Saturday

This afternoon and evening, a double-bill of Paul Taylor programs; six ballets in one day. Four of which we have seen before, one of which is having its first New York season.

As a result: an irregular weekend. No housekeeping today! I might have gotten up early, &c, but we did not get up early, and when I was finished with the Times I plowed right back into Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor’s penultimate novel. We know the story, or the part of the story that surived adaptation, from the film of the same name, with Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend. The book, as you might imagine, is darker, less whimsical. Well, it has more to say about getting old, for one thing; and, for another, the young man in the case, Ludovic Myer, is bound to appear more attractive if you’re not privy to his thoughts.

Last night, we watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which has just come out on DVD. Now that I didn’t have to try to follow the story, as I did in the theatre, finding the entire subject of Cold War espionage both tedious and regrettable, I could focus on how well-made the film is. Gary Oldman is very good.

What stuck in my mind afterward was the “aesthetic” argument for supporting the Soviets that is advanced by the traitor at the end. It was an argument launched by actual defectors in the Fifties — the West was decadent, &c; the future belonged to socialism, &c. Talking through my hat, connecting bits and pieces of possibly erroneous memory, I would say that, on the whole, the men making this argument came from Tory backgrounds, which was why the “aesthetic” frame was so much more appealing than a political one would have been. What the defectors shared with many conservative but loyal Britons was a visceral loathing for the Americans.

I thought of all the reasons for this loathing, and that kept me busy for quite a while. The only one that I want to mention now is the matter of language, which, as I get older, I see with sympathy for the English. Their language is not spoken in my country — not widely. What almost all Americans, even educated ones, who can do better on occasion, speak, for daily currency, is a dialect of Low German that I would call the International Language of High School. It must be unbearably grating to hear familiar words tumble out in foreign expressions, mispronounced and strung together without rhythm or art. I feel lucky not to be English myself for just this reason.

Sunday

This season, our fourth, we saw nine ballets (eight different ones) by Paul Taylor, and we’re not as mystified by the immense pleasure of watching his dances as we used to be. For one thing, we understand the dancing much better than we did. We have learned to expect a seamlessness in the choreography, an endless onrollong of connections and disconnections that has neither beginning nor, for the most part, end. We are familiar with Taylor’s vocabulary of classical adaptation — he seems to call for every classical move except, pointedly, dancing on point — and Broadway roughhouse. We know that, as Alistair Macaulay put it in the Times, Taylor “never just follows a score; he seems to keep resisting it.”

We also know the dancers. We recognize them immediately. This is another curious aspect of Taylor’s choreography: he calls for the kind of coordination among his dancers that we associate with the classical corps de ballet, but what he does not call for is the submersion of individual identity that goes with it. His dancers are rather heterogeneous, physically — tall, short, stocky, lithe — and their virtues as dancers differ, too. Michael Trusnovec, the senior member of the company and its polestar (Mr Trusnovec is also the company’s assistant dancing master), exhibits, paradoxically, the self-containment of enormous power, and he never appears to make so much as an extraneous blink of the eyes. But for passion and longing, I look to James Samson, who is not the virtuoso that Mr Trusnovec is but who embodies a grave drramatic agony at rest that never fails to become urgent whenever he moves. Robert Kleinendorst would be the jock of the troupe if he had only half of his brain; it takes a certain genius to foreground the athletic rigor of what’s going on onstage without sacrificing the aesthetic. Without making the dancing look effortful, he makes it look hard, and yet at the same time ecstatic: What a life, his body seems to be crying, to spend it running and jumping about the stage in front of all these lovely people! And then there is Michael Novak, the new kid on the block. He reminds me that, when we started going to Paul Taylor dances, Laura Halzack was the new kid on the block, and look what’s become of her!

***

We are still a bit under the weather overall. My eye hasn’t entirely cleared up, so that risking re-infecting Will (if indeed he’s the source) would be a possibility were we to spend time together. As for Kathleen, she had a very big week career-wise, joining an important advisory council to fill a seat that was created for her; a day of training was followed by a dinner and then, on the morrow, a board meeting: two days on a very steep learning curve (although the oddest part of it all, Kathleen says, was being to consider issues without respect to an actual client’s needs). I won’t bore you with the job description; if you’ve any real interest in the field, you’ll have other ways of finding out about it. The upshot is that we’re home today, all day. It’s not a nice day for going on; I’ve actually got the heat on in the bedroom. I will probably take care of the housekeeping that yesterday’s treats precluded.

Just before breakfast, I finished reading Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and immediately picked up A Game of Hide and Seek, also by Elizabeth Taylor. I expect that it’s going to be the saddest of the four novels that I’ll have read when I’m finished. I rather wish that I had picked up A View of the Harbor or Taylor’s last novel, Blaming, instead, but I’ll get to them soon enough. So far, I haven’t any sense of anything acute that distinguishes Taylor from other novelists; she’s hardly alone in writing clean, modest, mildly ironic prose, but I do sense, perhaps because I’ve grown up a bit myself, the presence of the animal behind the English manner of her characters. I wrote “beneath” at first, but that’s exactly wrong; this is not a matter of deeper, “lower” natures. What I mean is that Taylor creates human beings who know, unlike all other creatures, that they are going to die.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2012 at 12:58 pm.