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In Moscow he addressed the Soviet Union of Writers, declaring that his primary concern as a writer was not content but style. In the Soviet Union, replied the head of the union, the order was supposed to be reversed. “We think every poem and song should be a bullet and a banner,” he said. “I was
quite
silenced by that,” Truman told reporters when he returned to New York.

He was also taken up by the sons and daughters of prominent members of the Soviet hierarchy. “His contact was a young man named Victor,” said Nancy. “Truman referred to him, very frivolously, as his Moscow beau. He was a rich, good-looking layabout who came up to him at the theater one night and introduced himself in perfect English. The next afternoon Truman got a mysterious call telling him to be in his room at three thirty. He was then picked up—I was furious with envy because I wasn’t asked—and driven to an elegant Southern-style mansion where the Russian jet set was out in force. It turned out that Truman was a great sort of literary figure to these young people, and they took him to their dachas, where he saw that they all subscribed to
The New Yorker
and led a very Westernized life. ‘Only in a culture where refinement is valued do trousers narrow,’ said Victor, who was trying to look Western, but didn’t quite pull it off. One of his friends, referring to ordinary Russians, said, ‘The humbles are so dreary.’ That was such a wonderful expression! ‘The humbles are so dreary.’”

There was also time for Truman to indulge his lifelong passion for what Lyons called “foul-smelling, vile places,” and he organized a pub-crawling tour with Lyons, Nancy, and Priscilla Johnson, a Russian-speaking Radcliffe classmate of Nancy’s who served as interpreter. “We kept telling her to tell the taxi driver that we wanted a real low dive, not a tourists’ nightclub,” said Nancy. “Finally we passed a bar and Truman said, ‘There’s our place.’ Just as he said it, the door opened and a huge female bouncer threw a drunk into the street. So that’s where we went.”

In the career of every writer, even one who complains as often and as vocally as Truman did about the pain of putting words on paper, there is a book that seems to write itself, a magical moment when the ink rolls from his pen as smoothly as Old Man River. For Truman that book was
The Muses Are Heard
, and that moment began as the
Blue Express
started its slow journey across the plains of Eastern Europe. Looking back, he said, “
The Muses Are Heard
is the one work of mine I can truly claim to have enjoyed writing, an activity I’ve seldom associated with pleasure.”

What made his task so easy, what gave him such pleasure, was the tone of the writing, which mirrored his lunchtime conversation at its best—observant, gossipy, bitchy, and always entertaining. The Breens hoped that he would concentrate only on high matters; he was more interested in the low. He was an eavesdropper, and he recorded the things people actually said, not the things they wanted history to believe they had said. That style of reporting—the New Journalism, as it came to be called a decade later—is common now, but it was fresh and unusual then. Truman was not the first to experiment with it. Indeed, he was encouraged, if not inspired, in his effort by the example of Lillian Ross, who pioneered the technique in two earlier, much-celebrated
New Yorker
pieces, “Portrait of Hemingway” and
Picture
, her narrative of the making of John Huston’s film
The Red Badge of Courage.
But Truman went a step further. To her skills as a reporter, he added the craft of the novelist, who gives shape and structure to the facts he has gathered.

Like many later New Journalists, he took substantial liberties for the sake of lively reading, sometimes changing the order of events and occasionally bringing separated episodes together. In one case, he even invented a whole scene—a hilarious encounter in the Brest-Litovsk railroad station—and fabricated, or made composite figures of, some of his characters. “He fiddled with things,” said Nancy Ryan. “But he didn’t destroy basic truth or genuine spirit at all.”

Although several of those who made the journey with him across the steppes were offended by his portrayals, no one offered evidence to dispute Nancy’s assertion. Lyons, who felt most wounded, devoted a column to a refutation of some of the silly comments attributed to him; but to judge from the fatuous dispatches Lyons actually did send home, he was probably not misquoted in any substantial way. He retaliated by hitting Truman where he thought it would hurt most, by using his column to shower Gore Vidal with favorable publicity. Truman ignored the columnist’s many flattering references to his favorite enemy until one day Lyons said that the remarkable Gore had written sixteen books—“and he’s not yet thirty.” Truman instantly phoned to correct him. “He’s thirty-TWO!” he shrieked.

The Muses Are Heard
, a relatively short work of about 52,000 words, appeared in two issues of
The New Yorker
in October, 1956; Random House published it in hard cover at the end of the year. The critics, for once, were almost unanimous in their praise, regarding it, as Truman did, as an amusing bauble, “wicked, witty and utterly devastating,” in the words of one reviewer.

After returning to New York at the end of February, 1956, Truman went back to Europe, where he spent several weeks working on
The Muses Are Heard
in Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian palazzo. “He was very keen on keeping his line and made me diet also,” she said. “Every night he took me to Harry’s Bar and made me eat fish.” He was back in Manhattan in early May, and in mid-June he and Jack set up housekeeping by the ocean again, this time in Stonington, a Connecticut seaport. “You would adore it,” he told Cecil. “The most beautiful trees and old houses. We have a huge, rather amusing house with wonderful views.”

It did not take long, however, for both him and Jack to discover that they did not in fact adore it. There was no beach for swimming; most of their neighbors were elderly; and pugnacious Kelly was in constant combat with the town’s other dogs, one of which locked its teeth so deeply into Truman’s hands that they had to be swathed in bandages. In that otherwise placid setting he and Jack also went to war, a half-serious, half-comic battle in which Truman, for a change, was the aggressor.

“It was the greatest quarrel we ever had,” he recalled, “and it was over Medaglia d’Oro coffee! Jack had a passion for Medaglia d’Oro coffee, but there was no Medaglia d’Oro coffee in Stonington. One day I was going to do errands in Providence, Rhode Island, which was not far away, and he said, ‘Don’t come back until you get Medaglia d’Oro coffee!’

“‘Sure,’ I replied, thinking, ‘My God, of course they’re going to have Medaglia d’Oro coffee in Providence.’ But I went to seven or eight places there, and not only did they not have Medaglia d’Oro coffee, but they had never heard of Medaglia d’Oro coffee! Of course the first thing Jack said when I came back was ‘Where’s my Medaglia d’Oro coffee?’

“‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but they didn’t have it. I went to several places.’

“‘You didn’t go to a single one,’ he said. ‘You forgot it! You don’t care!’ There are certain things that happen in a relationship that lasts a long time, tensions that accumulate. I don’t lose my temper very often, but when I do, watch out! When he said that, I became furious. I went through that house systematically, throwing things around. He was in a state of terror because he had never seen me like that.” A peace treaty was soon signed, and for the rest of the summer Jack drank ordinary coffee.

One of the paradoxes of Truman’s character was that although he was as fond of luxury as a Roman emperor, he usually lived, without quibble or complaint, as simply as a Trappist monk. In the nearly eight years he and Jack had been together, they had moved around like gypsies, without a permanent address in either New York or Europe. Almost all their residences, including the Fontana Vecchia, had been spartan in the extreme; some had been primitive. Their current Manhattan apartment, for instance, two floors in a moldering town house on East Sixty-fifth Street, lacked a component as essential as central heating.

Now, as his thirty-second birthday approached, Truman wanted an apartment that had at least the basic comforts, a place he could call his own and decorate in the way Babe had taught him. He wanted to be able to entertain, as well as to be entertained. It was probably no coincidence that Holly Golightly—
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
was still much on his mind—had similar yearnings for permanence and stability. “In some part of his nature he was trying to find a home,” said Oliver Smith. “Where I don’t know.”

The immediate and mundane answer was Oliver’s own house in Brooklyn Heights. Built before the Civil War, it contained as much space, nearly twenty rooms, as a small hotel and had a basement that Oliver had already begun turning into an apartment. In mid-May he invited Truman and Jack for dinner and an inspection. They were delighted with what they saw. The basement apartment that he planned to rent had a large living room, a parlor, a small kitchen, and two bedrooms, one of which had windows and a door opening onto the backyard, where a giant purple wisteria was in fragrant bloom. “I’d like to live here if I could have this room,” Jack declared, and his wish was granted. “We’re very excited,” he wrote Mary Louise. “Truman wants to make ‘a beautiful home.’”

Overjoyed at the prospect of settling down at last, Truman spent much of the summer searching Connecticut for bric-a-brac and furniture, which he then refinished in their Stonington backyard. “He saw a lamp in an antique shop he wanted,” Jack reported to his sister Gloria. “The woman said she couldn’t sell it—it didn’t even belong to her: she kept it because it made the shop cheery. A big correspondence then began between Truman and the
real
owner. Anyway, Truman got the lamp. He bought me an old brass bed for eleven dollars for my birthday—and is painting and polishing it!”

In time, Oliver’s basement did become a beautiful home. Truman asked Billy Baldwin for advice. Taking advantage of its darkness, rather than trying to overcome it with bright colors, Baldwin picked out a dark green wallpaper, which, combined with bright lights and glittering appointments—such as Battersea boxes, a Fabergé pillbox, and a pair of gold mirrors in the shape of butterflies—created an atmosphere of perpetual Christmas, of winter by the fire. Oliver was willing to lend his own dining room for formal entertainment, and Babe and her sister Minnie visited often, as did Jackie Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill. When Oliver said he would like to meet Jackie, Truman arranged a lunch in Oliver’s dining room. Only later did Oliver learn that Truman had told her, or at least had strongly implied, that the whole house was his. “She laughed about it,” said Oliver, “because suddenly in the middle of lunch she got the idea that it wasn’t his. I suppose I acted as if it were mine.”

Unlike most of the rest of Brooklyn—or most of Manhattan, for that matter—the Heights still retained the leisurely and capacious feeling of nineteenth-century New York. Truman made friends with the shopkeepers; strolled the nearby Promenade, with its stunning views of Wall Street and the harbor; and snooped around the ships that docked below. As extensively as he had traveled, he still could not untangle the New York subway system; when he crossed the river to Manhattan, it was almost always by taxi. However far he wandered, he was always glad to return to the bright yellow house at 70 Willow Street. “Home! And happy to be,” was the way he concluded a description of his life there. “I love Brooklyn Heights,” he told a reporter. “It’s the only place to live in New York.”

T
HE
success of
The Muses Are Heard
had made him eager to do more journalism, and a little over a year after he had boarded the
Blue Express
, Truman set off again in hopes of repeating his Russian triumph. Though his destination was the Far East, his subject was similar: another American company trying to open doors to an alien society. Shortly after New Year’s, 1957, Warner Brothers was to begin shooting a big-budget movie called
Sayonara
in Japan’s ancient imperial capital, Kyoto. Set during the Korean War, the film was to have as its theme the cultural clash between Orient and Occident; playing its lead, an ace American fighter pilot, would be one of the world’s biggest stars, Marlon Brando.

As soon as he heard about the Warners’ project, Truman realized that the cultural clash depicted in the script could not be half as entertaining as that between Hollywood and Nippon, or between director Joshua Logan and the temperamental and reclusive Brando. A comic novel was again what he had in mind—a Japanese box lacquered in brilliant red, perhaps—and without leaving Willow Street, he could see boundless possibilities for his deadpan brand of satire. Although they were sparing neither time nor money to ensure that
Sayonara
accurately reflected Japan and its people, the filmmakers saw nothing incongruous, for example, in asking Audrey Hepburn to play Brando’s Japanese lover or in hiring a Mexican, Ricardo Montalban, to assume the part of a famous Kabuki performer. (Hepburn declined, predicting that audiences would laugh at her, and a Japanese-American was chosen in her stead.)
The New Yorker
, which hoped for a sequel to his Russian adventures, gave its blessing, Cecil Beaton agreed to keep him company, and on December 27, 1956, Truman and Cecil left for the Land of the Rising Sun.

Almost instantly things began to go wrong. In San Francisco, their first stop, Truman somehow got his head stuck in an elevator door of the St. Francis Hotel. It was extracted undamaged, but when he reached Honolulu, their second stop, he had to wait three days for his baggage to be found. Then, just as they were preparing to depart for Tokyo, he and Cecil both discovered that they had neglected to procure Japanese visas, without which they could remain in the country only three days. To stay longer, they would have to fly to Hong Kong, obtain visas there, and then return. When they reached Tokyo, Truman telephoned Logan in Kyoto and received the worst news yet: Logan did not want him to write about the film at all and planned to bar him from the set. “Of all the hypocrites!” Truman hissed to Cecil as he hung up the phone.