Understanding Truman Capote

Chapter 5 The Muses Are Heard

chapter 5 The Muses Are Heard When Capote received an invitation to accompany the Everyman Opera Company to the Soviet Union, he jumped at the opportunity. No American theatrical group had performed in Russia for decades, and Cold War tensions promised to generate significant international interest in the event. Of course suspicions ran high on both sides. The State Department worried about the ways Soviet propaganda might use this revival of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to highlight U.S. hypocrisy over racial discrimination. The Russian Ministry of Culture, on the other hand, orchestrated the trip to limit access to some of the socioeconomic hardships of Soviet life. Nevertheless the opera company and its entourage boarded a train for Leningrad on December 19, 1955. Capote crafted his experiences into The Muses Are Heard, which first appeared in two consecutive issues of the New Yorker and then as a book in 1956.1 The title alludes to the metaphor used by a senior Russian official to describe the cultural exchange between the two countries: “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent; when the cannons are silent, the muses are heard” (60). In many respects Capote took this declaration as his central argument for art’s potential to drown out the embattled rhetoric and practices of the Cold War. Capote begins part 1 (“When the Cannons Are Silent”) with a State Department briefing two days before the company’s departure from East Berlin. This forum enabled the troupe to raise questions about everything from the quality of tap water to the limits placed on personal freedom: “We heard they were going to trail us. And open our letters” (9). As soon as they boarded the Blue Express, they caught their first glimpse of the cultural differences between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Men 80 Understanding trUman capote and women (regardless of ethnicity) were required to share sleeping compartments , endure without a range of amenities (including a dining car), remain on the train at station stops (unless they wanted to be escorted back inside by “pale flat-faced” soldiers [43]), and adjust to subzero temperatures. The company also encountered forthright Russian workers such as the disgruntled tea maker and a member of the Ministry of Culture who had yet to marry because his “stipend [was] not yet equal to the aspiration” (77). At the Russian border and in Brest Litovsk, the Americans got a more detailed look at life behind the Iron Curtain. Women performed hard labor, “swinging picks, shoveling snow, pausing only to blow their noses into naked, raw-red hands” (56), and every kiosk sold the same items including “hairy slabs of raw bacon slipped between thick slices of grime-colored bread” (62). Their arrival in Leningrad concludes the first part. In part 2 (“The Muses Are Heard”), Capote traces the company’s experiences leading up to and including the performance of Porgy and Bess on December 26, 1955.2 The section opens with their accommodations at the Astoria Hotel, which lacked the niceties associated with “Western ideas of a deluxe establishment” (88). Prior to the performance, members of the company attended a ballet at the Mariinsky theater, went shopping in the government-owned stores on Nevsky Prospekt, and toured the Hermitage. Capote also became acquainted with a Russian man who drunkenly confessed his attraction to the director’s assistant. The night of the performance proved challenging. An array of exhausting speeches and introductions preceded the opera; when the curtain finally rose, the audience struggled to follow the first act because the program notes had not been copied. They warmed up to the second act, but the production did not elicit the response many had hoped it would. Although Capote remains uneasy about the politics shaping the opera’s reception among journalists and officials, he presents art itself—whether through Porgy and Bess or his own book—as offering an invaluable opportunity to promote mutual understanding and to mitigate Cold War tensions. The Muses Are Heard has not received much critical attention because most scholars view it primarily as a stepping stone to In Cold Blood. This connection makes sense on a number of levels. First, Capote described his approach to both books in similar terms. As he explained to Pati Hill in 1957, Actually, I don’t consider the style of this book, The Muses Are Heard, as markedly different from my fictional style. Perhaps the content, the fact that it is...