A biographers’ pas de deux

The birth of George Balanchine (1904-83), one of the most famous choreographers in history, has been the subject of international celebrations this year, and for good reason. Over much of the past century, his work was all over the place: in the repertories of ballet companies, in operas, in movies, in Broadway shows, on television. (Some of his ballets even survive today, reasonably intact.) His views on how ballet should be taught have helped change the way dancers look and move. His musicianship, unmatched in his lifetime by any other choreographer, remains unsurpassed. As the head of the New York City Ballet, the company he co-founded with Lincoln Kirstein in 1948, Balanchine was also one of the most admired ballet administrators of his era.

It is natural that the audience would want to know something about the life of such a complex and multitalented figure, and much has been published on the subject, including Balanchine’s own views, recorded when he was middle-aged in Bernard Taper’s classic “Balanchine: A Biography” -- still in print in paperback, thankfully. Dance books generally don’t sell, of course, and many of the most useful books about him and his ballets that were published in his lifetime, including Nancy Reynolds’ irreplaceable “Repertory in Review: 40 Years of the New York City Ballet” and nearly all the first-person accounts by his contemporaries, have disappeared from stores. To help fill the gaps in this centenary year, we have been given two short biographies that are, in essence, memoirs by members of his audience.

The more passionate and personally well informed is “George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker” by Robert Gottlieb, dance critic for the New York Observer and formerly editor of the New Yorker and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. For the last dozen years of Balanchine’s life, Gottlieb also served as a volunteer programmer and public relations consultant for the company. In a prefatory note, he writes: “For people like me the New York City Ballet, as Arlene Croce once put it, has been ‘our civilization,’ ” a tone of gratitude and respect he carries throughout the book. Its focus is Balanchine’s humanity, of which the ballets are seen as idealized extensions.

Gottlieb discusses Balanchine’s capacity for unkindness and mean-spiritedness -- his pattern of falling in love with ballerinas seriatim as his creative life changes course; his inability to tell male dancers directly, even colleagues of long standing, that they have grown too old for the stage; his inability to display, or perhaps to feel, empathy. Gottlieb doesn’t let Balanchine -- or, for that matter, almost anyone else -- get away with lying, as when he puts paid to Balanchine’s old charge that Lucia Chase never invited him to participate in Ballet Theatre when it was getting off the ground. (“The offer is well documented,” Gottlieb writes.) An exception is the ballerina Alexandra Danilova, who is permitted her unchallenged declaration that Balanchine gave her a choice of principal roles in the 1946 production of “Night Shadow” by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, an assertion her longtime partner Frederic Franklin has heartily disputed in his oral history of the company.

Gottlieb recognizes the misery that Balanchine’s self-absorption could provoke in other people but shows that he could be generous, even noble, especially in moments of adversity: Examples are the choreographer’s devotion to Tanaquil Le Clercq, his wife and muse for a time, when she became paralyzed by polio at 27 in 1956, and his kindness to Kirstein during the latter’s periodic breakdowns. Gottlieb also articulates with powerful simplicity the calamities that punctuated the choreographer’s life (abandonment by his family in childhood; the horrors of the Russian civil war and revolution; the loss of a lung to tuberculosis before 30; crushing professional and critical disappointments; Le Clercq’s illness). Included is a Balanchine essay on ballet that gives the reader a rare sense of the choreographer’s voice (Mr. B, as he was known, was often heavily edited or completely rewritten for publication), as well as an essay on major reference books about the choreographer and a critic’s canon of 92 ballets, movies and Broadway shows -- of the 400 or so he made.

As what might be called a pro bono executive at the New York City Ballet, Gottlieb was in an excellent position to study Balanchine as the head of a leading cultural institution. His anecdotes and personal observations about this are, to my knowledge, unparalleled by previous dance historians and memoirists. With the help of quotations from key unpublished memoirs by former dancers Ruthanna Boris, Barbara Milberg and John Clifford, Gottlieb also patiently -- and without judgment -- discusses the psyche of the choreographer in action, the passivity that was central to Balanchine’s personality and his lack of close male friends. He suggests that Balanchine’s attitudes toward the women he pursued were related to a need for emotional isolation. (“Until almost the end of his life, he avoided anything like a family situation: Women, yes; real wives, no; children, never.”) The late critic Robert Garis, in his 1995 book “Following Balanchine,” presented controversial speculations about the choreographer’s Oedipal motivations for such artistic decisions as, in the late 1970s, choosing to truncate his own landmark choreography and the revered Igor Stravinsky score of “Apollo.” Gottlieb’s approach differs in that he speculates only on Balanchine’s offstage actions; he does not try to penetrate the mystery of the art. This book sounds much like the way he spoke about Balanchine in the halls of the New Yorker, where I was a contributor during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Its integrity is unquestionable.

The second biography is “All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine” by the H.L. Mencken biographer and blogger Terry Teachout, a colleague whom I met at the theater in the mid-1980s, a few years after he began to attend ballet as a reporter for the New Dance Review. Teachout, who now writes for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, is a reasonably experienced dancegoer with a strong background in music and lots of opinions, which he tends to present as fact. Teachout never met the choreographer and had no firsthand experience of his ballets before the end of Balanchine’s life -- and so is free to render judgments that are detached, breezily casual and, sometimes, even a little scornful. He rejiggers chronology to suit his arguments, as when he uses an undated observation by dancer and choreographer Richard Tanner, who didn’t join the City Ballet until 1971, as evidence of Balanchine’s tyranny over dancers in the early 1960s. He recounts many unflattering things that dancers have published about the choreographer as well as unflattering things that Balanchine is reported to have said about others and holds up his actions of a half-century ago to the politically correct light of our time as examples of character flaws.

For someone like me, who began attending City Ballet performances in 1962 and once interviewed Balanchine, Teachout’s slyly edited quotation from dancer William Weslow (specifically about the coldblooded stage character of the Siren in “Prodigal Son”) to bolster Teachout’s generalization that “Balanchine’s gynocentric vision of ballet was more than merely pathological” is enough to discredit the book. This reductive picture of a genius is more than inadequate and flattening: It is grotesque.

However, I am not the intended reader for “All in the Dances.” Teachout explains that his purpose in writing is not to give a disinterested chronicle of Balanchine’s life, but rather to provide a guide for “a reader who has just seen his first ballet by Balanchine, or is about to do so, and wants to know something about Balanchine’s life and work and how they fit into the larger story of art” in the 20th century. Before these virgin audiences can judge theater (and theatrical history) for themselves, Teachout tells them what to think and value. But his advice is frequently misleading or inaccurate. He writes that Les Ballets 1933, the short-lived company that launched the fondly recalled original “Mozartiana,” is “remembered only for the premiere of ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ ”; that Philip Johnson’s New York State Theater, where City Ballet performs, “is squat on the outside and strange on the inside,” with public areas (whose commissioned art includes the luminous painting “Numbers” by Jasper Johns and startling, gigantic versions in Carrara marble of two works by Elie Nadelman) “full of undistinguished modern sculptures”; that by and large 19th-century ballet “is remembered more for its music than for its steps, just as we know more about the Ballet Russe’s costumes than its choreography”; that the three parts of “Jewels” are “in fact unrelated.” Some of what he writes is plain wrong, as when he says that Diana Adams was “infinitely elastic” or that there is “goose-stepping” in “The Four Temperaments.”

The very notion that one would require a guide to Balanchine’s ballets before seeing them goes deeply against the grain of why they were made and also of their effect even on today’s audiences, when they are exactingly performed. After all, we are speaking about a choreographer who believed that ballet “is important and significant -- yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.” Yet Teachout is concerned not with the pleasurable aspect of looking and listening but with laying down the right interpretation, with “meaning” as he alone defines it. In that respect, his book is very much of our time -- more up to the minute, perhaps (or maybe the word is “alas”), than are Balanchine’s ballets. *