Poet of the Dance

DANCE WRITINGS by Edwin Denby.Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95.

EDWIN DENBY HAS a particular tone of complex innocence and directness. In his essays and reviews about dance and ballet, which have been collected in Dance Writings, he is both charming and unexpectedly invigorating. Denby often writes a kind of sentence in which the words do not coincide immediately with the larger meaning; you think you know where he is going in a sentence, but his meaning is somehow stronger than the words themselves. Many of the pages in this hefty book are only mildly interesting; you read with little desire to mark a passage. Yet you develop a taste for Denby’s trim, spartan, unostentatiously silky style and his odd, stimulating phrases. You keep reading Dance Writings in order to encounter the next one.

Edwin Denby was a poet, reviewer, and essayist. His father was a diplomat, and Edwin was born in China. He went to Harvard. He did a variety of theater work in Germany in the twenties, and performed with the dancer Cläre Eckstein. By the mid-thirties he was writing about ballet and dance in New York. His busiest period as a dance reviewer was the forties, and his best pieces come from that time. He brought out two collections of dance writing: Looking at the Dance (1949) and Dancers, Buildings andPeople in the Streets (1965). He also brought out some volumes of poetry and a novel. Denby took his life in 1983, at the age of eighty. He was a slim and nicely proportioned man with an old, faraway look in his eyes. In appearance, he suggested characters from Shakespeare. One felt, This is Hamlet in his later years, with a bit of a jester and a courtier thrown in.

Virtually all of Denby’s work on ballet and dance, including pieces he did not publish, has been brought together in Dance Writings. It is an unusually attractive large paperback with informative essays by the editors, Robert Cornfield and William MacKay. The work reproduced on the cover is a black-and-tan Man Ray picture, Silhouette (1916), of stylized dancers. It is a modern—and a sweet and inviting—version of a Greek vase painting, and it is a good choice for Denby, because he makes a classical, formalist aesthetic sweet and inviting too. The large story he tells is about, as he puts it, the “deprovincialization” of American ballet and dance. Denby wants to show how America’s contribution to a world-class dance art is a certain stimulating blankness, emptiness, optimism, sense of space. But he lays down no rules; he doesn’t say that a significant dance art ought to look like this and not that. He leaves you with a gently liberating sense that an art of high style can appear in any shape or form.

Denby uses the biggest, most obvious and hackneyed words of praise over and over. Ballets, music, sets, and performers are “interesting,” “very beautiful,” “extremely brilliant,” “pleasing,” “very nice,” “pleasant,” “happy.” A work is “sincere.” The audience “sincerely” feels a ballerina’s art. Denby isn’t ironic. He admires these public words. He can sound as if he’s parodying the oh-so-polite gentleman reviewer. His politeness and old-fashioned courteousness and his appreciation of good manners and properness ought to make him seem musty. But he is, rather, driving. His words leave us with a sensation of being energized and thrust forward (when he admires a piece or a performer), or of being robbed, or pulled back (when he describes someone or a piece that doesn’t succeed).

For someone whose knowledge of and appreciation for dance is small and who has been drawn to Denby out of an interest in his considerable reputation and a love for criticism in itself, reading him produces the same experience as ballet or dance. A typical Denby piece is gleaming, avid, smiling, always “up.” The aggressive part of Denby is the way he refuses to be conventionally probing. His tone is one of resolve. It is there in any single sentence. It is like the attitude of goodness, lovingness, and appreciativeness that a child wishes to adopt toward his parents and the world after he has done something for which he feels embarrassment or even shame (and that probably no one knows about except himself).

In Arlene Croce’s dance criticism the word rhythms are dancelike too, but different; her rhythms are sensuous, slowly swirling, occasionally labyrinthine and hard to follow. Croce and Denby complement each other. She writes, in a sense, as the star and the love object of a ballet; she registers things that happen to her as she moves through space. She is the passive center of the story. Denby writes, as it were, as the darting, efficient, and faceless male who keeps attending to the woman who is the center of the story.

In his introduction to an earlier Denby book, Frank O’Hara compared Denby to Lamb and Hazlitt. (O’Hara’s introduction is reprinted in Dance Writings.) Denby is not another Hazlitt. Hazlitt is impatient, reckless, vehement, passionate. There is a connection, though, between Denby and Lamb; they write with a similar temperamental distaste for the self-important man and gesture. There is a similar underlying sense of forlorn isolation in them, and they want to make us more aware of the group act—they like situations where one ego is not lording it and there is a friendly concert of voices. Denby might also be compared to the Swiss writer Robert Walser, whose most compelling work (of the small amount of his work that has been translated into English) is the novel Jakob von Gunten. Jakob tells his own story. It’s about a school for butlers that he attends in Germany in the years before the First World War. He’s a bit of a bad boy, but he genuinely wants to be a good servant, to be “small” and anonymous. We don’t always know how to take what he says, but he isn’t simply a charmer or a pipsqueak or a little saint. He has a weird and powerful and somewhat sad voice.

DENBY’S EARLY WORK was for the bimonthly magazine Modern Music. Then, from the fall of 1942 to the fall of 1945, he wrote extensively for the New York Herald Tribune. There are more than two hundred pages here from those Trib days. He must have worked like a dog.

Denby clearly loved the idea of writing for a big daily, and his bosses must have been surprised and pleased by his clarity, good humor, and stamina. Reading these reviews, you can see why his writing career didn’t go on forever; these few years of hard work compress what for most critics would be a lifetime of work. (Denby says, in another place, that the war years saw a flowering of ballet and dance in New York.) He’s always the modest reporter first. He doesn’t show off his learning. In an indirect way, though, he has a large, husbanding voice. He’s educating the American public on how to look at and appreciate ballet, dance, and movement in general. There’s something quietly great about the way he goes out and gently scrutinizes ballroom dancers, ice skaters, the Rockettes, ballet dancers at the opera, modern dance, the role of management, individual stars, performers at the circus, and serious contemporary ballet.

Denby’s descriptions have a wonderful period flavor. They bring back the tone of America in the forties. I mean the sweet, innocent, corny America of the war years—the image of boys and girls at a soda fountain.

Denby has to be read carefully; he slips in observations that other writers would clear a lot of space for. He says that a flamenco dancer “always seems to have more expressiveness than he needs for a gesture, a kind of reserve of it. . . .” Talking about tap dancing, he says that “in taps you see and hear two different rhythms, both of them in the same strict musical meter. In ballet you often look at a free meter and listen to a strict one.” A gypsy dancer, Denby notes, can “go into or come out of a dance without embarrassment.”

About Martha Graham, whom he greatly admires, Denby says, “You watch her as intently as if you were perturbed.”Her Punch and the Judy has “the general air of middle-class self-importance and nervous activity.”George Balanchine’s Mozartiana is “as full of personal life as an ancient town on the Mediterranean on a holiday morning in the bright sun.” Sonja Henie, the ice skater, “doesn’t make her numbers express any more interesting emotion than ease.” He says that her skaters “leap correctly and oddly, they skate clumsily and delicately, and you see the point of the difference.”

Here is Denbv on Frederick Ashton, in 1939: “He derives too, it seems to me, from the kind of awkward and inspired dancing that young people do when they come back from their first thrilling ballet evening and dance the whole ballet they have seen in their own room in a kind of trance. The steps do not look like school steps (though they are as a matter of fact correct); they are like discoveries, like something you do not know you can do, with the deceptive air of being incorrect and accidental that romantic poetry has.”

About stage decor, Denby says something childlike, direct, unarguable, and startling. “The reason easel painters are better designers for ballet than anyone else,” he writes, “is that they are the only craftsmen professionally concerned with what keeps pictures alive for years on end. When they know their trade they make pictures that hold people’s interest for hundreds of years, so making one that will be interesting to look at for twenty minutes is comparatively easy for them.”

I think that Denby’s greatest sentence is this: “It seems to me that Offenbach’s humor, like Mozart’s, is poised on the suggestion that false love and true love are not as different as one might wish; they are both of them really tender.” Denby’s perception seems like the sort that a dance writer more than another kind of critic would have, because dance often strikes us as the most unreal art. Denby himself says that dance is the most unreal art. His sentence presents the formalist’s creed in a novel way. You have to agree with this point or disagree with it. You may find yourself more willing to accept it than you thought you would be.

OVER THE YEARS Denby’s writing lost its edge. His later work will be of interest primarily to dance lovers. From the early fifties until the mid-sixties, when he more or less stopped writing about dance altogether, Denby wanted primarily to record his impressions of Balanchine’s development. A long section on this choreographer in Dance Writings is relatively tedious and a letdown. As Denby sees him, Balanchine embodies the ideas and ideals about dance and human behavior that Denby most believes in. Describing Balanchine’s art, Denby might be describing his own values and his own writing style. Balanchine is the hero of the story that Denby tells in his reviews as a whole. Balanchine is the happy, brilliant, solidly professional, airy, and intuitive genius and courtier that Denby’s ideas lead toward.

In articles and notes on Balanchine up through the early fifties, Denby is radiant, too. Balanchine’s ballet Cotillon, Denby wrote in 1941 (to take one of many standout passages),

profoundly affected the imagination of the young people of my generation. It expressed in a curiously fugitive and juvenile movement the intimacy, the desolation, the heart’s tenderness and savagery, which gave a brilliant unevenness to our beautifully mannered charm. The thirties had not only a kind of Biedermeier parochialism, they had also insight into the eternity of a moment of grace. We are all out of them now, and it is strange to see now that what we then believed is still as true and absorbing in itself as any subsequent discovery.

The last sentence is Denby at his best; you expect that he’ll glide home in a minor key, but instead he delivers a flip that makes you see a number of things differently.

There are solid perceptions and beautiful descriptions here and there in Denby’s work from the fifties and sixties. There’s a serene piece on how to look at Kabuki theater that you may want to reread as soon as you have read it. But Denby in general seems depleted, grayed. He gives us too much plain, straightforward description of stage action.

As Denby aged, he seemed to want to take his thoughts about dance and movement into a wider terrain. He writes about stage movement and informal movement—a girl walking in a street, a dog bounding in a field. These later pieces have a philosophic, by-thefireside tone. One feels he’s taking dance criticism to some wonderful, fully ripened realm. Denby’s “big” pieces ought to be the fulfillment of his criticism. But this writing is similar to Balanchine’s later art—that is, the Balanchine that some of us first began to see in the early seventies. Denby is fluid, but what you are left with is a sort of restructuring of air. I think you have to be psyched up for the experience and that your relation to it is like that of an intellectual who is wrapped up in baseball; you’re as conscious of yourself as an appreciator as you are of the spectacle itself.

That Denby gradually lost his spindly power doesn’t dilute one’s feeling for his work in general. He belongs in the company of the many wonderful American critics of the time: Jarrell, Greenberg, Blackmur, Agee, and the rest. Denby’s voice is fainter and softer than theirs, but his subject doesn’t lend itself to the same discussion of ideas and textures. He doesn’t pretend that dance is another form of a Tolstoy novel. His criticism operates on the same set of rules as ballet or dance. His subject is a serious, thoughtless, youthful, perfect bodily expression. A great dance conveys a sense of unlimited and joyous physical power filtered through a great deal of unobvious training. Nijinsky’s Diary is one of the best places to absorb, through the momentum of the words themselves, the way a dancer can feel superhuman strength coursing through a beautifully balanced body. Denby very often conveys the same clean strength.