Archives for March 2004

“‘We have done our best, and must leave it. No one can do more.’

“‘We have done nothing,’ said Maria.

“‘Well, that is usually people’s best,’ said her stepson. ‘Their worst is something quite different.'”

I. Compton-Burnett, Two Worlds and Their Ways

The last time I finished writing a book (as opposed to editing a collection, which feels much less eventful) was on September 4, 2001. I’d actually typed the final words of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken years earlier–I wrote the prologue and epilogue first–and I’d completed the next-to-last draft of the book in late August, but it was on the afternoon of September 4 that I finished editing the last draft and started printing out the manuscript. I didn’t open a bottle of champagne or go out to dinner: instead, I spent the evening alone and went to bed early. I’d been working under extreme pressure all summer, and now, at last, the heat was off. I delivered the manuscript to my agent the next day and caught a plane to Missouri to visit my mother the day after that.

I was expecting to feel a touch of post-partum depression sooner or later, as most writers do when they finish writing a long book. Then, five days later, my mother’s phone rang and a caller from the Upper West Side told me to turn on the TV. That was the last time I thought about Mencken, or my book, for the next few weeks.

All these memories came flooding back as I sat at my desk two nights ago and printed out the seven chapters of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. Unlike The Skeptic, a full-length biography which took me the better part of a decade to research, ponder, and write, All in the Dances is a short biography, about 40,000 words long, and I spent just three months writing it, not counting four or five false starts as I tried unsuccessfully to get the first chapter going. I was still thinking in terms of a full-length book, one that would start with a lengthy set piece describing the making of Serenade, the first ballet Balanchine choreographed after coming to America. That had been my plan more or less from the time I decided to write a book about Balanchine, but it didn’t work. Not until I replaced it with a shorter description of the night I saw my first Balanchine ballet (part of which is in this posting) did the logjam break, and after that the rest was easy. If I hadn’t had so many other pieces to write in February and March, I probably could have wrapped the whole thing up in a month.

As the subtitle says, All in the Dances is a “brief life,” a biography short enough to be read in one or two sittings. I like brief lives (even The Skeptic is a good deal shorter than most full-length biographies), and I’d thought a lot about the form before deciding to write one of my own. A couple of years ago I reviewed Paul Johnson’s brief life of Napoleon, a volume in the Penguin Lives series, and made the following observations:

The premise of these tasty little volumes is that it ought to be possible to sum up the life of a famous person in 200 pages or less. Seeing as how Johnson specializes in really, really long books, I wondered at first whether he was the best choice for the job, but within a few pages I knew that Napoleon is a near-perfect model of what a brief life can and should be: crisp, clear, concise and strongly personal.

In order to write a good short biography, you have to start with an unambiguous point of view….

All in the Dances has one: I believe that George Balanchine, in addition to being the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century, was also a key figure in the modern movement in art, directly comparable in significance to Henri Matisse or Igor Stravinsky, even though he isn’t widely recognized as such outside the world of dance. This premise flavors the whole of my book in a way that would be inappropriately reductive in, say, an 800-page biography. It also makes possible a kind of overarching unity that isn’t easy to create in a longer book. When you’re writing 40,000 words about a man who lived to the age of seventy-nine, you have to be selective, and thus interpretative.

It didn’t surprise me that I had to leave so many things out. What surprised me was how much I was able to put in, and how many of the techniques I used in writing The Skeptic were equally useful in writing All in the Dances. Both books are built around scenes and portraits, though most of the “scenes” in All in the Dances deal not with events in Balanchine’s life but with the premieres of the Balanchine ballets I singled out for description and criticism. Conversely, I used the portraits–of Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Tanaquil Le Clercq, and Suzanne Farrell, the six most important people in Balanchine’s life–to keep the narrative moving forward.

If you’ve read The Skeptic, you’ll recall that it’s structured in a similar way, but that didn’t hit me until I looked over the last draft of All in the Dances. Up to that moment, I’d felt as if I were writing a brief life in the style of a full-length biography. Now I’m more inclined to see The Skeptic as a brief life writ large–an interpretative portrait of Mencken, not a first-he-did-this-then-he-did-that chronicle. The big difference is that it’s a lot easier to control the material when you’re writing a brief life: you can hold the whole book in your head at once and give it a consistency of tone that’s much more difficult to impose on a longer biography. I line-edited the entire manuscript of All in the Dances in a continuous ten-hour session, stopping only to eat two quick meals. You definitely can’t do that with a hundred-thousand-word book, though I did my very best to give The Skeptic a similar feeling of unity and sweep.

Another thing that surprised me was that there was room for a certain amount of poetry within the compass of a 40,000-word book. Even though I wrote All in the Dances out of sequence, I saved Balanchine’s death for last, just as I had Mencken’s, and it wasn’t until I actually started writing the death scene that I figured out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. This is what I wrote, late Sunday afternoon:

His memory had been fading for weeks, and now he was losing the power of speech as well. “I would just sit on the bed,” wrote Farrell, “holding his hand while he slept, but as soon as I rose to go, his hand would grip mine more tightly.” Karin von Aroldingen saw him most often, but most of the many women he had loved made the pilgrimage to his bedside. Tamara Geva was the last. “One day I found him clutching a small icon in the palm of his hand,” she said. “He brought it to my face and repeated several times,

For the longest time now I’ve been meaning to add the incomparable Coudal Partners website to our blogroll, and tonight I’ve finally done so. The site came to my attention back in February, when Nathalie did a stint as a guest editor there, and it has increasingly become my failsafe destination when I simply must find strong distraction from whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing–for those desperate times when hockey box scores just won’t cut it. Coudal’s Fresh Signals (right-hand column) haven’t failed me yet. I read stuff on the web all day, but here you can always find something to look at. Among the freshest at the moment, I particularly recommend 10 worst album covers of all time and the sequel, More album covers. Last one, I swear, as well as The world’s flags given letter grades.

Ah hell, now that I’ve linked to a flag report card I may as well throw in the too-cute Kitty Cat Dance movie I’ve been sending to everyone I know lately. The title says it all, so you can steer clear if kitty cat dances aren’t your cup of tea, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m afraid they’re mine. Thanks to Steve for this one.

“For two centuries, Siberia had had a reputation for being the freest place in the Empire, this open-air nuthouse where being a third-generation prisoner made you aristocracy. You could see the difference, the (comparative) fearlessness in people’s bearing: Gwen had met the descendant of a Decembrist who was married to the great-great-granddaughter of Poles deported here after the 1848 uprising, and it seemed to her that no beltway politician, no Boston Brahmin could ever match the arrogance of this couple whose families had been on the wrong side of power for a hundred and fifty years. What can you do to us, the joke ran, we’re already in Siberia.”

Fernanda Eberstadt, The Furies

(Yes, this does mean I finally finished Shirley Hazzard! The Transit of Venus will be the subject of one more gushy post. Any day now.)

“It is the line of least resistance, and there is no denying that in daily life it has its advantages. But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music, especially in the performance of old and familiar works. In fact, routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoarfrost on the performance of the most beautiful and best-known works.”

Wilhelm Furtw

I spent ten hours editing the Balanchine book today, then printed it out. I’m all done. I’ll be delivering it to Harcourt on Wednesday. I’ve never been so tired, and I still have those four pieces left to write (two of them tomorrow), but I’m done.

Thanks again for your forbearance, which I hope will last a little while longer while I finish cleaning my plate. Then I’ll start blogging again, and reading other blogs, too, something I’ve missed terribly in the past couple of weeks.

I look forward to serving you again!

Stunned by overwork, I made the mistake of peeking into my mailbox, where I found a hundred or so accumulated pieces of e-mail. Most of it was spam, of course, but I learned from quite a few of you that amazon.com just started shipping A Terry Teachout Reader, well in advance of the official publication date.

How about that? I’m published!

If you ordered the Teachout Reader in advance, your copy has either just arrived or is on its way to you. If you haven’t ordered it yet, go here and do so.

In addition, I got quite a bit of nice mail on various subjects (all of it answered–thanks very much).

I also got a rare piece of hate mail, which tickled me enough to pass on:

The main things that are unpleasant about your WSJ column are that you are relentlessly determined to show us how smart you are (not an elegant trait) and your poor white trash name (definitely not elegant).

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “Ah, me public!”

And now…back to overwork. See you tomorrow.

“‘Would you like a sandwich?’ she asked, offering a dejected-looking plate.”

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence