Though she wrote a doctoral dissertation on Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Acocella has spent most of her life as a writer outside of the academy, including twenty-one years as The New Yorker’s dance critic. Her subjects in the Review have included Marilynne Robinson, Donald Antrim, Isadora Duncan, and Bob Fosse, who “didn’t really have many steps at his command,” she wrote, “or, in the end, many emotions”—qualities she looks for in ballet and books, as she told me over the phone last week.

Sam Needleman: You begin your Balanchine piece with a warning that anyone who orders the biography “might want to tell the delivery man to bring a hand truck.” What is it about Balanchine that demands such sustained attention from his biographers, his critics, and, as you note in the piece, his dancers?

Joan Acocella: In his time, which was most of the twentieth century, he was not just the most important choreographer in the United States—he essentially created American ballet—but in some measure worldwide. The Russians are now trying to catch up. But I should say: not everybody worships Balanchine. Not everybody likes modernism. A lot of people still don’t like art that doesn’t have a story. I think it could be said that modernism is the first art style, at least in the West, that became dominant without the endorsement of the public. When Michelangelo was working, the public really loved the things he made. I don’t think the vox populi is behind modernism, and Balanchine was certainly an inheritor of that situation. The emotional meanings of his work have to be inferred. He made some story ballets that are immensely popular, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, God knows, The Nutcracker. But still, in Balanchine’s main line, it’s abstraction that’s the critical thing. 

You write that Balanchine, like Mozart, “often gladdens your heart in order, then, to break it, whereupon, in the next movement, he tells us that we have to go on living anyway.” Could you describe a particular moment from a Balanchine ballet when your heart was gladdened, then broken?

Well, take the first movement of Concerto Barocco: the hips sway, it’s very fast, it’s syncopated, it’s fun, it’s virtuosic. Two marvelous women lead their battalions. Then, in the second movement, suddenly the music slows down and the second woman is replaced by a man. In ballet there’s always a certain message when a male–female couple is featured, and that’s the case here. We get slow walks and sweeping lifts. Describing a lift during the crescendo, the critic Edwin Denby called the woman’s landing on one pointed foot a “plunge into a wound.” Bach’s music, I think, is very much telling you the same story—something heavy. And then in the third movement, everything speeds up again. The man disappears, so no more love story. The second woman comes back, and there’s fantastic ensemble choreography—once again, very syncopated, very fast. That’s when Balanchine’s telling you that you have to live, and that it could be worse. 

Your first piece for The New York Review of Books appeared in the October 11, 1990, issue, and it was also, in part, about Balanchine. It was a review of Suzanne Farrell’s autobiography, Holding On to the Air. You wrote that ballet “is not permanent; it must always be given new life, with new performances, born of their own day.” And by dancing in the way she did, “Farrell revivified the Balanchine repertory.” Whether in dance or in the other arts, have you encountered an equivalent of that extraordinary relationship between choreographer and dancer?

How about Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton? Fonteyn’s refinement, her classicism, her modesty, and the bloom and fullness that was contained within that modesty—that’s all very much Ashton. In some measure, he taught her all of that, and she taught it back to him. I’ll tell you another good one: Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp. She made pieces that were about him as a dancer. The more she did that, the more he worked on those gifts, and she then carried that style—a combination of a kind of skepticism and thoughtfulness, extreme virtuosity combined with a certain declining modesty—over to other dancers, and indeed to her ensemble. You could say they were destined to find each other, and each brought a great deal that was fresh to the other. 

Has writing about two forms, dance and literature, ever created a conflict for you, or is it simple to switch from one to the other? 

No problem! In a sense they’ve fed each other. I was trained to be a literary critic, and in literature we generally do have stories. I’ve written most about nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature, and boy, did those people have stories. But ballet, because it is fundamentally abstract, taught me to stay close to style and tone, and not always to be so intent on the story. Conversely, literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life, in dance, too—how people behave toward one another, and what they take from and give to one another. In Balanchine, you see how the choreography tells the dancers to treat one another. This adds a great deal of emotional power to the dance. And not just in Balanchine, and not just in ballet, but also, for example, in flamenco—how the singer and the dancer respect each other, confide in each other. Look at tap dance, too: the way the dancers trade the spotlight. Their happy pride, their sweet vanity.

Did leaving the academy for the public sphere come naturally to you? 

I think I always wanted to. I’m grateful that I did not become an academic. It would have been hard for me to navigate the culture wars in the university. But more than that, the university didn’t fit my style. I’m not sure I know exactly what my style is—your style is like your face, after a while you don’t really know what it is anymore—but editors make you think about it. I often give a paragraph or two of context for an artist. I don’t want readers to have to listen to a lot of stuff about Suzanne Farrell’s footwork if they don’t know who she was, and what a miracle she was, and how Balanchine spotted her very quickly and began collaborating with her. 

Readers of dance criticism hear less frequently about newcomers on the scene than do readers of, say, art and literary criticism. Are there any young choreographers who excite you? Any young dancers?

I believe that at the moment there is a dearth of good young ballet choreographers. I won’t say that’s true of dance in general, because there are some very bright lights in tap, like Michelle Dorrance, and in modern dance, like Pam Tanowitz. But ballet is in a bit of a trough. Most of the great old guys died in the 1980s and 1990s, not just Balanchine, but also Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Jerome Robbins. And I must say of the greatest old guy, Balanchine, that, like Mozart, he was hard to imitate. Young ballet choreographers took inspiration from him, but they weren’t able to achieve moral or emotional fullness in abstraction. 

The one utterly remarkable ballet choreographer in the United States right now is Alexei Ratmansky. He was the director of the Bolshoi for five years, and he has been the artist in residence at American Ballet Theatre for thirteen years. Starting in August he will move over to New York City Ballet, where he’ll occupy the same post. But he’s fifty-four—midcareer. As for beginners, a lot of daily reviewers do give themselves the job of picking young hopefuls, and they should. It’s an essential function of critics. I’m not sure I was great at it. I always said to myself, wait and see, which is wrong. Give them their dinner when they’re hungry. But I have a few early spottings I’m proud of. And I do think I know a hot dog from a real artist. 

The post Dancing Queen appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Each day, as Massine crossed the country on tour with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (he was its ballet master), he would set a timer: so-and-so minutes with his wife, so-and-so minutes with Zorina. Massine reportedly didn’t mind this arrangement. Zorina did and finally she slit her wrists in a Florida hotel where the company was staying. Soon after that, she switched to Balanchine, and the two were married in December 1938. But she seems never to have forgotten Massine, and she did not hide this fact from Balanchine. All around the apartment she came to share with him, she installed photographs of Massine. Balanchine fell crazy in love, probably the more so because she had been Massine’s before.

Zorina is the first big chapter in Jennifer Homans’s chronicles of Balanchine’s love life: how he bought her an ermine coat; how he had a beautiful pink house built for her on Long Island; how, once they separated, he would stand, grieving, under the window of her apartment at night. But here Homans makes a nicely iconoclastic point. Balanchine, always a gentleman, claimed that he never left any one of his wives. Every one of them threw him out, he said. Not so, says Homans. He left one of them: Zorina, his great passion. She never loved him, Balanchine later claimed. What she wanted, he said, was celebrity: Broadway and Hollywood, diamond bracelets, big-time boyfriends. When she was with Balanchine, she was also toying with Orson Welles and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. On this subject, her lack of real interest in his work, Balanchine wrote to her, “I promise myself to be a producer”—that is, the person who would decide what kind of ballets he would make—“and I am on the way, and I will be.” Zorina later complained that “if George had said to me ‘The hell with Hollywood! Come and dance with me,’ our lives might have been very different.” But he never did, presumably because he didn’t believe she could make something of the kind of dances he wanted to produce.²

The breakup with Zorina comes at the middle of Homans’s narrative and is its turning point. The suffering he endured over her in 1940–1941, the year they separated, actually saved him, Homans believes:

He was not artistically derailed by bad times. It was the good times—sunny Hollywood, bountiful Broadway, pink house, beautiful wife—that threatened his gift, and somehow he never let them last. Like an injured animal, he moved on and smelled out another woman, another situation, another way to make dances. Rupture was painful, but not destructive. He had an instinct for his own genius, and loss and unattainable or unrequited love seemed to stand at its heart.

At that time, too, he rejoined Lincoln Kirstein, from whom he had been separated for most of his Broadway and Hollywood years. Kirstein, through his friend Nelson Rockefeller, got Balanchine, with whatever group of dancers he could muster, a government-sponsored goodwill tour to South America, and now Balanchine returned to his heart’s home: classicism. For this tour, he revived Apollo, his first work of “neoclassicism.” Also for the 1941 tour, he created Concerto Barocco, to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor. This ballet more or less epitomizes his modernist classicism. In it, he married Bach’s fantastic syncopations to the “swung” style he learned from Broadway and Hollywood musicals, often from Black dancers.³ Following Bach, he also crafted a slow second movement to operate as a kind of tragedy offsetting the comedy, as it were—brilliance, speed, cheer—of the first and third movements.

In Barocco’s second movement the eight women who were the backups in the jazzy outer sections became the chorus of some darker drama. They bowed, they turned, they knelt, as the lead woman, partnered by a man who suddenly appeared at the beginning of the movement and vanished at the end, was borne into the air over them. During the theme’s crescendo, he lifted her five times in arabesque, in a vaulting parabola, and then brought her down slowly, point first—a “plunge into a wound,” wrote Edwin Denby, the Herald Tribune’s reviewer. I have never been able to explain to myself what the wound was that Denby was referring to. (Or why he said there were five lifts. In my time, I saw only four.) I think I know, though. This is the other “neoclassical” thing about Balanchine: like Mozart, he often gladdens your heart in order, then, to break it, whereupon, in the next movement, he tells us that we have to go on living anyway.

Perhaps as a side effect of this new, sobering clarity, Balanchine in the 1940s began to change his costuming practice. In 1945 the women in Concerto Barocco wore “practice clothes,” in this case probably plain black tunics. Soon he was costuming many of his new ballets, and recostuming important old ones, in tunics (often white, as in Apollo and today’s Barocco) or leotards (usually black, as in Agon or Stravinsky Violin Concerto). Some people saw this as a modernist gesture, as if the dancers had been newly dressed by Mies van der Rohe. Balanchine’s detractors, as usual, saw it as an act of withholding on his part. Still others saw it just as a species of theatrical wisdom. He was showing us things that buttons and bows could only obscure.

As Balanchine, in this period, hammers out his mature style, Homans is right there behind him, with full discussions of the matters that now became most important to him, above all time, music, abstraction, and faith. These are weighty subjects, and when Balanchine seems to think he is looking God directly in the face, Homans’s writing—like Kirstein’s, facing the same problem—can sometimes become more exalted than clear, but from what I can tell, she never avoids anything because it looks too hard. “The real world is not here,” Balanchine said in 1972. How are you supposed to get that onto the page? She tries.

In other circumstances, too, she is an excellent writer, with expert pacing. A Philosophy 101 section will be followed by a shovelful of hot gossip (Kirstein went to bed with his brother? Say it ain’t so!) and by a bundle of good quotes. Balanchine’s political opinions are always bluntly stated. For the USSR, he expressed an unstinting hatred from the day he left in 1924—before, actually—to the end of his life. For the tsarist regime that preceded it, he felt an ill-placed nostalgia, one that supported his half-political, half-religious idealization of what he saw as the “real world” standing behind his suffering homeland. Indeed, he was said to have modeled New York City Ballet on it: “One man, one rule.”

It is often claimed that he bullied his female dancers and scolded them if they gained weight, though in fact he also scolded them if they lost weight. (He was always throwing out Alexandra Danilova’s diet pills. Zorina’s too. “Eat more,” he wrote to her, “otherways you will loos your beautiful bust.”) He advised others of his female dancers, at all costs, never to get married. If you do, he said, you will just become “Mrs. Him”—not to speak of pregnant. All babies, he said, looked like Dwight D. Eisenhower. Of course, it wasn’t the babies’ looks that annoyed him but their tendency to interfere with their mothers’ work at NYCB. Two dancers whom he adored, Diana Adams and Allegra Kent, were repeatedly sidelined by pregnancies. One could say that it was partly because he could not have Adams that he developed his last great obsession, Suzanne Farrell, a prodigiously talented dancer whom he took into the company when she was seventeen, on Adams’s recommendation, and whose image dominated his waking mind to the end of the decade—perhaps to the end of his life.

It was the Zorina scenario all over again, but different. For one thing, Balanchine was married this time, to a widely beloved dancer, Tanaquil Le Clercq, who, to make things worse, had been immobilized by polio in 1956 at twenty-seven. Furthermore, the age difference between Balanchine and Farrell was not just extreme but almost bizarre. Balanchine had been thirteen years older than the teenage Zorina and twenty-five years older than Le Clercq, but he was forty-one years older than Farrell. He could have been her grandfather.

Such pairings had certainly occurred before, but this one was on public display. Anyone who wanted could go over to the Tip Toe Inn on 86th and Broadway, Balanchine and Farrell’s favorite after-the-show dinner spot, and watch the great man doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with the cute, ponytailed Farrell before he walked her home. And that is not to speak of the fact that, unlike his romance with Zorina, Balanchine’s relationship with Farrell was something that grew within a company, his company, and had the power to harm it. Balanchine was not discreet. When Farrell finished dancing for the evening—and she danced most evenings, as he wished—he would exit the theater, leaving his company to dance the remainder of the program alone, without his supervision (his care, his corrections), so that he could take Farrell to dinner. Before, whenever the company was performing, he was watching from his regular spot in the downstage-right wing. “I turn out the lights,” he famously said. Not anymore.

Another irritant was casting. In any given season, the roll call of dancers scheduled to perform in the upcoming ballets was posted backstage approximately the week before. The assignments, of course, had already been reviewed—for leading roles, determined—by Balanchine. But now they were reviewed by Farrell as well. And Balanchine flat out asked her what she wanted to dance. “He wanted to see her in everything,” Homans writes. When once (and probably more than once) she changed her mind and decided that she wanted to dance in a ballet she had passed over on her first perusal of the casting, Balanchine just crossed out the name of the woman who had been assigned that role—and who perhaps was already rehearsing it in a studio down the hall—and inserted Farrell’s.

Company morale plummeted. Several important dancers quit. A few tried to persuade Farrell that she should just, please, go to bed with Balanchine. They thought this would restore his sanity. But Farrell was a serious Roman Catholic. In her 1990 memoir, Holding On to the Air (written with Toni Bentley), she says that outside the studio the two of them had no intimate contact, and that she didn’t need any. Their work together in rehearsal, as she experienced it, “was more passionate and more loving and more more than most relationships.” Furthermore, as she omits to mention, but Homans states plainly, a teenage girl may not have hankered after bed sport with a man in his sixties.

Finally, in 1969, Balanchine, on his way to an assignment in Hamburg, took a detour to Mexico, where he obtained a quickie divorce from Le Clercq. He seems to have assumed that Farrell would marry him once he was free. He was mistaken. Farrell took the opportunity of his absence to marry Paul Mejia, one of the very few dancers in the company, reportedly, who still liked her. (They had been dating in secret.) When Balanchine got the news in Hamburg, he went nuts. Summoning his assistant, Barbara Horgan, from New York, he seems to have detained her in the dining room of his hotel for a full day, drinking boilermakers, weeping, and yelling.

Eventually he returned to New York, and the showdown came. Farrell appears to have anticipated that, however unhappy Balanchine might have been about her marriage, she would retain the privileges—I like this, I don’t like that—that she had had previously. Maybe she would have. But as she apparently failed to expect, her husband would not be forgiven, ever. When one night, soon after the new season began, Mejia was not cast in a role that Farrell felt was owed to him—in Symphony in C, in which she too had a role, arguably the lead role—she sent Balanchine an ultimatum: either Mejia danced that night, or neither of them would. Then she sat down in her dressing room and began putting on her stage makeup, sure that her wishes, as always, would be honored. There came a knock on the door. It was Madame Pourmel, from the company’s wardrobe department. She entered with tears in her eyes, collected the Symphony in C tutu, and told Farrell that she would not be dancing that night.

As Farrell understood, that was the end. Bewildered, she and Mejia packed up their things and left the theater. Great dancer though Farrell was—and in these years, at the top of her game—it was not easy for her to find employment after she left NYCB. By now, Balanchine was a famous and powerful man. Many ballet directors had no wish to get on his bad side. Furthermore, Farrell wasn’t the only one in this story who needed a job. It was understood that whoever hired Farrell had to be prepared to hire Mejia as well. In the face of these difficulties, Farrell, over the next few years, sent Balanchine a number of brief, airy notes. Finally, in 1975, six years after her departure, she wrote to him straightforwardly, and without any sidenotes about Mejia, “Dear George, As wonderful as it is to watch your ballets, it is even more wonderful to dance them. Is this possible? Love, Suzi.” Balanchine’s resolve crumbled, and he invited her back.

She never regained her former prominence. Not only was she still married—she and Mejia did not divorce until 1998—but by this time Balanchine too had found a new dinner partner: Karin von Aroldingen, a German dancer, taller and more solidly built than his usual picks, whom he had hired in 1962. Once Farrell left, von Aroldingen all but auditioned for her position. She took Farrell’s accustomed place at the front of the barre in company class. Around her waist she tied the same kind of flowered shawl that Farrell had worn around her waist. She was even said to have acquired Farrell’s overbite.

According to Homans, von Aroldingen, though married and with a child, offered to rent an apartment for herself and Balanchine. Balanchine reportedly declined the invitation: “He said no, please don’t, really, he wanted to be alone.” For him, apparently, that kind of love was over. But maybe not, completely. In 1977 he bought a small condominium across from the house von Aroldingen shared with her husband and daughter in Southampton. Sometimes von Aroldingen spent the night in the condo with Balanchine; sometimes she stayed home.

What changes will this book, with its unstinting discussion of intimate matters, make in our view of New York City Ballet? There has always been some speculation about Balanchine’s sexual habits; in time, this talk was abetted by the memoirs of his intimates. His fourth wife, Maria Tallchief, wrote in her 1997 memoir of how hastily Balanchine arranged for the two of them to have separate beds after they were married in 1946. When they went their own ways—pretty soon, in just a few years—this was registered with the Catholic Church as an annulment, not a divorce. That is, there may have been a problem about the consummation.

Some people proposed that perhaps Balanchine had special interests. In his 1957 Agon, he was one of the first ballet choreographers to use fully spread female legs—en face, or seen from the front (and covered, needless to say). Many choreographers have since used this maneuver. (What would Karole Armitage have been without the crotch?) God bless him, many of us thought. There it all is, the whole story of the female body, and unashamed—indeed with the pelvis featured, to show that it is the engine of movement. Men can’t do this. Only women can.⁴ (Women give birth and therefore they have to be able to spread their legs.) It seemed that we were at last seeing the full extent of what female dancers could do, as design and suggestion.

Homans does not avoid discussion of what are claimed to have been Balanchine’s favored sexual activities. But what she mentions are by no means exotic practices. Sex with the help of fingers, sex with the help of tongues: people have been doing these things for a long time. There is a poignant note here, though. Because of his love of younger women, Balanchine was very concerned about aging. Homans says that he was a longtime client of Swiss health clinics and took virility potions, including serum injections from bulls’ testicles. The illness from which he died, or at least the proximate cause, was ataxic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare human variant of mad cow disease. It is possible, then, that Balanchine died of his virility treatments, though by that time he was pushing eighty and had enough other ailments to have killed him long before.

Homans, I think, was right to be forthcoming about these people’s sex lives. It makes them seem more tender, more likable. Here is a poem that Balanchine apparently wrote to Farrell around this time. He imagines her as a lazy Susan:

Oh you suzi, my la-zy Suzi Com[e] on turn your dish for me, don’t be choosy you lazy Suzi twist and turn for all to see. Roll you[r] stuff-in, show your muf-fin, put out light and give me bite! What a pleasure to be at leisure when she stirs my a-ppe-tite.

This is certainly a dirty little poem, and also very funny. It reminds me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both Shakespeare’s play and the beautiful ballet that Balanchine based on it, soon assigning Farrell to the role of Titania. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” says Puck. Homans sometimes defends Farrell and Balanchine, and goes in for some heavy Tristan-and-Isolde kind of talk about their meeting their destiny: “Between them, there was no clear right or wrong, no should or shouldn’t—they were past all that.” At other times, though, she paints them, with a fine-point, acerbic wit, as the company must have seen them. By the mid-Sixties, she says, Farrell

was taking her rehearsal breaks in Balanchine’s private office and could be seen lounging on the couch in her robe, conferring with him on casting or bent over a crossword puzzle as he caressed her leg.

Balanchine had been the dancers’ god. “Who would ever have believed that we could lose respect for Balanchine?” one of the dancers, Carolyn George, said. “But we did.”

And what about respect for Farrell? In the “Farrell years”—that is, the years of Balanchine’s infatuation with her, roughly 1963 to 1969—he made some of the least interesting ballets of his career. During this period she danced with immense authority and freedom—perhaps too much freedom. The great and craze-resistant dance critic Arlene Croce wrote that Farrell, at this point, had a tendency to throw herself around. Balanchine was right to be in love with Farrell. The audience was right to be in love with her, too. But most of the roles in which she had her greatest triumphs at this time had been made for other women. It was as if she had been sent by God to complete them.

When, after Balanchine and Farrell’s separation, she returned, he at last made, specifically for her, roles that drew on her greatest gifts, in Chaconne (1976), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Walpurgisnacht Ballet (1975), Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” (1980), and Mozartiana (1981), his last top-drawer ballet. Homans writes that “he had to be in love” in order to create, and then she says that when he was most in love—with Zorina, then Farrell—he made weak work. She is at a loss to explain this, but I think that anyone would be. We could say that Puck was right—love makes fools of us all—and then, if we’re lucky, the passion subsides and we regain our sanity. But this seems a rather feeble explanation in the face of the great puzzle Homans sets up.

Homans stresses again and again the sufferings Balanchine went through (“They just left me there…like you take a dog and leave it”) and the courage with which he met setbacks and recovered, recovered, every time—from Zorina, from Farrell, and I have barely mentioned the other girls. But forget the girls. What about the ballets, so deeply thought and felt? To cite just one small example—it should stand for many—The Four Temperaments (1946), a peerless work of twentieth-century modernism, was postponed, put on hold, canceled, and so forth for six years before he was able to get it onto a stage. He stood by it. It has since been performed by scores of companies. This kind of steadfastness, however much it is a moral, not an aesthetic, quality, is a great part of what makes him an art hero. Homans, too, has a lot of backbone. “The deed, the act, the gesture, was all,” she writes. “The gesture, but abstracted. Not the story of feelings, but feelings themselves.” She is sober, reflective, factual. She does not cry on the page. We do.

—This is the second of two articles.

The post ‘The Real World Is Not Here’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Attention has been paid. A few people—Robert Gottlieb, Terry Teachout, Richard Buckle with John Taras—wrote short biographies. But in the four decades after his death in 1983, the big biography, the one that would take on the whole subject—the life, the death, the art, the mother—never appeared. Now it has.

Jennifer Homans was well qualified for this assignment. First, she was trained as a ballet dancer, in part at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and she performed professionally—for example, with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, a company long directed by New York City Ballet veterans. After her stage career, she went back to school and collected a doctorate in modern European history. Then she wrote a book, Apollo’s Angels (2010), on the history of ballet, stressing its origins in the manners of the seventeenth-century French court and prophesying that the art might now be dying, because fine manners had become passé.

So it is no surprise that she would then have spent ten years on a biography of Balanchine. His work was not only strong enough to serve as a model to young choreographers, people interested in preventing ballet from dying. His style also had a built-in life support. Its old-time manners were crossed with new-time manners. It was a modernist extension of classicism. That is why it is often called “neoclassical.” Actually, this is a poor description, insofar as it implies a kinship between Balanchine’s ballets and the frozen high style of the neoclassicists who spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Canova. Still, the misnomer, when applied to Balanchine, is the expression of a hope: that you could go modern—come onstage in a leotard, wrap your leg around your partner’s neck—and still do perfect triple pirouettes and make them mean something, still be classical.

Besides that, what sets Balanchine’s work apart? One of the first things the spectator remarks on is the sheer athletic skill required to perform his ballets. The daily class, an hour and a half long, that he expected NYCB dancers to take was famously difficult. In their prior teachers’ classes, the dancers would have been told to do maybe twenty-four tendus. Now, at Balanchine’s command, they were expected to do perhaps sixty-four tendus to the front, then another set of sixty-four to the side, and another set to the back. Then turn around, please, and do the same thing with the other leg. All the while, Balanchine was instructing the pianist to up the tempo—faster and then faster.

This is the platform Balanchine’s dancers danced on: strength and virtuosity. From there, they ascended to art. For spectators versed in ballet and music, the hallmark of Balanchine’s work was musicality. He was an expert musician. He was conservatory-trained (while he was being ballet-trained), but his musicianship didn’t stop at expertise. He coached the dancers to listen to the music and make their emphases respond to it. No aspect of dancing was more important to him than phrasing. With phrasing alone, he seems to have felt, he could make a dance as dramatic as it needed to be. In other words, he was an abstractionist—a quality that did not endear him to everyone. He responded:

What is “abstract”? They mean storyless. But…could be a meaning in it, you see. The people that meet—that one person gives the hand, and the girl embraces—its already has a meaning in it. A duet is a love story, almost. So how much story you want?

His ballet Liebeslieder Walzer (1960), set to Brahms, is basically eighteen waltzes for four couples in a drawing room, and then fourteen more waltzes for them under a starry sky. In it, Balanchine says about as much about love as can be said. The dancers do not kiss each other or kick each other, and they wear pretty straight faces, which increases their eloquence. If you don’t try too hard to sell something, people may be more inclined to buy it. Balanchine’s dancers were loved, by those who loved them, for being spontaneous, natural, not “face-y.”

Which brings us to one last point. Balanchine firmly believed in God. In a game he liked to play as a child, he would pretend to be a priest, like an uncle of his whose tonsure ceremony he had witnessed. He would construct an altar out of chairs in the living room; he would make signs, say prayers, and kiss whatever he had substituted for the altar cloth and the holy objects. As an adult he was no longer technically observant, but he retained his belief, as a kind of private chapel. His God, as he told a New Yorker interviewer in 1979, was not so much something he thought about as something he actually saw: “I know that He’ll talk, I know how He looks, I know His face, I know His beard and so on.” One doesn’t have to join hands with Balanchine in this conviction in order to be moved by his ballets—most Balanchine fans, I am sure, would not—but the statement helps us to understand his ability to direct his mind to a next world in which everything he believed was going to be clear (“I know His beard”) and which, in the meantime, he could point to with symbols of dance and music. Actually, as I understand it, he didn’t really imagine an overlying “next” world. He just believed in a different world, whose lower level, with its disappointments, we were living in.

Mostly, Homans says, the disappointments had to do with women. Balanchine had had girl trouble from childhood. As was revealed to us only recently, in Elizabeth Kendall’s book Balanchine and the Lost Muse (2013), his parents apparently never married, for the good reason that his father, Meliton Balanchivadze, a composer, already had a wife and two children back in his native Georgia when, in St. Petersburg, he met Maria Nikolaevna Vasil’eva, a frail, pretty woman, perhaps of German extraction.

No one has been able to find out much about Maria Vasil’eva, but Balanchine remembered her tenderly: “blond, small nose, very kind, small, soft woman, very nice…. She was absolutely calm and soft and did not ask anybody to do anything.” Though Meliton went on sending money to his first family, he and Maria took an apartment in St. Petersburg and also built a dacha in Finland. Insofar as Meliton was at home thereafter (not often—his job required travel), he was with Maria, and they had three children. The first was Tamara; the third was Andrei, who became a composer, like his father. The middle child was Georgi, born in 1904, a thin, pointy-nosed, dignified little boy. In early photos he stares out at us calmly, as if he knows everything that is going to happen and will tell it to us when the time comes.

Georgi never meant to be a ballet dancer. He auditioned at the school of the St. Petersburg Imperial Russian Ballet only because Tamara was auditioning. As was so often the case in the old days (and still is), boys were far scarcer than girls among the applicants to professional ballet schools, and therefore they were in greater demand. In the end, Tamara was not offered a place, but Georgi was—an outcome disappointing to everyone involved, including Georgi. Maria said good-bye to him on the spot, gathered up her other two children, and went home. “They just left me there…like you take a dog and leave it,” as Balanchine later recalled. The school did not train Georgi to be a danseur noble, classical ballet’s “prince” figure. From the beginning, he was a demi-caractère dancer, the man with the high spirits and high kicks—the Mercutio, not the Romeo—and he was good at this.¹

In 1917, when he was thirteen, his schooling was interrupted by the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Logically, early books on how Russian ballet survived this period stressed the privations: how the Imperial Theater, soon renamed the State Theater of Opera and Ballet, closed and opened, closed and reopened; how the dancers breathed steam-clouds into the air in the unheated auditorium; how the children in the school, forced intermittently to move home, would have to go out at night and catch cats for their mothers to cook. Some more recent histories—Kendall’s Lost Muse, Christina Ezrahi’s Swans of the Kremlin (2012), Lynn Garafola’s La Nijinska (2022)—have shifted the emphasis to the advantages the revolution offered young dance artists: above all, how it liberated them from Victorian fussiness and showed them their fellowship with machines and energy and sex—that is, with the twentieth century.

Balanchine did not miss any of this. In 1922, at the age of eighteen, he formed his own small company, which he called Young Ballet, and which, to judge from the photographs and the sparse eyewitness reports, produced kindred work, to strange music, or no music; with women draped over the men’s shoulders like scarves, and so on. Young Ballet was soon forbidden to perform in Russia’s state theaters—that is, pretty much all of Russia’s theaters. At Balanchine’s own theater, an announcement went up to the effect that anyone who worked with Young Ballet would be fired.

In 1924 a friend of Balanchine’s, Vladimir Dmitriev—formerly an opera singer, now a croupier—put together a group of singers and Young Ballet dancers for a summer tour of German resort towns. A few months into the tour, they received a telegram from the Russian authorities ordering them to return home immediately. The telegram was passed to Balanchine, as the head of Young Ballet, and his solution was to throw it in the wastebasket.

At that moment, the most important ballet company in Western Europe was Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which, starting in 1909, had introduced Western audiences to new kinds of ballet, by Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, and Léonide Massine. But Diaghilev always had trouble staffing his troupe with the Russian-trained dancers—and, above all, Russian-trained choreographers—whom he wanted, and this problem had just become especially urgent. To Diaghilev’s disgust, Massine, his lover as well as his house choreographer, had run off with a woman. Therefore he found the news about Young Ballet, at loose ends and with little work, a welcome piece of information. He had the dancers tracked down and brought to him in Paris, where, after auditioning them in a friend’s drawing room, he hired them on the spot. Diaghilev gallicized his new ballet master’s name. Balanchivadze became Balanchine. The surprised twenty-year-old had begun his Western career.

From 1924 to 1929 Balanchine created for Diaghilev’s troupe close to a dozen ballets (not counting opera ballets), including, at the end, two pieces—Apollo (1928) and The Prodigal Son (1929), outgrowths of Young Ballet’s innovations—that are still in the international repertory today, a century later, and are considered turning points in the history of the art. But in 1929, practically before audiences had time to figure out what they had seen, Diaghilev, age fifty-seven, died while on vacation in Venice, and his company disbanded overnight.

The dancers scattered to various European troupes. Balanchine went to the Paris Opera, whose director had commissioned from him a big new piece, to Beethoven, that looked like a tryout for the job of directing the opera’s famous old ballet troupe. Then one day, just as he was starting work, he passed out cold on the floor of the studio. He had never recovered from the hardships—the cold, the starvation—he suffered as a boy during the revolution. Now he was spitting blood. He had tuberculosis. On borrowed money, he was sent off to a sanatorium in the French Alps, where, like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, he lay wrapped in blankets in the cold sunshine and had time to think.

This experience affected all the rest of his life. From then on, Balanchine met with many other difficulties, but none of them seems to have surprised him. Years later he told one of his dancers, Ruthanna Boris, “You know, I am really a dead man. I was supposed to die and I didn’t, and so now everything I do is second chance. That is why I enjoy every day. I don’t look back. I don’t look forward. Only now.” But his illness fed more than his fatalism. It helped to form his style. Whatever else he taught his dancers, the “only now” directive—speed, freshness, spontaneity—was always at the top of the curriculum. It may have been the most important quality differentiating his dancers from other ballet dancers.

When he got back to Paris, after three months in the sanatorium, Balanchine found that his Beethoven ballet, and his hope of directing the Paris troupe, had been co-opted by another dancer. He took what work he could find. He made music hall numbers. He remounted old Ballets Russes ballets, by Fokine and Massine. At this juncture Massine was the toast of what there was of a ballet audience in Europe. Still, a number of people were interested in talking to Balanchine. One night in 1933, at a party, he met a recent Harvard graduate named Lincoln Kirstein, who invited him to lunch a few days later. Over their meal Kirstein asked him what he was planning to do next.

Kirstein, at that point twenty-six years old (Balanchine was twenty-nine), was a rich boy whose father, Louis, a partner in Filene’s department store in Boston, was a public-spirited man, serving repeatedly as president of the Boston Public Library and giving a lot of time and money to arts organizations. Lincoln followed his father’s example. At Harvard he founded an arts quarterly, Hound and Horn, bankrolled by his father, that published writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. After graduating, he wrote a learned history of ballet, Dance: A Short History, which was not short. Eventually, he also cofounded America’s first scholarly dance journal, Dance Index. It is hard to imagine how or when dance history would have been established in America without Kirstein. But the most important thing he did was to bring Balanchine to the United States.

In his late years, Kirstein said that his father “gave me the idea that…anything could be possible for me.” Louis Kirstein also settled a considerable fortune on Lincoln when the latter was still in his twenties. Kirstein would have had trouble doing what he did without that money, or the friends—the Rockefellers in New York, the Bloomsbury group in London—he made at Harvard or acquired from his family. He may have inherited from his family something else as well: bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder. However he got it, he seems to have had it, and one is hard put to say that it, too, didn’t help him, in some measure, by making him both grandiose and fantastically hardworking.

Kirstein discovered ballet late, as did almost every American who came to care about the art at that time, because, before Balanchine and a few others, the United States didn’t have much ballet, and what they had was largely imported. This pained Kirstein, a patriotic man, and so he went to Europe to hire someone who would move to the United States and create such an institution. To anybody who knows that professional ballet had been percolating in Europe and Russia since the seventeenth century, this project of Kirstein’s may sound like a joke, but if you have a lot of money and contacts, plus a psychological disorder that enables you to work all night—and if your father has told you that anything is possible for you, and he’ll write the checks—it is apparently not impossible. The miracle is not that Kirstein undertook this project, but that he chose the right person to bring to America.

By the time he met Balanchine, both men were at loose ends. Kirstein said that he needed a choreographer; Balanchine said that he needed a job. And so, on October 17, 1933, Balanchine and his manager—Dmitriev, the croupier—arrived in New York Harbor aboard the Olympia, a sister ship of the Titanic. Balanchine thought New York was fabulous. The lights, the tall buildings! The Automat, where you put a few nickels in a slot and a little glass door opened, revealing a piece of pie, and it was yours. At dinner at the Barbizon-Plaza with Kirstein, he practiced the few words of English that he had learned in Russia, from pirated movies: “Okay kid!” “Scram!” “One swell guy!”

Less than three months later Balanchine and Kirstein opened a school, the School of American Ballet, on the fourth floor of an unglamorous building at Madison Avenue and 59th Street, and stocked it with teachers, mainly Eastern European. As for a company, their first, called the American Ballet and staffed with dancers from the school, made its debut in 1935. Later that year it was taken on by the Metropolitan Opera as its resident ballet troupe. But its experimental production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice in 1936 was coldly received by the critics and the audience. (The male dancers wore little clothing; the set was dominated by what looked like electrocuted tree branches.) In 1938 the Met declined to renew the company’s contract.

Again, Balanchine made do. He was a genius at just putting on an entertaining musical comedy, and Broadway found that out fast. Between 1936 and 1945 he staged the dances for more than a dozen Broadway shows, working with Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, Frederick Loewe, George Abbott, and Frank Loesser, all of them top dogs of American musical theater. For him, however, the promised land was not so much Broadway as Hollywood. It is touching to see this Russian man, with one operative lung and a long history of disappointment and failure, filled with joy as he arrived in Los Angeles in 1937. There was nothing about Southern California he didn’t love: the sunshine, the orange groves, the beautiful girls walking around in halter tops. He later said that when he was introduced to Ginger Rogers, he felt as though he were shaking hands with the Statue of Liberty.

At this point, it would be a good idea to abandon chronological narration. There are just too many things happening at the same time. We could then take a mental photograph of Balanchine, pick out the main lines of his life—they are practically all in place by now—and ask what Homans, with her new material (Balanchine’s assistant, Barbara Horgan, donated his papers to the Harvard Theatre Collection in 1992; important diaries were unsealed; Balanchine’s dancers, no longer obliged to protect the great man, became more talkative), was able to add to the record.

First, about his health. Many people inside the company knew, all along, how sick he was: how he would lose consciousness, have seizures, and so on. When Balanchine told Ruthanna Boris that he was a dead man—that he was supposed to have died in his twenties—he knew what he was talking about. But this is not something Balanchine’s audience was aware of.

A second special topic is Kirstein. Balanchine was married five times,² but as Homans says, it was with Kirstein that he had the most lasting relationship of his life, and possibly the most consequential. Kirstein not only brought him to the United States and cofounded with him the School of American Ballet (of which Kirstein became president) and New York City Ballet (of which Kirstein was made general director), but when the choreographer needed money—or anything, really—Kirstein went out and got it.

Homans introduces Kirstein into her narrative by saying that at age twelve he used his mother’s nail scissors to complete his infant bris, apparently mismanaged on the first go-round, and she proceeds to treat him in the same seriocomic vein—funny, sad, heroic—to the end of the book. She quotes the letters that Kirstein wrote to boys he had picked up in bars, signing off as “nasty pants” and “miss pussy.” She records how, at the School of American Ballet, he would sometimes take a break and stroll into one or another studio, sitting down and taking off his shoes to relax. Then, when he got up to leave, he would forget his shoes. Later, when someone pointed out to him politely that he was, for example, about to take a meeting in his stocking feet, a staff member would be dispatched to find the shoes.

Those are merely eccentricities. But Kirstein had habits that went beyond eccentricity. He sometimes had screaming fits, and being six foot three and 250 pounds, he wasn’t easy to pack into a straitjacket. He was repeatedly hospitalized.

How was it, for these two men, both very ill, to create and manage the institution of American ballet—its companies, its schools, its press relations? And how is it that Kirstein, in between the “nasty pants” letters, also, unstoppingly, wrote illuminating articles and books on dance? The catalog of his writings at the New York Public Library’s Dance Division runs to 254 items, and once you get used to his unusual writing style, both lofty and low-down, you start to feel that he understood early Balanchine better than anyone else. In his 1952 book The Classic Ballet (coauthored by the SAB teacher Muriel Stuart), he wrote that Balanchine’s subject,

apart from love (of music, of the human body, of human beings), is the physical act or presence of the dance itself….

But he has also defined an intensely personal manner…. His unmistakable signature is in his masterful designs for tenderness, regret of loss, mystery, exuberance, and human consideration.

The wording gets a little hazy, but still, you realize, Kirstein is right. That’s what’s going on up there. Keep in mind that this was published only four years after NYCB was founded. There wasn’t yet a “line,” an agreement, on Balanchine. Kirstein was flying solo.

As for Balanchine, here you have to be careful of your metaphors. He occasionally said that dancers were angels, and at times he said that he too was an angel. By which he didn’t mean that he was a person nicer than other people, but a being caught between earth and heaven, masculine and feminine, with a message of love. That is what Homans sees as his main subject—love, specifically of women—and consequently she takes it as the main subject of her book. Whatever its beginnings with his separation from his mother at age nine, she sees this as having pinioned him in the Thirties and Forties in Hollywood, where, she believes, he was almost destroyed by it. We knew that he liked girls, but, in Homans’s version of events, it wasn’t until he got to Hollywood that the full force of the feminine grabbed him by the neck and hauled him off to its cave.

—This is the first of two articles.

The post From Russia, with Love appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In 1967 Clive Barnes, of The New York Times, flew home from a trip to Russia and reported that in a class at the Vaganova Choreographic Institute, the Kirov Ballet’s school, he had encountered “the most perfect dancer I have ever seen.” That was a weighty announcement. Barnes, the Times’s lead dance critic, had seen a lot of dancers, and this one, Mikhail Baryshnikov, was only nineteen. Because Baryshnikov became an extraordinary dancer so young, many people failed to realize he was also an extraordinary actor. One of the earliest performances I ever saw him in was a Soviet movie, Fiesta (1971), an adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. He played Pedro Romero, the teenaged matador whom Brett Ashley seduces, and he was a thrill: handsome, open, and innocent, a flower awaiting the scythe. Acting was not new to him. It was part of his training, as it was, and is, for almost all serious ballet students in Russia. And dramatic inventiveness was central to his breakthrough role at the Kirov, as Albrecht in Giselle, where he turned the male lead, traditionally played as an aristocratic cad—an interpretation that supported Soviet ideology—into a lovestruck boy.

Once he defected to the West in 1974, Baryshnikov again and again triumphed as an actor-dancer, in new ballets such as Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove (American Ballet Theatre, 1976), in which he played a sort of confused hipster, and also in nineteenth-century ballets such as the Russian Don Quixote, of which he made a new production for American Ballet Theatre in 1978, dancing the part of Kitri’s lover, the barber Basilio, himself and shocking that tired old piece back into life.¹ He bit off those assignments with gusto. Good ballet, bad ballet—it didn’t matter. He filled each role to its very skin. When, in 1978–1979, he abandoned his opera-house repertory to go to New York City Ballet and dance in George Balanchine’s largely nonnarrative works, he was sometimes scolded by critics for doing too much acting—for making faces, as they say in the trade.

Some critics, when they could, described his achievements in the classroom vocabulary,² not, I believe, because they thought the reader would understand those words but because the words sounded rich and fine enough to convey the critic’s astonishment that Baryshnikov could draw out of his body so elaborate and poetic a response to his dramatic situation. After all, he was only a Sevillian barber (Don Quixote) or a boy in love (Giselle) or something like that. Yet when he performed those beautiful, clear, fantastically difficult steps, he was no longer just a barber or even just a dancer—even a great dancer—but a metaphor, for all the intelligence, energy, and allure that a human being might aspire to.

Baryshnikov returned to ABT in 1980, now as the company’s artistic director, and remained there until 1989, at which point, having had several operations on his knees, he pretty much abandoned classical dance. This was not shockingly early. He was forty-one. Most ballet dancers quit by the age of forty-five or so, for the same reason he did. They can’t hack it anymore, physically. Then, typically, they go on to something less interesting. If they are big stars, they may be asked to direct a company. Far more often, they simply teach, or find a hedge-fund manager to marry.

But Baryshnikov, though he retired from ballet, did not retire from dancing. He just switched to other kinds of dance. Practically the minute he left ABT, he got on a plane and flew to Brussels, where he went to work as a guest artist for his friend Mark Morris, whose modern-dance company was headquartered at that time at Belgium’s royal theater, the Monnaie. (At one point, Baryshnikov was to have been the Nutcracker in Morris’s Hard Nut, which premiered at the Monnaie, but his knee problems scotched that plan.) In 1990, together with Morris, he founded the White Oak Dance Project, a small, rather deluxe modern-dance company (live music; private planes, if they needed one). He also did tours with people he admired—Tharp, the postmodernist Dana Reitz, the kabuki star Tamasaburo Bando—and he made guest appearances with Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and, above all, Morris.

At the same time, he was drifting toward “talk theater.” In the spring of 1989, he performed in a revival of Steven Berkoff’s 1969 play Metamorphosis, based on Kafka’s novella. His Gregor Samsa, upon discovering that he had been changed into a bug, seemed to want to wreck his body. He thrashed, he convulsed, he levitated and crashed back down. You worried that Baryshnikov would injure himself. He was nominated for a Tony Award.

But it was not just for himself that Baryshnikov was turning to straight theater. Something that is not widely known is how often he has come to the aid of other people’s projects, especially those of former Soviet artists. Once he escaped from the USSR, Baryshnikov never returned to Russia. His wife traveled there; so did his children. (And his colleagues. Rudolf Nureyev, who defected in 1961, went back as soon as he was invited, and returned with pots of money.) Baryshnikov, however, would not set foot in Russia or even, as time passed, give interviews to Russian journalists—a fact that infuriated the Russian press. At the same time, he was quietly helping former Soviet theater artists—Rezo Gabriadze, Lev Dodin, the students of Piotr Fomenko and of the Moscow Art Theatre School—secure bookings and raise money to bring their work to the United States. Soon the collaboration went deeper: he was performing with these people. He played an automobile, humming and sputtering, in Gabriadze’s Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient, at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2004. We never thought that we would see this prince, this count, as an automobile.

Then, eventually, he became involved with the theater of Latvia, his native land. After World War II, Russia suffered a terrible housing shortage, whereupon Stalin moved many of his people into adjacent lands. Among those sent to the Baltic were Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Petrovich Baryshnikov, an instructor of military topography, and his young wife, Alexandra. Therefore, when their son Mikhail Nikolaievich was born, in 1948, it was in Riga. He lived there, not always happily—his mother committed suicide when he was twelve, and he had no relationship to speak of with his father—until he was sixteen. He had started ballet lessons under a friend of his mother’s when he was nine but he had advanced quickly, and now he needed more training. He moved to Leningrad to go to the famous Vaganova School, but from what I can understand, he always felt a vestigial loyalty to his small Baltic homeland.

So when Alvis Hermanis, the most prominent young theater director in Latvia today—and the director, since 1997, of its New Riga Theater, the headquarters of the country’s experimental drama—called him in 2014 with an idea, he listened. Hermanis’s proposal was for a play where a man, in a kind of dreamscape—a small glass house, nestled in dense foliage, like something from a fairy tale—read poems by the great Russo-American Joseph Brodsky, interrupted occasionally by the voice of Brodsky himself, like a ghost, on a tape recorder. Baryshnikov agreed to take the part. It was an eerie show, but also poignant with remembrance. Baryshnikov and Brodsky, though they were both celebrities in the Soviet Union, did not meet until they had relocated to the United States, Brodsky because the Russian authorities threw him out in 1972, Baryshnikov because he defected. They found each other at a party in New York and became close friends, a relationship that lasted for twenty-two years, until Brodsky’s death in 1996. Brodsky/Baryshnikov, as the show came to be called, premiered in Riga in 2015 and toured widely.

Last year, Hermanis called Baryshnikov with a second idea, a play about Pope Benedict XVI, who had mysteriously resigned his post in 2013.

Hermanis has for some years been described as a “controversial” figure in European theater, which in his case means that in a field heavily populated by leftists, he is regarded as a right-winger. He has been most outspoken on the subject of immigration. In 2015 he canceled an agreement to produce a show at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater on the grounds that the German government’s enthusiasm for opening its borders to refugees was dangerous to Europe. There were terrorists among those refugees, he said. His action set off what the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called a “Twitter-shitstorm.” Soon after ditching the Hamburg show, he withdrew from an agreement to direct Lohengrin at Bayreuth.

Relatedly, Hermanis has protested what he sees as the reduced authority accorded to believing Christians versus an increasingly secular Western world, and to Europeans versus non-Europeans. “Nowadays in Europe,” he said to me,

Muslims are enjoying our freedom of speech. They’re also building mosques in Europe. Then why, in Arab countries, in Muslim countries, are they not respecting Christian believers? It disturbs me when only one side has a say.

That, I believe, is what is behind his interest in Benedict XVI.

Hermanis’s play, The White Helicopter, lays out its story in the first five minutes or so. The curtain opens on a small, homey-looking bedroom (the set is by Kristīne Jurjāne)—old-fashioned wallpaper, Hepplewhite chairs. The room is in half-darkness, but a spotlight is trained, with burning intensity, on the middle of the floor, and in it an old man, Baryshnikov, in a white wig, is lying prone. He writhes, he thrashes, now in fetal position, now splayed as if nailed to a cross. The lights go out, and when they come on again, we see the man, back in his bed, waking up.

The door to his room opens, and in comes his aged housekeeper, Tabiana, a nun (Guna Zariņa). He gets out of bed, and she helps him dress, with great difficulty. Where is the sleeve? Where is the hole for the head? Between the two of them, they practically strangle him. He brushes his teeth; she looks away, as if from an intimate scene. Presentable at last, he says to her, “What day is this, Tabiana?” Sunday, she answers. “Please don’t do anything foolish,” she adds, with meaning. The play’s action takes place on February 11, 2013. On that day, as Tabiana knows, Benedict will resign from his office, the first pope to willingly do so since Celestine V, in 1294. The scene is emblematic, of course, of the enormous changes that have taken place in human meanings and values in the last millennium. But this drama of the old nun trying to help the old priest find the arm hole in his cassock is also a formidable piece of realism, and very touching.

John Paul II, Benedict’s predecessor, who reigned from 1978 to 2005, was doctrinally conservative, but many liberals, together with the great majority of Roman Catholics, loved him for what seemed his large-heartedness. John Paul wrote poetry. He traveled to far-off lands. He reached out to Jews and Muslims. He supported the liberation forces in his native Poland. In the United States, he is still credited with helping to bring down the Soviet Union. The current pope, Francis I, is also widely admired, being, like John Paul II, a relaxed, genial man, and also, unlike John Paul, a progressive, concerned with sociopolitical issues: poverty, above all, but also contraception, divorce, and gay rights. To a journalist’s question as to whether homosexuals were sinners, he famously answered, “If a person is gay and seeks the lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” (The pope, that’s who, or that had been who.)

Benedict had none of the qualities that swayed liberals toward his predecessor or conservatives toward his successor. He was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger in 1927, in a small town in Bavaria. His father was a policeman; his mother, when she worked, was a cook. His family members, Benedict said, were “completely normal people,” but exceptionally devout. Benedict’s older brother, Georg, like him, became a priest. His sister, Maria, never married; as an adult, she managed Benedict’s successive households until her death in 1991. When Benedict was five, he was part of a delegation of children sent, with flowers, to welcome the cardinal archbishop of Munich, Michael von Faulhaber, to their town. He liked Faulhaber’s outfit, and later that day, he declared that he wanted to be a cardinal when he grew up. His wish came true. After writing a dissertation on Saint Augustine at the University of Munich, he went on to teach theology at the universities of Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and Regensburg, and also wrote many books.

But he was eventually promoted out of his happiness. In 1977 he was made the archbishop of Munich and Freising, and then a cardinal. Soon afterward, in 1981, John Paul II moved him to the Vatican to direct the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department of the church, formerly known as the Roman Inquisition, that was concerned with conformity to the church’s teachings. (This is the organization that brought Galileo to his knees.) He did his job there with zeal. “God’s rottweiler,” some people called him. Others claimed he was the bad cop who made John Paul’s good-cop routine possible. He silenced a number of priests, including, some say, his famous colleague Hans Küng, who had denied papal infallibility. He also did his best to shut down liberation theology, the Marxist-tinged movement of Latin American priests on behalf of the poor.

As for those he didn’t shut down, but should have, they were often people who stood in positions of special favor with the church. Father Marcial Maciel, founder-director of Mexico’s extremely popular Legion of Christ movement—a man described by the National Catholic Reporter as “the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic Church”—was allowed to continue as a priest and head of the Legion of Christ long after more than thirty of his former seminarians had accused him of molesting the boys in his care. (He also had a number of mistresses, plus resultant children.)

Ratzinger didn’t move against Maciel until John Paul was dead. To have done so would have raised the question of why John Paul hadn’t. (Indeed, John Paul had lavishly praised Maciel.) Ratzinger required Maciel to renounce his ministry and give himself up to a life of penitence and prayer, but he never publicly condemned the man. It hardly needs to be said what such leniency contributed to the pedophile-priests scandal of the 1980s onward. Already by 2006, the settlement of sexual abuse claims, most of them originating in crimes committed during the reign of John Paul, had cost the church billions of dollars, not to speak of the damage to its honor and authority.

John Paul lived to an old age, eighty-four. In his later years he was seriously disabled by Parkinson’s disease. (The first symptoms appeared in 1991; the Vatican managed to keep his condition secret for twelve years.) Ratzinger was the person closest to him and no doubt made many decisions for him. John Thavis, who for many years was the Rome bureau chief of the Catholic News Service, wrote in The Vatican Diaries (2013), his history of Benedict’s papacy, that after John Paul’s death, a Vatican insider said to him, “Benedict has been pope for a lot longer than you think.” Benedict was asked later whether John Paul, when he was dying, had indicated that he wanted him to be the next pope. He answered that he didn’t know. By that time, he said, John Paul couldn’t speak.

Whether or not John Paul thought that Ratzinger should succeed him, the majority of the cardinals apparently did, because Ratzinger was elected on only the fourth ballot. At least one cardinal, however, did not favor this choice: Ratzinger. Subsequently, he said that when the result of the final ballot was announced, what he saw in his mind’s eye was the blade of a guillotine falling—on his neck. “My only dream,” he recalled, “was to become a professor of theology and spend my life in a library,” and that, apparently, was his dearest wish throughout his career. Three times, he said, he had asked John Paul to release him from his post at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and John Paul refused each time.

But advising the pope is one thing; replacing him is another. Apart from his intellect, Benedict had none of the personal qualities that are needed for a leader today, with the television cameras and the crowds and the flesh-pressing. When asked by his biographer Peter Seewald what he thought of Pope Francis’s ease in such situations, Benedict said, “I ask myself how long he will be able to maintain that. It takes a great deal of strength, two hundred or more handshakes and interactions every Wednesday.”³ You can see in photographs how hard Benedict works to keep his reluctant little half-smile hoisted up on his face as scores of people thrust their big, sweaty hands—indeed, their babies—out to him across the barriers. A younger man might have managed it better, but he was seventy-eight when he became pope—the oldest man elected to the office since 1730—and may still have been suffering aftereffects of the hemorrhagic stroke he had in 1991. Reporters noted when he dozed off at Midnight Mass; television newscasts showed how he had to be propelled to the altar of St. Peter’s on a wheeled platform.

Then there were the blunders. Revoking the excommunication of a group of illicitly ordained conservative bishops in 2009, he managed to include a Holocaust-denier, Bishop Richard Williamson of England. Williamson’s remarks on what he called “the quote-unquote Holocaust” had been broadcast on Swedish TV and YouTube three days before the group was restored to its bishoprics, but apparently no one on Benedict’s staff bothered to tell him. At other points, his staff actually compounded his difficulties. In 2009, when he was visiting Jerusalem, he was accused in the Israeli press of having belonged to the Hitler Youth in his teenage years. This charge was indignantly denied by the Vatican press secretary until it was pointed out to him that the pope, in a memoir published in 1997, had himself written that as a young teenager he had been forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth program and, later, into the Wehrmacht, from which he then deserted. (He was interned in an American POW camp for part of 1945.)

Finally, there was the “Vatileaks” scandal of 2012, in which papers stolen from the office of the Vatican’s secretary of state and turned over to the press revealed a long history of financial improprieties: padded bills, kickbacks, the works. One document showed a company charging the Vatican $750,000 for setting up the Christmas crèche in St. Peter’s square. The pope’s butler was arrested and confessed to the theft of the documents. He had been inspired by the Holy Spirit, he said. He was swiftly convicted and given a brief sentence, but, not surprisingly, no one in Italy seems to have believed that this man had acted alone in stealing the papers, let alone that he masterminded the chicaneries to which they testified.

Some people claim that embarrassment over the Vatileaks affair was the cause of Benedict’s resignation the following year. He himself pointed to his age. To guide the church in these faith-challenged times, he said, “strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.” But while his age must certainly have been a factor, it should be repeated that Benedict was never really papabile, or pope material, not for our time. He has a face like a Hummel figurine; he doesn’t look good in the tiara. He seems deliberately to drain his words of any rhetorical force. In his resignation speech, he announced his decision only as the last agenda item. First he said that three more of the faithful had been made saints. Then, in his usual monotone—and in Latin, so that most of his audience didn’t entirely understand what he was saying—he told them he was quitting his job.

In The White Helicopter, Benedict’s toilette is no sooner finished than his personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, played by Kaspars Znotiņš, walks in. He knows what Benedict plans to do that day, and he does not like it. Holy Father, he says, popes don’t resign. How are we going to explain your decision to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics? That question is the two hours’ traffic of this stage. Gänswein asks, Benedict answers, Gänswein asks, Benedict answers. In some measure, the debate is what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, a device introduced merely in order to set a narrative in motion. Only Benedict knows for sure why he resigned, and now that seven years have passed, most people probably don’t care. But it was certainly the most dramatic event of his papacy, and one that might have motivated him to make a few remarks about himself, something he was not accustomed to doing. Hermanis now gives him the chance. I asked Hermanis whether he was trying to mount a defense of Benedict. No, he said. “We wanted to give a voice to him,” Hermanis said. And that, Hermanis insisted, was all he wanted.

He means this literally. These days, what Hermanis mostly writes are not plays, strictly speaking, but assemblages of preexisting texts—a method sometimes called “verbatim theater.” Brodsky/Baryshnikov was a bricolage of Brodsky poems. The White Helicopter uses roughly the same method. From what Hermanis told me, 95 percent of the sentences spoken by Baryshnikov in the play were said by the real Benedict during his career in the Vatican. (The rest are ligatures, glue.)

In a way, this verité approach is useful. It enables Hermanis to erect a kind of structure of information around Benedict. Latvia is not a predominantly Catholic country. (Indeed, until it was taken over by the Soviet Union, most Christians in Latvia were Lutheran, as was Hermanis, by upbringing.) Therefore, The White Helicopter dealt with matters that may have been unfamiliar to many in the audience. It was helpful for them, and me, to be told that there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. And then, because Benedict’s papacy was brief, there are many things we needed to find out, or be reminded of, about him specifically: that he is Bavarian, that he is blind in one eye, that he plays the piano, favoring Bach and Mozart, and so on. Hermanis’s method also allows his Benedict to add his view to the historical record. It has long been said that Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II, did not come to the aid of Europe’s Jews under the Nazis. Benedict rebuts the charge, as have others—for example, Primo Levi, who did time in Auschwitz. And he gets personal. He says that he realizes, when he prays, how much he has done wrong. This is interesting to hear. We do not expect remorse from God’s rottweiler.

At the same time, the question-and-answer form forces much of the dialogue into a stiff, lockstep ABAB pattern. Furthermore, it is odd to hear Gänswein, who had been Benedict’s secretary for almost ten years, ask him such basic things as why he always writes in pencil, and what language he spoke with John Paul II.

Hermanis of course is aware of this problem. At one point in the play he seems to become self-conscious about it. “I can’t believe you are asking me this,” Benedict says in response to one of Gänswein’s more improbable questions. Then he goes right ahead and answers it.

Hermanis tries to aerate the text with some lighter elements. Of the play’s three main characters—Benedict, Gänswein, and Tabiana—Tabiana is the foremost comic figure. Wearing what looks to be a pair of Birkenstocks, she clomps around the room loudly, seeming, every moment, as if she might fall over. Gänswein, a modern man (the real Georg Gänswein is twenty-nine years younger than the real Benedict, and the play reflects this age difference), cites Wikipedia; to support his arguments, he produces an array of technological devices: a cell phone, video and audio recordings.

At one point it is announced that pilgrims have come, with gifts for the pope: a barrel of beer, a huge chocolate egg, and a copy of what is said to be the world’s smallest printed edition of the Bible. To deal with the last item, the Swiss guards bring in a microscope on a wheeled platform. Tabiana’s efforts to operate this mechanism play out, hilariously, at stage right, while Benedict and Gänswein are debating theological issues at stage left. In a delightful coup de théâtre, near the end of act 1, a drone in the shape of a helicopter flies in through the room’s window. This infuriates Gänswein. He goes to the window and shakes his fist at the children in the square below, who he believes are responsible for the intrusion. “Leave them alone,” says Benedict. The Swiss guards come in and bat at the toy as if it were a fly. It escapes through the window. Benedict thanks the men. The barrel of beer should be given to the Swiss guards, he tells Gänswein. The chocolate egg should go to the children’s hospital.

Baryshnikov says that when Hermanis came to him with the idea for this play, he declined. First of all, he didn’t necessarily agree with Hermanis’s politics—and “that’s putting it mildly,” he adds. Unlike many other immigrants from the Soviet Union, he is a convinced liberal. (He made a TV commercial for Hillary Clinton in 2016.) He never imagined playing a pope—he’s not a believer—let alone a pope who had spent twenty-four years directing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “That’s like the chief of police of the Catholic empire,” he said to Pauls Raudseps of the Latvian magazine Ir.

And though this is something that Baryshnikov probably would not say, he has never played so undashing a hero. In his years on the ballet stage, he was used to being the prince, or at least the charming rascal, and in the movies that he made during those years he was usually the man causing all the women in the corps de ballet to fall over in a dead faint. In 2003–2004, to cap off his dreamboat career, he appeared in the final season of Sex and the City as Carrie Bradshaw’s ultra-cool Russian boyfriend: an avant-garde artist with a plummy accent and an extensive knowledge of wines, poetry, and Chopin.

This is not to speak of the extent to which life imitated art. In his first few decades as a dancer, Baryshnikov accumulated a formidable reputation as a skirt-chaser. “He goes through everybody,” his ex-girlfriend Gelsey Kirkland said to a reporter. “He doesn’t miss anyone.” In 2006 he finally got married, to a former ABT dancer, Lisa Rinehart—a smart, talented, and, apparently, patient woman—with whom he had already had three children. (Before that, he had a long relationship, and a daughter, with Jessica Lange, who finally dumped him, it is said, for infidelity.) This was not a man who would naturally see himself as playing a pope—a pope, furthermore, who had said publicly (as Benedict had) that condoms were abetting the spread of AIDS in Africa. In 2015 the Milwaukee artist Niki Johnson created a portrait of Benedict, Eggs Benedict, out of 17,000 colored condoms, a sort of latex mosaic. Benedict, to some people, wasn’t just a conservative; he was a figure of fun. Baryshnikov had not played anyone like that before.

Then there were technical problems. “It is a two-and-a-half-hour play,” Baryshnikov points out, “and I don’t leave the stage. Also, I talk the whole time. I am not used to talk that much on a stage.”

To reiterate: old-fashioned, reactionary, sex-negative, unpopular—Benedict was all the things that Baryshnikov was not, and so, after thinking about Hermanis’s proposal for a few days, he called the playwright back and said he had changed his mind. He wanted to do the play after all. “You cannot pass an opportunity to play such a character,” he told Ir. “I would regret it forever.” He thinks Hermanis’s Benedict is fascinating: “He is fighting himself. He wants to finish his life with a pious dignity. There’s a theory that he stopped believing. Or there’s another theory that he thinks the Lord does not believe in him anymore. Who the hell knows.”

Hermanis gives his pontiff a lot of nice, sarcastic lines, which Baryshnikov delivers with an astringent wit. At one point in his back-and-forth with Benedict, Gänswein says that Tabiana has reported that he had a mystical revelation. Perhaps that is why he is resigning, Gänswein suggests hopefully. Benedict replies that perhaps Tabiana had a mystical revelation that he had a mystical revelation, but he can say, with his colleague the Dalai Lama, that he has never in his life had a mystical revelation. At another point, pulling out a Mozart LP to play for Gänswein, he dusts it by wiping it on his cassock-draped behind.

He also dances, sort of. Four times in the play, beginning with the thrashing routine at the opening, he does a movement passage, maybe a minute long, usually in silence, usually agonized. (“Internal confessions,” Hermanis calls these passages. They were all choreographed by Baryshnikov, and they include a substantial amount of improvisation. They change every night, Hermanis says.) The most hair-raising, apart from the opener, comes at the end of act 1. Here Benedict wears the full papal regalia, including the tiara, and it seems to weigh down on him like lead. Taking very small steps, he turns in place, 360 degrees. He seems imprisoned, as in a museum vitrine, or in history.

When Benedict resigned, he was given the title of pope emeritus and moved to a dwelling at the Vatican, the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery (formerly a residence for cloistered nuns), only a few hundred yards from the new pope’s quarters. He said that he would live there quietly and not interfere with Francis’s administration. But in April 2019, for whatever reason, he issued a six-thousand-word letter dealing with the church’s foremost difficulty, the matter of the pedophile priests. Francis, like most progressive priests, had addressed the scandal as a structural problem, a product of abuses of power and of excessive respect for authority. Benedict, in his letter, put forth a different explanation. He said that these crimes were a consequence of the libertine 1960s. He also conjectured that the reason airplanes did not include pornographic films in their entertainment offerings was that the airlines feared unrestrained sexual intercourse in the aisles.

The press had a lot of fun with this letter, but Hermanis—wisely, I think—did not include it in his play. Benedict is ninety-three. He clearly still has things to say, and few opportunities to say them. If some of them sound nutty, others deserve a hearing. Alexander Stille wrote in The New Yorker that Benedict, by resigning, was setting a good example: a pope who feels he can no longer bear the burdens of that job should resign. And Hermanis’s Benedict is allowed to give serious presentation to his belief that the church does not have to follow the modern world down the path to increasing secularization. Near the end of the play, he offers a theory that “to survive at all in a world hostile to its message, the church of the future may have to be much smaller in numbers and more hermetic, and to wait until the false promises of hedonism have run their course.”

Gänswein thinks this is ridiculous. Furthermore, he says, such a reversal would take centuries. Benedict answers:

Does it seem absurd that in ancient times a couple of Jews went out and sought to convert the great Greco-Roman world to Christianity? The first Apostles could not make sociological research. They had to trust in the inner power of the Word. At first, very few people joined. But then the circle grew. We do not know how Europe will develop, or the degree to which it will still be Europe if it is restructured by a different population.

If you squint your eyes and look at this proposal—waiting secularism out—from a pope’s point of view, it may seem the most reasonable solution, and certainly the least contentious. (Note that Benedict assumes that Europe’s population will be changing.) But the suggestion depends on a factor that not everyone besides Benedict entirely trusts, the inner power of the Word. Gänswein now gets to that. “Where is this God of whom we speak?” he asks. Benedict answers, “There is not a place where he sits. God Himself is the place beyond all places. If you look into the world, you do not see heaven. But you see traces of God—everywhere.” Gänswein, increasingly desperate, asks, “Do you have an idea what God looks like? How God looks?” “I don’t know,” Benedict replies, and then, dryly, returns to the opening of their conversation: “What is written in Wikipedia about Him?”

Before, Baryshnikov made us feel Benedict’s age in a geriatric sense: aching joints, impatience, why don’t these young people understand anything? Now, after all Gänswein’s questions and arguments, the old man makes himself a different kind of old. “Genug!” he says. (“Enough!”)⁴ And the superb Baryshnikov somehow turns his body to stone, ending the colloquy.

Gänswein stalks out. Benedict, energized, reaches under his bed, pulls out a bag that he has obviously stowed there, takes out civilian clothes, and changes into them. He does it all very awkwardly. Pants? Instead of a cassock? He manages it. And forgetting that he is wearing a zucchetto (the beanie), he jams a fedora down on top of it and races out. The helicopter drone, from before, flies in the window. This time, though, it is not meant to be seen as a children’s toy. It is a symbol. It is the means by which Benedict will leave the Vatican. The rest—or the events that transpired in real life, and are being referred to here—you can see on YouTube. At the Vatican’s heliport, Benedict boards a white helicopter with the words “Repubblica Italiana” stamped on the side. It flies him over the Colosseum (the pre-Christian world), and past the beautiful dome of St. Peter’s Basilica (the Christian world). On the stage, Tabiana stands at the window, reaching toward the sky. All across Rome, church bells ring. Benedict is gone.

The post The Red Shoes appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

It will surprise many people, but not many dance historians, that the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century, the Franco-Russian Marius Petipa (1818–1910), was accorded no biography for more than a century after his death. Dance was central to the religious and patriotic festivals of ancient Greece and Rome, but with the transfer of power to the Christian church, it was pretty much kicked out of the arts. It was too closely associated with bodily pleasure. Social dance probably never died out among common folk. As for the better-placed folk, the processions in which the servants of the French and Italian courts of the Renaissance brought dinner to their guests involved, if not exactly dancing, then a great deal of synchronized gown-swishing and foot-pointing. But dance did not officially reenter the lists of the high arts in the West until the seventeenth century, under Louis XIV. Louis imported music masters and dance masters, mostly from Italy, to create elaborate allegorical ballets, in which he himself appeared. In 1661, he founded Europe’s first proper dance school, the Académie Royale de la Danse.

In those days, dance people, like most other theater people, tended to come in families, including actors and musicians as well, because not all of them had a royal academy to teach them their arts. They learned from their mothers and fathers. Also, there was still a stigma attached to making one’s living on the stage (Molière, famously, was denied a Christian burial), so theatrical professionals often married within their own ranks and thereby created clans.

One was the Petipas of France and Belgium. Their name starts appearing in the annals of the Continental theater at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Marius Petipa was the son of a ballet master (that is, a teacher/choreographer) and an actress; most of his siblings too were theater people. In the beginning, he was not the star of the family. That was his older brother, Lucien, a handsomer man and a far better technician. Lucien was the premier classicist of the Paris Opera Ballet, the oldest and most respected company in Europe. (It was the descendant of Louis XIV’s academy.) He was in demand all the way to Russia, but when Russia called, it is said, Lucien, already in possession of a good job, declined, and recommended his younger brother. Thus, in 1847, Marius Petipa, age twenty-nine, presented himself at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet and was given a one-year, let’s-see contract. As it turned out, he stayed for sixty-three years and was the company’s artistic director—or first ballet master, as they called it—for nearly thirty-five years. In Russia he created more than fifty original ballets, mounted versions of nineteen other ballets, and fashioned dances for thirty-seven operas. Today, the name of Lucien is known only to specialists, whereas Marius is acknowledged as the prime creator of late-nineteenth-century ballet and, one could say, the foremost source of twentieth-century ballet as well.

Still, this did not earn him a proper biography—in any language, not just English—until last spring, with the publication of Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master by Nadine Meisner, a longtime dance critic in London.¹ The book is low on analysis, but at last someone has collected the facts—the successes, the flops, everybody’s patronymic—and put them down in graceful English prose.

Marius spent his youth in the French cities where his parents were performing—mainly Nantes, Marseilles, and Bordeaux—and in Brussels, where his father built a ballet company at the royal theater, the Monnaie. Unlike Lucien, who was a danseur noble—that is, a master of the pure danse d’école (glissade, assemblé, pas de bourrée, etc.)—Marius excelled in character roles and in national dances, feet stomping, ribbons flying. In addition, he is said to have been wonderfully accomplished in mime, the elaborate hand-dance (e.g., finger circling face = “you are beautiful”; index and middle fingers pointing to heaven = “I vow to love you forever”) that was once so much a part of ballet.

In his early years as a dancer in the St. Petersburg company—known today as the Maryinsky Ballet²—Marius was now and then given featured roles and also minor choreographic jobs. Then, in 1862, there occurred in his life a version of that drama so dear to theater historians, the last-minute rescue. Carolina Rosati, an Italian ballerina, had spent three years with the Imperial Ballet and had been promised that, before she went home, a big new ballet, called The Pharaoh’s Daughter, would be mounted for her. But as the date of her departure drew near, little seemed to have been done. Finally, Rosati persuaded Petipa, who was slated to design the dances, to go with her to see the director of the Imperial Theaters. When they met with him, the director gave every indication of wishing to cancel the project. Turning to Petipa, he asked, “Can you stage this ballet in six weeks?” He clearly expected to be told that it could not be done, and the heck with it. But Petipa was known, throughout his career, for his speed and practicality, for making do with what he had, and by the end of this meeting he had committed himself to producing a ballet in three acts, plus prologue and epilogue, in the space of six weeks—a near-impossible task, especially with the story that he and another librettist had already worked up for the project.

The Pharaoh’s Daughter is set in Egypt, where an English explorer, Lord Wilson (played by Petipa at the premiere), and his servant, John Bull, are investigating pharaonic mysteries. A violent sandstorm arises, and the two men take refuge in a nearby pyramid, where they find a statue of a pharaoh, together with the mummies of his beautiful daughter Aspicia and her attendants. Resting from the storm, Lord Wilson smokes some opium, and a dream ballet takes over, in which Aspicia and her ladies come to life in what is reported to have been a pleasingly butch huntress ballet. Then Aspicia is chased by a lion and is rescued by Lord Wilson, who has been transformed into an ancient Egyptian hero, Tahor, “fearless, honorable, passionate,” as Meisner puts it. (Petipa also played Tahor.)

Soon the king of Nubia arrives, and he wants to marry Aspicia, but she is now in love with Tahor. The lovers flee, arriving, at last, at the home of a kind fisherman. He and Tahor go fishing on the Nile, leaving Aspicia behind—an unwise action, because in the night, the Nubian king invades the cottage. To escape his proffered embraces, Aspicia jumps out the window of the cottage and sinks to the bottom of the Nile, where the audience now witnesses a “grand pas of rivers, streams, and sources,” in which each of the great rivers of the world performs a national dance: the soloist representing the Tiber does a tarantella, the Rhine does an Austrian ländler, and so on. But Aspicia is worried about Tahor, and rightly so, because when she returns to dry land, she finds that her beloved, now captive in the pharaoh’s palace, is about to be handed over to a venomous snake. She saves him, and the pharaoh, chastened, marries them. The skies open, revealing Isis, Osiris, and the rest of the Egyptian pantheon hovering in congratulation. Then the mummies all return to their mummy cases, Lord Wilson and his servant wake up and rub their eyes, and the ballet ends.

The production, with intermissions, lasted five hours, a long stretch of time on which to hang a rather piddling plot. But as we know from the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies of the 1930s, a show whose point is dance is not necessarily handicapped by having a fatuous story. The Pharaoh’s Daughter was a huge hit. Ballerinas fought one another for the lead role, because the ballet always got a full house. This put Petipa, an energetic careerist, in line for a promotion, and he soon wrote the directorate to that effect. They responded by promising him a raise. For a change in rank, he would have to wait.

Russian ballet, like most other Russian arts by the nineteenth century, was heavily Westernized. One by one, the Petersburg troupe’s top ballet masters came from France. Soon after Petipa arrived, Jules Perrot (1810–1892), another Frenchman, was brought in to lead the company. Today, when most of these artists’ ballets are lost, it is difficult to determine how much each learned from his predecessors, but the general consensus is that if Petipa was the great master of late-nineteenth-century ballet, Perrot had that role in the early nineteenth century. For evidence we have, above all, Giselle, the paradigmatic Romantic ballet, of which Perrot seems to have choreographed about half. In the words of his biographer Ivor Guest, “Perrot was essentially a dramatic author working in movement,” and this is what Petipa is said to have learned from him: how to infuse the classroom steps with dramatic force.

In 1859 Perrot was succeeded in the Russian capital by yet another French ballet master, Arthur Saint-Léon (1821–1870). Of his work there survives even less than of Perrot’s, but he was known as a specialist in elegant female solos, and that is what Meisner points to as Petipa’s inheritance from him. In 1870 Saint-Léon dropped dead of a heart attack in a café, and Petipa became the chief ballet master of the Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. He was fifty-two.

Petipa, as Meisner introduces him, “was a gifted raconteur, a dapper dresser, and an indefatigable worker who hated holidays.” In other words, she likes him, and that’s a good start, because she soon gives us reason to feel otherwise. In the ranks of the Imperial Ballet, he found his first wife, Maria Surovshchikova, who had just graduated from the company’s school. They married in 1854, when he was thirty-six and she was eighteen. Maria, we are told, was not much of a dancer. Petipa coached her for hours, accompanying her on the violin. She didn’t get appreciably stronger, but according to at least one reviewer, her gifts lay elsewhere: “Her slightly upturned nose, her white teeth between pink lips give her face something strange, wild, tartar, added to which is hair of reddish brown with waves that refract, here and there, flashes of fire.” That is, she was sexy. According to Meisner, she had “numerous admirers.” They would send her flowers backstage; Petipa would seize the bouquets and rip them apart in front of her face.

Things got worse until, after twelve years of marriage and two children, Surovshchikova wrote to the procurator of the St. Petersburg district court that Petipa beat her up regularly. A criminal case was opened, but eventually Maria dropped her complaint and simply moved to an apartment of her own. Soon afterward, she retired from dancing. Eventually she relocated to a spa in the Caucasus, where, according to Meisner, she continued to have many admirers, including the crown prince of Montenegro.

Five years after his separation from Surovshchikova, Petipa set up house with another dancer, Liubov Savitskaya. If Surovshchikova was younger than he, Savitskaya was more so. When they met, Petipa was fifty-five and Savitskaya was nineteen. But unlike her predecessor, Savitskaya reportedly stood in no danger of being pushed around by Petipa. A friend of the family said that Savitskaya, if she got stuck on a crowded sidewalk behind someone who she felt was moving too slowly, did not mind hitting the dawdler with her umbrella. At home, too, she had her way, and Petipa stayed out of her path, but according to their youngest daughter, Vera, the two loved each other very much, and they had six children. After Surovshchikova’s death in 1882, they probably even got married, though Meisner was apparently unable to find a record of this.

Petipa expected his daughters to have careers in dance. To that end, he installed in the family’s apartment a studio with a raked floor, where, every morning, he awaited the girls for lessons. One after another, they disappointed him, by giving up or by marrying some unsuitable person or, indeed, by dying. The only one of his children who became a dancer of note was Marie (1857–1930), his oldest daughter. Like her mother, Surovshchikova, Marie wasn’t an accomplished technician, but she was spirited, fun. And, as Petipa protested, “Elle est si belle.” He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Again like her mother, Marie had many admirers, and when she appeared on stage, her bodice was covered with the jewelry they had given her.

Compared with his output, Petipa’s extant ballets are few—La Bayadère (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892), Swan Lake (1895), Raymonda (1898)—and of these, only parts of the choreography can be confidently assigned to him. Even those parts turn out to be full of revisions and interpolations by others, and this is not to mention the small daily adjustments that Petipa’s choreography underwent—that all choreography undergoes, beginning with the second performance—as a result of forgetfulness or changes in taste and skill. When The Sleeping Beauty had its premiere, the heroine, Aurora, never extended her leg higher than the hip. To have raised it further would have been considered improper, and this rule held through the mid-twentieth century. (Go to YouTube and see Margot Fonteyn’s mid-century performances.) Today, even third-cast Auroras try to get their foot up at least to the height of the clavicle, because that is the way the training has drifted: to high extensions, among other feats.

In 2015 the Russo-American choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, artist in residence at American Ballet Theatre, made an extraordinary effort—decoding early-twentieth-century notation, examining photographs, and so on—to restore Petipa’s original choreography for The Sleeping Beauty, and when his production premiered, many spectators felt let down by what seemed to them its unglamorous restraint. Some of them must have said to themselves, Can’t those women get their legs up? A nineteenth-century ballet is less an artwork than it is a tradition.

In the past, many ballet scholars were undiscouraged by these epistemological problems. A lot of the time, they just went to the library with their dual-language dictionaries, installed the microfiche, copied down what the early reviewers wrote, and assumed that that was the ballet. Meisner is sensitive to gaps in the evidence, and she tells us about them, but she too likes to keep things moving, and with an artist as little discussed as Petipa, relative to his achievement, that is a virtue. She generalizes. Petipa’s specialty, she tells us, was the ballet à grand spectacle, “colossal, magnificent, and leisurely.” The ballet had a story, though less time was spent on overt drama than on dances suggestive, at their best, of a mood or spiritual state. Such dances came in two forms, big ensemble numbers and smaller numbers (solos, duets, trios), the latter often nestling in the former.

In the big ensemble dances, Petipa has perhaps never been bettered or even equaled except, perhaps, by his heir George Balanchine. When, in the “Shades” scene in La Bayadère, sixty-four³ women, dressed all in white, descended a ramp gravely, single file, in a small, repeating phrase (arabesque on bent knee, backbend, step, step, and repeat), the spectators must have felt that they had died and gone to heaven, which was more or less the case. Solor, the hero of the ballet, has lost his beloved. To see her again, he has gone to the Kingdom of the Shades. This business of a mortal journeying to the next world to visit a dead loved one is an old trope. Petipa said he got the idea of the souls descending, single file, down the pathways of heaven from one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Paradiso.

Among the smaller numbers that play out against the ensemble dances, Petipa is most acclaimed for his female solos, of the kind, it is said, that he learned from Saint-Léon—that is, beautiful creations in which one step, one shape, one tone was joined to another in such a way as to make a small, exquisite itinerary. The trick here, for Petipa, was to fashion a dance that, though it might be clearly related to the next one and the preceding one, was nevertheless a wholly individual creation. So he gave the audience a dual pleasure: recognition and discovery. It’s as if Mother Nature came on stage and made the lily, the tulip, and the rose. They are all flowers, but each is a different idea of what a flower might be.

Petipa took immense pains with these solos. He complained of how hard it was to come up with a different combination each time, but he tried. More than that, he attempted, with each solo, to call upon the best qualities of the dancer scheduled to perform it. One woman might have better turns; another, a higher jump. Petipa would create a dance that would show off the performer’s virtues and hide her faults, thus making it seem as if she did everything wonderfully. That is a considerable act of choreographic tact. Even more courteous was his habit of redesigning the solo when a new dancer, with different specialties, was cast in it.

If Petipa labored over the ballerina solos, that was nothing compared with what he did for the ensemble numbers. He had a set of little papier-mâché figures, like a chess set, to represent the men and women of the corps. Sitting in his study, he would move these pieces around on a table as he was creating the big ensemble dances. I have never seen a photo of the papier-mâché figures, but Petipa’s papers contain drawings of the decisions that, using them, he made for the ensemble dancers: X’s for men’s movements, O’s for women’s, other symbols for other men and other women, and arrows indicating who is going where.

Those two forms, the great ensemble and the female solo, were the two poles of Petipa’s choreographic imagination. In between, there were other standard features. Frequently, there was a procession.(At the beginning of the second act of The Nutcracker, for example, the audience got a lineup of all the treats—coffee, tea, ginger—that were going to have dance numbers in that act.) Often, there was a vision scene, the most famous being the Shades scene in La Bayadère. Other staples were national dances, such as the tarantella and the ländler in The Pharaoh’s Daughter; the finale, in which everyone, their difficulties overcome, joined in a group dance; and then the apotheosis, in which, like Isis and Osiris in The Pharaoh’s Daughter, the gods smiled down on them. Essentially, each of these eight or ten structural maneuvers was a way of telling the audience what had happened, or was going to happen, in the ballet. They were eight or ten angles—psychological, national, eschatological, etc.—on what the show was about. If you missed one, you were given another.

An aspect of Petipa’s ballets that sometimes goes undiscussed—because we still have modernism peering over our shoulders, telling us not to be vulgar—is the grand spectacle. Petipa was working in Russia, the land of bolshoi, or big. His ballets had waterfalls, shipwrecks, earthquakes. Even just the regular events were awe-inspiring. The Pharaoh’s Daughter had a “dance of the caryatids,” with an ensemble of thirty-six caryatids, each carrying a basket from which, at the end of the number, a small child popped out, with the result that, if you count supernumeraries, there were close to eighty people onstage. No wonder that, in the ensuing hubbub, Aspicia and Tahor were able to escape undetected.

Another thing that made Petipa’s ballets spectacular was their exoticism. They had maharajahs, Incas, Iroquois. The makers of these ballets—Petipa and the librettists and the set and costume designers—had no scruples about making use of the “other.” On the contrary, they were proud of such excursions, as were the creators of the world’s fairs of the late nineteenth century, with their Indonesian temples and Malagasy huts. They were showing their audiences the world’s far-away splendors. In doing so, they epitomized what are still today two opposing sides of ballet: on the one hand, decoration, frivolity, naiveté, with everything beaded and ruffled and too-much; on the other hand, vision, wonder, the knife through the heart.

Petipa did not go on doing the same thing for a half-century, however. There were gradual changes and then, in the 1880s, some very big changes, making him the rare artist to enter his great period in his old age. Until shortly before that time, he rarely had, in the director of Russia’s Imperial Theaters, a person whom he could truly regard as a friend of the ballet. The last one he had been required to work under, Baron Karl Kister, was a retired cavalry officer who knew little about the art and, according to Meisner, delighted in forcing the company to buy cheaper fabrics for the costumes, hire cheaper technicians for the set department, and so on.

Then, in 1881, Petipa got a new boss, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who was an altogether different sort of person. Vsevolozhsky was young (forty-six), immensely refined, and, in those days of contention between the Slavophile and Westernizing camps of Russian art, an ardent Westernizer. He was devoted to theater. He wrote plays, devised libretti, designed costumes. The most highly regarded of Petipa’s ballets, The Sleeping Beauty, was Vsevolozhsky’s idea. He wrote the libretto, which was derived from Perrault’s well-known fairy tale, and it was probably owing to him that Beauty followed what was, at that time, the Western fashion for the féerie, a kind of dance show featuring hyper-elaborate sets and spectacular ensemble numbers. (Meisner compares the féeries to Busby Berkeley movies.)

The Sleeping Beauty was Western also in its movement style. Ever since the 1830s and 1840s, the Russian Imperial Theaters had periodically extended invitations to Western dancers, some of whom, whether or not they were more interesting artists than the Russians, were stronger. They could just do more things, nameable things: more pirouettes, longer balances. In the last decades of the century, this difference became quite marked. Russian dancing, however advanced, favored lyricism. Western dancing—above all, the style inculcated at the celebrated La Scala school in Milan—favored virtuosity. “Points of steel,” the Italian women were said to brandish. Vsevolozhsky wanted for Russia what the Westerners had. Petipa was not in favor of this. He was a lyricism man, but he did not always have his way. The first Aurora of The Sleeping Beauty was Carlotta Brianza, from La Scala. The first Swan Queen in the St. Petersburg Swan Lake was Pierina Legnani, another La Scala graduate. Legnani was the woman who introduced into Russian ballet the famous thirty-two fouettés (successive whipped turns, in place)—first in Petipa’s Cinderella, then, more famously, in Swan Lake—a power-drill maneuver that defeated many later ballerinas. Misty Copeland, so lauded upon her New York debut in Swan Lake in 2015, could manage only twenty-three, by my count. Indeed, a number of Swan Queens have simply substituted a different step. Alexandra Danilova, the star of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1930s and 1940s, did chaîné turns, which are far less taxing, and nobody thought the worse of her for it.

But the most important change that Vsevolozhsky made in Russian ballet was in its music. Before him, the people who wrote the scores for ballet in St. Petersburg were minor composers, notably Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus, and Riccardo Drigo. These men are often called the “specialist” ballet composers. What they specialized in was melody and a regular beat—in other words, something you could dance to. We are told that it was Vsevolozhsky who persuaded Petipa to set his musical sights higher. According to Meisner, Petipa didn’t want to. Not only were the specialists’ compositions easier for the dancers to work with, but, because these men’s professional standing was lower, Petipa had no trouble getting them to take instructions and make changes, something he was less eager to attempt with Tchaikovsky, who, in the early 1890s, was arguably the most celebrated living composer in Russia. In the end, Tchaikovsky wrote the scores for Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and Nutcracker, which are not just the choreographer’s three most famous ballets but perhaps the three most famous ballets in the world.

In the case of The Nutcracker, it is said that Petipa did not actually compose the dances. In 1892, the year of that ballet’s creation, his teenaged daughter Evgenia died, and he was present when the doctor, trying to save her, amputated her leg. He probably was never the same afterward. He retired from teaching that year, and his youngest child, Vera, said that this was when he was stricken with the skin disease (probably pemphigoid) that he suffered from so terribly in his old age. Ordered by his doctor to go take the waters at a spa in the Tyrol, he reportedly turned over the job of making the dances for The Nutcracker to his assistant, Lev Ivanov.⁴ But the libretto, adapted from a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, was apparently his. Most important, it was he who wrote the “Instructions to Tchaikovsky” and the “Ballet Master’s Plan” that together specified what the dances would be—so many bars of such-and-such kind of dance, in such-and-such a rhythm—and that’s at least half the job.

I cannot say that at the end of Meisner’s book I felt I knew the person who is her subject, but this, in large part, is surely the fault of the records. Petipa kept a diary, but the fragment that survives begins in 1903, when he was already eighty-five. So while we are longing to hear his views on ballet and art and life, he tells us instead how much he spent on a lottery ticket and how badly he is being treated by people who treated him better before. (Which is not to say that, had he been younger, he would have shared deep thoughts with us. He was a choreographer, not a writer or even, one might say, a thinker.) After his 1903 Magic Mirror, a Snow White ballet, the company never again used him. He made a ballet for the 1904 season, but the directorate cancelled it. Again and again, in the diary’s late entries, we find the note, “They did not send the carriage”—that is, the carriage to take him to the theater. His salary had been guaranteed for his lifetime, but his job hadn’t been. For the last decade of his life, he was left scratching his skin as his wife and daughters went shopping. “They do not visit me,” he wrote.⁵

Meisner cushions this sad material by looking back at what Petipa was like when he was young. In general, he was good to his ballerinas. Indeed, he spent all his working hours with them. (He didn’t care much about the men. In large measure, Meisner says, he let them devise their own steps.) Like many ballet teachers—actually, teachers of all subjects—in the old days, he could be cruel in the classroom. Meisner records that if a dancer whom he had corrected did not mend the fault on the second or third try, Petipa didn’t mind getting up, taking the woman’s hand, escorting her to the back row, and then filling her place, in front, with someone else. When, however, a serious talent was involved, notably, Meisner says, Tamara Karsavina and Anna Pavlova, he recognized it and accommodated its idiosyncrasies. What he wanted, always, was expressiveness: feeling, not precision; arms, not legs.

Meisner also tells us a lot about the circumstances in which Petipa worked. We find out how much everybody was paid, something that historians of Western ballet seldom tell us. We learn about the claques, the soccer fan–like rooting squads for competing ballerinas. (In 1848 the partisans of a local favorite, Ekaterina Sankovskaya, threw a dead cat onstage while her rival, Elena Andreianova, was performing. It hit Andreianova’s partner on the head.) We also hear about the generation of superb dancers who joined the St. Petersburg company during and soon after Petipa’s final years: Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, the people who would go on to staff the early seasons of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. They thought Petipa was old- fashioned. They lived to regret having said this. In 1905 they petitioned the directorate to bring him back to work. That effort did not succeed, but after Petipa’s death, Diaghilev paid him a more effective tribute. In 1921, the Ballets Russes mounted a lavish production of The Sleeping Beauty in London. It lost money—Diaghilev, to escape his creditors, had to borrow funds from the mother of one of his dancers and skip town—but it won a number of influential friends for Russian classicism and was thereby the seed of twentieth-century British ballet.

As for the fate of Petipa’s ballets in Russia after the revolution, here Meisner takes a strange turn. In her final pages, she implies that under the protection of various brave souls—notably Anatoly Lunacharsky, the USSR’s commissar for education in the 1920s; Fyodor Lopukhov, the director, on and off, of various Soviet state ballet theaters from the 1920s onward; and Agrippina Vaganova, the celebrated teacher at the St. Petersburg school (now named after her)—the Petipa tradition survived in the shadows, waiting for its hour to return. That would be easier to say if Russia had preserved even one complete example of the fifty-plus ballets Petipa created there; if Lunacharsky had not been fired as soon as Stalin consolidated his power; if Lopukhov had not been dismissed again and again from his positions of leadership, and so on. Meisner’s argument also forces her to move briskly past the official call for ballets about Soviet subjects (in 1964 the director of the St. Petersburg company made a ballet inspired by the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin) and ballets with wholesome conclusions. In 1950 the St. Petersburg Swan Lake was given a happy ending. It still has it.

Meisner does not deny that Petipa’s legacy came up against some obstacles in the Stalinist years. But everything changed, she believes, in 1956, when the St. Petersburg troupe’s sister company, Moscow’s Bolshoi, made its first Western tour, to London. The featured item of this tour was Leonid Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, framed as a battle between idealism and tyranny (i.e., the revolution vs. the tsars). The star of the ballet—indeed, of the tour—was Galina Ulanova, Soviet ballet’s queen of sincerity. “Western audiences had not seen such technical mastery since the days of Nijinsky and Pavlova, such artistry, such whole-hearted commitment,” Meisner writes.

The idea seems to be that the Petipa tradition was thereby born again. In fact, it didn’t have to be reborn. It was still alive, just not in Russia. Faced with Soviet aesthetics, many of Petipa’s students and his students’ students fled the USSR and carried the Russian tradition to Paris and London and New York. In the 1940s the most famous, and probably the best, interpreter of The Sleeping Beauty’s lead role was an Englishwoman, Margot Fonteyn. Russia basically lost Petipa, or, you could say, threw him away.

Now, ambivalently, they are trying to get him back, via reconstructions of his ballets and imports of the works of his heirs, above all George Balanchine. It’s hard, though. If you’ve grown up on Socialist Realism—tractor ballets, as the Russians called them—and then on the crotch-grabbing psychodramas that emerged after perestroika, how are you supposed to learn overnight to value ballet as an art of musical steps, which, despite their stories, is what Petipa’s works really were?

But if Meisner applied a little Vaseline to the lens, it is hard to blame her. As I read her last chapter, entitled “Apotheosis,” I thought that, after her long study of Russia’s glorious contributions to ballet, she simply couldn’t bear to have a sad ending, with so many twentieth-century Russian dancers, often the best ones, ruining themselves with drink or shooting themselves or being sent to the provinces, or, if they had the opportunity, defecting. Don’t read the last chapter. It’s very short anyway, as if Meisner knew there was a problem with it. The rest of the book is admirable.

The post Souls in Single File appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Salvatore Scibona’s new book, The Volunteer—this is his second novel—ranges over about a hundred years, from the mid-twentieth century to the mid-twenty-first, and over four generations: an Iowa farm couple; their son, Vollie; Vollie’s ward, Elroy; and Elroy’s son, Janis. Not in that order, however. The structure of the book is like that of shattered glass. The novel begins with the person last in line. The characters are joined not by chronology, by begats, but by their fate—abandonment—which Scibona announces in the opening pages, in a scene of great cruelty.

A small boy, maybe five years old, is standing in front of Gate C3 in the Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel Airport, weeping horribly and, between sobs, trying to tell the people around him what the problem is. But they cannot understand the language he is speaking. He is wearing a black quilted jacket with bits of white batting sticking out of its innards. The rips are repaired badly, with insulation tape. Someone loved him, but not too much.

Six years or so earlier, an American, Elroy Heflin, enlisted in the army. On assignment in Riga, the Latvian capital, he takes a shine to the waitress serving him in a street café. “How come you like my ear so much?” Evija, the waitress, says to him that night in bed. Before his stay in Riga has ended, she is pregnant. Redeployed to Afghanistan, he goes about twice a year to visit mother and son—Evija has named the boy Janis—until eventually she writes to him that she is moving to Spain, and can’t take Janis with her. Would Elroy please come—within a month, is that okay?—and pick him up? Sorry, she doesn’t know when she is coming back.

Elroy agrees, and he is in a café in Riga, armed with a coloring book, when the child arrives, pulling a little wheelie suitcase, in the company not of Evija but of her landlady, whom Evija has obviously paid to deliver him: “Elroy watched the woman leave. He felt a warm thing on the top of his leg. It was the boy’s left hand. With the other hand, the boy was paging through the menu as he looked at the pictures of the food.”

Elroy hustles Janis out of the café and onto a plane to Hamburg. Once in the Hamburg airport, he takes Janis to the men’s room and locks himself and the boy into a stall. There he says that he has to go take care of something. He has given the child his watch and showed him which way the hands will point when it is two o’clock. That’s when he will come back and collect Janis. Elroy lets himself out of the stall, taking Janis’s suitcase with him. Janis sits on the toilet, in all his clothes, wishing he had remembered to keep the coloring book.

Two o’clock comes, and Elroy doesn’t appear. Eventually, Janis slides the lock and leaves the men’s room, returning to the gate where he and Elroy arrived from Riga. But Elroy isn’t coming. No sooner had he left the men’s room than Elroy took account, in his mind, of the hugeness of the arrangements he would have to make for the child—“day care, catechism classes, haircut”—and realized that he couldn’t manage them. He hurriedly boards a plane to London, where, upon arriving, he stuffs Janis’s wheelie into a dumpster. Then he catches a plane to the US—Boston, then Albuquerque. He picks up a rental car and drives it to the home of Vollie, the person who took the place of his mother when she ditched him. Entering the apartment, he sees, on the living room floor, the accommodation Vollie has made for Janis: “a quilt folded twice to make a mattress, a pillow, an acrylic blanket. Atop the pillow, a box of apple juice with its shrink-wrapped straw affixed.” Vollie is waiting for them. “I thought you were coming with the boy,” he says. “Yeah,” Elroy answers. “It didn’t work out, you know?”

Back in the Hamburg airport, Janis is still crying and also, by now, starving. But he refuses to eat anything: “Papa will come. By suppertime. Any minute now. So Janis should save room.” Some airport security officers persuade the child to let them take off his jacket, and he watches as they empty its pockets. They find a Kit Kat wrapper, a pack of gum, and $263, folded in half, that Elroy had stuffed into Janis’s pocket in the men’s room. That is, in his heart Elroy knew before he left the toilet stall that he would not be bringing the boy with him.

What Elroy did to Janis, most of the characters in the book do to one another, or get done to them. Elroy’s mother, Louisa, cut him off at the insistence of her second husband. As for the preceding husband, that was Vollie, who, when he was living with Louisa, drove off one night and never came back. Rarely do we understand why these people can’t stay with those who care for them and whom they seem to care for. But actually, the book asks, why should they? What do we owe one another, after all? Maybe not as much as we’re told? But if we don’t owe other people anything—if we aren’t somebody’s mother or son or whatever—do we have any identity, any “self”? As I read Scibona’s novel, I had to flip back a few times to remind myself of the difference between Vollie and Elroy, and I know that on some occasions I shed tears for Elroy that had accumulated for Vollie.

Scibona differentiates his characters, in part, by using a very tight point-of-view technique, whereby what is reported, even though it is in the third person, is only what the character being spotlighted at the moment sees or feels. But writers have been using this method at least since Henry James. Having placed most of his characters in the same emotional landscape, how does Scibona manage to give them different lives?

Sometimes he just insists, by the sheer force of the imagery he attaches to them. Why did Elroy like Evija’s ear so much? He’s not sure, he says. “It tasted funny…. He had a little bit of the USSR right here in his mouth. It tasted of sweat, sebum, and lemon-flower perfume.” This mix of sweetness with a slight repulsiveness: that’s Evija. Or consider Vollie’s parents, Annie and Potter Frade, a mature couple—she is forty-six, he fifty-three—when chapter 1 begins, with their marriage in 1949. A year later, however, Annie bore Vollie

in the Frade parlor, with pages of the Quad-County Advertiser spread all over the rug. Potter Frade, practiced in calving, delivered him and wiped him with dish towels and painted his navel with iodine. Annie looked him over and found nothing the matter with him and gave him her breast, and he nursed, wrestling the air. He was angry and strong…. They called him the Volunteer. Later, they called him Vollie.

The Frades’ quiet efficiency, their courage and know-how (“wiped him with dish towels and painted his navel with iodine”): you never, thereafter, stop loving them for it.

All these experiences are private, and not necessarily because the characters wanted to keep them secret. But a small detail can emerge as big as a house if we are allowed to discover it ourselves. Vollie enlists in the army when he is seventeen. One day in Vietnam, a rumor goes around that a shipment of candy bars went missing from a convoy and was hidden nearby. Soon it is found, in a tunnel: a whole pallet of Snickers with a dead dog tied to it. Though Vollie doesn’t tell us, we know instantly that the dog was left there to guard the candy bars, but was tied in such a way that he couldn’t get to them and eat them himself. And in the empty space where Scibona doesn’t inform us of this, we see the dog dying of starvation, a little bit every day, with a couple hundred candy bars nearby.

Later, Vollie, by now a prisoner of the Vietcong, reaches into his pocket and finds a silver-plated barrette, engraved with vines, that he bought for a Vietnamese prostitute whom he used to meet once a week. He liked her, he says, because once she was alone with him, she always took off all her clothes, “every stitch.” Also, she always remembered his name. He bought this barrette for her. It’s in his pocket because, that week, when he was supposed to meet her, she failed to come, and sent no message. What happened to her? We don’t know, and we never find out. But she had taken off all her clothes for him, and he had bought her a barrette engraved with vines. That’s story enough.

Sometimes, however, Scibona pointedly does not insist on his characters’ distinctiveness. Indeed, he undermines it, most notably by the theme of abandonment and the unity that it makes among them. That, I think, is the book’s greatest quality: the spectral manner in which characters keep melting into and out of one another. Of course, this makes their story seem universal; we are all abandoned, the book is saying. The constant violations of chronology also contribute to the characters’ merging. We do not get Elroy’s story, or Vollie’s or anyone else’s, in an ABCD sequence, so we can’t say, in chapter 6, that a character is doing something because of what that other person did to him in chapter 3. Lacking these causal links, we have a harder time assembling personalities for them. On page 21 we see Vollie, in his apartment, waiting for Elroy to arrive. Then, five pages later, Vollie is born, on sheets of the Quad-County Advertiser.

The book’s overarching story is that, in 1970, during Vollie’s third deployment in Vietnam, the United States began bombing Cambodia. Vollie is part of the incursion. Almost all the men in his unit are killed by the Vietcong, but three survive and are taken prisoner: a lieutenant, a “cherry” (new recruit) named Wakefield, and Vollie, who now has a bullet lodged between his kidney and his spine. The three are led into an underground tunnel where the Vietcong make grenades out of tomato-juice cans and road gravel. In this hole the American soldiers are tied up and left to themselves. Every day or so, someone brings each of them a packet of cold rice, wrapped in newspaper, and a cup of broth. Vollie is in the tunnel for 412 days. He listens to the lieutenant—some distance away from him, but audible—as the man prays, incessantly. In his own spot, Vollie has Wakefield on his hands. Day after day, he watches this boy—younger, even, than he—and smells him, dying. Eventually, Wakefield ceases to be able to eat, and, in a horrifying passage, Vollie gives himself permission to eat the boy’s food as well as his own.

There is worse. When he was a child, Vollie’s school was overrun by spinal meningitis, and his parents, to save him, repeatedly plunged his face in a frozen creek and held it there—a prairie remedy, apparently. This experience, of having loved hands nearly drown him: Is this what taught Vollie that he was alone? In the black tunnel in Vietnam, with Wakefield dying, Vollie’s “long work” began, Scibona writes:

The work toward which he had been groping since the moment in childhood he was plunged through the surface of the ice bath. The work of becoming no one. In the total dark, he closed his eyes. He studied the difference: the one dark with him, the other without.

Our armed forces weren’t just ordered into Cambodia. They were sent without the president’s informing Congress or the American public, a circumstance that, as many of Scibona’s readers will remember, set off the final convulsion of their countrymen’s opposition to the war in Southeast Asia. Bad enough that we had attacked Cambodia, but our having done this a year before President Nixon acknowledged the fact was a scandal of huge proportions, and therefore anyone who was an actual witness to the invasion had to be silenced.

Which brings us back to Vollie. In the Saigon hospital where he is sent after being rescued from the tunnel, he is approached by a man named Percy Lorch, who tells him that he deals in “intelligence products.” As Vollie soon discovers, Lorch is hoping to make him one such product. By now, it is 1973. Some people, even in the government, Lorch says, are claiming that the United States lost the war in Vietnam. That can’t be true. So, by fiat, it isn’t. “After the secret bombings and the incursion Congress passed a law,” Lorch tells Vollie. “The law said you [Vollie] could not be in Cambodia. Ergo you were not…. Actually, you were not only not in Cambodia. Actually—and I’m sorry to tell you this—you deserted.” That’s what his file says. But Vollie could make this problem go away by helping Lorch locate other inconvenient witnesses. It won’t be hard, Lorch says.

Lorch is the most insinuating character in the book. You can almost hear his words in your ear. Not since Ivan Karamazov’s midnight visitor has the Prince of Darkness come to a mortal in so mediocre a form. Lorch is modest, occasionally even tender: “We’re in this together, Sergeant. The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet.” He knows everything about Vollie: how much money he has in the bank, how many cavities he has in his teeth. This makes the story more sinister. Come over to our side, Lorch says to Vollie. We’ll fix everything.

At first, this is nice to hear, since there is so much hardship in The Volunteer. Apart from its unity of theme, this is the remarkable achievement of the book: its unity of atmosphere, of image, if only in the service of grief. Throughout its pages, the image of a human skull appears and reappears. Repeatedly, we also see a child’s head, like Vollie’s during the meningitis epidemic, being held under water. The image comes back in his nightmares. He also sees his parents, whom he loved, setting him on fire.

And then there is just the world, or the world of this book, a fairyland of cheesiness and lies. Lorch’s eyeglass frames are made of “iridescently marbled acetate.” So, pretty much, is everything else. Louisa, Vollie’s mate, has a job as a “simulcast teller associate in the off-track betting parlor of a casino owned by a Cherokee Nation conglomerate with their fingers in health care, environmental and construction, hospitality, real estate, security, and defense.” Not infrequently, the book sounds like Don DeLillo. Scibona has acknowledged his admiration for his predecessor, with the latter’s artillery of threat and junk and falseness. At one point, Vollie is living with Louisa and Elroy in a rented house with no electricity or gas, in New Mexico, near Los Alamos. The phone has been disconnected for years. It hangs on the wall like a forgotten spoon rack. Then, one day, it rings, like a summons from hell. Which it is. Lorch is calling. He has an assignment for Vollie. He needs him to find a man, Egon Hausmann, who is living in Queens, in hiding.

In the neighborhood to which Lorch directs Vollie, there is a certain Miss Colt, a Jehovah’s Witness, who used to take in homeless people. The health department eventually closed down Miss Colt’s flophouse, but it is still crazily squalid:

Discs of pressed foundation powders shriveled on the sills. In the sink, an old cake. Along the hall floors, levees of cellophane, pencil boxes, hosiery, record sleeves. Jars of sand evidently collected from deserts on four continents and labeled as such with embossing tape. Six rooms, each of them somehow the living room, with an appliance that didn’t belong, in the corner.

Squashed rats lie along the baseboard. The smell practically knocks you over.

The city inspectors seem, understandably, to have given Miss Colt’s establishment a hurried examination. In any case, they missed a secluded room at the back of the house, where Egon Hausmann, all but dead, lies naked on a soiled mattress in a tangle of afghans. Miss Colt has hired a girl from the local Ursuline convent school—Trisha, eleven years old—to bring Hausmann his oatmeal and empty his waste. But soon, Vollie appears at Miss Colt’s door with a colleague from Lorch’s secrecy operation. The man shoots Hausmann dead. Then he kills Trisha, because she tried to stop him. Finally, he turns to Vollie, a witness, as usual. He shoots him in the foot and walks out.

Who is Hausmann? I know Salvatore Scibona from his work at the New York Public Library, where he is the director of the Cullman Center, and so I actually telephoned him and asked. He said he didn’t know, and that I didn’t need to know, either. For that matter, we never find out much about who Percy Lorch is. He’s just a “contractor,” as he tells Vollie. We know that the people in the Defense Department often use independent contractors to do jobs that they don’t want our own soldiers to do. Makes sense, right? No, or not in this book. There are too many secrets, too many appointments unkept, too many strangers walking into people’s houses and shooting them. The whole novel gradually acquires a kind of overhang, compact of heat and car exhaust, enigma and cruelty. It is the atmosphere, the air, of the book.

Scibona gives us good people, too—for example, Trisha, Hausmann’s pre-adolescent caretaker. At one point, she tries to explain to a local hoodlum, Marlon, whom she has a crush on, why she thinks Miss Colt has been right to protect Hausmann and to go on preaching love at her Jehovah’s Witnesses’ meetings:

“Miss Colt’s family is dead,” she said. “But she’s out at her reading group now, and later they’re going to have cheese sandwiches at Fregel’s.”

“I don’t get your point.”

“My point being she made a decision to go on loving people. New people if necessary.”

“This is love?” Marlon asked, indicating the room with his chin.

“What’s worse, to treat people not as well as you could have, or to pretend they’re dead?”

But Scibona, it seems, is not quite satisfied with the churchy young Trisha, and, near the end of the book, he gives us instead—a virtuoso conclusion—the wedding night of Annie and Potter Frade, the progenitors of Vollie, who had known each other, in their farm town, from childhood. After the ceremony, Potter’s mother, who lives with him, courteously goes to spend the night with relatives in town. Potter brings Annie back to his home and, with some awkwardness, escorts her to his bedroom. She removes her dress and her corset. He is clearly not accustomed to such a situation:

He had gone hungry in his childhood, and now he could not distinguish the pang in his gut from the pang he had known as a boy, the need for oats in the morning after he had gone to bed without supper. His father would give him an apple at lunch and the boy would eat even the seeds.

Now his body was wracked from his sore feet to his searing inner organs to his brain swelling against the sides of its case. And he saw her holding herself under her armpits, covering, the long thumbs up around the shoulders.

Somehow she was roasting, although it was manifestly very cold, as the wind from outside rippled the curtains in the draft. She bent double and removed one stocking, then the other, sitting on the lower bunk, the relics of boyhood all around. He had wept once, talking with her decades ago outside a dance, explaining that Harold, his goose, had died.

Soon she is wearing only her panties. She watches him approach: “He was a predatory monster with its front on backward…. He approached, wicked, nude, and shivering.” He lies down on top of her. Soon she feels a terrible pain between her legs.

This is the only sex scene in The Volunteer, and though it doesn’t come till late in the book, it is worth waiting for. Each of these two frightened middle-aged virgins wants to do the right thing for the other, and they try. Indeed, they succeed. A year later, Vollie is born, into a world of yawning grief and some small kindness.

The post ‘The Work of Becoming No One’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

My father, Charles Grass, was the other Riff Brother who formed the tap-dance duo with Bob Fosse from ages eight to eighteen (they became professionals at the age of twelve) when they were growing up in Chicago [“Crotch Shots Galore,” NYR, May 24]. While Bob was from a big family, my father was an only child, and I can assure you that my grandmother was a very persistent chaperone. The Riff Brothers danced in some seedy places but did not hang out with strippers or go on stage with erections. My father was always bemused by Bob’s rewriting history to give himself a scandalous adolescence to “explain” his sexual obsessions.

Marie Grass Amenta
Flossmoor, Illinois

Joan Acocella replies:

I am glad to have a second report, and one that defends the honor of the Riff Brothers’ parents.

The post Adult Supervision appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

When people think of the work of Bob Fosse, Broadway’s foremost choreographer-director in the 1960s and 1970s, what they are likely to see in their minds is a group of dancers, in bowler hats and white gloves, standing in a stiff configuration and bobbing up and down in a cool sort of way. The dancers may rotate their wrists or splay their fingers, but they don’t stick out too many parts of themselves at one time, and they generally don’t travel around the stage much. They are often dressed in some combination of panties and garters and sheer silks; and even in the live shows, not to speak of the films, they offer you crotch shots galore. Not that they’re planning to do much with their crotches. Most of them would as soon knife you as go out with you. The sex is not sexual but satirical. It’s there to show us that every word we speak is a lie, that every promise will be broken.

That is what Fosse came to think about life, but even he was a child once. He was born in Chicago in 1927, the son of a salesman and a housewife, and he wandered into dance in what, for boys of the period, was the usual way, or the way they later claimed: his sister went to dance lessons, and he accompanied her. She quit; he stayed and became a star.

His teacher paired him with another boy in a tap duo called the Riff Brothers, and they played American Legion halls, amateur shows, and the like, until the other boy dropped out and Fosse went on, to TV—Your Hit Parade, The Colgate Comedy Hour, etc.—and eventually to small roles in movies. He loved dancing, and if you go to YouTube and search for “My Sister Eileen movie 1955, Alley Dance,” you can see this in a duet he performs with another man, Tommy Rall (Fosse’s the blond), both of them in hot pursuit of Janet Leigh. Even next to the excellent Rall, he’s clearly a virtuoso. Bell kicks, triple pirouettes, barrel turns, knee slides, back flips: he can do them all.

Nevertheless, he would have had a hard time making a career as a dancer. He was runty looking and stoop-shouldered, and he lost much of his hair as a young man. His looks also stood in the way of an acting career. His first big role was the lead in a 1951 summer-stock production of the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey. If ever there was typecasting, this was it. Like Joey, a small-time nightclub emcee, Fosse could reel out breezy, lame jokes and get good-looking women to do him favors. This role, to which he returned many times, may have helped to form his rather sleazy personality, and vice versa.

The good-looking women were important. He was married by twenty, to the dancer Mary Ann Niles, and he soon had a useful girlfriend on the side, another dancer, Joan McCracken. (Of his love life, he said later, “I give my relationships two weeks now. Sometimes I bring it in ahead of deadline.”) Nine years older than Fosse and more sophisticated, McCracken nagged him to try for better roles, in film as well as theater, and to get some serious dance training, which he did, at the American Theatre Wing in New York, where he studied with Anna Sokolow, Charles Weidman, and José Limón.

McCracken also enthused about her boyfriend’s talents to the powerful producer/director George Abbott, who valued her opinion, and got him to go see Fosse in the 1953 film of Kiss Me Kate. Fosse’s role in that movie started small—he was just one of the Paduan skirt chasers—but its effect on his future was huge. The person in charge of the dances for Kiss Me Kate was Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire’s old collaborator. Fosse was desperate to make a dance for a movie, and he begged Pan to let him create just one number for Kate. Pan said okay, and Fosse made a dance to “From This Moment On,” and also performed in it. (Again, call it up on YouTube. Again, Fosse is the short blond.) From that moment on, exactly. The piece was high-flying, fun, crazy. Fosse got to choreograph Abbott’s next two big shows, The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955).

Fosse had divorced Niles in 1951 to marry McCracken. A few years later, inconveniently, he found the woman who would become his greatest star and, presumably, his greatest love, Gwen Verdon. Verdon had been the protégée and assistant of Jack Cole, the inventor of what was then called “jazz dance.” She was a sexy redhead at the same time that she was sweet-spirited and comical, with an ear-to-ear grin. (“That alabaster skin, those eyes, that bantam rooster walk,” he said later. “Her in the leotard I will never forget”—a moving tribute.) In Damn Yankees she portrayed a devil intent on seducing the Washington Senators’ chief slugger, played by Tab Hunter in the 1957 film version. In her striptease, “Whatever Lola Wants,” she flings her garments this way and that over the Senators’ lockers as Hunter looks on, slack-jawed. The Senators won the pennant, and Fosse and Verdon became famous.

Fosse was by now very ambitious, and Verdon, who married him in 1960 (she got better than the two-week treatment, but not by much—they never divorced, though), was ambitious for him. Soon they embarked on a project, New Girl in Town (1957), that few other people would have dreamed of: a musical version of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. The main plot point of O’Neill’s play is that the heroine, after a number of years as a prostitute, tries to make a conventional marriage. The show included a dream sequence portraying an enthusiastic orgy in Anna’s old brothel. The producer of New Girl—George Abbott again—pronounced the orgy scene “just plain dirty” and ordered that it be taken out. There ensued a bitter fight, which Fosse lost, but which had a decisive effect on his career, because it convinced him that in the future he would be the director, not just the choreographer, of his shows. In other words, this man, who loved to shock and was used to indulging himself, would now have no rein on him, no one to tell him he had to tone something down.

On the contrary. It was at this time, the end of the 1950s, that Fosse went into psychoanalysis. (He would stay for five years.) His purpose, apparently, was to assuage his guilt over leaving McCracken for Verdon, and to calm his anxieties over becoming a director. The analyst prescribed for him some powerful drugs: Seconal to go to sleep and amphetamines (Dexedrine, Benzedrine) to wake up. The amphetamines, combined with the long, long hours of work that they supported—he rehearsed the dancers until they dropped—kept him in a state of sometimes irritable, sometimes euphoric hyperalertness. (He later did a lot of cocaine and, according to another biographer, Sam Wasson, gave it to some of his performers to help them fight off exhaustion: “‘The dressers would lay out your lines in your quick-change booth,’ one dancer said.”) Flying high, he did not mind scolding others for flying low—for not screaming, not taking drugs, not changing bedmates every two weeks. Such an approach may seem unnuanced to us now, but in the United States these were boom years for Freud’s reputation, and for the idea that getting naked meant telling the truth. Hair was less than a decade down the road.

At the same time that this boundary was being breached in his mind, so was another. In the early twentieth century, the major innovation in musical theater was the advent of realism, the elision of the song with the stage action. Before, the actors would be doing something or other; then, typically, they would stop and break into a song related to what they had been doing. Gradually, in the 1930s and 1940s, this changed. The song would grow out of the action. The actors would be admiring their cornfields or thinking about their nice new buggy, and then, as naturally as the choreographer could manage it, this would turn into a song, and maybe a dance, too.

But in the midcentury, as part of a ramping up of modernism throughout the arts, show dancing got tired of realism. As Fosse put it, “I get very antsy watching musicals in which people are singing as they walk down the street or hang out the laundry.” And so he took the step of acknowledging that the lyric situation of the show, its song-world, was different from its story. Indeed, he went in for forthright antirealism. Following Brecht and others, he used vaudeville techniques, film techniques, anything techniques. In his musical Sweet Charity, adapted from Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957), he had his heroine, Charity, walk from one set into another without interrupting what she was saying. At the end of the show, her fiancé ditches her—pushes her into a lake—and Charity, played by the always-game Verdon, threw herself headlong into the orchestra pit. Fosse wasn’t pretending anymore that this wasn’t a show.

Those two developments, scabrousness and antirealism, were the two most important projects of Fosse’s middle period, his best period, and they are the main subjects of two new books about him: Kevin Winkler’s Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical and Ethan Mordden’s All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical “Chicago.”

Winkler’s book covers Fosse’s entire career, and he may be the world’s best-informed person on that subject, since he spent almost two decades working for the performing arts division of the New York Public Library. (He also danced for Fosse briefly, in the ensemble rehearsals for a revival of the 1962 show Little Me.) After what must have been years in front of the NYPL’s videotape machines, he can describe, I think, every step that Fosse ever created. If, in a dance that the choreographer made for an Ed Sullivan TV special in 1969, Gwen Verdon raised her arms and turned her back and froze on count such-and-such, he can tell us about that, plus whatever came before and after. In fact, he could probably perform it. This does not always make for easy reading, but it is responsible scholarship, and it is going to be useful to researchers in the future. (Particularly that dance for the Ed Sullivan show: “Mexican Breakfast.” It was the basis for Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” music video, which was named video of the year at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and has received over 640 million views in the version currently on YouTube.)

Apart from his mastery of detail, Winkler is our best source for what he thinks of as Fosse’s “conceptual staging”—that is, his attack on the fourth wall. Winkler believes that this starts in earnest in Sweet Charity. Charity is a “taxi dancer,” a woman who, in a special sort of club, will dance with you for a fee. (This is of course a metaphor for prostitution, and in Nights of Cabiria the heroine is a prostitute. The story was cleaned up for America.) The most interesting number in the show, at least insofar as the 1966 stage version was preserved in the 1969 film version, is “Big Spender,” in which a man enters such a club and confronts the dancers—a row of them, in a fantastic array of wigs and dangle earrings and whatnot—lined up behind a rail, waiting to be chosen. One beckons, “Hey, cowboy, you wanna dance?” Another slings her thigh over the rail and asks, “You got a cigarette for me?” Given the practiced coarseness of the routine—the frozen smiles, the squatty pliés—you don’t feel sorry for the women. Like so much middle-to-late Fosse, it’s not a representation of sex, but a representation of a representation of sex.

Fosse’s 1972 movie Cabaret shows a similar distancing. Cabaret grew out of Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical Berlin Stories, about a young tutor of English and Sally Bowles, a woman who, with little talent but great determination, is trying to make a go of it as the headliner in a seedy cabaret, the Kit Kat Klub, in Weimar-era Berlin. The story was later reborn as a play, then as a musical, Cabaret, directed by Hal Prince and set to songs by John Kander (composer) and Fred Ebb (lyricist).

Prince’s musical had a new tilt toward the unsayable—Nazism, violence, bisexuality—with, accordingly, newly indirect ways of addressing such matters. Once Fosse took over as director of the film adaptation, the material predictably became more sordid. To assemble his extras, Fosse got Verdon and his assistant director to cruise the dives of Berlin in search of faces that looked like something out of Georg Grosz or Otto Dix, and he instructed the Kit Kat Klub’s dancers to put on weight and stop shaving their armpits. At the same time, however, the presentation became more metaphorical. Most radical was Fosse’s decision to drop all but one of the songs that were not part of the Kit Kat Klub’s floor show. The remaining songs, because they were entertainment for a disreputable club, were almost all comic or obscene or both. But again, as in Sweet Charity, they were all to be seen as representations, performances, which made them seem more comic or obscene, but more coldly so. Think Jeff Koons.

As Cabaret is Winkler’s main exhibit, Chicago, the 1975 stage show with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera (not the 2002 movie with Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which many of us have seen, but not Fosse, who died in 1987)—is Ethan Mordden’s subject. Coming only three years after Cabaret, Chicago has a lot in common with it. Both of them deal forthrightly with vice, and both are tied to a very specific time and place—Cabaret to the 1930s in Berlin, Chicago to the 1920s in Chicago—a fact that, by giving historical underpinnings to the misdeeds, seems, at least superficially, to make some excuse for them. (“That’s the way Chicago was in the twenties.”) As the main characters of Cabaret are surrounded by crime and cynicism, and laugh at it sometimes, so do the people of Chicago, and not just sometimes.

Also like Cabaret, Chicago had a considerable prehistory before Fosse got his hands on it. The first version, a 1926 play based on true, or true-ish, events, concerns a pretty and not especially virtuous young woman, Roxie Hart. Roxie longs to perform in vaudeville, and she feels she has what it takes. Married to a man she considers a big nothing, she acquires a lover, Fred Casely, who promises to introduce her to important people in the theater, people who could help her. The show opens one night when, after a hasty, drunken copulation, Roxie reminds Casely of his promise, and he casually confesses that he lied. He doesn’t know any important theater people; he was just trying to get her into bed. He seems to think this was an okay thing to do. She doesn’t. She reaches for the gun in her chiffonier and plugs him full of holes.

In any other crime drama, the ensuing events would have been about Roxie’s trying to evade the murder charge. Not here. Roxie figures that her elimination of Casely might get her onto the stage. Innocent young woman, her morals undermined by booze and jazz, forced to kill the man who corrupted her: such a story, fed to the tabloids, might be just the thing to jump-start a vaudeville career. And that is the gist of the 1926 play, written by Maurine Watkins, a crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who had taken a playwriting course at Harvard. Watkins’s play was followed, in 1927, by a silent movie, Chicago, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, which Mordden finds dull, and then in 1942 by William Wellman’s excellent movie Roxie Hart, starring Ginger Rogers as Roxie.

Fosse knew all this history and for years had tried to buy the rights to Watkins’s play. She wouldn’t agree. From her youth, Watkins had been a devout member of the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant sect, and she was not ignorant of Fosse’s reputation; she thought he would turn her story into something dirty. Finally, in 1969, Watkins died, and in her will she took pity on the choreographer, in a roundabout way. She gave to Gwen Verdon the right of first refusal to the tale of Roxie. Of course she knew that Verdon was Fosse’s wife, but apparently she considered women more trustworthy. Verdon immediately turned the rights over to Fosse, and he proceeded to make something dirty, starring Verdon.

Mordden may know more about American musical comedy than anyone else on earth. His past works include When Broadway Went to Hollywood, on how Broadway song-writers fared in early song films; Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre; Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s; Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s; Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s; and On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide, among others. And he doesn’t just know the musicals; he knows their contexts, their surroundings, item by item. In the case of Chicago, for example, he can list for you the city’s foremost crime neighborhoods (“Mother Conley’s Patch, Shinbone Alley, Little Cheyenne, the Black Hole, The Bad Lands, Satan’s Mile, Hell’s Half-Acre, and Dead Man’s Alley, among others”), the brothels that served them (Madame Leo’s, Monahan’s, French Em’s, Dago Frank’s, etc.), the items on the dinner menu of the fanciest whorehouse, the Everleigh Club (“from Supreme of Guinea-fowl to Spinach Cups with Creamed Peas and Parmesan Potato Cubes”), and so on.

Who cares? Mordden does, and you come to like him for it, a little. It gives his writing a pleasing relaxation. He loves these shows, they are his friends, and he joins in with them. “Roxie, close the door!” he yells at her at a certain point, while relating the events of DeMille’s movie. Someone is coming down the stairs. “Oh no,” he says, turning to us now. “Pallette’s body is in the way!” (Eugene Pallette is the actor who played the murder victim.) And in our minds, we try, with her, and him, to drag that big lummox out of the doorway. It’s like watching a child in front of a TV set trying to warn Bugs Bunny that Elmer Fudd is arriving with his shotgun.

Fosse’s Chicago was not a smash hit at the beginning. At the 1976 Tony Awards, it faced a formidable competitor, Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line, to which it lost in category after category. Then, in 1996, as part of City Center’s excellent revival series, Encores!, it returned. Soon it moved to the Richard Rodgers Theatre, and in the twenty-odd years since, it hasn’t closed. It is now the second-longest-running show on Broadway, after Phantom of the Opera.

Mordden thinks that Chicago was born before its time—that the world had to get nastier before audiences could endorse Fosse’s cynicism. In particular, he thinks that the O.J. Simpson trial, with its parade of incompetence, showmanship, and bad faith, may have sparked the huge success of the Chicago revival. (It opened the year after the Simpson verdict was rendered.) At last, he says, the public found out that what Fosse was telling them about the connection between show business and the American justice system was the truth.

And that is Mordden’s main point about Chicago, that it is “commentative,” by which he just seems to mean satirical. God knows there were satirical musicals before it, notably Pal Joey (which, as noted, Fosse acted in a number of times) and also The Pajama Game (1954) and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961)—he was the first choreographer for both—and that’s not to mention the grandfather of the genre, The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and its descendant, The Threepenny Opera (1928). But none of these was as ugly-hearted as Chicago.

Mordden says that the show was Fosse’s farewell to Verdon. By now they had established separate residences. This was the last time she would be his star, and even then he had to bring in a second star, another boyfriend-killer—Velma Kelly, played by Chita Rivera—because Verdon, champ though she was, was fifty, and couldn’t have managed it alone. But, says Mordden, Fosse was not happy with the show. While he felt he had to give Verdon something, he resented having to do so, and he wanted Chicago nastier than he made it. In his original choreography, there was an orgy in the courtroom at Roxie’s trial. (The producers demanded its removal. It was only Jerry Orbach, who played Roxie’s greaseball lawyer, who got Fosse to take it out. Fosse respected Orbach, and Orbach told him that Brecht wouldn’t have done it that way.)

Fosse asked his musical collaborators, Kander and Ebb, to provide a really lame final number for Roxie and Velma, to show that these girls, though they killed their men to get into vaudeville, weren’t very good vaudeville performers. And the number that Kander and Ebb provided to Fosse’s specifications turned out so lame that he had to ask them to rewrite it. Even so, the resulting song—“Nowadays,” which they are said to have produced in an hour—is ambiguous. Things are terrific nowadays, Roxie and Velma say. You can get away with whatever you want. (“You can even marry Harry, but mess around with Ike.”) But somehow, they seem to feel, they aren’t having as much fun.

One interesting feature of the Winkler and Mordden books is how little they go in for biography. There was plenty of dirt to be had. Fosse reported how, when he went off to perform alone after the breakup of the Riff Brothers, he often worked in strip clubs, and how the strippers liked to take him on their laps and stick their tongues in his ears, among other things, so as to send him out on stage with an erection. I have two feelings about that. Imagine this thirteen-year-old boy ejaculating in his pants (he said he did) as he achieved what he thought was his dream. That could go a long way toward explaining how obsessed he was—morbidly, tediously—with sex throughout his life. Second, consider how afraid he must have been. “I was very lonely, very scared,” he said later. “You know, hotel rooms in strange towns, and I was all alone, 13 or 14, too shy to talk to anyone.” What did his parents think when he disappeared for days on end, saying he had to be in a show? Did they never think of going to the show? Of course, those were the days when people had big families—Fosse was the fifth of six children—and it was hard to keep track of what everyone was doing. Still.

In the last fifteen years of his life, things got tough for Fosse, and the spark that had enlivened Cabaret and Chicago dimmed. After Chicago he never again worked with a writer or with a first-rate score, and he never again had Verdon, that warm presence, on his stage. He made a number of movies: Lenny (1974), supposedly about Lenny Bruce but really about Bob Fosse, and then All That Jazz (1979), flatly about Bob Fosse, played by Roy Scheider. He used his daughter, Nicole Fosse, as one of the dancers; he used Jessica Lange, a recent girlfriend, as an angel who comes to visit him before his death. The labels on the hero’s Dexedrine bottles bore an address a few doors down from his own house, on West 58th Street. His last movie was Star 80 (1983), about a Playboy centerfold who was murdered by her husband. Anyone who wants to know the specifics can look it up on the Internet. It is appalling.

Fosse had a bleak ending. He retreated to his house in Quogue, on Long Island. He turned down offers to direct movies, such as Flashdance, that he would have been good at, and for which he would have made a lot of money. But he already had a lot of money, from shows like Dancin’, a 1978 anthology musical with, for example, a duet, “The Dream Barre,” in which the man slid his face under the woman’s dress as she did her barre exercises. Bernard Jacobs, the president of the Shubert Organization, accurately called this the “cunnilingus number.” But the problem wasn’t the unsexy sex, or not mostly. It was that, the 1960s and 1970s having passed, people began to notice that Fosse didn’t really have many steps at his command—characteristically, he acknowledged this—or, in the end, many emotions. He remained very influential. In the 1980s, you could barely see a dance in a music video—let alone a TV commercial or a Cirque du Soleil number or a dancercise routine—that wasn’t filtered through his style. But an influence is not necessarily a good influence.

And by now, four decades after the 1980s, you may ask yourself what the difference is between this work and a Vegas floor show. Winkler is not afraid of the question. He flatly says that some of Fosse’s product is leering, tawdry, crude. At the end of All That Jazz, there is a number called “Bye Bye Life,” in which Joe Gideon’s death is played against the Everly Brothers’ sweetly anodyne “Bye Bye Love.” Winkler writes:

It is Fosse’s comment on both his fears of being second-rate and his cynicism about his ability to manipulate an audience. “I hesitate about a movement and think: ‘Oh no. They’ll never buy that. It’s too corny, too show-biz.’ And then I do it, and they love it.”

So he does it again, and he hates himself, and hates them.

In 1987, at the age of sixty, while walking down the street with Verdon—they were on their way to the opening of a revival of Sweet Charity—Fosse had a heart attack, his second. He died in the hospital emergency room. For his reputation’s sake, this was not a moment too soon.

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Obscene language presents problems, the linguist Michael Adams writes in his new book, In Praise of Profanity, “but no one seems to spend much time thinking about the good it does.” Actually, a lot of people in the last few decades have been considering its benefits, together with its history, its neuroanatomy, and above all its fantastically large and colorful word list. Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, an OED-style treatment of fuck that was first published in 1995, has gone into its third edition, ringing ever more changes—artfuck, bearfuck, fuck the deck, fuckbag, fuckwad, horsefuck, sportfuck, Dutch fuck, unfuck—on that venerable theme.

Meanwhile, Jonathon Green’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang, in three volumes (2010), lists 1,740 words for sexual intercourse, 1,351 for penis, 1,180 for vagina, 634 for anus or buttocks, and 540 for defecation and urination. In the last few months alone there have been two new books: What the F, by Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California at San Diego, together with Adams’s In Praise of Profanity. So somebody is interested in profanity.

Many writers point out that there hasn’t been enough research on the subject. As long as we haven’t cured cancer, it’s hard to get grants to study dirty words. Accordingly, there don’t seem to have been a lot of recent discoveries in this field. Very many of Bergen’s and Adams’s points, as they acknowledge, have been made in earlier books, an especially rich source being Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing (2013). Mohr even reads us the graffiti from the brothel in ancient Pompeii—disappointingly laconic (e.g., “I came here and fucked, then went home”), but good to know all the same.

Of course one wants to know the history of the words, and all the books provide it, insofar as they can. Fuck did not get its start as an acronym, as has sometimes been jocosely proposed (“For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” etc.). If it had, there wouldn’t be so many obvious cognates in neighboring languages. Sheidlower lists, among others, the German ficken (to copulate), the Norwegian regional fukka (ditto), and the Middle Dutch fokken (to thrust, to beget children), all of them apparently descendants of a Germanic root meaning “to move back and forth.” Sheidlower says fuck probably entered English in the fifteenth century, but Bergen, writing later, reports that the medievalist Paul Booth recently came across a legal document from 1310 identifying a man as Roger Fuckebythenavel. Booth conjectures that this might have been a metaphor for something like “dimwit.” On the other hand, it could have been a nickname inflicted on an inexperienced young man who actually tried to do it that way, and whose partner could not resist telling her girlfriends.

Something to note here is that the word appeared in a legal document. For a long time fuck was not considered especially vile. Cunt, too, was once an ordinary word. A fourteenth-century surgery textbook calmly states that “in women the neck of the bladder is short and is made fast to the cunt.” Until well after the Renaissance, the words that truly shocked people had to do not with sexual or excretory functions but with religion—words that took the Lord’s name in vain. As late as 1866, Baudelaire, who had been rendered aphasic by a stroke, was expelled from a hospital for compulsively repeating the phrase cré nom, short for sacré nom (holy name).

Many exclamations that now seem to us merely quaint were once “minced oaths.” Criminy, crikey, cripes, gee, jeez, bejesus, geez Louise, gee willikers, jiminy, and jeepers creepers are all to Christ and Jesus what frigging is to fucking. The shock-shift from religion to sexual and bathroom matters was of course due primarily to the decline of religion, but Mohr points out that once domestic arrangements were changed so as to give people some privacy for sex and elimination, references to these matters became violations of privacy, and hence shocking.

Though research has not done much for profanity, the opposite is not true. Neurologists have learned a great deal about the brain from studying how brain-damaged people use swearwords—notably, that they do use them, heavily, even when they have lost all other speech. What this suggests is that profanity is encoded in the brain separately from most other language. While neutral words are processed in the cerebral cortex, the late-developing region that separates us from other animals, profanity seems to originate in the more primitive limbic system, which lies embedded below the cortex and controls emotions. As a result, we care about swearwords differently. Hearing them, people may sweat (this can be measured by a polygraph), and, tellingly, bilingual people sweat more when the taboo word is in their first language.

The very sound of obscenities—forget their sense—seems to ring a bell in us, as is clear from the fact that many of them sound alike. In English, at least, one third of the so-called four-letter words are indeed made up of four letters, forming one syllable, and in nine out of ten cases, Bergen writes, the syllable is “closed”—that is, it ends in a consonant or two consonants. Why? Probably because consonants sound sharper, more absolute, than vowels. (Compare piss with pee, cunt with pussy.) It may be this tough-talk quality that accounts for certain widely recognized benefits of swearwords. For example, they help us endure pain. In one widely cited experiment, subjects were instructed to plunge a hand into ice-cold water and keep it there as long as they could. Half were told that they could utter a swearword while doing this, if they wanted to; the other half were told to say some harmless word, such as wood. The swearing subjects were able to keep their hands in the water significantly longer than the pure-mouthed group.

Related to this analgesic function is swearing’s well-known cathartic power. When you drop your grocery bag into a puddle or close the window on your finger, geez Louise is not going to help you much. Fuck is what you need, the more so, Adams says, because it doesn’t just express an emotion; it states a philosophical truth. By its very extremeness, it is saying that “one has found the end of language and can go no further. Profanity is no parochial gesture, then. It strikes a complaint against the human condition.” And in allowing us to do so verbally, it prevents more serious damage. “Take away swearwords,” writes Melissa Mohr, “and we are left with fists and guns.” The same is no doubt true of obscene gestures. According to Bergen, people have been giving each other the finger for over two thousand years, and that must certainly be due in part to its usefulness in forestalling stronger action.

But even when anger is not involved, obscenity seems to operate on the side of fellowship. The philosopher Noel Carroll told me once of an international conference in Hanoi in 2006. On the first day, to break the ice, the Vietnamese and the Western scholars, taking turns, had a joke-telling contest. The first two Vietnamese scholars told off-color jokes, but the Westerners, still fearful of committing some social error, stuck to clean jokes. A stiff courtesy reigned. Finally, the third Western contestant (Carroll, and he recounted this proudly) told a filthy joke about a rooster, and everyone relaxed. The conference went on to be a great success.

This barrier-crossing function, together with other forces—boredom, machismo, the analgesic effect—helps to account for the notorious frequency of fuck and, perhaps more frequently, of motherfucker in speech exchanged by people in the military and by men in work crews, jazz groups, and similar situations. Adams proposes that the reason dirty words foster human relations is that they depend on trust, our trust that the person we are talking to shares our values and therefore won’t dislike us for using a taboo word. “If a relationship passes the profanity test,” he writes, “the parties conclude a pact that whatever they say in their intimate relationship stays in their intimate relationship.” I would say, indeed, that they make a pact that they have an intimate relationship. (This is the place to add that many people find that “talking dirty” enhances sex.) But such considerations seem too tender to apply to the ubiquity of fuck and motherfucker among soldiers and workmen, to whose interchanges these words seem, rather, to apply a sort of hard, even glaze, a compound of irritation and stoicism, together with, yes, a sense of subjection to a common fate.

But situations vary. According to the largest surveys that Bergen could lay his hands on, the English, the Americans, and the New Zealanders all agree that of sexually related profanities, cunt is the dirtiest. Yet there is huge disagreement within these countries about how foul a word is. (About one third of New Zealanders thought cunt would be acceptable for use on television.) There is great variation in the investment that different societies have in religious profanity, and in some, the taboo on blasphemy has survived considerable secularization. In Quebec, Bergen says, tabarnack (tabernacle) and calisse (chalice) are far stronger obscenities than merde (shit) and foutre (fuck). Germany has a sort of specialty in scatological obscenities: Arschloch (asshole), Arschgesicht (ass face), Arschgeburt (born from an asshole), et cetera.

Japan, curiously, does not have swearwords in the usual sense. You can insult a Japanese person by telling him that he has made a mistake or done something foolish, but the Japanese language does not have any of those blunt-instrument epithets—no ass face, no fuckwad—that can take care of the job in a word or two. The Japanese baseball star Ichiro Suzuki told The Wall Street Journal that one of the things he liked best about playing ball in the United States was swearing, which he learned to do in English and Spanish. “Western languages,” he reported happily, “allow me to say things that I otherwise can’t.”

The West is moving toward further liberalization, a trend hastened by cable TV and the Internet. Melissa Mohr reports that in March 2011, three of the top-ten hit songs on the Billboard pop music chart had titles containing obscenities. Nevertheless, the Federal Communications Commission still imposes fines on broadcasters who use what it regards as profanity. Steven Pinker, in his The Stuff of Thought (2007), reprints the excellent “FCC Song,” by Eric Idle, of Monty Python:

Fuck you very much, the FCC.
Fuck you very much for fining me.
Five thousand bucks a fuck,
So I’m really out of luck.
That’s more than Heidi Fleiss was charging me.

But though the FCC levies fines, it has never published a list of the words that in its view merit this penalty, nor does the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America specify what material leads to what ratings. Bergen records that when Matt Stone and Trey Parker submitted their South Park feature to the MPAA board, it came back with an NC-17 rating, one level below R. (No one under the age of seventeen, even if accompanied by an adult, may be admitted to a film rated NC-17.) In the filmmakers’ view, this would have sunk the film financially. At the same time, they resented the meddling, so, while they changed passages that the board singled out as problematic, they took advantage of its failure to explain exactly what the problem was. Stone told the Los Angeles Times, “If there was something they said couldn’t stay in the movie, we’d make it 10 times worse and five times as long. And they’d come back and say, ‘OK, that’s better.’”

The act of writing a sober book, with charts and notes and bibliography, about dirty words is itself a species of comedy, and Bergen and Adams use this for all it’s worth. While actually doing a serious job—Bergen offers useful information, and Adams supplies subtle, nuanced reflections (he is the most philosophical of the writers I have read on obscenity)—they are also, unmistakably, having a good time, and trying to give us one. Bergen publishes scholarly graphics full of filthy gestures, and, on the stated assumption that we need to know how American Sign Language lines up with spoken English, he reproduces photos of an attractive woman signing “You bitch you” and worse.

Adams, in a long digression, pays tribute to a book on latrine-wall graffiti by the linguist Allen Walker Read. Ostensibly, he is trying to rescue Read’s findings from oblivion (the book was privately printed in Paris in 1935 and is now out of print), but the quotations, like Bergen’s dirty pictures in ASL, are suspiciously numerous and entertaining. In an auto camp in Truckee, California, Read found the following:

Shit here shit clear
Wipe your ass
And disappear
     Shakespear

Adams himself has made a long study of the walls of public bathrooms and adds his findings to Read’s. The traditional offerings, he says, are reflections on the meaning of life, contact information for people who would like to make friends, specifications of the length and girth of one’s penis (“My dick is so long it can turn corners”), teacher evaluations (“Mr. Radley is a cocksucker”), and art, of course, together with art criticism (“The man that drew this never saw a cunt”). The discussion goes on for twenty-five pages, all of them rewarding.

But while the subject of these books sends the writers off on enjoyable tangents, it also encourages some tediousness. Adams cannot avoid the temptation to set up straw men—for example, a book, The No Cussing Club: How I Fought Against Peer Pressure and How You Can Too!, brought out in 2009 by a fourteen-year-old boy, McKay Hatch. Hatch, disgusted by the amount of obscenity he heard in his school, founded this clean-speaking organization. According to publicity materials, the No Cussing Club now has 20,000 members. “I was just a regular kid,” Hatch writes. “Except, now, my dad, my teachers, even the mayor of my city and people from all different countries tell me that I’ve made a difference. Sometimes, they even say I changed the world.”

This kind of thing is fun to read about for a paragraph or two, but Adams gives us five. Also, the implication that objections to obscenity are gaining ground seems to be just plain wrong. As noted, many signs point to increasing linguistic permissiveness in our country, a good example being the public reaction to the release of Donald Trump’s 2005 “pussy tape.” Many people (me too), seeing the tape when it was released, four weeks before last year’s election, concluded that, after this, Trump could not possibly be elected. We have learned otherwise.

As for Benjamin Bergen, his problem is that he cannot get over his joy in being naughty. Often, very often, he reminded me of a little boy who runs into the kitchen, yells “Fuck, fuck, doody, doody” at his mother, bursts out laughing, and runs off, expecting her to come after him with a rolling pin or something. There’s not a dirty joke in the world that he doesn’t think is funny.

In 2014, Pope Francis, trying, in his weekly Vatican address, to say “in questo caso” (in this case), ended up saying “in questo cazzo” (in this fuck) instead. This was an understandable mistake—the two words are close—and the pope corrected himself immediately.

Nevertheless, Bergen, in a chapter entitled “The Day the Pope Dropped the C-Bomb,” goes on and on about the supposed implications. Uttering a profane word like cazzo places the pope “in an ideological double bind,” he writes. And what might that be? Well,

if the curse word was accidental, then he’s just as linguistically fallible as the next guy, which isn’t necessarily the ideal public image for the professed terrestrial representative of God. Conversely, he might still be infallible, yet have intended to say cazzo. Again, likely not the image he means to project.

But clearly the substitution was accidental. Bergen just can’t bear not to have a good snigger over the pope’s saying fuck. Sometimes he seems to have written this book for teenagers. He explains what a syllable is, and a pronoun. He calls us “dude.”

So great is Bergen’s passion to liberate dirty words from censorship that he includes racial slurs among them. He says he has a principle—he calls it his “Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle”—that almost all obscenities in English have to do with religion, sex, excretion, or ethnic difference, and he thinks that words in the fourth category deserve the same safe-conduct as those in the other three. He summons several old arguments, notably that people saying nigger are not using standard English but a different language, AAE, or African-American English (which seems to be the same as the “Ebonics” so argued over in the late 1990s), and that suppressing nigger means punishing the very people we are supposedly trying to protect, since users of AAE are primarily African-American.

But I think that lurking behind these arguments is another circumstance, the so-called “I’m offended” veto, which is causing students at our universities, and many other people, to demand that they be shielded from any information they might find disagreeable. Bergen hates righteousness, which, to him, I believe, would include all those who, when under the necessity of saying “nigger,” even to designate a word (e.g., “He said ‘nigger’”), not a thing (e.g., “He’s a nigger”), will substitute the phrase “the n-word”—a usage that seems designed not so much to avoid giving offense as to point to the speaker as a person who could never commit such a wrong. And like other recent commentators on this matter—Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their much-discussed essay “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic of September 2015 and Timothy Garton Ash in his recent book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World—he is worried that our brains will become enfeebled if we avoid disagreement and debate.

I applaud his sentiment. But he should not have tried to make this controversy parallel to quarrels over obscenity. Calling someone a fuck face is not nice, but it is meant to insult only one person. By contrast, a white person calling a black person nigger, the word the slave owners used, is insulting 13 percent of the population of the United States and reinvoking, in a perversely casual tone—as if everything were okay now—the worst crime our country ever committed, one whose consequences we are still living with, every day. (By the end of his discussion of slurs, Bergen seems to agree. I think his editor may have asked him to tone it down.)

As for fuck and its brothers, though, you can see Bergen’s point. Sometimes they are simply the mot juste, and even if you could come up with an inoffensive substitute, chances are it would be a lot less satisfying. Swearwords, as he says, are “good dirty fun.” Michael Adams, too, is fond of them and, more than that, feels that they emerge from a kind of shadowland in our minds and our lives—an intersection of anger and gaiety—that demands acknowledgment. Bergen is sometimes silly, and Adams sentimental, but both are on the right side.

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In the arts big changes are often wrought not by the person who introduced the new thing but, sadly, by a person who came after, and copied it, and, thanks to greater luck or talent, made of it something that a lot of other people, too, wanted to try, thus creating an entire style or tradition, rich and various and streaked with different tastes, different sensibilities. It is now widely known, but once wasn’t, that the interior monologue technique that so many twentieth-century novelists proudly believed was their inheritance from James Joyce’s Ulysses was not invented by Joyce. As he willingly acknowledged, he copied it from a modest novella—Édouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés, about a Parisian dandy in love with an actress—that was published in the Symbolist journal La Revue Indépendante in 1887, a half-century before Ulysses came out.

Likewise, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, a number of all-black musicals played on Broadway, but the one that created the fashion for all-black shows, and spawned hundreds of descendants, in Europe as well as the United States, and left its mark—notably, syncopated (off-the-beat) music, with all the joy it brings—on the entire enterprise of musical theater, white and black, up to this day, was an ill-favored, underfunded little show called Shuffle Along from 1921, the creation of the comedians F. (Flournoy) E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, the lyricist Noble Sissle, and the pianist-composer Eubie Blake. All four men were vaudevillians, creators of short acts for variety shows. None had ever done a musical before, but somehow they stumbled into this one. Soon, as they found themselves stranded in train stations (the producer failed to deliver the tickets), as they got booked into a house with no orchestra pit, as they were forced, week after week, to miss payroll, they learned to curse the day they became involved in it.

Meanwhile, slowly, almost behind their backs, their show became a hit. For a few people in the cast, it supplied a career-making breakthrough. Florence Mills, an ingenue with a pretty voice who came in at the last minute to replace someone who’d left, went on to become a big star. And it was on the strength of Shuffle Along that Josephine Baker, an unknown girl from St. Louis who liked to cross her eyes and make funny faces at the end of the chorus line, got a job in a show in Paris, La Revue Nègre, and went on to become Europe’s idea of the Black Venus. But the crucial point was that Shuffle Along ran for 484 performances, a near record for an all-black production. Within months, black shows were popping up on every corner. Brian Seibert, in What the Eye Hears, his recent history of tap, tells how, a year after Shuffle opened, the Ziegfeld Follies’ shimmy queen, Gilda Gray, was singing a song, “It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway,” in that popular review.¹

It is no surprise, then, that George C. Wolfe, famous as the director of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America but more famous for writing and directing some of the most important black shows of the past few decades—notably Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), about Jelly Roll Morton, and Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk (1995), about the history of African-Americans as told through popular entertainment—should want to revive Shuffle Along. But in a bold move, Wolfe decided that he wouldn’t try to reproduce what was there before. The original show had a silly little plot about a small-town mayoral election. Actually, I don’t know how silly it was. We see it in the new show for only a few minutes—a couple of top-hatted politicians shaking hands, a gaggle of chorus girls singing “I’m Just Wild About Harry” (Harry’s the candidate)—to establish that the 1921 Shuffle Along actually made it onto the boards. Otherwise Wolfe’s Shuffle Along takes place entirely on the periphery of the ur-Shuffle—in the dressing rooms, in the rehearsal halls, in the tryout houses, at the nearby nightclubs—and its subject is the travails of getting the show produced. Accordingly, the title of the musical that opened at the Music Box in April is not Shuffle Along, but Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.

With that change comes the show’s one big trouble: dispersal, atomization. However stupid the mayoral race story was, it no doubt had some unity. Harry decided to run, then ran, and then won or lost. Wolfe’s show, by contrast, is a bag of pieces. Of course, it has a master narrative—four people trying to mount a show—and an under-narrative: how, everywhere those men turned, in everything they did, they were given fifth-best, sixth-best, because they were African-American. But that’s basically all the show has to offer by way of cohesion. What happens again and again is that something onstage reminds one of the actors about something related to black musicals or black life or black something else, whereupon that person turns to the audience and fills in background.

We see Sissle (Joshua Henry) and Blake (Brandon Victor Dixon) at the piano. Do they deliver a number, or do something to advance the plot? No, or not yet. First they tell us about their families. Sissle came from a middle-class home, whereas Eubie got his professional start at age fifteen playing piano at Miss Aggie’s whorehouse. That’s interesting. Did Eubie’s humble beginnings have any effect on the way he wrote music? Don’t ask George C. Wolfe. By then, he’s gone on to something else, namely the introduction of the leading lady, Lottie Gee (Audra McDonald).

Now we get a little of what you’d expect in a show—a song, some jokes, a bit of plot—but not for long. Sissle needs to tell us about the band leader James Reese Europe, who doesn’t even appear in Shuffle Along, 1921 or 2016, but who seems to have introduced the creators of Shuffle to one another, and encouraged them to put on a jazz show. Sissle relates the story of James Europe’s death. Apparently, one of his drummers thought Europe was pushing him too hard, so one night, at intermission, this man ran backstage and stuck his pen knife into the conductor’s neck. You never saw so much blood! But never mind, because that part’s over now, and we’re in Penn Station, where the company is catching a train for an out-of-town tryout.

It all goes by so fast, and so this-way-and-that, that you can’t keep it straight. (The only reason I can tell you the James Reese Europe story is that I called the press representative and he kindly read to me from the script.) The scattershot narration also plays hell with the character development. A person who is a dear soul one minute is a mean bastard the next, because that’s what the differing stories about him at those junctures need him to be.

Most damagingly, the speed and get-everything-in nature of the storytelling can create serious confusion. At one point, Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles put on blackface to go into the 1921 show. Blackface on black people is a strange and upsetting sight even if you know the historical reasons for it. (The black actors were copying white actors who blacked up to put on minstrel shows, in which they appeared as black people. But as black people blacked up, this of course became a critique, or a “meta” action—in any case, something perverse and subtle and complicated.) Miller says a few words of explanation, but fast and casually. I’m sure that nobody who went into the Music Box Theater ignorant of black performers’ practice of corking up understood much about it upon exiting either. Everything’s catch as catch can. If you don’t get this bit, don’t worry, maybe you’ll get the next. It’s like vaudeville.

Except that the show is quite polemical. I have the sense that Americans are living, right now, in something like a second civil rights movement. Arguably, we needed one. In any case, Wolfe gives us plenty of historical material, most of which I’m sure is true. One actress in the show says of black theater, “Anything that makes us heartfelt and hopeful instead of beastly and buffoonish is forbidden.” She tells of a black man and woman who were tarred and feathered for holding hands on stage. (Love between black people was not to be represented physically. That was disgusting.) Likewise—for what sin I don’t know—Bert Williams and George Walker, a famous duo, had their clothes torn off as they came out a stage door.

Wolfe should be thanked for telling us these things. But how about “We’re not going to complain, we’re going to fight to make it right,” or “You feel the hope and the loss pushing you to give all you’ve got…. For one night out of so many where you dare not to, you believe”? This kind of stuff, of which there is a lot, out-Hallmarks the soupiest anthems of Rodgers and Hammerstein, out-pep-talks the corniest speech by Coach, and lays an icky little coating of goody-goodyism on people whose pride, in part, is to be cool. You may answer that there’s nothing wrong with hoping and believing and making things right. I say amen to that, but you can choose your words. This is art we’re talking about.

Loose as the show is, it has a secret center: Eubie Blake, the composer of the 1921 show, and Lottie Gee, its leading lady, fall in love. This plot point, invented, it seems, by Wolfe, drove the casting. That is, it made the role of Gee rich enough to tempt Audra McDonald, the most admired black woman in American musical comedy today. (She has won six Tony awards—a record in the performers’ category.) She accepted, and her voice is one of the show’s central pillars.² As for Brandon Victor Dixon, you can certainly see why Lottie Gee falls in love with his Eubie Blake. He’s handsome and witty and sweet. He plays the piano like a dream. I congratulate his mother. He is also a man of powerful feelings. When he looks at Lottie, he has to mop his face with a handkerchief. Everything he does is natural, and that goes for McDonald too. She can talk and sing and rub Dixon’s neck all at the same time and make this seem like the normal thing to do. At the end of their best number, “You’re Lucky to Me,” she sits on the piano and slaps her thighs with joy when she hits her high notes. You want to die of happiness.

There are some other fine performers, notably the young, pure-voiced Adrienne Warren as Florence Mills. There are also some performers who are not so fine, such as, depressingly, Brian Stokes Mitchell, a hero of the Broadway stage, so touching as the Man of La Mancha, so sexy and funny as Fred Graham (Petruchio) in Kiss Me, Kate, so boring here. Perhaps that is how Flournoy Miller’s role was written—that he moves stiffly and has an accent that hails from nowhere and can’t dance worth a nickel—but if so, Mitchell shouldn’t take any more roles like that.

To me the star of the show was not one of its performers, but its choreographer, Savion Glover. Glover has been working with George C. Wolfe since he was a teenager, when he played the young Jelly Roll Morton in Jelly’s Last Jam. He was also the star, and choreographer, of Bring in ’da Noise. His mentor Gregory Hines said of him that he was possibly the greatest tap dancer who ever lived, and even those who don’t like him (he can be a charmless performer) would have to agree that he is the most remarkable tap virtuoso alive today. He is a be-bop artist—a man of complicated, straying rhythms—and at the height of his inventiveness, his dancing can stun the mind. At his last New York concert—OM, a mostly solo show, an hour and a half long, at the Joyce Theater in 2014—some spectators actually walked out. I think they couldn’t take it; it hurt their brains. For these reasons, I was worried when I heard that Glover would choreograph the dances for Shuffle Along. Could a choreographer who was that sophisticated create dances such as the ones done by a chorus line in 1921? Could Paganini play “Goodnight, Irene”? Yes.

And the next award should go to the eight chorus dancers themselves. They were wonderfully capable—no surprise; imagine how many women auditioned for this job—and, at the same time, very relaxed, shaking their ruffled panties and having a great old time. They always seemed a little bit in disarray, their garters at different heights, the bows on their shoes a little askew. (The costumes were designed by Ann Roth.) As with Lottie Gee on the piano, smacking her thighs, you love them for this. It seems a token of truth and happiness.

Most of the rest of the cast were clearly chosen for their ability to sing, not dance, and this would have been okay if the score had been better. As with almost every new show on Broadway at the moment, it was only passable, and that was after Wolfe did substantial work on the 1921 song list. Some items had to go. (There was a song about how light-skinned African-American women were more desirable than dark-skinned ones.) Then a lot had to be imported from other shows, including, if I’m not mistaken, most of the really good songs in the show, such as “You’re Lucky to Me” and Lottie’s big ballad, “Memories of You.” (Both had music by Eubie Blake, though.) The only 1921 song familiar to 2016 ears, or mine, was “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and that’s not because of its tune or lyrics, which aren’t much beyond a cheerful bustle, but because Harry Truman used it as a campaign song in 1948 and thus stamped it on the national memory.

The ending of the show is curious, as if, at the last minute, Wolfe and his colleagues doubted the value of what they had done or of what the 1921 Shuffle had done. All the main characters drift back onto the stage and, as in Our Town, speak to us from beyond the grave, telling us what happened to them after Shuffle. The collaborators broke up. Miller and Lyles went off to make a show called Runnin’ Wild (1923). Sissle and Blake wrote the score for the 1924 Chocolate Dandies. Both shows were successful (Runnin’ Wild is said to have given birth to the Charleston), but not like Shuffle Along. Then all the principals went on to lesser fates. Lyles died young; Miller got involved in films, including negro westerns such as Harlem on the Prairie and The Bronze Buckaroo. Sissle became a bandleader. Lottie Gee returned to vaudeville. (“I went to Los Angeles,” she says, “and died. Then I died.”)

Eubie Blake is the only one whose star really shone again. In the midcentury, he was rediscovered by the tireless jazz producer John Hammond, and in 1969 he released the two-LP Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake. In 1978 there was a Broadway musical, Eubie!, that celebrated his work. He also made appearances on the Johnny Carson show and Saturday Night Live. (Imagine: a man whose parents were born slaves appeared on SNL.) He died at ninety-six, swearing he was a hundred. In the last moments of Shuffle, he and his colleagues speak of their lives with mixed sentiments: some pride, some irony, some elegiac feeling. They seem bewildered by what happened to them. No wonder. Good for Wolfe for trying to get some credit for them. Still, it should have been a better show.

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