Mr. B. airborne (left), and in a deep plié during a 1961 teacher workshop. Photograph © Nancy Lassalle
George Balanchine (1904-1983) is generally considered the greatest--and, with 425 known works, the most prolific-- choreographer of the twentieth century, possibly of any century. By the time that Jennifer Homans, his newest biographer (herself an erstwhile professional ballet dancer and the author of Apollo’s Angels, the much-heralded history of ballet) decided some ten years ago to write a book about Balanchine, his life and work had been examined intensely in several languages.
First off, in English alone, there were five critically appreciated book-length Balanchine biographies (by journalist Bernard Taper, whose book was based on his interviews with Balanchine for The New Yorker; by Richard Buckle, the critic and biographer of Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky; by the ballerina Moira Shearer, star of the film The Red Shoes; by Robert Gottlieb, the head of Alfred A. Knopf and a member of NYCB’s board who had programmed company seasons for ten years as a volunteer; and by the music critic and biographer Terry Teachout). Francis Mason’s anthology of memoirs I Remember Balanchine, which runs to six hundred pages, could be considered a sixth biography. Balanchine himself had (with the editorial assistance of Mason) already published a long autobiographical essay on his career up to his early years in the U.S. and--assisted editorially by Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he had co-founded both the New York City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet--theoretical essays on music and choreography and on the filming of ballet.
Kirstein, on his own, had published two books on the history of NYCB plus a personal memoir; and Balanchine had given long, unguarded interviews concerning his thought processes to Ivan Nabokov and Elizabeth Carmichael at Horizon Magazine, to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov, and to essayist and poet Jonathan Cott. Furthermore, scores of his dancers and nondancing colleagues had produced remembrances of him, and biographies and other studies of Balanchine’s collaborators contain extensive information. There were the unpublished memoirs of him (by ballerinas Ruthanna Boris and Karin von Aroldingen)—not to speak of the many studies of his ballets, beginning with historian Nancy Reynolds’s Repertory in Review, critic Nancy Goldner’s two excellent collections of essays, and the collected reviews and penetrating essays of Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. And there is the large section on him in the immense oral history by dancer Frederic Franklin, Balanchine’s choice as ballet master at Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where Mr. B worked in 1940 and then again, as the company’s resident choreographer, from 1944 to 1946.
And when Homans was starting, there were already available many analyses of his choreographic process in the video programs that constitute The Interpreters Archive and of The Archive of Lost Choreography, produced by The George Balanchine Foundation. (In these film shoots, currently numbering 75 and counting, the original principals and/or early principal casts of individual ballets, going back to 1925, coach younger dancers to pull from their dancing bodies what Balanchine had asked for when the works were being made.)
So, when a press release from Random House, the U.S. publisher of Homans’s Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, and the dust jacket of Granta’s British edition of the book present it as the “first major” biography of its subject, a reader familiar with the literature is brought up short.
More perplexing than that are the covers of the U.S. and UK editions. Their common source is an image by Martha Swope showing a rehearsal moment from Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a ballet Balanchine made for Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in 1968, based on the number he’d choreographed for the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes. On both book covers, Swope’s photo has been severely tampered with, but more objectionable is that they present the relationship of Balanchine and Farrell as a summarizing illustration of Homans’s title, “George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century.”
Farrell was a very great dancer indeed, but to encourage the notion that her relationship with Balanchine overshadows his entire career is not only distorting but is also unfair to the book, which diligently attempts to relate his story from cradle to grave. Homans offers enough here for a small monograph about what made Farrell’s dancing unique to Balanchine, viz. that, by choice, she did not use her technique in service of conventional models of perfection, which was fortunate, as Balanchine did not want perfection. Homans is fascinated by how their mutual experiments with Farrell’s capabilities led the ballerina to make impeccably arresting musical choices freshly at every performance and to look beautiful even when her body was violating academic rules of classic dance: That is, Farrell somehow intuited what Balanchine really wanted from dancing and, even more, to his delight eventually taught him what he ought to want.
I agree with Homans’s award of the laurel wreath: I watched Farrell on Balanchine’s stage beginning in 1963, and she really did make extraordinary things happen through her choices in coordinating movement and music and by exciting the imagination through unpredictable phrasing--a conversation with music that complemented the larger give-and-take conversation Balanchine’s choreography was always conducting with musical scores. This book, though, has bigger fish to fry than the Farrell story.
What sets Homans apart as a Balanchine biographer is her willingness to aver as long-accepted fact certain suppositions that evidence stops just short of clinching. She goes for the gusto of storytelling, and, after the first few pages, the book becomes an irresistible read, at least as far as any dance book can be said to be irresistible. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, of course, and Homans is on a mission, as she explains in her Introduction, to address the “secrets” of Mr. B’s life and works. These go beyond previously unpublicized conventional liaisons to the nature of the subject’s intellect, the range of his reading, his implicit commentary on some musical scores through what Homans suggests was his devising of counter-scores in movement, and the ungenerous depths of his personality. Perhaps the cover speaks to the possibility of a metaphysical secret: that although, according to Farrell, she and Balanchine never slept together, the unslept-with “Balanchine” was the one who drew Surrealist pictures of himself as a serpentine phallus and who was known to make dirty jokes and mean-spirited remarks to dancers in public when he wanted them to change their behavior.
One of the things that sets this book apart from earlier Balanchine biographies is that important individuals--beginning with Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s longtime assistant and the executrix of his estate--who never before had spilled the beans to writers, spilled to Homans. And, like so many political prisoners released from oubliettes, dancers from several generations tumble over one another to testify to Balanchine’s “cruelty”—about their losing battles with weight or Balanchine’s occasional sarcasm when they were unable to master a step and he had to make changes or what they say are his brutally repetitive combinations in class or his cold-hearted remarks concerning their looks on stage. Not a single one is quoted as less than enthusiastic--if not in awe--of his ballets, though; and no one interviewed is quoted as disdaining Balanchine the person. Homans includes some of the negative details in her text; however, what comes through strongly is her fundamental protectiveness toward Balanchine—whom she clearly loves even while she is also trying to exorcise his hold on her: “He was deeply flawed and human, but also genuinely otherworldly—not of this life, and he knew it.” (609)
Among Homans’s most-discussed revelations is that, in addition to watching “Charlie’s Angels” and Westerns on t.v. and to drinking in the voluptuous image on his Wonder Woman poster, Balanchine was a serious reader, often in English, of the Great Books of Western literature and philosophy. His most surprising reader’s fare: Spinoza, one of the many Jews—dead and living—whom Homans identifies as surrounding him in America. It might be expected that he would be partial to Pushkin and all the Russian Silver Age novelists and poets and to his early contemporary Mayakovsky. And his taste for Goethe, the visionary dramatist of man led on by the “Eternal Feminine,” makes sense--but Ralph Waldo Emerson? Relevant, too, for pondering Mr. B’s ballet secrets are Homans’s discussions of his attitude toward his musical scores, which, she tells us, he used to read in bed the way some people read mysteries. He may not have had any idea what the actual movements of a dance would be until he worked with particular dancers in the studio, but he knew exactly what the blueprint was of the overall dance construction: He knew the footprint of the building and the extensiveness of the air rights, the way light would fall at this or that musical moment, whether the style was rococo or mid-century modern, what kind of materials were available to him, and what he preferred. Most of everything else could be adjusted. His process of choreographing was, in essence, a walk-through of the building.
Another provocative way into his secret self is Homans’s contention that Balanchine had a consistently double experience as a conscious being: One might dramatize the halves as, here, an isolated, abstracted, inwardly directed Quixote of the spirit, even an innocent, a Holy Fool, and there, a grounded Sancho Panza-like navigator of the senses, appetites, and practicalities. Balanchine’s first wife, the dancer Tamara Geva (they married as teenagers in Petrograd), characterized this doubleness early by calling Balanchine a poet and a general. One frustrating aspect of Homans’s book, though, is that she withholds some information that might help one appreciate the general. For instance, in describing Balanchine’s physicality, she says, “he was not small at all but physically quite average, average weight, average height, average proportions.” But she doesn’t give us any of those metrics. In her decade of research and writing, in her hundreds of live interviews, in her thousands of pages of reading, in her colloquies with Balanchine’s physicians, wives and romantic crushes, she shares his anxieties regarding the bathroom and his sexual preferences in bed, yet she doesn’t divulge so much as his shoe size.
But then, Homans tells us, he wasn’t a classical dancer of more than average abilities at the Mariinsky and, later, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. That was another stopper. He was critically acclaimed as a demi-caractère dancer in Russia, was on occasion a partner of Imperial ballerinas, and is frequently cited by his dancers as showing the movement of his dances more tellingly than the younger and fitter dancers could. Moreover, Homans studied at the School of American Ballet in the 1970s, when, as she says, she could attend company rehearsals and see Balanchine demonstrating; she says that she also took one of his company classes. “Average” abilities? A recently published photograph (see above) puts that notion to rest: During a seminar in 1961 that Balanchine conducted for ballet teachers from around the country, when he was in his late fifties, the passionate Balanchine and Kirstein supporter Nancy Lassalle took a remarkable photo of Mr. B airborne. The photo shows him way above the floor, his back held as strongly as if he were in his twenties, his legs arrowing behind him. However, you won’t find this picture or any reference to it in Homans’s biography; you won’t even find any entry in the index for Nancy Lassalle, whose boundless generosity to NYCB and SAB had a tremendously beneficial effect on both institutions.
Homans’s extensive notes and bibliographies intimate that she’s considered everything that’s available on Balanchine. However, as you read her notes as well as her main text, you find that the information giving rise to her key concepts tends to come from recurring groups of materials, most regularly, for the early U.S. years, from the unexpurgated diaries of Lincoln Kirstein, and, for the later years, from the transcripts of individuals she was able to interview herself. For Balanchine’s years in Russia, the warm feelings expressed in Homans’s valuable account derive most powerfully from the members of his family with whom she spent a good deal of time in Slavic Georgia.
Some of her conclusions about Balanchine’s art are noticeably dark. For Balanchine admirers, one of the strangest things in this book is its interpretation of the ending of Apollo as, not the transcendence to divinity, as is commonly accepted, but rather a leavetaking by Apollo and the Muses of not only youth but also life as they know it, a transformation “fatalistic,” renunciatory, or, in a word, quoting Stravinsky about the final chords of the score, “tragic.” Sometimes, her interpretations go beyond my comprehension, as when she writes of the matter of “abstraction” in the choreography of The Four Temperaments (1946): “[I]t was shadowed the way a heart can become when it has been through too much. You can breathe fine, feel fine, but there is something leached, drawn down, pulled unnaturally away from the inner flow of blood into the weaker regions of the outer limbs—consumed by temperament, perhaps, or maybe just a bit hidden. It was a sign of the ways that Balanchine could live, and make us live, on other people’s intimacies. . . .” This is not The Four Temperaments I know and love.
Even Balanchine’s foundational essay “How I Became a Dancer and Choreographer,” which offers scenes of pleasure as well as misery from his school days, contributes less to Homans’s portrait of the child Balanchine than does her insistence on the hardships of the training, the atrocities of the Revolution, the darkness of the period, and her conclusion, from various sources other than Balanchine, that he was essentially always a lonely individual, who had a world of acquaintances but few or none whom she, at least, can bring herself to call his true friends.
Dead souls and lively angels from Russian literature and art seem to haunt the book’s prose, which sometimes feels as if it’s aspiring to the kind of elevated language about Russian history as practiced by Orlando Figes. This feeling obtains even in the chapters contextualizing world-shaking events when Balanchine is in Europe or America. I’d like to salute her literary style; however, I’m sorry to report that despite many ecstatic syntheses—such as those in the brilliant chapter on Agon, my favorite part of the biography—there are all too many examples of deflationary imprecision. Alas, the book lacks thorough copy-editing and fact-checking. It misuses such words as scion, ferreted, languishing, dispossessed, perdition, staunch. It makes Orval Faubus the governor of the wrong state; has Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane shot down over Cuba rather than over the Soviet Union; misspells the names of Harald Kreutzberg, Hershy Kay, and Yul Brynner; misidentifies Marie Rambert; misidentifies the ballet training of star André Eglevsky; calls the famous operetta Song of Norway--starring Alexandra Danilova and the entire Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo--“Songs of Norway”; has Balanchine choosing “a princess” from his dancers during a rehearsal for Orpheus when there is no princess in that ballet (Was she thinking of Firebird?); gets wrong the reason why Allegra Kent’s surname was changed from “Cohen”; speaks about the “skeleton,” rather than the exoskeleton, of a butterfly; insinuates without evidence that Kirstein’s Harvard friend and early donor to SAB, Edward Warburg, might have been sleeping with his psychiatrist; says that Isamu Noguchi’s austere sculptural set pieces for the 1948 Orpheus recalls Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (which had an elaborate series of wildly colorful painted drops by Nicholas Roerich); has an elaborate color-coding of plaids and velvets as costumes for the finale of Union Jack when the finale dresses the entire cast in navy blue and white uniforms; gives Boston-native Lincoln Kirstein an “émigré past; ascribes the wrong year to the Gershwin ballet Who Cares? (it was 1970, not 1969); quotes Balanchine’s famous throwaway comment “It’s all in the programs” (i.e., in the casting) as “It’s all in the dances,” when asked to speak about how personal matters might have related to his ballets; confuses the conductor Robert Irving with the conductor Hugo Fiorato in a picture caption; and on and on. Some of the memories by the interviewees have aroused controversy on the part of subjects who are still alive. Among the book’s disputed reports that are stated as fact is the questionable portrayal of the concerns and actions of NYCB’s General Counsel and Board member Randal Craft when the company was faced with the potential loss of rights to perform Balanchine’s ballets following his death; Craft described these in a 2015 public lecture that is not mentioned.
Perhaps a useful master’s project at a dance history program would be for an able grad student or two to scour this initial edition of the biography for spots where fixes are needed, thereby helping out the biographer when her book is reprinted--under the natural presumption that any first major biography of George Balanchine will certainly have legs.
Copyright © 2023 by Mindy Aloff
Mindy Aloff is the author of Why Dance Matters, recently published by Yale University Press.
Suzanne Farrell was the greatest Balanchine ballerina I have ever seen. It seems clear to me that the great choreographer had finally found his total muse -- in body, in spirit, in dance genius -- who could inspire and help to create his sublime visions. As the famed dance critic, Arlene Croce, once wrote, "We will never see her (Farrell's) like again."
Thank you for this interesting article on George Balanchine. Even after all the fine books and articles, I still love reading about his monumental, magnificent work.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | February 24, 2023 at 02:42 PM
Mindy Aloff, thank you for your intelligent discussion of Jennifer Homans's book, "Mr B.," which I am currently reading. The errors you mention are alarming and it is shocking that a major publisher, Random House, or Ms. Homans' herself, did not thoroughly fact check the draft many times. There is much I would like to say about your review but I didn't see anything with which I disagreed and much that I applauded.
I had a moment of disbelief when I read Homans' opinion on the ending of Apollo but particularly when I saw her assessment of "The Four T's," one of my top favorite ballets. Granted it's her opinion but how can anyone who has spent from her teen years at SAB, as Ms. Homans has, through to researching and writing this current book immersed in ballet, not feel the transcendent beauty and lifting of the spirit that gives me chills every time I see that ballet?
Posted by: Lisa Mehigan | February 27, 2023 at 01:37 PM
My gratitude to Emily Fragos and Lisa Mehigan for their respective comments above. Many of the book's problems are easily fixable. Make the corrections and print a second edition. No mess, no fuss: Don't think (about the $), dears, just do.
Posted by: Mindy Aloff | March 06, 2023 at 06:27 PM
Thank you, Mindy Aloff, for shining the light of your expertise on this prodigious and highly praised biography. So far, I have not seen reviews of the book by others I consider dance experts. Although the book is, for the most part, an engrossing read, I noted dismaying problems throughout. I found so many errors and mischaracterizations in the particular area of my expertise, as the biographer of Tanaquil Le Clercq, that I wonder about the sections I know less about. My book is listed among the copious bibliographies Homans includes, but I found no evidence that she or one of her assistants read it. And I am not the only author whose work was cited who feels this way. I have detailed my concerns in a long piece that highlights the book's virtues and flaws, which I submitted for publication, and others are doing the same.
Apart from errors, I was dismayed by Homans's mean-spirited tone when describing the ballerinas Balanchine anointed with major roles, even Farrell, who is called "spoiled" more than once without any evidence supplied. Mary Ellen Moylan, called "the first great Balanchine dancer" by Maria Tallchief, is not even mentioned. The men fare better. As for Balanchine, I gained a deeper appreciation for the range of his intellect, but I wish that the author had not included unattributed gossip about his sexual proclivities. Too often, Homans dares to speak for Balanchine himself, giving her interpretations of his feelings and/or thoughts about the women in his life, for example, with a novelistic imprecision, as if they came from him.
Entrusted with a life, a biographer should be as careful as a doctor. This cannot be the "definitive" word on Balanchine's life and work.
Posted by: Orel Protopopescu | April 13, 2023 at 10:05 AM
Thank you, OP, for this very thoughtful comment.
Posted by: David Lehman | April 14, 2023 at 01:44 PM
Thank you Mindy for this thoughtful review. I am about 2/3 of the way through the book, spotted many of the same errors you did, as well as the misidentification of the photographer Man Ray, who was NOT the Russian emigre she calls him: he was born in Maryland and grew up in New Jersey. More egregious is the assertion that Ballet Caravan performed some of Mr. B's ballets: they did not. Like Lisa Mehigan, I am shocked that a publisher of the standing of Random House doesn't have better copyeditors; Homans it seems to me has been ill-served by them. I do believe that Balanchine was such a giant figure that there can be no definitive biography of him, just as there is no definitive biography of Pablo Picasso, or Virginia Woolf.
Posted by: Martha Ullman West | November 13, 2023 at 08:12 PM