they are about to be brutally murdered in front of our eyes, and that is truly terrifying.
In the two extracts I chose, we gain an insight into the life of teen queen Nancy Clutter before her death. This way of accessing the text might be a great way to engage teenage girls with a text that at first glance appears very masculine.
As I read my extracts, I asked my audience to hold in their minds the fact that some of the text is factual and journalistic, while some of it could clearly never have been known. How does the author conflate the two? And why?
In Cold Blood is an amazing example of the fusion and fission of fact and fiction and is an absolutely compulsive read. If you haven't already, read it.
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Nancy's bedroom was the smallest, most personal room in the house - girlish, and as frothy as a ballerina's tutu. Walls, ceiling, and everything else except a bureau and a writing desk, were pink or blue or white. The white-and-pink bed, piled with blue pillows, was dominated by a big pink and-white Teddy bear - a shooting-gallery prize that Bobby had won at the county fair. A cork bulletin board, painted pink, hung above a white-skirted dressing table; dry gardenias, the remains of some ancient corsage, were attached to it, and old valentines, newspaper recipes, and snapshots of her baby nephew and of Susan Kidwell and of Bobby Rupp, Bobby caught in a dozen actions – swinging a bat, dribbling a basketball, driving a tractor, wading, in bathing trunks, at the edge of McKinney Lake (which was as far as he dared go, for he had never learned to swim). And there were photographs of the two together - Nancy and Bobby. Of these, she liked best one that showed them sitting in a leaf-dappled light amid picnic debris and looking at one another with expressions that, though unsmiling, seemed mirthful and full of delight. Other pictures, of horses, of cats deceased but unforgotten - like "poor Boobs," who had died not long ago and most mysteriously (she suspected poison) – encumbered her desk.
Nancy was invariably the last of the family to retire; as she had once informed her friend and home-economics teacher, Mrs. Polly Stringer, the midnight hours were her "time to be selfish and vain." It was then that she went through her beauty routine, a cleansing, creaming ritual, which on Saturday nights included washing her hair. Tonight, having dried and brushed her hair and bound it in a gauzy bandanna, she set out the clothes she intended to wear to church the next morning: nylons, black pumps, a red velveteen dress - her prettiest, which she herself had made. It was the dress in which she was to be buried.
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"Well, it was pretty bad. That wonderful girl - but you would never have 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.'
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