“Apart from emulative envy, the only aspect of envy that does not seem to me pejorative is a form of envy I have myself felt, as I suspect have others who are reading this book: the envy that I think of as faith envy. This is the envy one feels for those who have the true and deep and intelligent religious faith that sees them through the darkest of crises, death among them. If one is oneself without faith and wishes to feel this emotion, I cannot recommend a better place to find it than in the letters of Flannery O’Connor. There one will discover a woman still in her thirties, who, after coming into her radiant talent, knows she is going to die well before her time and, owing to her Catholicism, faces her end without voicing complaint or fear. I not long ago heard, in Vienna, what seemed to me a perfect rendering of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and was hugely moved by it, but how much more would I have been moved, I could not help wonder, if I were in a state of full religious belief, since the Ninth Symphony seems to me in many ways a religious work. Faith envy is envy, alas, about which one can do nothing but quietly harbor it.”

Joseph Epstein, Envy

Frenzied telephone calls all morning (I’m booking myself into this weekend’s New York International Fringe Festival even as we speak), an interview in Brooklyn this afternoon (I’m the -er, not the -ee), Mark Morris at Lincoln Center tonight…you get the picture. Expect no further postings until Friday.

Till then.

“Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.”

Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line

My assistant’s hard drive crashed yesterday, thus throwing our smoothly running operation into a tizzy. This being a writing-for-money day, I may not be getting back to you again until tomorrow. Then again, maybe I will. We’ll see.

Later.

P.S. Our Girl in Chicago is on vacation. She promised to tell you so, but I think she left in too much of a hurry to bid you farewell. Think lovely thoughts and she might try to post from her insecure, undisclosed location. Or maybe not.

I just signed off on the photo insert for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which contains 14 “images,” as we say in the book biz. Together with the frontispiece and two photos reproduced on the dust jacket, that comes to a total of 17 images with which I tried to sum up Balanchine’s life and work as completely as I could.

I think every biography of an artist should contain as many well-chosen photos as the budget will permit–especially a biography of a visual artist like Balanchine. The trick, of course, is to integrate them with the text. Ideally, you want to second-guess the reader and include images of everything and everyone mentioned in the book about which (or whom) he might be curious.

To that elusive end, I looked for:

– A photo of each individual discussed at length in the book.

– A photo of each Balanchine ballet described in detail in the book.

– A mixture of small-group and large-ensemble photos.

– A mixture of performance photos, rehearsal photos, and posed images taken in the photographer’s studio.

– Portraits of Balanchine taken at different times in his life.

– At least one photo illustrative of his interest in music.

Since the insert could be no more than eight pages long, I talked Harcourt into including a frontispiece (that is, a photo opposite the title page) and putting photos on the front and back of the dust jacket. Then I drew up a wish list and sent Meital Waibsnaider, my trusty research assistant, down to the New York City Ballet Archives at Lincoln Center to do my dirty work for me. She returned with a pile of pictures carefully chosen to my specifications, from which we selected most (but not all!) of the 17 photos reproduced in All in the Dances.

Between them, these 17 photos illustrate:

– Thirteen major Balanchine ballets, Apollo, Prodigal Son, Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Symphony in C, Orpheus, The Four Temperaments, La Valse, Agon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Liebeslieder Walzer, Don Quixote, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto, 11 of which receive more than passing mention in the text.

– Five of the many ballerinas with whom Balanchine is known to have been in love: Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams, and Suzanne Farrell.

– Twelve other dancers with whom he worked closely: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jacques d’Amboise, Jillana, Serge Lifar, Nicholas Magallanes, Peter Martins, Kay Mazzo, Arthur Mitchell, Francisco Moncion, Violette Verdy, Edward Villella, and Patricia Wilde.

– Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, and Igor Stravinsky, his three most important offstage colleagues.

– A 1938 photo by Walker Evans that shows Balanchine seated at a piano, playing from a score.

Looking at the results now, I regret that I failed to include Tamara Geva, Serge Diaghilev, Allegra Kent, and Patricia McBride, all of whom are mentioned prominently in the text. I also wish I’d found room for an illustration of Balanchine’s work in Hollywood and on Broadway–perhaps a rehearsal shot from The Goldwyn Follies, which starred Vera Zorina, his third wife. And one major ballet discussed in All in the Dances, The Nutcracker, slipped through my net.

For the most part, though, I’m delighted with the finished product. Not only did we contrive to cram a huge amount of information about George Balanchine into just 17 images, but nearly all of them are aesthetically pleasing in their own right. (The photographers include Costas, Walker Evans, Fred Fehl, Paul Kolnik, George Platt Lynes, and Martha Swope.)

See how complicated it is to put together a good photo insert? It’s not just a matter of sitting down one afternoon and flipping through a couple of bulging scrapbooks. Meital and I have been working on this one for more than two months, and we (well, she) had a hell of a time tracking down certain photos and obtaining permission to reprint them. Still, it was worth the trouble. Should you happen to read All in the Dances, the chances are good that you’ll be able to see much of what I’m talking about–at least to the limited extent that any still picture can rightly be said to “illustrate” a ballet, or capture the ephemeral essence of a stage performer’s personality.

If I sound proud, that’s because I am. From the beginning, I wanted the images in All in the Dances to complement the text as fully and sensitively as possible. I think they do. I hope you think so, too.

UPDATE: I just got an e-mail from Harcourt’s managing editor in San Diego, informing me that he’s been unable to obtain high-resolution scans of two photos. The next-to-last minute having arrived, he wants me to FedEx him my personal copies of the books in which these two photos were first published. Fortunately, I happen to own both volumes, so it’s off to the nearest FedEx office.

That’s how books get published in the information age!

A friend writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting about my Balanchine book:

Congratulations on the completion of the book on Mr. B. And when can we expect the Armstrong opus?

I suppose you could say that the seeds of my next book, a full-length biography of Louis Armstrong, were planted three years ago, when I was writing an essay for the New York Times about Armstrong’s centenary in which I called him “jazz’s most eminent Victorian.” (The Teachout Reader contains a longer version of this piece.) Struck by the way in which Armstrong’s autobiographical writings point up the intensity of his work ethic, I’d thought it might be worth paying a visit to his home in Queens, which at that time was not yet open to the public. So I arranged for Michael Cogswell, who runs the Louis Armstrong Archives, where Armstrong’s papers and personal effects are preserved, to give me a private tour of the Armstrong house (it’s good to write for the Times, even as a freelancer). That tour inspired these words:

In a review of Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words and The Louis Armstrong Companion, Brian Harker, an assistant professor of music at Brigham Young University, remarked that Armstrong was “a product of turn-of-the-century African American ideology, especially that of Booker T. Washington. Like Washington, Armstrong was an accommodationist, determined to play–and win–by the rules of the white majority.” This is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that most jazz musicians, black and white alike, come from middle-class backgrounds, while most of those who are born poor strive mightily–and, more often than not, successfully–to join the ranks of the middle class.

Anyone who doubts that Armstrong filled the latter bill need only visit his home, located some seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part of Queens. It is a modest three-story frame house whose elaborate interior is uncannily reminiscent of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s gaudy Memphis mansion. From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets of the master bathroom, the Armstrong house looks exactly like what it is: the residence of a poor southern boy who grew up and made good.

Unlike Graceland, though, it is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As one stands in Armstrong’s smallish study (whose decorations include, among other things, a portrait of the trumpeter painted by Tony Bennett), it is impossible not to be touched to the heart by the aspiration that is visible wherever you look. This, you sense, was the home of a working man, one bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but from what he did. The American dream has had no more loyal exemplar. “I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don’t have I don’t need,” he wrote. “My home with Lucille [his fourth wife] is good, but you don’t see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain’t gonna play your horn for you. When the guys come from taking a walk around the estate they ain’t got no breath to blow that horn.”

As he drove me from the house to Queens College, where the Armstrong Archives are located, Cogswell asked casually if I’d thought of writing an Armstrong biography. I told him that I’d only just put a Mencken biography to bed after ten years of struggle, and that the thought of doing the whole thing all over again was too horrific to contemplate. I suppose I must have meant what I said, but it’s no less true that I’d been stirred–perhaps more deeply than I knew–by my first sight of the Armstrong house, which brought tears to my eyes. The wheels were already starting to turn.

A year later, I gave an interview to Publishers Weekly on the occasion of the publication of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. It contained the following paragraph:

Teachout isn’t sure which of several book ideas might come to fruition. “I don’t contemplate writing another biography, though I’m really glad I did this one. I’m a scholar manqué, like a lot of journalists, and to do a fully annotated book based on primary source material was my chance to be a full professor without having to put up with all the nonsense. I’m not sure I need to do it again.”

Truth to tell, I was sure I didn’t. Or so I thought. But a couple of months later, as I lay in bed in a hotel room not far from Washington’s Union Station, mulling over a lecture about Mencken that I’d just delivered, an idea hit me from out of nowhere like an arrow in the middle of my forehead: I should write a biography of Louis. It really did come to me just like that—and the more I thought about it, the better it sounded. Like Mencken, Armstrong was a quintessentially American figure. Like Mencken, none of Armstrong’s previous biographers had managed to get him on paper in all his fascinating complexity. Like Mencken, he was a packrat who saved everything, and most of what he saved, like his home in Queens, has been preserved and impeccably organized for the use of researchers. And having written my first biography, I’d learned enough along the way to have an easier time with the next one—right?

By the time I got back from Washington, I’d talked myself into writing another biography. Shortly thereafter, to my amazement, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, my agents, talked me into writing two—and it didn’t take much talking, either. Glen and Lynn wanted me to build on the success of The Skeptic by bringing out a fairly short book as soon as possible. I mentioned that I was interested in writing a brief life, and when Lynn suggested over a celebratory dinner that George Balanchine might be a good subject, I agreed on the spot. It had never before occurred to me to write a book about Balanchine, but no sooner were the words out of Lynn’s mouth than I fell in love with her idea: first Mr. B, then Satchmo.

That dinner was a year and a half ago. Last Friday, with All in the Dances ready for the printer, I rented a car and headed for Queens, accompanied by Stephanie Steward, my research assistant. We’d been planning for weeks to spend a day visiting the Armstrong house and archive’an orientation tour for Steph, so to speak. The house was opened to the public as a museum last October, but as I turned the corner onto what is now Louis Armstrong Place for the first time in three years, I saw that nothing much had changed but the street sign. The block was still shabby but respectable, a textbook example of a working-class neighborhood, and except for the garage, which has been turned into a reception center and museum shop, the house looks the way it did in 2001: the same gaudy wallpaper, the same gold faucets, the same touchingly elaborate furnishings, right down to Tony Bennett’s oil painting of Armstrong. Steph’s eyes were as big as hubcaps. As for me, I felt like laughing and crying at the same time.

When the tour was over, I said to Steph, “I know how I want to start the book.”

“Really? How?”

“Just like this. Coming to Louis’ house and taking a tour.”

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Awesome,” she said.

We’ll see whether my idea holds up over three or four years’ worth of research and writing. But even if I should change my mind later on, it won’t matter. The important part is that I’m off and running. As of last Friday, I’m officially at work on my next book.

“America is a country of children. The New Yorkers are a little more grown up, but not much. Once some friend of mine put me on a ferry to Coney Island. This, Tsutsik, I wish you could see. It is a city in which everything is for play–shooting at tin ducklings, visiting a museum where they show a girl with two heads, letting an astrologer plot your horoscope and a medium call up the soul of your grandfather in the beyond. No place lacks vulgarity, but the vulgarity of Coney Island is of a special kind, friendly, with a tolerance that says,

I just sent an e-mail to Harcourt containing my final changes and corrections to the second-pass proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. “I am now signed off on the text of All in the Dances,” I wrote, taking a deep breath as I typed those words and another as I clicked the send button. Barring any unexpected glitches (or last-minute catches) at Harcourt’s end, the book that goes to the printer this week will be the book whose text I have approved. I’m all done.

I’ve been feeling rather strange about All in the Dances in recent weeks, and especially since I started working on the galleys last month. I spent a full decade at work on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and by the end of that time, it had become an oppressive, inescapable presence in my life, not unlike the “heavy bear who goes with me” of Delmore Schwartz’s once-familiar poem. I wanted nothing more than to be rid of it. All in the Dances, by contrast, took me just three months to write, and throughout that period I was simultaneously preoccupied with the imminent publication of A Terry Teachout Reader. Before I knew it, one book was written, another in the stores, and within weeks I’d embarked on the lengthy process of seeing the first one into print. As a result, the experience of writing All in the Dances now seems unreal, almost dreamlike to me. Did I really write it this past winter? Could it possibly be ready to ship off to the printer?

The second-pass proofs arrived via Federal Express last Friday, and I spent yesterday and this morning combing through them line by line, hoping against hope that my eye had not yet grown so numb as to cause me to overlook any remaining mistakes. In the end, the list of changes I e-mailed to San Diego was reassuringly short, but not so short as to make me distrust my good judgment. I fixed two outright errors, one a mistranscribed word in a Serge Diaghilev letter (I spotted that one), the other a tiny but embarrassingly significant factual slip-up in the next-to-last chapter (the managing editor spotted that one, God bless him). I changed or deleted five repeated words and phrases (my personal bugaboo). I made minor adjustments of emphasis to two phrases, the second of which was in the very last paragraph of the book (got to get that one right!). I changed two punctuation marks and queried the hyphenation of three words. Finally, I asked the editor to make two typographical adjustments, both of which will be invisible to anyone not fanatically obsessed with such dainty matters.

So that’s that. I’m not quite finished–I still have to approve the layout of the photo insert and proofread the captions–but the book itself is now definitively complete. And yes, I still feel more than a little bit strange, this time for reasons I couldn’t put into words until just now, when a coin dropped in my head and I recalled something Samuel Johnson wrote in the final installment of The Idler, his second and last series of periodical essays:

Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no close friendship, they are perhaps both unwilling to part. There are few things not purely evil of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, “this is the last.” Those who never could agree together shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to final separation; of a place which has been frequently visited though without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart; and the Idler, with all his chillness of tranquillity, is not wholly unaffected by the thought that his last essay is now before him.

This secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking being whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. We always make a secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination; when we have done anything for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining.

Grim thoughts to be thinking about a book of which I’m still intensely proud! (The doubts and second thoughts will come calling later on.) But they’re all of a piece with the uneasy feelings that most of us New Yorkers are experiencing these days. As I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel last Friday afternoon, and rode past Citicorp Center in a cab late Saturday night, I saw cars filled with unsleeping policemen, on guard against unknown nightmares. I’ve been hearing more helicopters in the air of late–or perhaps I’m simply noticing them more often. We’re all thinking night thoughts in broad daylight, and there’s nothing to be done about them but live our lives. George Balanchine, who nearly died of tuberculosis as a young man, had something to say about that: “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.”

Dr. Johnson is my hero, the man I admire most and from whose life and work I have drawn inspiration throughout my own life–but today I’m with Mr. B. All in the Dances is finished. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do any more to it. Now it’s time to move on to the day’s next task. I have a lot of things to do this afternoon, after which I plan to dine with a friend and go see a movie. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself. It always does.