GLR May-June 2023

ESSAY Lincoln Kirstein’s Greatest Get M ARTIN D UBERMAN

As director of the Athenaeum, he’d transformed Hartford’s rep utation as the stodgy headquarters of the insurance business into an important center of cultural ferment. Kirstein knew that, al though Austin was married, his erotic preference was homo sexual, and he hinted to Kirstein, who also preferred men, about having recently indulged in “some highly irregular pleasures,” saying that he’d tell him more some other time. § W HEN IN E UROPE DURING THE SUMMER OF 1933, Kirstein—age 26 at the time—met with Balanchine, and the two had “a long and satisfactory talk” in French. Kirstein found him “wholly charm ing.” A few days later, they had lunch, Balanchine arriving nat tily dressed in a gray flannel suit, “his strong, delicate Caucasian face very animated” (as Kirstein wrote in his diary). They talked

E DITOR ’ S N OTE : What follows is excerpted from a longer piece that will soon appear in The Line of Dissent , a collection of the author’s essays published in this magazine over the years. Some of the material that follows has previously appeared in these pages (in 2017)—in a three-part essay on impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who cofounded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine—but much of it is brand new. B Y 1933, Lincoln Kirstein’s long-simmering search for a way to establish a classical ballet company in the United States picked up steam and intensity. His interest in the ballet had ini tially quickened on his various trips to Europe as a teenager, when he’d seen Diaghilev’s Bal lets Russes. That same year, 1929, with Diaghilev’s death, the ballet world had become rent by fac tions. A number of émigré artists had been trying to lay claim to his man tle, and to find venues, patrons, and, they hoped, companies that might make their existence less precarious. George Balanchine, who’d been

in some detail about the possibility of an American ballet, with Kirstein briefly mentioning Chick Austin’s museum in Hartford as a possible site. “We got frightfully excited about it all,” Kirstein wrote in his diary. “I visualized it so clearly. He wants so much to come ... says it has always been his dream. He would give up everything to come.” Kirstein then got “frightfully worked up” and, able to “think of nothing else,” sat down and wrote his now famous sixteen-page letter to Austin. It began with a grand theatri cal flourish: “This will be the most important letter I will ever write you ... my pen burns my hand as I write: words will not flow into the ink fast enough. We have a real chance to have an American ballet within 3 years time. When I say ballet, I mean a trained company of young dancers—not Russians—but Ameri cans with Russian stars to start with.” Years later, Kirstein claimed that he’d

Diaghilev’s last important choreog rapher, succeeded in putting to gether a group called Les Ballets 1933, a young company of some fif teen dancers, including Toumanova, Derain, and Roman Jasinski. None of this would have come to pass had it not been for the events of a decade earlier, when Vladimir Dimitriev, a former baritone in the Mariinsky opera company, successfully engi neered exit visas from the Soviet Union for a small group of artists, the so-called Soviet State Dancers. Among them were Balanchine, Tamara Geva, his first wife, and the ballerina Alexandra Danilova, who would become his “unofficial” sec ondwife.

Kirstein went up to Hartford to see his friend Chick Austin, the youthful head of the prestigious Wadsworth Athenaeum, who showed him the half-completed new International Style addition to the museum. Kirstein noted in his diary that “his lit tle auditorium is perfect for small ballets.” Austin, like Kirstein, was a serious advocate of the arts and an audacious innovator. Martin Duberman’s latest book is titled Reaching Ninety . His forth coming collection, The Line of Dissent , will be published by TheG&LR .

deliberately chosen “an optimistic style” in writing to Austin. But “calculated optimism” doesn’t capture a tone that sings with ar dent intensity; his words leap off the page with an almost libidi nous passion. “You will adore Balanchine,” he tells Austin. “He is, personally, enchanting—dark, very slight, a superb dancer and the most ingenious technician in ballet I have ever seen.” Then, knowing his audience, Kirstein appealed to Austin’s homoerotic side by describing Roman Jasinski, likely to be the new com pany’s male star, as “extremely beautiful—a superb body.”

TheG & LR

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