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[pp. 260-261] Surely the most revealing expression of Capote’s difficulty with endings, and all that they represent, is the lyrical scene with which In Cold Blood ends. He liked to say that part of the appeal of writing the book lay in the discipline imposed by having to recount a true story: ”I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me and I can do nothing about it. I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it.” The great sweep of the story he tells in In Cold Blood, with its severe and measured pacing — the discovery of the terrible crime; the search for the killers, craftily intercut with flashbacks to their wretched lives; the canny rhythms with which Capote presents the hasty trial and the prolonged delay before the executions — culminates beautifully in a final scene that takes place in a cemetery where, on a wind-swept day a few years after the killings, Alvin Dewey, the detective who solved the murders, encounters a young woman who had been the best friend of the teenage Nancy Clutter, one of the victims. A brief conversation between them pointedly gives both Dewey and the reader a gentle sense of closure, and the novel ends with one last alliterative evocation of the bleak Kansas landscape: ”Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”

The problem is that this ending is too artful: as it turns out, the scene was entirely fictional. Capote added it, he later told Clarke, because the ending that real life had provided him — the hangings of the killers — didn’t seem satisfying. ”I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace.” Faced with an ugly reality, he withdrew into a beautiful fantasy — the kind of gentle peace that imbues his evocation of childhoods long past. (Gerald Clarke rightly notes that this final scene rehashes the ending of The Grass Harp.) Capote knew, finally, that he wasn’t up to bringing his most serious and important work to an authentic conclusion. The coda as it stands was just the last in a series of endings that he fudged, or from which he retreated; and you can’t help wondering whether the inability to face unalterable facts (as represented by this particular false ending) was, in some way, the key to Capote’s disintegration. His own words suggest as much. ”No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” he later said. ”It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me.”

– Daniel Mendelsohn
“The Truman Show” from How Beautiful It is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays
(Harper; $26.95)