In Colder Blood: How Truman Capote Plagiarized his “Masterpiece” from Willa Cather

 

When Truman Capote saw the NY Times headline in November 1959 of the murders of the Clutter family of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon in Holcomb, Kansas that would become his book In Cold Blood, he was not thinking of the family that had just been executed in their home or the even the killers, although all of it was immediately appealing. He was thinking of himself. His immediate phone call to The New Yorker was because he recognized the elements of an opportunity that matched what he was looking for with very specific criteria that also matched the level of sensationalism he desperately desired. Those specific criteria had to do with the model he would use to write another work, and the criteria matched exactly. This was not literary intent of an insightful author. This was about fame and the manipulation of it for more. The instantaneous decision of the pressing need to get to Kansas right on top of the funerals and the families and town in shock, and show up knowing his appearance would make himself the star of the show (famous or not, he would make himself central of attention) was based on established patterns of personality disorders with traits now known to be borderline, histrionic, and narcissism. While those criteria must be left to psychology to determine the exactness with which this played out, the patterns are present in his literary history, his previous ‘writing’ from his beginning in 1945’s “Miriam” and plagiarizing those around him, through his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his actions in ‘creating’ those publications and the intentional publicity he garnered around that ‘important process of creation’—the stature required for receiving the attention, which is what led Truman to this personally urgent decision to get to Kansas with the backing of a publication like The New Yorker—status and publicity being key to being bigger than everybody. The inner work didn’t matter. This was calculated story and fame.

As I demonstrated before in his plagiarism of Willa Cather, this ‘story’ immediately met the model of setting and characters similar to hers that he could use to frame it like hers, and that’s how he knew instantly he could ‘write’ it and it be a ‘masterpiece,’ as hers is. What probably no one saw coming is that he would more readily identify with the perpetrators of the crime, more akin to him, more attracted to it because of the crime, and also oddly, he would not demonstrate empathy with the slaughtered family in the least, and would in fact take a stance of demeaning them right in front of the remaining family members and town. This, too, was not daring or a literary decision of his own (although it was sold and received as such), but his own, now shared pathology with the killers, but with himself, of course, the intended star.

Strangely, the structure of Willa Cather’s 1922 Pulitzer winning novel One of Ours could provide the setting, story structure, and the characterization for Truman’s outline, and when Willa showed Claude Wheeler’s internal desperation, Truman would, too, and when she did not sympathize with the Wheeler family, Truman had her story structure in the literary sense as a frame and literary excuse of not sympathizing with the Clutter family—but of which he was not actually psychologically capable, so it matched ironically, wonderfully. Willa, of course, had deeply insightful reasons for not sympathizing with the Wheeler family as their lack of understanding and unwillingness to break from convention was the cause of their son Claude Wheeler’s building internal combustion of ordinariness leading to his death. All other doors were closed to him because of proprieties that could not be questioned. For Truman, he could then insert his dislike of any family, subconsciously or not, and identify himself also with Perry Smith who murders them, and have the groundwork for the reasons awkwardly justifying the murders of a conventional society, as Perry then ironically becomes the victim as Claude Wheeler and as Truman himself (as Truman always inserted himself into Willa’s stories), and using this instead of the reality of these humans and their perpetrators to write the story. This is not mere inspiration. Willa’s story provides the entire setting, structure, characterization, and outcome. The careful contemplation and insight came from Willa herself, and from having witnessed it of her cousin Grosvenor Cather who was killed in WWI in 1918 in France. Truman needed a real person too, then, to carry out the literary model. And Willa’s statements about why she had to write it? ”It stood between me and anything else.”—the very public stance Truman would take.

As made obvious in those intervening years, Truman had no empathy for Perry Smith either, and wished for Perry’s demise to be done more quickly so that he could have the book published. He needed Willa’s ending, and that meant an execution. And then move immediately upon publication with the new-found money to celebrate himself by throwing himself the ‘party of the century,’ and quite literally holding the hand of the owner of the press, Katherine Graham, beside him. It was a war of publicity he was waging against anyone who would speak out against his inner character, a place where even he could not stand. Katherine Graham said herself she knew when she was asked to be the centerpiece and reason of the evening that she was a prop. It is no wonder that it worked so well on the public: Truman had justified his victimization within the work and all around it, put himself into the role of tortured master artist, publicly ‘endured the hardships’ of writing such a piece, and waited for so long . . . When the movie was released the next year in 1967 to more celebrity fanfare, it was ‘normal’ that Perry Smith got the moving scene of the last trip to the bathroom for his dignity, last words, trembling hands, and audible heartbeat—his humanity, as Truman was getting despite all evidence of offense and this gnawing of what wasn’t right pushed aside—the humanity and consideration never granted to the family, shown now with all the trauma of Perry/Truman recalling his own heart-breaking past while rain on the window, the natural deluge, the now natural cause of the pathology causing him to become a bad guy from what had happened to him, is shown reflected by glowing light flowing profusely down his own face as he faces his more important and heartbreaking demise, and now serving important purpose as with Claude Wheeler, and when the credits rolled, Truman was there to scoop up the waiting and now seemingly justified Martyred Artist of the Year Award.

It worked. It has worked seamlessly without a ripple for nearly 60s years. The movies and series since based on the affair portray him as ‘quirky.’ No one dares publish a statement of his manipulations, even plagiarism, as manipulative, constantly instead retreating to that he was abandoned as a child, as if that is a given blessing to now commit any breach and to be perceived as “literary” and courageously socially defiant, when actually it is the exact opposite. It is fraudulent. It isn’t attractive or successful in a meaningful way.

And this continued decade after decade despite what Audrey Hepburn herself did in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Paris When It Sizzles to demonstrate what was dishonestly happening and what Truman was offensively and unethically doing with others’ intellectual property and reputations, and to direct the legitimate artists and artworks back to their own power, radiance, and beauty using her own. What also stands out that even then it could not be spoken, as it cannot in this moment. Ironically, the novel from which Truman took In Cold Blood, Willa’s One of Ours, is an examination of the extreme loss paid by a culture’s unwillingness to let the truth be spoken, the truth which carries with it the actual golden of being alive.

Now to be contended with is eighty years (Truman would have been 100 in 2024) of not only Truman’s victimhood, but also his solicited and sensationalized publicity of his self-importance that went with that, but it can be simplified into the evidence of where he was getting his ‘inspiration’ and content and from where he was ultimately deriving his “literary identity” (and delusional one) in the things he wrote and said, and therefore the things that were continually repeated about him with careless discernment, still repeated to this day with ‘fame is success’ (much as fame is a business now) as unassailable armor. With this popularity criterium, though, fraud is also considered ‘success.’ In this moment where illusion, press, and social media make it almost impossible to discern reality, it still would be considered cold-blooded ruthlessness for us to call this perpetrator/victim out on any transgression. It’s quite upside down. The grounding of his fame lies in that. It is poisoned ground. With the literary evidence, however, the pathologies then stand alone and really are unable to act. It is the art we save, where it leads, and what it opens, as Willa’s works open, profoundly, gorgeously, more so now. And so it is important to show the illusion of what happened and the actual realness and reality more substantially and vibrantly grounded underlying the grandiose amplification of a problem. Perhaps that problem does have to scream for attention so loudly and on every magazine cover, publicity fed every single day, that it forces us to open up the real of what is the free soul’s blossoming and extraordinary, timely, necessary expression.

In previous articles I have discussed how Truman repeatedly plagiarized his works from author Willa Cather, across an entire ‘career,’ actually. One of our brightest social classic moments, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for example, and the freeing of the feminine spirit informing culture instead of the other way around, is an assemblage of passages taken from her works “The Bohemian Girl,” “Coming, Aphrodite!”, The Song of the Lark, A Lost Lady, and My Ántonia, with added elements in models such as featured by photographer Richard Avedon for the magazine pages, bringing Avedon fame in NYC, whetting Truman’s jealousy of any success or fame and no personal line drawn in then taking that exact content, and then Dovima also featured then in Audrey Hepburn’s 1957 movie Funny Face. (What is cosmically lovely is that Willa’s stories began there on Washington Square where Audrey is the expression of the books and the budding feminine there in Greenwich Village—moving to realization and the capitol of humanity and culture, Paris, where there could be nothing more lovely than Audrey’s triumph of self-expression there. Nature does indeed take her course! And inform culture. Art takes us there.)

“Miriam,” Truman’s first published story, is a simplified and literarily reduced to titillating and juvenile horror, the same personality of Truman who, hidden behind proprieties, likes to creep in past normal boundaries and say, “hello” after he’s been asked to leave, and show you how you will never get rid of him. Yet it is too closely similar in conception to Willa Cather’s the much more brilliant and much deeper disintegration in My Mortal Enemy (like Truman’s borrowed conception too, for example, the holiday theft in his “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and Willa’s “The Burglar’s Christmas,” or biographically his cousin Sook and Willa’s “Old Mrs. Harris,” and her own personal sources, i.e. not conceiving these ideas on his own, but merely applying them to himself free of charge), and taking methods of description, style, or the gothic elements from her and from other writers such as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, which has already long been documented, but overlooked, because, well . . . ‘success’ of popularity and fame (popularity a lot of times not a great gauge, as in high school or fascism, for example). But breaking open the art is a good idea. The real art can most certainly can speak when recognized in consciousness. Willa Cather’s intricate and felt descriptions of nature, for example, open up into a realization of the palpable life possible surrounding us in virility, as in the Garden of Eden all around but not seen or understood. Truman lifting her technique of describing nature constantly may offer gothic mood, but it leads no where in insight.

But Truman’s limit (lack of personal and professional boundaries) was not just plagiarism, for in his pathology everything was about him and because of his successful public victimization, he was publicly granted access and even entitled to it, would even be handsomely rewarded for it, or when it was pointed out, it would have made some ethical or personal difference, at least minimally about the artists from which he ‘borrowed,’ and their and their works value, with him unable to form those creations on his own from his own learning, growth, contemplation, insight, intuition, and inspiration. He’s merely an illusion, and behind it, deceit. This was not merely his ‘Pinterest Mood Board.’ He could not do it on his own. This inability and emptiness is also shown in that Truman was taking for himself the personal ‘script’ such as Willa’s “A Chance Meeting,” as his own story of his biography, degraded to the mundane, this even heightened with the perceived opposition or ‘threat’ (always victim) from those working to deflect him while they were protecting the path of Willa’s work, like Edith Lewis, leading Truman to add more lies to shore up his biography in the face of this ‘threat’ and his brain taking from the very works Edith had commissioned. He did this to Audrey Hepburn as well, making himself her and Paramount’s victim when they were merely, even humorously without humiliation, pointing out his plagiarism of an author who did earn respect. The personal script became that he, the entitled author reinforced here from the “book he wrote,” which is only vaguely true (true in that he made it about himself), had wanted Marilyn Monroe (a personal power play) for a character that wasn’t his, insinuating in subtext that Audrey had somehow overstepped her bounds as an actress, attempting to turn public opinion against her and her performance and thus lessen the movie in its impact. His twisting of reality shows a stark lack of reality, reason, and ethics, but because he was Truman and he had ‘won fame’ by these methods, as if the past cannot be revealed and thus altered to awareness, he demanded the reality be shifted to his stance about his existence. Authenticity, genuineness, concreteness are to be dismissed for the Truman party so that he can be famous.

In other articles I have discussed the challenges this caused for Edith Lewis, Willa Cather’s life partner and literary executor, upon Willa’s passing in April 1947, that indeed it was not just plagiarism Edith had to consider in her course of action, but Truman’s pressing need for identity from others, in particular parasitical to Willa Cather, and his attention-seeking publicity which complicated what Edith needed to do. Edith Lewis’s actions in 1948-49 show that she moved three books into creation for publication which would through care and brilliance show the dynamics of Willa’s life, choices, and works that would quietly distinguish them from Truman’s narrative that was building in the press of his “genius” and “prodigy” while borrowing her words and career—all her homework, so to speak, and which had just happened again upon Willa’s passing with Truman’s Other Voices, Other Rooms being copied from The Professor’s House and My Ántonia with himself as central figure. He even then made these details from her stories biographical of himself. The first book Edith and publisher Alfred Knopf put out was Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art, in Willa’s own words about her theories, development, and inspirations of her lifetime of works, and with a forward by Willa’s dear friend and gay socialite Stephen Tennant, putting an end to rumors that Truman had any personal claim to her or her ‘influence’ as an excuse for his violation of her. Stephen Tennant showed a careful and intimate understanding of the power of her words, and Edith was public with the close relationship with him. Edith began notes of her personal relationship to how the works were written to aid scholar E. K. Brown to give voice to “the peculiar qualities and effects” in an examination of Willa’s works in that pivotal moment: Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, which had to be finished by his friend and scholar Leon Edel upon E. K.’s untimely passing, and Edith’s notes would become a companion book in Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record in which again she gives special place to Stephen Tennant and his relationship with Willa and her encouragement in particular of his genuine writing. Each manuscript makes a point of showing the growth, realness, and natural path of the lived lives in reality, what went into the works, and the dear, bonded relationships that were not merely for show or manipulation.

Thus Truman overstepped the bounds of personal identity evidenced in his continual portrayal of himself using documented identifying markers of Willa Cather as his own identity by rewording her quotes or inspirations as his own, not just in one or even a few instances beyond the plagiarism, but, when one looks closer, by almost all of his literary conceptions of himself, such as his quotes about his theories and writing, that can be traced back to things published by and about Willa.

E.K. Brown writes of Willa’s early years in Nebraska:

“She is remembered in Lincoln as a devotee of Flaubert, and of Madame Bovary in particular: she often carried a copy of that novel. In the sketch “A Chance Meeting,” written in the early 1930s, she speaks of Flaubert as one in whom and near whom “lay most of one’s mental past.”” (Brown 61).

And of the commonality, even in the generational difference, of her meeting Sarah Orne Jewett:

“Miss Jewett was to die a little more than a year after this first meeting, and Willa Cather was the last person to whom she gave her friendship. Between these two women, separated by a quarter of a century in age, and by all kinds of superficial circumstance, there were deep affinities quickly recognized. [ . . . ] Both had turned to an early apprenticeship to writing and had taken for a master Flaubert.” (139 Brown).

Truman often repeated that Flaubert was the master he followed. His biographer describes:

“Flaubert’s attitude toward writing, his sense of perfectionism, is what I would like mine to be,” Truman said, and his approach to fiction was, like his French master’s, almost teleological: he knew from the start where his characters were going and what they would do when they got there. He could not comprehend how some writers he admired—Dickens, for example—could give in to impulse, letting their pens fly across the page and allowing their characters to wander down their own, often surprising paths. His own temperament was such that he had to be in control, and Flaubert’s dictum was his as well: “We must be on our guard against that feverish state called inspiration, which is often a matter of nerves rather than muscle. Everything should be done coldly, with poise.” His practice was in distinct contrast to the image he conveyed or the seeming spontaneity of his writing style. When he sat down in the morning with his pad and pencil, Truman was not the flighty-looking young man the Sicilians saw rushing toward the Americana Bar in the late afternoon, trailing an absurdly long scarf and yelling in a high-pitched voice to his friends across the square. During those prenoon hours, he was as calculating as an accountant checking receipts. (Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography)

 

From Willa’s theories on writing, Truman took his stance claiming to be the first. From her Not Under Forty in her essay “The Novel Démeublé” she writes of the difference of the novel with journalism and the better goal:

 

“If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism. Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art. There are hopeful signs that some of the younger writers are trying to break away from mere verisimilitude, and, following the development of modern painting, to interpret imaginatively the material and social investiture of their characters; to present their scene by suggestion rather then enumeration. The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification.” (from  “The Novel Démeublé”).

 

Willa described her theories of how she was shifting her writing in 1925 away from action. In the article “Artistic Forms and the Delivery of State of Beingness and Place” I wrote of Willa’s intentional move to non-action in evoking the effect of a painting:

The miracles in the artistic creation I have mentioned briefly before: groundedness and different rootedness in actuality of Place—its deeper truths, its reality—deeper than convention as Eudora Welty shows, miraculously delivering truth. The next is forms of delivery that get closer to the state of Being by moving away from ‘situation,’ plot, excessive detail, the ‘furniture,’ it opens the further dimension that it points to: it creates the setting, the atmosphere for it to appear. Willa saw these cultural deliveries in opera, legend, painting, religion, shifting from forcing action from words to the actual effect. There is also what is already potently known of the 'Old World' as in French literature. With these Willa could come closest to the delivery of Being and thus also different Place naturally from the real effects.

Willa wrote in a letter describing her intentions with Death Comes for the Archbishop and non-action and non-situation as in legend and painting:

“My book was a conjunction of the general and the particular, like most works of the imagination. I had all my life wanted to do something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment. Since I first saw the Puvis de Chavannes frescoes of the life of Saint Geneviève in my student days, I have wished that I could try something a little like that in prose; something without accent, with non of the artificial elements of composition. In the Golden Legend the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it—but to touch and pass on. I felt that such writing would be a kind of discipline in these days when the ‘situation’ is made to count for so much in writing, when the general tendency is to force things up. In this kind of writing the mood is the thing—all the little figures and stores are mere improvisations that come out of it. (Willa Cather on Death Comes for the Archbishop, 23 November 1927).

Truman’s biographer credits Truman with this from Truman’s speaking as if it was all his ideas:

Truman had long maintained that nonaction could be both as artful and as compelling as fiction. In his opinion the reason it was not—that it was generally considered a lesser class of writing—was that it was most often written by journalists who were not equipped to exploit it. Only a writer “completely in control of fictional techniques” could elevate it to the status of art. “Journalism,” he said, “always moves along on a horizontal plane, telling a story, while fiction—good fiction—moves vertically, taking you deeper and deeper into character and events. By treating a real event with fictional techniques (something that cannot be done by a journalist until he learns to write good fiction), it’s possible to make this kind of synthesis.” Because good fiction writers had usually disdained reporting, and most reporters had not learned to write good fiction, the synthesis had not been made, and nonfiction had never realized its potential. It was marble awaiting a sculptor, a palette of paints awaiting an artist. He was the first to show what could be done with that unappreciated material, he insisted, and In Cold Blood was a new literary species, the nonfiction novel. By that he meant that he had written it as he would have a novel, but, instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. (Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography).

This is why in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s Audrey’s Holly Golightly apartment has Willa’s literary theory very visible, as Willa wrote:

How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of the Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and four walls.

This is not a conglomeration of Truman’s influences as he stated in his deflection when naming such people as William Faulkner and Edgar Allan Poe, purposefully sticking Willa far into the mix, but very particular to this female author, perhaps indeed because she was female and could be overlooked. In his warped estimation, then, she couldn’t compete with his power of fame.

But Truman thought he was going to get the Pulitzer to seal it for eternity in halls of fame. He had also calculated that so in this very method. Purposefully copying Willa Cather’s footsteps with her life-partner of 40 years, Edith Lewis, and their travels and Edith working as a private editor of Willa’s works, Truman recruited author Lee Harper, a friend since childhood, (diverting her from her own manuscript that was about to be published), to work with him on the likewise identified travel west in the trip to Kansas, just as Willa to her plains of Nebraska, using even her methods of describing its personality and nature, and then also Harper Lee’s partnership on the research and writing of In Cold Blood. He employed himself an Edith. Harper Lee’s response shows that she expected that she would be credited, especially as during the process in 1961 she won the Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. The year following the publication (1965 serially and in January 1966 in book form in which Truman purposefully made note of and then omitted recognizing her—purposefully giving her Edith’s place even in the paper trail headed for collection in a library), he told Playboy Magazine, that she was just his “friend” and “assistant.” It made him look bigger and more important even though research shows the immense role in research and writing that Harper actually played. But Willa and Edith had not named Edith, and so there it was, unethical, yet literary justification for using Harper Lee and not crediting her on his way to further greatness, but of course losing the human friendship bonds with Harper who felt very burned.

Now using the text model of Willa’s One of Ours, Truman could shape place, action, and character to match, aiming for that Pulitzer both Willa and Harper Lee had (not to mention thwarting Edith Lewis again, who was still alive, and Audrey Hepburn who was working on the set of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1960 when he started on it, and she would be on the set of the humorous subtext of How to Steal a Million at his book’s release).

Part of what leads Willa’s character Claude Wheeler to give up on the conventional life of his hometown and the family farm he is expected to run is the family of Enid Royce, the girl he marries whose mother Willa describes as ill, weak, and ineffectual:

“A deep preoccupation about her health made Mrs. Royce like a woman who has a hidden grief, or is preyed upon by a consuming regret. It wrapped her in a kind of insensibility. She lived differently from other people, and that fact made her distrustful and reserved. Only when she was at the sanatorium, under the care of her idolized doctors, did she feel that she was understood and surrounded by sympathy.”

Truman’s description of Bonnie Clutter:

In regard to his family, Mr. Clutter had just one serious cause for disquiet—his wife’s health. She was “nervous,” she suffered “little spells”—such were the sheltering expressions used by those close to her. Not that the truth concerning “poor Bonnie’s afflictions” was in the least a secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric patient the last half-dozen years. Yet even upon this shadowed terrain sunlight had very lately sparkled. The past Wednesday, returning from two weeks of treatment at the Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, her customary place of retirement, Mrs. Clutter had brought scarcely credible tidings to tell her husband; with joy she informed him that the source of her misery, so medical opinion had at last decreed, was not in her head but in her spine—it was physical, a matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and afterward—well, she would be her “old self” again. Was it possible—the tension, the withdrawals, the pillow-muted sobbing behind locked doors, all due to an out-of-order backbone?

And later,

[ . . . ] after each confinement the young mother had experienced an inexplicable despondency-seizures of grief that sent her wandering from room to room in a hand-wringing daze. [ . . . ] the pattern of postnatal depression repeated itself, and following the birth of her son, the mood of misery that descended never altogether lifted; it lingered like a cloud that might rain or might not. She knew "good days," and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those days when she was otherwise her "old self," the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband's pyramiding activities required. [ . . . ] hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors. But she was not without hope. Trust in God sustained her, and from time to time secular sources supplemented her faith in His forthcoming mercy; she read of a miracle medicine, heard of a new therapy, or, as most recently, decided to believe that a "pinched nerve" was to blame. [ . . . ] Some years earlier Mrs. Clutter had traveled to Wichita for two weeks of treatment and remained two months. On the advice of a doctor, who had thought the experience would aid her to regain "a sense of adequacy and usefulness," [ . . . ]

 

Claude marries her daughter, Enid, and everyone knows this can lead to no good; there will be no female care or love; the mother, the female lineage is an indicator of that. That inability to have love in his life is key to the structure of Willa’s story, as it becomes in Truman’s.

Truman’s portrayal of Bonnie Clutter in like manner of the description upset the remaining surviving daughters who said that their mother had been mischaracterized—clearly more hurt and harm on top of the murders of their entire family they experienced, but that was of no concern to ‘auteur’ Truman, as Bonnie’s life and the daughters’ lives were also of no consequence to Perry Smith or Richard Hickock (who also falls by the wayside because he’s not Truman, and so it’s okay to just kill him). It’s not just a ruthless world in the murders, but now also in the creation of the book for publicity. There is no light here, even though Truman wants it shining on him. He blocks any healing. But the weakness in the mother’s character that was leading Claude to his ultimate decision leading to his death helped Truman fortify the perception that Perry Smith himself, on the other more valid hand, unlike weak, mentally ill Bonne Clutter in Truman’s version, had had hopes and passion and carried those passions with him literally in boxes and in a guitar, unsung, as Claude carried his hopes in spirit, unspoken, and that this weak society had failed him, his town and its unwillingness to see different value in him. Of course Willa’s portrayal is more nuanced and meaningful as they all suffer but cannot break free and ultimately an entire population is in discord at the beginning of WWI and the Germans marching into people’s homes with their own agenda, but the townspeople only see it as the aggression of “others.” The world Truman creates of his own greed is still murderous in his own actions. As for Cather in her portrayal there can be no Garden of Eden because it can’t be recognized, and Truman makes sure of that for everyone else. 

As Claude and his mother diligently and worriedly study maps as WWI breaks out in Europe, it is the map that Claude finally takes literally as path to France that should have been to a realized statement of opening worlds, identity, learning, and purpose, and of feeling freedom, hope, and place. He will simply become fodder in gorgeous, healing nature turned into ruinous mud. Truman makes this Perry’s map of the Sierra Madre with direct reference to the Humphrey Bogart movie and makes it the significance with Perry being the lost innocence at the end of his life in his execution, the boyish crime of having believed in such a thing as gold mining and dreams coming true for someone like him.

As Claude stops in the German restaurant at the train station when he returns for a week before being shipped out to never return, likewise Perry is about to travel home to see his family. Perry is also paired with the father figure like Claude is:

Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a café called the Little Jewel never drank coffee. He preferred root beer. Three aspirin, cold root beer, and a chain of Pall Mall cigarettes--that was his notion of a proper "how-down." Sipping and smoking, he studied a map spread on the counter before him—a Phillips 66 map of Mexico-but it was difficult to concentrate, for he was expecting a friend, and the friend was late. He looked out a window at the silent small-town street, a street he had never seen until yesterday. Still no sign of Dick. But he was sure to show up; after all, the purpose of their meeting was Dick's idea, his "score." And when it was settled—Mexico. The map was ragged, so thumbed that it had grown as supple as a piece of chamois. Around the corner, in his room at the hotel where he was staying, were hundreds more like it--worn maps of every state in the Union, every Canadian province, every South American country-for the young man was an incessant conceiver of voyages, not a few of which he had actually taken: to Alaska, to Hawaii and Japan, to Hong Kong. Now, thanks to a letter, an invitation to a "score," here he was with all his worldly belongings: one cardboard suitcase, a guitar, and two big boxes of books, maps and songs, poems and old letters weighing a quarter of a ton. (In Cold Blood)

That physical takes the place of the mental anguish that Claude carries across on the ship headed to France, now being freed by what he finds of the culture there.

And then the derision of those dreams that Claude faced and that Perry now so heavily, literally carries, the books and dreams Claude had to give up leaving the university, Claude’s enlistment becoming Perry’s parole board stopping his boundaries and then not wanting to return home, and finally the comparison becoming the investigators who will arrest Perry and Dick, all their disillusionment leading to this as if trying to make something of themselves while having to kill others, as Claude and his other soldiers must on the battlefield because of the way the world is.

(Dick's face when he saw those boxes! "Christ, Perry. You carry that junk everywhere?" And Perry had said, "What junk? One of them books cost me thirty bucks.") Here he was in little Olathe, Kansas. Kind of funny, if you thought about it; imagine being back in Kansas, when only four months ago he had sworn, first to the State Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its boundaries again. Well, it wasn’t for long.

In this Perry’s mother is actually to blame for leaving, becoming ill (alcoholic), getting beaten, as Claude’s wife has left for China because her sister is ill (as well as her mother, leading to this in generational patterns), and Claude is left alone to realize Enid doesn’t care about him or want to be near him. Claude’s dad is cold, like Perry’s dad but who now is physically abusive, and his only concern is his too-expansive wheat farms, just like the now literarily expendable Herb Clutter who also must have only cared about the wheat operations similar to Claude’s father.

Truman’s descriptions of Kansas are slight reworkings of Willa’s about Nebraska, hers with a lifetime of listened and felt sensitivity to the pervasive strength of the presence of nature that all the while promises the aliveness and vitality as with the very real groundedness and hope to be found in female characters such as Ántonia Shimerda and Alexandra Bergson. The un-attuned humans in Claude Wheeler’s family are seemingly in tune with nature by knowing the planting seasons so well, but it is how to plant and harvest to make money to conserve (not to experience life) or to buy things which break and go away. There is no life. Truman’s descriptions of nature closely imitate Willa’s but are as empty of this kind of revelation as what Willa is exposing in careless human thought and action not recognizing nature on Earth for what it is. Truman’s descriptions are to make Truman look like a writer, to create that mood, but again for instant money, prestige, the generations lost. What awaits in that promise is absent, void. It creates a bitter, harsh world where there can be no love.

And Truman takes the exact route from the life-celebratory beginning of the novel, Claude Wheeler awakening beside his brother Ralph and jumping excitedly out of bed to get the car ready to go to the circus:

Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed. "Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car."

"What for?"

"Why, aren't we going to the circus today?"

 

Truman describes the common small town life, now with elements of the circus, the place where Perry and Dick are headed, as Claude and his brother Ralph too are headed:

 

And everything else a decent man needs—we’ve got that, too. Beautiful churches. A golf course”), the newcomer to Garden City, once he has adjusted to the nightly after-eight silence of Main Street, discovers much to support the defensive boastings of the citizenry: a well-run public library, a competent daily newspaper, green-lawned and shady squares here and there, placid residential streets where animals and children are safe to run free, a big, rambling park complete with a small menagerie (“See the Polar Bears!” “See Penny the Elephant!”) [ . . . ]

Claude washes his face, getting ready before he goes to wash the car:

Claude rose and dressed,—a simple operation which took very little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock's comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom, which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to the kitchen, took Mahailey's tin basin, doused his face and head in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.

This scene makes it into the movie with Perry standing at a sink washing his face while waiting on Dick for the start of their journey and dreaming of playing music in Las Vegas as circus music plays. Then there are scenes of getting the car ready.

As the stories build to Claude’s death on the battlefield and Perry’s execution, time and time again, the inspiration is not Truman’s own. Research into Harper Lee’s notes likely shows that the details she wrote in her extensive notes provide the rest, and Truman pieced them together as the showman.