New Journalism and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song versus Capote’s In Cold Blood

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is Considered a Seminal Work of New Journalism

The term “New Journalism” has been used to describe Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But any writer knows that the blending of factual accounts with fictional techniques (the definition of New Journalism) is, in many ways, what all of us do whenever we write fiction. Every novel I have ever written (all but one unpublished), every short story, every piece of nonfiction, is, for me, New Journalism. When I write, I cannot help but inject the knowledge of life I have acquired over the years into my work in one way or another. The experiences I have, the understanding of the events of my life that give me the ability to provide, or at least try to provide in my fiction, stems directly from my interpretation of the things that affect me. Yes, I understand the term refers to nonfiction made into fiction, but why isn’t it labeled “historical” fiction? Here’s a definition for the “purpose” of historical fiction: “to entertain and explore the past through engaging, imagined stories set in real historical periods.” And here’s one for New Journalism: “To report on contemporary events in a subjective, vivid, and emotionally engaging way, blurring the lines between reporting and literature.”* My issue, if I can call it that, concerns the terms “imagined” and “subjective,” as well as “blurring the lines between reporting and literature.” Where’s the exact separation? And are only the events recognized by a large number of people, meaning events in history books and documentaries, etc. what count? Because there’s probably more history that hasn’t been written about than has, in particular due to the fact that (as the saying goes) history is written by the victors.

When I think of New Journalism and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song versus Capote’s In Cold Blood, two books which I love and that were and are pivotal works in the genre of New Journalism, I want to pull the thread a little and see how the term unwinds. I get that I’m opening up a can of worms likely for the sake of just opening up a can of worms. But is there something to it? Having gone through an MA program that required I take courses in rhetoric and literary criticism, Old English and Grammar and a bunch of other “need-to-know” subject matter to fulfill my MA requirements, I learned something early on: like corporate America and the many industries under the umbrella of “business,” my graduate program in literature used just as much jargon as any other industry—jargon, I believe, employed so as to provide its degree holders with a language only they understood, a language created so they could, like business, distinguish themselves from the other industries out there (yes, education is an industry) and thus ensure their relevance.

For me, the works, and the term, fall into a sort of messy classification construct that I found prevalent in graduate courses while pursuing my master’s degree in literature in English. For the purpose of making it easier for bookstore patrons to find books, we, or the Barnes & Nobles of the world, create rows after row of books broken down by genres based on their “content and style, typically divided into Fiction and Nonfiction. Common fiction genres include Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Romance, Historical Fiction, Horror, and Young Adult. Nonfiction genres cover subjects like History, Biography, Self-Help, Cookbooks, and Art. Other popular categories are Graphic Novels, Poetry, and Children's books.”* But no “New Journalism” row or section, as far as I have seen. There is, however, a section in many bookstores for “literary nonfiction.” And just as an aside, New Journalism novels have also been referred to as nonfiction novels. Anyway, I guess some bookstores have to make accommodations for the general public who’d likely not know the term “New Journalism.”

But to return to the subject of the title of this post. I read The Executioner’s Song (1979) back in my twenties, before I read In Cold Blood (1966). I think I read Capote’s book in my thirties. Like many, I was enthralled by both books. Mailer’s book, however, pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go. Capote’s book felt more like reading a long newspaper article—it was interesting (I’m not saying it wasn’t) but, for me, not captivating. With Executioner’s Song, I was right there next to Gary Gilmore as he all but begged to be executed by firing squad for the murders of two men in Utah. Blood deals with the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Capote’s book came first, so he’s credited with being the “groundbreaker” when it comes to nonfiction novels/New Journalism. Both Mailer and Capote deserve the accolades. But why leave out other “nonfiction novels?” Again, is it because we don’t know the stories as a collective? And who is we? I bet every Native American knows the stories of their people, while we don’t. They may be orally transmitted narratives, and thus more likely than not possess all of the qualities of New Journalism, but why are their stories left out?

Imagined. Subjective. Blurring the lines between reporting and literature. Sounds an awful lot like memoir too, doesn’t it? Memoirists tell you the story of their lives. But as John Updike said, “Memory has a spottiness as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.” Like New Journalism and nonfiction novels, it’s not really fiction and it’s not really truth. Memory is fallible. Memoirists tell the stories as they believe them to be based on their memories, not necessarily based on the facts of what happened during the period(s) in their lives which they write about. There’s nothing wrong with that; for the most part, we, as readers, understand what we’re getting. So, from what I can tell, memoirs are differentiated from New Journalism and nonfiction novels based on the subject, or rather, the hero of the story, and who’s telling that story. But what if the memoirist changed the first person to a name? So, instead of, “I worked at the glue factory for half my life” the memoirist changed it to “Ulrich worked at the glue factory for half of his life?” Is that all that need be done to morph the writing from memoir to New Journalism/nonfiction novel?

Here's the first paragraph of The Executioner’s Song:

“Brenda was 6 when she fell out of the apple tree.  She climbed to the top and the limb with the good apples broke off. Gary caught her as the branch came scraping down. They were scared. The apple trees were their grandmother’s best crop and it was forbidden to climb in the orchard. She helped him drag away the tree limb and they hoped no one would notice." That was Brenda’s earliest recollection of Gary.”

And here’s the first paragraph of In Cold Blood:

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”

Mailer’s opening goes straight into the characters. Capote’s straight into a description of the landscape. In Mailer’s opening, the key sentence is “That was Brenda’s earliest recollection of Gary.” Which immediately allows us to hypothesize that her “recollection” is likely faulty. Capote’s opening is much more based in objective fact, however adjective heavy. I’m not saying either is right or wrong; but Capote’s opening is more in line with “reporting” than is Mailer’s. Truth be told, while I’m writing this, I’m trying to figure out where the delineation is between your everyday, typical novels and nonfiction novels. Again, I ask where’s the line? And secondly, who designates that line? Is it as simple as the difference between something being common knowledge and something falling more into obscurity because it wasn’t as newsworthy as a family of four being blown away by two ex-cons, for example?

Memory has a spottiness as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

                                                                        --John Updike

When I wrote my novel, I didn’t tell anyone that what I wrote was real, because not all of it was—it’s fiction and my readers took it as such. What Mailer and Capote wrote, while saying it was mostly true, also wasn’t “real” in that, like memoir, the events they reported/wrote about were hazy, and viewed through the prism of the people Capote and Mailer interviewed, the newspaper stories they read about, and the sources they utilized to come up with what they believed were the complete, or mostly complete, versions of what happened. In my novel, The Losses, much of what happens actually happened, though not to the extent portrayed in the novel. I amplified the “bad” things for dramatic purposes in much the same way, I’m guessing, that Capote and Mailer did in their New Journalism/nonfiction novels. I took events that happened, added some twists and turns, changed genders of the people certain things happened to, fabricated other things, and then dropped it all into the pages of the manuscript. My book was placed in the “Fiction” section. But what if I said it was memoir? Or New Journalism? Or a nonfiction novel? Could anyone deny my claim?

Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song Tells the Story of Gary Gilmore, Who Murdered Two Men in Utah.

I guess this is all, in some way, a screed against the designations/classifications/jargon-creation that has always been an issue for me when it comes to literature and the ivory tower. I’m not saying terms like New Journalism or nonfiction novel or anything like that doesn’t serve a purpose; clearly they do. My beef is with the ever-changing nomenclature we come up with for basically the same thing. When James Frey was skewered by Oprah for “fabricating” or “exaggerating” what he wrote in My Friend Leonard and especially A Million Little Pieces, the guy was metaphorically hung by his readers and the literary world. Would he have suffered the same fate if he’d called his memoir New Journalism? Or called it a nonfiction novel? I mean, we know memoirs are fallible. They are. So, what about the memoirs out there that didn’t sell 5 million copies plus but that also contain fabrications and exaggerations? Must they also be publicly flogged by the queen of television? Or is that just for the writers that “make it?”

I remember one class I had at Georgia State when I was pursuing my MA. Everyone in there except for me, if my memory serves me 😉, were studying to be college professors. Some of the students may have been some going to teach at high schools as well, some others just studying for fun. But I remember everyone jumping down my throat one day because I approached some piece of literature from the creative writer’s perspective rather than either an educator’s perspective or a critic’s perspective. That I wavered from the group’s “accepted” version of the text was offensive to them. The gist was this: We all believe X, and you’re saying Y, and you’re wrong. One person came to my defense: the professor. The issue was not X, and it was not Y, the professor told us, but rather both (I can’t recall exactly what the issue was, but I do remember what he said). He said, “When a writer writes, she views the writing differently than a critic or scholar might. She has written the words and worked on the plot and the characters and the story. She has imagined the settings and spoken the dialogue aloud, and she has spent countless hours trudging away at everything else a writer must work on when setting on her journey to write her novel. The critics and scholars who study her work see what they see based on the text but also based on the experiences they’ve encountered and maneuvered through throughout their own lives. They bring to the text something, but it’s not necessarily what the writer wrote. Criticism and scholarly endeavors are not creative writing, or New Journalism, nonfiction writing or any other type of writing. They are a study of the text, a critique of what’s been written, nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes we need to put aside what things are called, or how we view them based on the latest trend or philosophies or whatever, and just enjoy them for the entertainment value they bring to our humdrum lives.” He knew I was going to write this blog post twenty-six years later, and that I would call it “New Journalism and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song versus Capote’s In Cold Blood,” even though I would only write tangentially about those two books, leaving the brave (or bored) readers of this post wondering why I would do such a thing, trick them, in a way, with what we call “click-bait” these days. He told me so, and often.

Or maybe I made that up.

New Journalism and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song versus Capote’s In Cold Blood

*Pulled from Google’s AI Overview

Author Cully Perlman. Or Maybe Not.

Cully Perlman is a novelist, short story writer, and blogger. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com