I started reviewing books for magazines nearly twenty-three years ago (and no, it doesn’t seem like only yesterday). The third or fourth book about which I wrote was Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, a memoir by Toni Bentley, who was at the time a twenty-two-year-old dancer with New York City Ballet. I can’t recall how I heard about her book or why I took an interest in it, since I’d as yet seen only two or three ballets, none of them by George Balanchine. Whatever the reason, I was struck by Bentley’s poetic chronicle of a dancer’s life, and wrote a review in which I called Winter Season “quite possibly the most revealing book about the world of ballet ever to see print.” This is an embarrassingly choice example of a baby critic talking through his hat–I doubt I’d read any other books about the world of ballet in 1982.
Be that as it may, my review found its way into print. I shelved Winter Season and eventually forgot about it, but Bentley’s evocative little memoir obviously made a deeper impression on me than I knew, for a decade later I finally got around to seeing my first Balanchine ballet, and within a couple of years I had somehow metamorphosed into a full-fledged dance critic. Now I’m about to publish a book of my own about Balanchine’s life and work. Would any of that have happened had I not stumbled across Winter Season in 1982? Maybe–but maybe not.
As for Toni Bentley, she fell victim to a hip injury and stopped dancing a few years after publishing Winter Season. She turned herself into a full-time writer, collaborating with Suzanne Farrell on her autobiography
and writing several striking books of her own. I learned a few years ago that we shared an agent, but by then Bentley had moved to Los Angeles, and our paths never crossed. Last year, though, the University Press of Florida brought out a new edition of Winter Season, and a sentence from my 1982 review was printed on the back cover. I smiled to see it, remembering what a powerful effect the book had had on me all those years ago, and what an unexpected effect it ended up having on the rest of my life. Not only that, but I realized upon rereading it that the uninformed praise of a baby critic had by some unearned act of grace been right on the money: Winter Season is one of the most revealing books about the world of ballet ever to see print.
Four months ago, as I was gearing up to write All in the Dances, I looked in my e-mailbox one evening and found a note from a reader of “About Last Night” that was signed “Toni Bentley.” Astonished, I wrote back at once, asking if she were the Toni Bentley. Sure enough, she was, so I told her to look on the back cover of the paperback of Winter Season, which in turn astonished her. Charmed by this chain of coincidence, we resolved to have lunch the next time she found herself in Manhattan, which was yesterday. Toni appeared on my doorstep, I gave her the fifty-cent tour of the Teachout Museum, and we proceeded from there to Good Enough to Eat, where we conversed for an hour and a half, marveling every few minutes at yet another unlikely-sounding thing we had in common. She’s as good a talker as she is a writer, and we vowed to do it again soon.
This story has no moral, save that my chance meeting with Toni was made possible by the existence of this blog. To be sure, it was possible, if difficult, for readers and writers to get in touch prior to the invention of blogs, and sometimes correspondences and even an occasional friendship blossomed as a result–but not often. “About Last Night,” by contrast, has made it easy for anyone who reads my stuff, on or off line, to send me a note that I’ll see within hours of its dispatch. Even if you know nothing about the blogosphere, all you have to do to find the e-mailbox of “About Last Night” is google my name. It’s amazing how many people have done just that in the past ten months, including a number of performers about whom I’ve written, a couple of long-lost friends I hadn’t seen since high school–and Toni Bentley.
So this is a Tale of the Blogosphere, as well as a Tale of Middle Age. Once you’ve lived long enough, certain arcs in your life loop the loop and start heading your way again. The urge to reconnect with the past, to answer unanswered questions, becomes all but irresistible, which is why people write memoirs, call up old girlfriends (and occasonally write novels
about it), and go to class reunions (I’ve been to one so far). I can think of at least a dozen friends from my increasingly distant past about whom I’m curious, and in a few cases I’ve been able to satisfy that curiosity by surfing the Web, though most of them, alas, have slipped between the cracks. This is another aspect of middle age that goes unmentioned in the instruction manual: you learn that some stories have unhappy endings, while others simply trail off into silence. Even so, the Web does facilitate the closing of certain circles, some as small as a fleeting desire to know the name of an actor seen and noticed in a bit part, others as large as a lifelong quest for a missing piece of your identity.
Nor is it always a one-way process. Sometimes you find in your e-mailbox a note from a person you’ve never met, and all at once you remember what it felt like to open an unread book and fall headlong into a strange new world. That’s what happened to me in 1982, and I’m glad I got a chance to tell Toni Bentley about it face to face. I hope I get to repay a few more debts like that while I still can.