{"id":130549,"date":"2018-11-01T13:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T17:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130549"},"modified":"2018-11-01T13:11:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T17:11:31","slug":"edward-gorey-lived-at-the-ballet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/01\/edward-gorey-lived-at-the-ballet\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Gorey Lived at the Ballet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Edward Gorey near one of the Nadelman sculptures on the promenade at the NY State Theater, 1973. Photograph: Bruce Chernin. Image provided by the Alpern Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.<\/p><\/div>\n

On the evening of April 23, 1964, the New York City Ballet opened the doors to its new home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center,\u00a0<\/sup>with a gala performance of George Balanchine\u2019s Allegro Brillante <\/em>and\u00a0Stars and Stripes<\/em>. It was, for all practical purposes, Edward Gorey\u2019s new home, too, five months out of the year.<\/p>\n

As in all the rituals that governed his life, Gorey was compulsive in his devotion to routine, arriving for eight o\u2019clock\u00a0performances at seven thirty, when the doors opened. Yet he sometimes spent long stretches in the lobby if he didn\u2019t like one of the evening\u2019s offerings. Gorey \u201chad to be there on time, partly (he would say) because maybe they would change the order of the program, but I think it was just his compulsion\u2014he had <\/em>to be there,\u201d says Peter Wolff, a ballet friend of Gorey\u2019s who now sits on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation. \u201cIt was all part of his insane routine.\u201d<\/p>\n

During intermissions, Gorey could be found in the theater\u2019s main lobby, the Grand Promenade, located above the orchestra level. Three tiers of undulating balconies overhang the room; Elie Nadelman\u2019s massive, generously proportioned female nudes, sculpted in white marble, bookend it. Inevitably, Gorey was near a bench by the east stairs, at the center of a circle of gossipy, inexhaustibly opinionated ballet obsessives. Toni Bentley, a Balanchine dancer turned author whose Costumes by Karinska <\/em>features a foreword by Gorey, recalls him \u201cleaning in his full-length fur coat, in his full-length beard, against the left-side Nadelman statue at intermission every single night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gorey \u201cwas very breezy about his opinions,\u201d tossing them off in an artless manner, Peter Anastos says. \u201cHe just sat back and proclaimed evident truths about the company from a lofty cloud.\u201d\u00a0<\/sup>He had a flair for the bitchy bon mot, dubbing Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, neither of whom he could abide, \u201cthe world\u2019s tallest albino asparagus.\u201d\u00a0<\/sup>Asked about the moldy chestnuts of the classical repertoire, he sniffed, \u201cLes sylphides<\/em>? Where they\u2019re all looking for their contact lenses?\u201d\u00a0That said, his pronouncements were never mean spirited. \u201cEven if Ted hated something or somebody or some costume or set, and covered it with abuse, it was never really very fearsome,\u201d Anastos emphasizes. (\u201cYou can often hear me bitching about somebody\u2019s performance, but I\u2019m bitching on a terribly high level,\u201d Gorey said.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Behind the witticisms, however, was a profound appreciation\u00a0of Balanchine\u2019s genius, Anastos says\u2014\u201ca knowledge and a familiarity with every arcane aspect of life at the NYCB going back to City Center days\u201d coupled with a fluency in the vocabulary of ballet (arabesques and grand jet\u00e9s and pench\u00e9s and all the rest of it) that enabled Gorey to pick apart a dancer\u2019s performance on a technical level and compare it with another ballerina\u2019s interpretation of the same steps, way back when. He tossed off his aper\u00e7us in a nonchalant manner that dared the listener to take them seriously, although dance critics such as Arlene Croce, of\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, and intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, who knew Gorey from Bill Everson\u2019s screenings, knew better. \u201cThey\u2019d want to know what he thought of things,\u201d Peter Wolff recalls. \u201cHe was experiencing it on a different level.\u201d People who didn\u2019t know Gorey may have thought he was \u201ca campy character because of the way he dressed and spoke and all that,\u201d Croce says, but he impressed her as \u201cutterly serious \u2026 a thoughtful man who made penetrating remarks\u201d yet was \u201cgenuinely witty.\u201d<\/p>\n

To those who weren\u2019t admitted into his charmed circle, however, Gorey could exude an in-crowd snootiness. Even old friends such as Larry Osgood and Freddy English got the freeze-out, since they were mere balletgoers, not acolytes of the Balanchine cult. \u201cTed would be holding court with his admirers and his fellow aficionados and you couldn\u2019t get near him,\u201d Osgood says. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t even recognize old friends who might try to approach him during the intermission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of this may have been high school\u2013cafeteria cliquishness, but it might have had something to do with Gorey\u2019s secretiveness, too. He lived a compartmentalized life, maintaining strict boundaries between his social lives: between his Harvard friends and his ballet coterie, between his New York circle and his Cape Cod crowd, and so on. For the nearly three decades he went to the ballet, the Promenade crowd was <\/em>his social life when the NYCB was in residence. \u201cI have very little social life, because the only people I have time to see are the ones I\u2019m going to the ballet with,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

New York City in the sixties and seventies was the dance capital of the world. Balanchine was producing works of genius; the NYCB was a\u00a0serious contender for the most dazzling collection of dance talent on the planet; avant-garde choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, and Paul Taylor were blazing trails for modern dance. The fever-pitch anticipation that greeted the premiere of a new work by Balanchine is unimaginable today, when the New York City Ballet no longer dominates New York\u2019s cultural consciousness. \u201cBeing in New York in the seventies with Balanchine working was like being in Salzburg when Mozart was working,\u201d Wolff recalls. \u201cIt was like abstract expressionism: it was of its time; it was wildly earth-shattering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeing a Balanchine premiere was an indispensable part of being culturally au courant, of understanding the zeitgeist. \u201cThe lobby of the State Theater was the one place where you could see, night after night, literary intellectuals like Susan Sontag, the poetry critic David Kalstone, the essayist Richard Poirier, the cartoonist Edward Gorey, the music and dance critic Dale Harris, the editor of Knopf, Robert Gottlieb\u2014and dozens of others,\u201d recalled Edmund White, the novelist and memoirist, in his essay \u201cThe Man Who Understood Balanchine.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWe were all enjoying a rare privilege\u2014the unfolding of genius. Balanchine had started out in imperial Russia, reached his first apogee under Diaghilev in France and, in the 1930\u2019s, moved to the United States, where he led dance to summits it had never known before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gorey\u2019s sentiments exactly. \u201cI feel absolutely and unequivocally,\u201d he said in 1974, \u201cthat Balanchine is the great genius in the arts today \u2026 My nightmare is picking up the newspaper some day and finding out George has dropped dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He coined the term <\/em>Afrofuturism, popularized the concept of \u201cculture jamming,\u201d taught at Yale and NYU, and has published widely on pop culture, the media, and the mythologies (and pathologies) of American life. His books include <\/em>Flame Wars, a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture; <\/em>Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, <\/em>The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, and the essay collection <\/em>I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey<\/a>. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Mark Dery. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For all practical purposes, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center was Edward Gorey\u2019s home for five months out of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1636,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[40032,40027,40026,1942,199,40030,55,40022,2043,429,471,228,40031,4885,504,7935,31005,1941,40023,16744,40029,40024,2427,2428,30382,501,40025,40028],"class_list":["post-130549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-albino-asparagus","tag-allegro-brillante","tag-arabesque","tag-ballet","tag-biography","tag-born-to-be-posthumous","tag-dance","tag-ed-gorey","tag-edmund-white","tag-edward-gorey","tag-george-balanchine","tag-illustration","tag-les-sylphides","tag-lincoln-center","tag-literature","tag-merce-cunningham","tag-modern-dance","tag-new-york-city-ballet","tag-new-york-state-theater","tag-old-new-york","tag-paul-taylor","tag-peter-anastos","tag-seventies","tag-sixties","tag-stars-and-stripes","tag-susan-sontag","tag-toni-bentley","tag-twyla-tharp"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEdward 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