The audience whose loss Lebowitz mourned was still bumble-beeing when I made my first sortie into Lincoln Center, not realizing that I was about to embark on the longest romance of my life and the most incongruous. It began on a Sunday afternoon that might have otherwise lay fallow, with me lying fallow in it. I had bought a single ticket for a matinee performance of New York City Ballet, a seat in the fourth ring, the equivalent of the upper mezzanine at the old Yankee Stadium, absent the wind gusts and rustling hot-dog wrappers. I’m not sure what the source of the impulse was that tugged me there to Lincoln Center’s State Theater that Sunday, but whatever was on the other end of the fishing line knew me better than I knew myself. Ballet was just a big fluffy cloud to me then, just as opera was a complicated bawl. I hadn’t seen any ballet when I was growing up in Maryland, not even a childhood rite-of-passage Nutcracker, and my look-in on modern dance consisted solely in catching a touring performance of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company at Frostburg State, my primary takeaway being what a godlike torso Hawkins brandished, an Apollo shield form-fitted to his body and burnished in battle, even though he may have been in his sixties then. He made the rest of us look like cookie dough. Hawkins’s history with Martha Graham, the mythopoeic roots of his choreographic philosophy and action-painting attack—of these I would have known nothing beyond what was in the program notes, assuming there were program notes. But that I went and that I remembered that I went meant it had dropped a dime in my imagination, made a deposit. Here I am, I thought, holding my program like a missal—my first ballet. If they could only see me now, I thought, “they” being nobody in particular. The arrival of the orchestra conductor, who it pleased me to think had just gotten off the phone to his bookie, was greeted with a flock of applause that sounded as if it were deriving from an adjacent banquet room, and as the musicians poised their instruments, the curtain rose with a wheely noise suggesting a crew hoisting sails.
It was probably The Firebird on the bill that tapped my interest when I was leafing through The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town listings, foraging for something cultural to do for my merit badge. The Firebird had a score by Igor Stravinsky, sets by Marc Chagall, and costumes by Karinska that from photographs really turned up the Cyd Charisse red. And choreography by George Balanchine, who even I understood in my heathen condition was regarded not simply as a creative genius but as God’s junior partner, handing out one ballet classic after another like year-round holiday bonuses. The Firebird would have made for just the sort of combo platter I was seeking in my continuing efforts at self-improvement, my knowledge of classical music, art, and theatrical costume needing some filling in, along with all the other cavities. I had an incomplete set of Time-Life books devoted to the great painters purchased secondhand at outdoor stalls in the Village—volumes on Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and Renoir—whose biographical content I would munch on before moving to the main course: studying the color-plate reproductions to educate my “eye.” Mailer wrote about how the paintings of Cézanne and Picasso taught him to see in a new surface-destroying way, and my “eye” was still stuck on the boring flat-planed obvious. I also turned on the classical music stations (there was more than one then) whenever I felt it incumbent upon me to listen to classical music because I thought it was something I should be doing, but it usually wasn’t long before my mind wandered out of the yard. Rock music had shattered my attention span into Flintstones vitamins, which may have been why I went to a mixed bill at NYCB rather than to a full-lengther such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Firebird, my first ballet, didn’t disappoint, but it didn’t ring steeple bells either. I remember enjoying it, in a self-consciously “appreciative” manner, as if my eyes were set forward a fraction more than usual, the music holding me more than the dancing, which seemed subordinate to the costuming and a folk-legend storytelling that relied on a lot of portentous gestures prophesying terrible weather heading in our direction. The Firebird herself was performed by Karin von Aroldingen, whose tall, vanquishing presence lived up to her imposing name, but dancing-wise she didn’t have that much to do under all that Vegas-red howdy-do. Afterward I felt a bit yawny, and no one ever truly yawns alone. History is made at night, as the movie title goes, and the afternoon dip of the audience’s biorhythms and the energy-conservation mode of many of the dancers, who had perhaps danced the night before or were scheduled for that day’s evening performance, made for a bit of a Valium drip. I didn’t mind. I figured it was all part of the induction process, easing me into the wonder of it all with gentle massage. At intermission I went out to the viewing tier and looked down upon the promenade, where clumps of conversationalists and solitary figures were moving like Hitchcock miniatures in a high-angle shot or positioned like map pins, the rink book-ended by the Elie Nadelman marble statues that seemed smug in the rich plenty of their fertile hips. Also on the program that afternoon was Afternoon of a Faun, which had the tender intimacy and caressing delicacy of a recital piece, Debussy’s piano notes strung like little drops of dew on your eyelashes. Nice, but nothing to write home from camp about.
My Song of Bernadette moment, my face bathed in miracle light, may have been Balanchine’s Serenade, which I’m hesitant to admit since it has been the portal-opening ballet for so many converts, the dropped panel that divides Before and After, and I was so hoping to be different. It was the first ballet Balanchine did in New York, and from the opening tableau—the dancers in tulle skirts raising their palms in unison to salute the blue night—to the closing processional, the ballerina held aloft and carried off, her arms and back arched in rapt surrender, Serenade serves as an annunciation. Unlike the other early ballets I saw, it didn’t have paraphrasable content, origin material; it seemed to have dreamed itself into existence, its seams and struts invisible. Proof that the pure products of modernism refuse to die! And it didn’t depend upon a star dancer to send it through the uprights; everyone onstage seemed equally ensouled, answering the same votive call. Or could it have been Symphony in C that cinched the romance—its exhilarating marshaling of forces at the end, the small attack units of the corps, employed in slashing diagonals, uniting in a ranked surge, rallying to an excelsior finish? It may have been the stereoscopic power of both: the Rapture Vision and the Victory Romp.
After a couple of more incursions, I bought a matinee subscription to New York City Ballet, something affordable then even for a low-income, hardworking unpsychotic loner like me, and became a semi-semi-regular, seeing Balanchine’s Agon and Four Temperaments and other T-shirt ballets whose names I couldn’t pronounce and still couldn’t pronounce if you pop-quizzed me, such as Cortège Hongrois and Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée.” I saw Jerome Robbins’s work for the company, including his insensibly maligned Dybbuk with beating music summoned from the bowels of the earth by Leonard Bernstein, which finally got its just due when it was revived in 2007. I began referring to dancers familiarly by their first names, as if we were the chummiest of acquaintances, hearing myself say things like, “I saw Patty last week in Coppélia”—Patty being Patricia McBride, one of my favorite principals at the company, the only ballerina who made Coppélia seem more like a candy factory. And Suzanne, referring to—well, there was only one Suzanne, as we shall see, make the sign of the cross when you hear her name. I should have known I was a goner once I started stopping after performances at the Ballet Shop on Broadway, which stocked, along with illustrated ballet storybooks, biographies, critical studies, and girlie souvenirs (ballerina figurines, baby toe shoes, music boxes), a cardboard box full of assorted back issues of Ballet Review, the magazine founded by Arlene Croce, who had since ascended to dance critic at The New Yorker and was virgin queen of all she surveyed. Ballet Review contained articles by her that were looser, swingier, and sparkier than many of her New Yorker columns, lacking the more raised-chalice tone of taut distinction that sounded like an abbess played by Maggie Smith with both nostrils. BR’s contributors even graded new dances as Bob Christga
u did with his Consumer Guide, a running scoreboard that gave the revival of Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations, for example, a B at best, one critic docking it a D. A D—to Balanchine! Sacre bleu! Although Ballet Review didn’t pie-face the reader with the messy, chop-shop layout of a punk zine, its curt Dragnet poker-faced diligence—every article in the issue looked as if it had been pounded out on the same old newsroom typewriter—registered its own resistance to the angel fluff and slatternly praise thrown about most places in print about dance. Its absence of photographic spreads picturing dewy dancers holding dewy poses—a text-driven emphasis perhaps from economic necessity or production limitations—gave Ballet Review a frank stare of intellectual rigor reminiscent of the literary quarterlies that built their reputations piling one plain block of text upon another in the forties and fifties, a brick wall of surety.
Hard to believe now, but ballet once had an intellectual constituency, an arty swank. The postwar exuberance of the mid-forties had carried all of the arts along on its dolphin crest, from painting to theater to music composing to fiction to poetry. “Even in ballet, previously hardly known, we were preeminent,” observed Gore Vidal. (No stranger to the dance wings, Vidal had pseudonymously authored a murder mystery called Death in the Fifth Position, in which his sleuth “keeps one entrechat ahead of the police in their heavy-footed search for the killer.”) Although Vidal brackets this golden age in the brief span from VJ Day in 1945 to the commencement of the Korean War, its glamorous legs stretched longer than that, long enough to bask in the glow of Camelot. Jacqueline Kennedy took ballet lessons at the old Metropolitan Opera House, hosted evenings at the White House where the invited guests included Stravinsky and Balanchine (indeed, Balanchine was the first guest invited to the Kennedy White House), and today has one of New York’s leading ballet schools posthumously named in her honor. In his journal The Sixties, Edmund Wilson, the closest thing American literary criticism would ever have to Dr. Johnson in a Panama hat, records a gala evening in the mid-sixties:
Elena [Wilson’s wife] and I went to New York May 19 and attended the first night, on the 20th, of [the composer Nicolas] Nabokov’s Don Quixote ballet. Balanchine danced, or rather mimed, the title role, appearing for the first time in years and probably the last time in the night. It was not a very brilliant evening. Nicholas had told us beforehand that the score was made of “Ukrainian cafe music,” but there were also invoked, on occasion, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. The end of the first act consisted of one of those varied vaudevilles that occur in Tchaikovsky’s ballets; but then the early part of the second act was a somewhat similar sequence. This broke up the dramatic line, which was not very effective anyway. Everybody was there. Nicholas had a section reserved for his friends in the middle of the first balcony: Kirstein and his brother and Mina Curtiss, Marianne Moore and John Carter were close to us. The New York Reviewers, Cartier-Bresson, and Marian Schlesinger [the then wife of the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.]; but the mob at the “reception” afterwards was so dense that it was impossible to talk to anybody.
“Everybody was there,” a statement that affixes the royal seal of cachet, brilliant evening or no. The cachet hadn’t diminished in the seventies, but it had acquired a brow of canonical sobriety, despite the raffish omnipresence of the artist Edward Gorey in his fur coat and tennis shoes, who was said to have attended every performance of New York City Ballet, racking up more Nutcrackers than mental health authorities should have allowed (he didn’t even like Nutcracker!). The literary critic Richard Poirier, whose essay “Learning from the Beatles” was a landmark moment of highbrow recognition of the new Atlantis of pop culture, wrote about Balanchine and New York City Ballet for Partisan Review, Susan Sontag was a regular attendee, and even the easily chafed socialist thinker and literary critic Irving Howe had succumbed to the tulle, publishing an essay in Harper’s in 1971 called “Ballet for the Man Who Enjoys Wallace Stevens” (a play on the title of the dance and music critic B. H. Haggin’s primer for the harried mind, Music for the Man Who Enjoys “Hamlet”). In a 1972 entry in his journals, published posthumously under the title The Grand Surprise, the former Vogue and Vanity Fair editor Leo Lerman records the NYCB’s principal dancer Edward Villella’s effusion while standing on the pavement at 3:00 a.m., the hour of Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, but not for Villella. “This is where it is right now. This is where I want to be—lucky to be. Ballet’s here with the New York City Ballet—the center—the living center—Balanchine’s given us glory—the glorious opportunity.”
To the faithful, New York City Ballet was the only true team in town, the diamond crown. I once asked a literary intellectual if he followed ballet, and his response was, with a distinct note of corrective, “I follow New York City Ballet,” as if any other brand were simply too lower shelf. NYCB was the monarch Yankees and its closest rival for attention, American Ballet Theatre, the patchwork Mets, its bench strength and institutional heritage nowhere near as deep or storied. NYCB prided itself on not being fame-driven in its casting and promotional material (it didn’t import internationally renowned dancers for B-12 ass-bumps of glamour) or yoked to lavish-scenery warhorse story ballets that made you wish the nineteenth century would go back where it came from. ABT, albeit performing works by Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor, relied on a more MGM approach, refreshing yesterday’s favorites with the stars of today. Hence there was more bravoing and brava’ing at its curtain calls, more flower-bouquet lobs from the balcony, accepted with courtly bows of humble gratitude from the gallant thigh-man in tights and Eve Harrington so-touched-by-your-generosity genuflections from the ballerinas, who would sniff from the presented rose as if its fragrance had been distilled from all the adoration of the cheering throng. Whereas the curtain applause for NYCB on the average night was more like a suitable tip left on the dining table while climbing into one’s coat—rather Waspy.
The English professor and literary critic Robert Garis, in his one-of-a-kind critical memoir, Following Balanchine (imagine Frederick Exley of A Fan’s Notes intoxicated by arabesques and never falling asleep on a stranger’s sofa), chronicled two decades of the intellectual devotion and personal engagement with what he calls the Balanchine Enterprise. Each Balanchine ballerina was a vessel of devotional investment. “I remember an enjoyable argument at the 57th Street automat (that splendid large space was one of the places we went to for coffee and postmortems) with Haggin and Marvin Mudrick, a friend of ours from the Hudson Review, after a performance: Haggin was supporting Verdy’s style strongly against that of [Allegra] Kent, Mudrick was supporting Kent against Verdy, whom he identified as a ‘soubrette.’ Verdy was my special interest, and I couldn’t accept Mudrick’s limiting category for her, but I really did love Kent, too.”
This would never happen today. It takes the spurious power of a telepsychic to picture a pair of New Yorker arch druids such as James Wood and Louis Menand—or any of the cybernetic brains from newer literary journals such as n+1, or the policy wonkers seated across from PBS’s Charlie Rose debating the merits of Sara Mearns versus Tiler Peck (two of the premier principal dancers in New York City Ballet’s current roster) under a rain-sheltering awning on West Sixty-sixth, or co-analyzing the recombinant geometry of Balanchine’s choreography for the corps, its mandala designations. Longtime friends once fell out for good disagreeing over the degrees of goddess stature of their favorite dancers, over a specific ballet interpretation. The fraternal relationship between Garis and the over-volted Haggin (a classic grievance collector who detected hostility with every cilium of his being) irreparably ruptured over, among other things, the super-supremacy of Balanchine’s final, greatest muse, Suzanne Farrell. “[Not] that he disliked Farrell, for he admired her greatly, but … she did not seem to him as transcendently special and new as she did to us.” It was hell on the digestion, breaking with a former comrade, as it must have been back in the Trotsky era. Even after Farrell temporarily left the company, the rift remained, the worry of being targe
ted by assassin eyes. “This is the point at which my following the Balanchine Enterprise began to drift … even the physical experience of going to the ballet had become difficult since I had to be on guard not to run into Haggin.”
Similar animosities rake the edges of the ballet scene today—rival cliques retiring to opposing corners in the lobby, former buddies giving each other the leper treatment, veiled insults pressed into print like thin cheese slices—but only among the shrinking band of professional dance critics, its more partisan combatants and embittered shrunken heads. Literary critics with the pebbled subtlety and ardor of Garis and Mudrick interested in ballet or any performing art have become nearly extinct (literary critics of any word grain not exactly a going thing). Today’s intellectual homeys are inserted so snugly into their visors of expertise that they patrol their particular beat like RoboCop, perhaps finding ballet too frilly for their brawny brains. Or they may have “issues” with the body ideals in ballet and gender representation, since everyone loves having issues as an excuse to stay home and darn their egos. Were a fledgling Irving Howe or Richard Poirier to flirt with an interest in ballet, there’d be no high lama for him to look up to for divine guidance, no Edwin Denby or Arlene Croce whose dance expertise serves as airfield beacon.
Croce’s arrival at The New Yorker was a signature moment for the magazine and for dance criticism, another masterstroke by the editor William Shawn. In the seventies, The New Yorker was at the pinnacle of its cultural influence, and Croce’s head-held-high prose and persona only extended the elevation. Reading Arlene, you never felt that her responses were saw-toothed by warring impulses, that ambivalences dug into her critical formulations and left tiny divots of doubt. In this she was unlike Pauline, for whom contrarieties were part of the jazzy rush of sorting out what you felt and thought. Witty, adventurous, mordant, occasionally slangy as Arlene could be (“In spite of its yuckiness, the Sacre remains in memory as the only tolerable [Pina] Bausch piece”), her New Yorker essay-reviews—like those of the art critic Harold Rosenberg or the literary critic George Steiner—radiated a fine chill of infallibility, which could have its own perfect-martini invigoration in the untucked seventies. She removed the valentine lace from dance writing that had gussied and gauded it up in the journalistic past with platitudes and sugarplum superlatives, covering dance as the demanding, exacting, grown-up art it was, not a rest-stop for tired minds wanting to look at legs. Her column seemed to have its own proscenium arch, a tremor of expectancy that heightened the stakes. She eagle-eyed why Suzanne Farrell was indeed worth warring over, what made her a figure of consequence, an altering force:
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