Jennifer Homans' biography of Balanchine

[vipa]

The Homans book is a lot. I don't disagree with what's been said on this board. I skipped some sections of the book because I didn't find her lengthy descriptions of ballets useful at all. There were times when she indulged in mind reading, based on her own ideas, and clearly she takes anything anyone writes in a diary at face value. I thought her treatment of Von Aroldingen oddly and unnecessarily unsympathetic. Homans did a lot of research and lays out a lot of information. There were sections that I thought fascinating bits of ballet history, but on the whole I found the book unsatisfying. Bottom line, we have the ballets. In the words of George Balanchine - "How much a story you need?"

[BalanchineFan]

Hi @vipa could you talk more about your take on Homan’s treatment of von Aroldingen? I just finished the book. I didn’t find it unsympathetic, just interesting to hear how people configure their lives. 

[pherank]

On 4/11/2023 at 7:30 AM, BalanchineFan said:

Hi @vipa could you talk more about your take on Homan’s treatment of von Aroldingen? I just finished the book. I didn’t find it unsympathetic, just interesting to hear how people configure their lives. 

"Karin was as ruthless about dancing as any of the wives"
"...and when she got pregnant a few months later, she told no one and (by her own accord) worked herself physically to the bone in hope of losing the baby"
"Her relationship with Balanchine revolved around dancing, yes, but also around cooking and food--and plenty of alcohol--and around money and sex. She was acquisitive ad nervous about money, couldn't get enough, and Balanchine indulged her every whim: Parisian fashions, jewelry, fine wines, restaurants, and elegant hotels. That was part of their arrangement...."
"...he also took to hiding rolls of cash in the closet of his apartment, where she wouldn't find them; cash was a gift he bestowed on many dancers..."
"But she could also be maudlin, pouty and stubborn. She--they--drank a lot, and she even occasionally showed up for rehearsals and performances with alcohol under her breath"

Not really a good look. But all people have issues and weaknesses that they are dealing with - it's all in the telling.

This brings me to one of Homans' stylistic affectations: dancers and staff of the NYCB are often referred to by their first names in these 'recollections', whereas others - Stravinsky, Kirstein, Baum, Karinska, etc. are mostly kept on a last name basis. Balanchine is referred to in various ways throughout the book - George, Georgi, Balanchine, Mr. B - which is totally screwy. Vera Zorina gets to be called "Zorina", which is one of Homans' many inconsistencies. As most of the people being referred to by first name are female, it is problematic. And for me, it isn't something a historian should do. Using a first name to represent someone has implications in our society (and I'm sure in others as well). The tendency to refer to female public figures by their first names, but men always by their surnames, is something much discussed by feminisits and others, so I won't go into that here. I'm more concerned about inconsistencies in Homans' writing -  why have book sections devoted to discussing "Karin" and then go back to referring to her as "von Aroldingen" elsewhere? Is the subject better, more accurately served by switching to the familiar? Is she made more personable if negative (or positive) comments are being delivered? It was this type of stylistic oddity that kept me thinking that Homans never really had an overarching plan for this book - it was a mass of individual writings being stitched together. The best historians have a strong, consistent voice, and they manage to successfully inhabit that narrative voice throughout the work so that reader is never confused about direction and intention. With Homans, I found too many points confusing when the narrative style would shift - to little benefit that I could see.

Edited April 12, 2023 by pherank

[DanielBenton]

Excellent critique, thanks!

[vipa]

3 hours ago, pherank said:

 It was this type of stylistic oddity that kept me thinking that Homans never really had an overarching plan for this book - it was a mass of individual writings being stitched together. The best historians have a strong, consistent voice, and they manage to successfully inhabit that narrative voice throughout the work so that reader is never confused about direction and intention. With Homans, I found too many points confusing when the narrative style would shift - to little benefit that I could see.

Well stated pherank. I didn't think of the use of first and last name while I was reading the book, but you are spot on about it. There certainly were unsettling narrative shifts through-out. There seemed no rhyme or reason to what she dwelled on, rushed over, commented upon, or passed judgement on. At times I thought she was trying to pass her opinions off as scholarship. I suppose it's good that she interviewed numerous people for the book, before they are lost to us. On the other hand we don't have the interviews, have bits and pieces that Homans selected to fit into her uneasy narrative. Never-the-less, there were historical aspects to the piece I enjoyed. Ultimately it's a book I would not recommend. 

[pherank]

I can recommend Homans book - but not until after people read Bernard Taper's "Balanchine: A Biography" and Francis Mason's "I Remember Balanchine" to get a general sense of things. And I still recommend reading Elizabeth Kendall's book to get a better sense of the context of Balanchine, Danilova, Ivanova and Geva's early years and life at the Mariinsky School. And Kendall's book is great for descriptions of Balanchine's earliest work.

Homans does spend time talking about various poets/literary figures and philosophers that had a large influence on Balanchine's thinking and aesthetics. And of course Sergei Diaghilev gets some attention, although I think he remains an elusive character in this rendering.

Various ballets are discussed at length, such as Concerto Barocco and Agon. She may not have the last word on those ballets, but it's worth thinking about their construction and intentions.

I often got the feeling that Homans assumes the reader has been through all the usual Balanchine books and so she's just refreshing our memories about the "facts" and myths to then concentrate on her own reaction to the information. Portions of the book read like proto-essays, and in some ways these are the more interesting sections. We have Homans' musing on muscle-memory, eternity and time with regards to dance, the developing and shaping of the dancer's body, the relationship between dance and music, and more. These things relate to Balanchine's ambitions and aesthetics so I don't quibble with their inclusion, it's just the way in which Homans flits from one subject to another (often within a larger discussion on other matters) that tends to exhaust this reader.

Homans always has an opinion, and that opinion naturally has a particular bias. She's fond of insinuation, and that imparts a more informal, conversational tone to some of the content. She often takes sides.

She loves sharing her musings, but I'm not sure that makes this the 'go to' book on Balanchine after all.

Portions of the book read like proto-essays, and in some ways these are the more interesting sections. Homans' musing on muscle-memory, for example, was engrossing.

This is a biography used as departure point for Homans' musings on myriad ballet and societal-related subjects. It's certainly possible that Homans was not entirely comfortable playing historian (and attempting to remain neutral with regards to her subject) and so quickly segues towards editorial commentary whenever possible.

Edited April 13, 2023 by pherank

[pherank]

A comparison of sorts...

Bernard Taper:
In most of his academic subjects--French, arithmetic, Russian grammar, and literature--he did poorly also, excelling only in the classes in music and religion. On top of that, he did not get along with the other students. He had a trait, when nervous, of sniffing perceptibly, a twitch of his upper lip that showed his front teeth; his classmates promptly nicknamed him "Rat." [end of paragraph]

Elizabeth Kendall:
How did the older borders react to the newest small recruit making a show of haughty indifference? It might have been they who rechristened him 'Georges'--a French name for the smallest, unhappiest among them. They also called him "Rat," because of compulsive sniffing that showed his front teeth (a habit that never left him). But Georgi/Georges could do nothing about the bullying: he had to fall into the school routine and learn by imitating. [end of paragraph]

Jennifer Homans:
The other students called him "rat" because he was small--the youngest in the boy's hall--but also because he developed around this time his characteristic sniffing tic, like a rat seeking or busily foraging for shiny tokens in the trash. It was a tic that would endure for most of his life, the first of many masks he would hide behind and a sign of his nerves and appetite for traveling unnoticed through the worlds he found himself in, collecting scraps and gems to be stored in his mind and later extracted for use in art.

Neither Taper nor Kendall bring up the subject of Balanchine's nervous tic again - they plainly didn't see it as an important aspect of his life story. Homans, on the other hand, peppers the book with other examples of Balanchine referring to himself as "mouse" or "Mighty Mouse". Perhaps that was his way of dealing with the humiliation of being dubbed "rat" by his cohorts.The experience may well have stuck with him throughout his life.  But I don't recall Homans discussing the possible psychological issues at work. Only Kendall directly calls out the Mariinsky boys' treatment of Balanchine as "bullying". Homans really delights in the rodent metaphor, and takes it and runs with it, so we hear more references to "mouse" (not so much "rat") as the book goes on. Besides the fact that Homans uses the school incident to fuel her own imaginings, I just found it annoying that the rodent metaphor doesn't serve a real useful purpose in the book. Balanchine wasn't really a rodent, he was a human being, so I'm not sure this metaphor can really be said to illuminate something about the psychology of a particular man. Like Taper and Kendall, I don't see Balanchine's nervous tic as central to his artistic or social life, or a technique for "foraging for shiny tokens ".

Edited April 13, 2023 by pherank

[Quiggin]

I can understand why Homans dwells on the mouse motif, since Balanchine signed off many letters to his lovers as a mouse, even making drawings of himself as such. And of course it's a huge part of "Nutcracker" – originally "Nutcracker vs the Mouse King" – which he brought with him to the new world. Regarding scraps, Ruthanna Boris in "I Remember" says Balanchine told her that "you have to look everywhere, at everything, all the time. Look at the grass in the concrete when it's broken, children and little dogs, and the ceiling and the roof." Maybe a little like Manny Farber's idea of "Termite art vs Elephant art." ???

I agree the book does want to be a series of essays, which could be a way of doing a biography, and would let the biographer leave big chunks of lesser material out. It might be interesting to see the male's part in "Apollo" compared to one of the male 4T's solos, rather than linking it as a progression to "Agon" as it usually is. To sweep sideways through Balanchine's life through his ideas and second thoughts, rather than in chronological order.

Edited April 15, 2023 by Quiggin

[pherank]

4 hours ago, Quiggin said:

I can understand why Homans dwells on the mouse motif, since Balanchine signed off many letters to his lovers as a mouse, even making drawings of himself as such. And of course it's a huge part of "Nutcracker" – originally "Nutcracker vs the Mouse King" – which he brought with him to the new world. Regarding scraps, Ruthanna Boris in "I Remember" says Balanchine told her that "you have to look everywhere, at everything, all the time. Look at the grass in the concrete when it's broken, children and little dogs, and the ceiling and the roof." Maybe a little like Manny Farber's idea of "Termite art vs Elephant art." ???

I agree the book does want to be a series of essays, which could be a way of doing a biography, and would let the biographer leave big chunks of lesser material out. It might be interesting to see the male's part in "Apollo" compared to one of the male 4T's solos, rather than linking it as a progression to "Agon" as it usually is. To sweep sideways through Balanchine's life through his ideas and second thoughts, rather than in chronological order.

For me, the rat/mouse references are a red herring - I just don't learn much of anything for all the mentions. Many people are given nicknames within their family or circle of friends, but nicknames rarely 'explain' the person to the world. If anything they tend to be overly reductive.

The book might have worked better as a set of discrete essays, but Homans obviously felt the need to try to make it an all-encompassing work. A bridge too far?

[BalanchineFan]

On 4/15/2023 at 3:06 PM, Quiggin said:

I can understand why Homans dwells on the mouse motif, since Balanchine signed off many letters to his lovers as a mouse, even making drawings of himself as such. And of course it's a huge part of "Nutcracker" – originally "Nutcracker vs the Mouse King" – which he brought with him to the new world

I agree with this. Homans shows us Balanchine's drawings of himself as a mouse and different women (was it LeClerq or Zorina or both?) as the cat. In a weird way, it seemed that Balanchine was bringing it up. Small, private, a craftsman and ballet master rather than an Artistic Director. I thought she leaned on the "cloud in trousers" metaphor much more.

One thing I loved about the book, which I hadn't considered, even with all the other Balanchine material I've read, is Homans' idea that he swallowed up dying cultures right before their demise, and got out before they fell. Russia and the Russian Imperial School - he left before Stalin cracked down and made that impossible. Berlin at the height of the Weimar era - she goes through many artistic influences there. Paris in the late 1920's and early 1930's and again, by the time Nazi-ism came to the fore to end that golden era Balanchine was in NYC. It was a great device to place him in the twentieth century and show how the major events of the century shaped his life and career.

It's so enlightening to read multiple accounts of the same events. One can evaluate the accounts against each other and (hopefully) get a more nuanced, fuller picture of the events.

[Jack Reed]

The dance writer, editor, and sometime critic Mindy Aloff has recently published a critique of Homans’s book much along the lines of pherank’s thoughtful one just above in this thread, though I find hers broader and deeper, and so this seems the right place to post a link to it, especially since her place of publication is not so widely known:

 

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/george-balanchine-mindy-aloff/comments/

 

I haven’t read the book, but along with pherank and others, having read Aloff’s corrective to much of the book, I’m also puzzled by Homans’s purpose in writing it.   

[pherank]

35 minutes ago, Jack Reed said:

The dance writer, editor, and sometime critic Mindy Aloff has recently published a critique of Homans’s book much along the lines of pherank’s thoughtful one just above in this thread, though I find hers broader and deeper, and so this seems the right place to post a link to it, especially since her place of publication is not so widely known:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/george-balanchine-mindy-aloff/comments/

I haven’t read the book, but along with pherank and others, having read Aloff’s corrective to much of the book, I’m also puzzled by Homans’s purpose in writing it.   

Thanks for this link, JR. If I had been smart, I would have made notes as I read through the book, but once I had finished and a few weeks had passed, my heart just wasn't in it. Homans' book is rather a mish-mash of styles and subject matter - making it difficult to find things later. Now I've come to the conclusion that Homans' would have been better off planning a book of discreet essays that are all related rather than try to thread the various subjects together. A book titled "Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century" can be expected to cover an enormous range of subject matter, OK sure, but I didn't come away feeling like the 20th century part was well represented. Why his 20th Century, and not something like, "George Balanchine: A Life In Dance"? I'm still pondering that one.

So can such a large-scale subject as "Balanchine's 20th Century" be tackled successfully? It can, and has been in other biographies, but not yet in dance writing. There are quite a few great biographies out there of course, but I'm reminded of Barbara Tuchman's "Stilwell and the American Experience In China, 1911‐45." That book is a completely engrossing account of the life, and personality, of American General Joseph Stilwell, that just happens to also include all manner of things about the US-China relationship up through WWII, and manages to not lose the reader or ever become a snooze. The book deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1972. It is extraordinary that such a messy, complex subject could be kept under control for 532 pages, but it was done.

Kudos to Mindy Aloff for mentioning the following:

"Alas, the  book lacks thorough copy-editing and fact-checking. It misuses such words as scion, ferreted, languishing, dispossessed, perdition, staunch. It makes Orval Faubus the governor of the wrong state; has Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane shot down over Cuba rather than over the Soviet Union; misspells the names of Harald Kreutzberg, Hershy Kay, and Yul Brynner; misidentifies Marie Rambert; misidentifies the ballet training of star André Eglevsky; calls the famous operetta Song of Norway--starring Alexandra Danilova and the entire Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo--“Songs of Norway”; has Balanchine choosing “a princess” from his dancers during a rehearsal for Orpheus when there is no princess in that ballet (Was she thinking of Firebird?); gets wrong the reason why Allegra Kent’s surname was changed from “Cohen”; speaks about the “skeleton,” rather than the exoskeleton, of a butterfly; insinuates without evidence that Kirstein’s Harvard friend and early donor to SAB, Edward Warburg, might have been sleeping with his psychiatrist; says that Isamu Noguchi’s austere sculptural set pieces for the 1948 Orpheus recalls Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (which had an elaborate series of wildly colorful painted drops by Nicholas Roerich); has an elaborate color-coding of plaids and velvets as costumes for the finale of Union Jack when the finale dresses the entire cast in navy blue and white uniforms; gives Boston-native Lincoln Kirstein an “émigré past; ascribes the wrong year to the Gershwin ballet Who Cares? (it was 1970, not 1969); quotes Balanchine’s famous throwaway comment “It’s all in the programs” (i.e., in the casting) as “It’s all in the dances,” when asked to speak about how personal matters might have related to his ballets; confuses the conductor Robert Irving with the conductor Hugo Fiorato in a picture caption; and on and on. Some of the memories by the interviewees have aroused controversy on the part of subjects who are still alive. Among the book’s disputed reports that are stated as fact is the questionable portrayal of the concerns and actions of NYCB’s General Counsel and Board member Randal Craft when the company was faced with the potential loss of rights to perform Balanchine’s ballets following his death; Craft described these in a 2015 public lecture that is not mentioned."

I can't claim to have noticed each every one of these problem spots, but I did run into various grammar and syntax 'oddities', and noticed her re-working of Balanchine-isms to suit herself, which essentially creates misinformation. Homans does tend to present her statements as if they are the unvarnished truth, but then doesn't provide any real evidence to back up her assertions. There's a certain purity to many of the older Balanchine books that I now appreciate all the more.  😉

[sandik]

On 11/5/2022 at 5:17 PM, l'histoire said:

Thank you for this wonderful list, pherank! I already have too much on my "to read" list, but I've added several of the ones I haven't read to it. I sometimes dreamily consider teaching a class on ballet history (it would never fill, so it never enters more than my random musings), but this just reminds me that there is SO much good writing on ballet from SO many perspectives (when I asked my grad seminar on "writing history" to share their favorite pieces of non-academic writing, my selection was Acocella's profile of Farrell from 2003, because the prose is simply so spectacular). 

I've finished the book & while I still feel like it's way too long, Homans does "catch the spirit" of what she's writing about in many parts, which can be quite gripping. I'll try and write a more considered review soon. The long & short is that it does a lot of stuff great, does bring some new material in, but so much of the rehashing of previously-published pieces could be cut - I wish she'd let her own narrative/research shine. 

I taught dance history in various places for a number of years, so I empathize with your desire!  At the risk of adding to your "to be read" list, you might be interested in Deborah Jowitt's "Time and the Dancing Image."  As well as her work as a dance critic, she also taught dance history at NYU, and was intent on showing her students the cultural and political context of the works she discussed.  Her book is a distillation of those lectures.

[l'histoire]

Thank you for the recommendation, @sandik. I just ordered a copy - I'm going to have a summer full of ballet reading (and mountaineering, but such is the life of a cultural historian with rather varied interests!

Edited April 24, 2023 by l'histoire

[sandik]

2 hours ago, l'histoire said:

Thank you for the recommendation, @sandik. I just ordered a copy - I'm going to have a summer full of ballet reading (and mountaineering, but such is the life of a cultural historian with rather varied interests!

Let me know what you think.  And in the meantime, remember the sunscreen.

[dirac]

Joan Acocella has reviewed the book in a two-part article for The New York Review of Books.

Quote

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.

 

[DanielBenton]

Amen.  Acocella's is a very meaningful review that touches on the essence of Homan's endeavour.

[angelica]

On 5/21/2023 at 7:30 AM, DanielBenton said:

Amen.  Acocella's is a very meaningful review that touches on the essence of Homan's endeavour.

Agree, but for Part 2 of her review, which focuses almost entirely on Balanchine's sexual life, preferences, proclivities. I'm giving my granddaughter a copy of the book as a gift and wanted to include the Acocella review, but now I'm thinking of giving her only Part 1 of the review. In the book, the sexual stuff is spread out and in context, whereas in Part 2 of the review it has a spotlight on it.

[Kathleen O'Connell]

On 4/23/2023 at 8:41 PM, sandik said:

At the risk of adding to your "to be read" list, you might be interested in Deborah Jowitt's "Time and the Dancing Image."

Another thumbs up for "Time and the Dancing Image." It is excellent. 

ETA: I prefer Jowitt's work to Homans' for the simple reason that Homans always seems to write to promote an agenda whereas Jowitt writes to support an idea. 

Edited May 24, 2023 by Kathleen O'Connell

[Anthony_NYC]

Acocella in her NYRB review makes a great observation:

“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. (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.”

(Acocella might have added that Balanchine gave us the spread legs as early as 1928’s “Apollo”—in an actual birth scene. There is also the famous head-through-the-crotch move in “Prodigal Son” that still raises a murmur from the audience almost a century later.)

Personally, I think Acocella is right to single out Homans’s addressing of Balanchine’s emotional and sensual life as perhaps her most significant contribution. The book genuinely gave me a new perspective on an artist I thought I knew well already. I’m still turning it over in my mind and looking at his ballets again with a different perspective. Homans’s writing style is occasionally a little ponderous, and I agree with those who find her descriptions of individual ballets less enlightening than other elements in her biography. (Her description of “Diamonds” is positively Cubist—things don’t happen in the order she gives them, and even the music is identified incorrectly. Very puzzling.) But I was glad to have a great big, long, loving book to get lost in about an artist who is so dear to me, and I plan to reread it in the near future. 

[dirac]

Thanks, Anthony_NYC. I remember Arlene Croce writing that while both Ashton and Balanchine were both inspired primarily by women in ballet, the difference in their sexual orientation could be discerned in Ashton's emphasis on the upper body and Balanchine's with the lower.

[Quiggin]

Sounds as if Acocella was following up on the talk she gave at UC Berkeley about twenty years ago, "Balanchine and Sex," originally titled "Balanchine and the Crotch," in which she analyzed the pas de deux from "Agon." She also alluded, in an amused, off the record sort of way, to Balanchine's sexual preferences.

Interesting that Acocella referred to Mies van der Rohe (though more as a minimalist than as a modernist), in that both artists had European and American careers and both opened very influential, anxiety provoking, schools (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was once characterized as the "three blind Mies"). You might even say that Mies's celebrated treatment of corners of brick buildings at Illinois Institute of Technology – each frontally exposing the "I" beam within – was the equivalent of Balanchine structuring his ballets on the pelvis and the crotch.

Both Acocella and Homans seem to stand in awe of the ballets, at the threshold where biography leaves off.  About the works, Homans is "more exalted than clear," according to Acocella, and Acocella gives only a bare bones account of what sets Balanchine's ballets apart: athletic skill and speed; musicality and phrasing; and a kind of abstraction. His works such as "The Four Temperaments" were the "modernist extension of classicism."

Which could be also stated as the war between modernism and classicism, since Modernism is said to be always trying to clear the slate and establish a new order, a new, all encompassing, light-filled present without a past – a little like Balanchine's bio.

 

 

Edited June 6, 2023 by Quiggin

[dirac]

I got a copy of the book from the library and am dipping into it now. Given the many minor errors that reveal themselves even in a casual reading, I’m glad I didn’t buy it and will wait for another, cleaned-up edition. Along with the errors pointed out by others, I would add that it’s Barbara Milberg, not Barbara Millberg, and before Homans’ book I only ever saw the diminutive of Patricia McBride’s first name spelled as “Patty” not “Patti.” Minor, but distracting. Preliminary comments:

• Even allowing for the fact that Balanchine’s sex life and eroticism were central to his life and art, the sex gossip became tedious, especially in the latter part of the book. TMI.
• When Balanchine saw Seligmann’s costumes for The Four Ts, he asked Seligmann, “Where is Mary Ellen? I can’t see Mary Ellen.” I ask the same question. While I realize that Homans couldn’t possibly mention every dancer who featured in Balanchine’s life, it seems to me that to omit any comment on Mary Ellen Moylan’s career with Balanchine leaves an important gap. I was also sorry to see no mention at all of Marnee Morris, although it’s a lesser omission.
• I am more familiar with some periods of Balanchine’s life than others, and unfortunately Homans’ descriptions of ballets and interpretations of events are sufficiently puzzling to me for the parts of his life that I know better that they make me untrusting of her account of matters that I don’t know as well.
• “Plain-faced” Diana Adams? I should be so plain as Diana Adams. Yeesh.

I echo the thanks of AnthonyNYC for this book, however. I’m finding out a lot I didn’t know and a major comprehensive biography of Balanchine is long overdue. I would like for this book not to be the last one, but it’s probably the only one we will get for a long tme to come, so thanks to Homans for undertaking the project and staying with it.

[Marta]

8 hours ago, dirac said:

I got a copy of the book from the library and am dipping into it now. Given the many minor errors that reveal themselves even in a casual reading, I’m glad I didn’t buy it and will wait for another, cleaned-up edition. Along with the errors pointed out by others, I would add that it’s Barbara Milberg, not Barbara Millberg, and before Homans’ book I only ever saw the diminutive of Patricia McBride’s first name spelled as “Patty” not “Patti.” Minor, but distracting. Preliminary comments:

• Even allowing for the fact that Balanchine’s sex life and eroticism were central to his life and art, the sex gossip became tedious, especially in the latter part of the book. TMI.
• When Balanchine saw Seligmann’s costumes for The Four Ts, he asked Seligmann, “Where is Mary Ellen? I can’t see Mary Ellen.” I ask the same question. While I realize that Homans couldn’t possibly mention every dancer who featured in Balanchine’s life, it seems to me that to omit any comment on Mary Ellen Moylan’s career with Balanchine leaves an important gap. I was also sorry to see no mention at all of Marnee Morris, although it’s a lesser omission.
• I am more familiar with some periods of Balanchine’s life than others, and unfortunately Homans’ descriptions of ballets and interpretations of events are sufficiently puzzling to me for the parts of his life that I know better that they make me untrusting of her account of matters that I don’t know as well.
• “Plain-faced” Diana Adams? I should be so plain as Diana Adams. Yeesh.

I echo the thanks of AnthonyNYC for this book, however. I’m finding out a lot I didn’t know and a major comprehensive biography of Balanchine is long overdue. I would like for this book not to be the last one, but it’s probably the only one we will get for a long tme to come, so thanks to Homans for undertaking the project and staying with it.

I agree with all your comments.  "Plain-faced" Diana Adams made me wonder if we were talking about the same Adams.  I found a lot of Homans' writing gossipy, and she seemed positively  hostile toward some dancers, e.g., van Aroldingen.  Mindy Aloff has also written a critique of the Homans book:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/george-balanchine-mindy-aloff.html

[pherank]

2 hours ago, Marta said:

I agree with all your comments.  "Plain-faced" Diana Adams made me wonder if we were talking about the same Adams.  I found a lot of Homans' writing gossipy, and she seemed positively  hostile toward some dancers, e.g., van Aroldingen.  Mindy Aloff has also written a critique of the Homans book:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/george-balanchine-mindy-aloff.html

I too had a similar reaction to the book. The absence of information about Alexandra Danilova was another one of those head scratchers for me. We still need to go to Elizabeth Kendall's book and the various autobiographies to get a decent picture of Balanchine's early school days (and the various important relationships).

Edited June 8, 2023 by pherank