Lucking Out (28 page)

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:

“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
Nutcracker
s 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 targeted 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:

I too was part of that audience that tremulous night and I sure didn’t see what Croce saw and wouldn’t have been able to articulate it if I had, even with a set of drawing pencils. What she saw was this:

Has any anatomy study ever swung that high? “Farrell and Farrellism” the essay was called, and its publication in
The New Yorker
had a sonic impact, exciting even among those who never went to the ballet and didn’t know Farrell had left, much less returned, but knew something major was afoot. I know it made me sit up a little straighter when I went to the ballet from then on, working on my X-ray vision. After typing the quotation above into the text you’re now reading, I flipped to the front of the original paperback of
Afterimages
, the collection that contains “Farrell and Farrellism,” and saw, written in ink:

For Jim Wolcott,

In keenest admiration.

Arlene Croce 1980

I had forgotten that she had inscribed it for me. How could I have forgotten? Memory is a treacherous mistress, keeping so many past kindnesses from us.

What was it about ballet that won my allegiance? It was hardly the only thing hopping in tights. New York City—the entire country—was experiencing a dance boom in the seventies, a leotard liberation army breakout that was recognized while it was happening, as opposed to those golden eras known only in retrospect by their afterglow. The pioneer explorers who had made the Judson Memorial Church the Cabaret Voltaire of modern dance had matured, evolved, and dispersed: Kenneth King, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown. Institutional largesse and arts funding kept companies solvent that had been formerly dangling by a shoestring. “Sexual liberation and gay liberation added momentum to the dance boom,” the critic and cultural historian Holly Brubach told
City Journal
in 2011, “and you sometimes got the feeling that they were turning out because they were curious about bodies.” Turning out and getting turned on. “Dance was the art in which the body woke up,” recalls Elizabeth Kendall. “For us in our early twenties, the late 60’s early 70’s were about such dramatic waking up, that the awake body, the strongest metaphor for that, was front and center.” From
The Exorcist
to Sam Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs
to
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, the rudely awakened body was a war zone, the locus of sexual-social-political strife, the Supreme Court’s
Roe v. Wade
decision in 1973 legalizing abortion setting a decades-long conflict between personal autonomy and government control. Alfred Kazin’s walker in the city became the jogger in the park, trying to stay one frantic step ahead of the muggers and gnarly inquisitors. Where punk and New York–based movies such as
The French Connection, The Seven-Ups
, and Sidney Lumet’s garbage-lid bangers shoved a street-level picture of clutter, graffiti, and the cracking vertebrae of the rotting infrastructure at the viewer, ballet—thanks to Balanchine and Robbins—proclaimed the water-towered rooftops and the silver-spired skyscraper skyline, the upward arrowing of energy and aspiration. Where nearly everything I enjoyed were provisional operations, making the most of make-do and snaring contingencies on the fly, ballet relied upon massive resources, exacting rehearsals, wealthy patrons, and a fine-boned sense of hierarchy, a bred-in appreciation of lineage, proportion, perpetuation, deference, decorum, unswerving devotion, acute sacrifice. It should have been out of joint with the jagged decade. Plus it had all that mime.