GLR May-June 2023

that henceforth he would “criticize and be harsh with him [Balanchine] when I feel like it ... instead of being scared by his uniqueness and genius.” Yet ironically, by the time Balanchine had had his fill of Broadway and returned full-time to the American Ballet, Kirstein’s interest in ex ploring the American past through dance had sharply diminished. It wasn’t a mat ter of Balanchine compelling adherence to his neoclassical vision, but rather the result of Kirstein’s lessening involvement in left-wing politics after the 1930s, and a diminished interest in American-themed narrative dance. Unlike Kirstein, Balan chine had always been politically conser vative and deeply religious, and when he turned, briefly, to American subjects in the ballets Western Symphony (1954) and Stars and Stripes (1958), it would be in a spirit of joie de vivre rather than moral earnestness. Kirstein had also come to realize that he was temperamen tally ill-suited to the many demands of managing a touring com pany. Harvard’s Houghton Library’s new collection of family letters tells us a good deal more than we’ve previously known about the multiple responsibilities of running a ballet company and the demands it made on Kirstein’s limited patience for the mundane details of daily life. Brilliant, deeply serious, and widely read, Kirstein never lost his “affection” for the Caravan and its ac complishments but, especially during the last year of touring, he developed, to his own surprise, “certain sudden murderous in stincts” toward his “little troupe.” “I can’t stand easily,” he wrote home, “the unremitting gaiety and good clean fun of one and all.” After the touring finally came to an end in 1938, Kirstein suddenly came up with a new idea, one that might, on the side, serve as a more creative outlet than “laying out the master’s clothes.” Still interested, if to a lesser degree, in left-wing pol itics—much later, he would join the Selma March—he came up with a “divine” idea for a new ballet he called “Memorial Day.” Its theme would be “democracy in crisis,” as represented through Civil War iconography. He planned to write the libretto himself and asked his friend Aaron Copland (with whom he would always have a good relationship) to write the score—a commission Copland accepted enthusiastically. For a time, the project consumed Kirstein; he sent his sister Mina letter after letter (all in the new Houghton collection) detailing his progress and using her as a sounding board for his ideas. He was especially keen to get Mina’s take on getting the prestigious Mercury Theater involved. John Houseman (who’d been Mina’s lover) had in 1937 cofounded the Mercury with 21-year-old Orson Welles, and Kirstein hoped Mina’s influence would lead Houseman to produce Memorial Day first as a con cert and then as a theatrical run. Though Mina had also come through at the last minute with a crucial donation that allowed the legendary John Houseman-Marc Blitzstein production of The Cradle Will Rock to open, she wasn’t able to interest House man in Memorial Day . In the upshot, Kirstein revised and redrafted his libretto for Memorial Day , accepting many of Mina’s suggestions for revi

sion, though he came to see the whole project as “very pretentious.” No one, in any case, proved willing to showcase it. Disappointed, he went back to working in the traces, once again focusing his atten tion full-time on developing the American Ballet School and company. After World War II—in which Kirstein served as a private and ended up being one of the Monuments Men who discov ered the huge Nazi horde of stolen art buried in the Altaussee mine—the ballet company reconstituted as a unit connected to the City Center, the large mosque-like building on West 55th Street devoted to cultural events and offering low ticket prices. In its director, Morton Baum, Kirstein found a sympathetic soul, but City Center lacked the resources needed

Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, ca. 1960.

to guarantee the ballet an extended season, much less a perma nent home. Still, by 1950, the American Ballet had achieved enough prominence and recognition for London’s prestigious Covent Garden to offer a five-week engagement. It proved enormously successful, and Kirstein, in a pub lished article, brilliantly pinpointed why the company’s unique style—Balanchine’s style—had finally gained the recognition it deserved. His distinction lay, in Kirstein’s words, in “a lean ness, a visual asceticism, a candor ... and sometimes a galva nizing, acetylene brilliance, a deep potential of incalculable human strength.” What fascinated Balanchine, Kirstein wrote, “was the human body’s instinctive, yet scarcely unconscious, expression of its era—our corsetless, all but skirtless ... era, where good social and theatrical manners are more a problem of individual obligation and affection than the reflection of the de votion for, or authority felt resident in, sovereign or system.” § A LTHOUGH HOMOSEXUALITY WAS OMNIPRESENT in the ballet world, it seems never to have been, in any explicit way, a point of contention between Kirstein and Balanchine, perhaps in part because Kirstein had married Paul Cadmus’ sister Fidelma in 1941. However, at no point before or after the marriage did he stop having sex with other men, sometimes becoming deeply attached to them. The dancer Pete Martinez, one of the great loves of Kirstein’s life in the late ’30s and early ’40s, not only lived with the Kirsteins for a time but became a close and trusted friend to Fidelma. Later, the painter and curator Jensen Yow would fill a similar role. Whether and to what extent Kirstein and Fidelma ever dis cussed these relationships (and others) remains unknown. Paul Cadmus was already dead when I began work on The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein , but I talked at length with his long-term part ner, Jon Anderson, who told me that Cadmus’ sense was that Fidelma understood early on that “Lincoln simply needed his close relationships with men—and that was that.” One could argue, if intent on categorization, that Kirstein might best be viewed as bisexual. He’d had affairs with women in his early twenties, including one of profound importance to him with the cultural doyenne Muriel Draper. That he cared

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