Kirstein’s Letters 3: Rivals and Idols
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

UNLIKE Kirstein’s relationship with Paul Cadmus, others did not always follow a pattern of reconciliation following a blow-up, occasionally because the other party refused, but more often because Kirstein would neither seek nor accept a renewal of friendship. Sometimes, too, there would be no dramatic explosion; Kirstein would simply lose interest in a person and allow a friendship to gradually lapse. Stephen Spender was one such case. Early on in their friendship, Kirstein had admired Spender’s poetry, but before long his opinion of him took a nosedive. By the end of the 1950s, Lincoln would write to Donald Ritchie: “I have no respect for Spender as poet or person”—and their contact soon after diminished to nothing.

Lincoln’s rejections of British poet Edith Sitwell, composer Marc Blitzstein, and writer Glenway Wescott were more caustic and severe. Of the three, he knew Sitwell the least well (though he was close to her brother Osbert and admired him as “daring and honest”). Kirstein and Edith Sitwell had met initially in the 1930s, through Tchelitchev, who was then very close to Edith. The two shared, in Kirstein’s view, operatic temperaments, “a venomous hatred of everyone, except a very few close leeches,” and a penchant for vitriolic gossip. But then Sitwell came to the disastrous conclusion that she was in love with Tchelitchev—though she, like everyone else in his circle, had often been exposed to his lyrical descriptions of the beauty of boys and was never in doubt about his intimate relationship with Charles Henri Ford. Sitwell’s persistence led to coloratura quarrels between the two that further excited her ardor; the two would remain in contact for some thirty years, but were most in harmony in their letters.

         In the early 1950s, Kirstein—possibly for Osbert Sitwell’s sake—encouraged Edith to do a series of dramatic readings in the U.S. In the event, she chose to read from Macbeth and chose Glenway Wescott to read opposite her. After attending a rehearsal, Kirstein found the combination breathtakingly awful: “Edith thinks Lady Macbeth [is]a sort of old maid aunt; Glenway thinks Macbeth is … Rabbi Stephen Wise [then a well-known figure]. She uses a microphone; he uses his, er, natural voice. The combination is not to be described. One’s averted eyes will never re-avert.”

Unlike Stephen Spender, whom Kirstein had initially held in high esteem and thought less and less of over time, Glenway Wescott never attained any altitude from which to fall. Kirstein first met Wescott and his partner Monroe Wheeler (for many years the head of publications at MoMA) in the early ’30s in Europe. He’d liked Wheeler from the start, found him “charming and delightful,” knowledgeable about ballet and shrewd in his judgments of people. Wescott was another matter entirely. He lived in France for much of the 1920s and ’30s, and at their very first meeting he and Lincoln “quarreled steadily for 2 hours” (so Lincoln reported to Mina, his sister), “he saying how important it was to live in France—for anybody and everybody—and I saying how necessary it was for a writer (like himself) to get back to his own country.”

Kirstein’s initial impression of both men held. Through the years that followed, he came increasingly to admire Wheeler’s character. He had, in Lincoln’s view, a “selfless” and “sunny” nature, “always sympathetic [to other people’s]crises, whether of money matters or personal gaffes.” When Tchelitchev at one point was desperate to find studio space, Wheeler created one for him in his own office. Another time, when the painter was, in Lincoln’s view, “certifiably mad, determined on devouring fame, with unappeasable hunger,” it was Wheeler who supplied the “surplus of patience and affection” (Kirstein’s words) that succeeded in calming him down.

As for Wescott, from the start Kirstein thought him “chi-chi,” a frivolous mediocrity, and never changed his mind—despite the fact that Westcott’s second novel, The Grandmothers (1926), had won the Harper Prize and been a bestseller. (His 1940 novel The Pilgrim Hawk still has its fans). During the life of Kirstein’s touring Ballet Caravan, Wescott came to him at one point with an idea for a ballet he called “The Dream of Audubon,” but Kirstein wouldn’t touch it, finding it “very old hat and full of nonsense.” Wescott had many well-placed friends and admirers, including Jean Cocteau, Marc Chagall, Somerset Maugham, Thornton Wilder, and Katherine Anne Porter, but Kirstein (and Hemingway too) remained a stubborn detractor. If anything, as the years went by, Wescott seems to have annoyed Kirstein more and more. Kirstein saw him as a lazy, whiney conniver, and he flat-out refused to see him socially for five years during the late ’40s and early ’50s, even in a group setting. The animus was apparently mutual. At one point Wescott wrote Kirstein a nasty letter telling him to “stop fooling around as a dilettante in the arts” and stick to raising money for the ballet—advice that amounted to the implicit verdict that money-grubbing, not art, was all that Kirstein was suited for (a view that must have echoed for him Balanchine’s attitude, as discussed in Part 1).

(En passant, Kirstein managed, usually with pinpoint accuracy, to disparage many a celebrity of the day. “The atmosphere of cut throat bitchery suits him,” Kirstein wrote Tchelitchev about the composer and critic Virgil Thomson. “He is the coldest-blooded of all.”)

The only other gay artist of the day about whom Kirstein felt as consistently negative as he did Wescott was the composer Marc Blitzstein—a judgment that stands out as one of the few exceptions to his generally shrewd assessment of people. In my biography of Kirstein, I make reference to his mixed feelings about Blitzstein, but it’s only with the new Ransom Center letters that the depth of his dislike becomes apparent—though the reasons for it remain somewhat mysterious. Some of the antagonism was politically based, relating to what Kirstein referred to as Blitzstein’s “Stalinist shenanigans.” The latter did belong to the Communist Party (CP), and in the late ’30s the Moscow purge trials were fresh in everyone’s memory.

In 1938, ten days before the play Danton’s Death—with music by Blitzstein—was due to open at the Mercury Theater, Blitzstein, “in a state of extreme agitation” (according to John Houseman, who headed up the Mercury), wanted to cancel the production, fearing that the critics would equate the play’s ruthless Robespierre with Stalin. According to Houseman’s 1972 autobiography Run-Through—and its accuracy has been persuasively questioned—Blitzstein insisted that a meeting be arranged with V. J. Jerome, a CP spokesman and editor of The Communist. Several meetings proved necessary before a compromise was reached: Some of the more obvious Robespierre–Stalin parallels were removed from the play and, in return, the CP agreed not to boycott it.

Kirstein furiously denounced the decision to allow the CP to act as censor, and for good measure he dismissed Blitzstein’s music as “lousy” and his influence on the production as “fatal.” When the mostly unfavorable reviews of the play appeared, Kirstein put the blame squarely on Blitzstein—on (as he wrote Mina) “Marc’s rigid Stalinist tactics plus self-indulgent hysteria. Marc is a Jewish fascist and robbed the play of any point or idea.” He bracketed Blitzstein with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein as “self-pitying” men of “the Jewish resentment school. … [E]ven success” did not cure them.

Mina—no blushing violet—refused to sit still for Kirstein’s attack on Blitzstein, of whom she was deeply fond, calling him an “irreplaceable friend.” Nor was she alone in defending him. Orson Welles—a man not easily pleased—had warm feelings toward Blitzstein throughout his life. “He brightens a room when he enters it,” Welles wrote at one point; “he is mannerly, widely educated, unaffectedly civilized, a man of natural authority and unstudied charm. If he sounds a little too good to be true, he is, almost, just that.” Some fifteen years later, after the Cold War had set in and HUAC had begun hunting down “un-American activities,” Blitzstein would be among those called to testify before the committee. Unlike Elia Kazan, Blitzstein bravely challenged HUAC’s right to interrogate him and refused to name names, which led to his indictment in 1951 under the Smith Act—and to four years (1954-1957) in prison. A few years later, in 1964, the 59-year-old Blitzstein was murdered by three sailors he’d picked up in a bar on the island of Martinique.

THANKS TO the extraordinary series of letters from Kirstein to Pavel Tchelitchev now available at the Ransom Center, we’re able for the first time to see in detail how extraordinarily generous and forgiving Kirstein could be to the people he cared deeply about. He first met Tchelitchev in the early 1930s and, in Kirstein’s words, they “raced into intimacy at a hundred miles an hour.” Kirstein saw from the first that Tchelitchev had a “mild, but clinging paranoia” leading him to turn the merest slight into an unforgivable act of treachery. Tchelitchev early on became reliant on astrology and numerology, reflecting, in Kirstein’s view, his need to remain on permanent guard against “malevolent forces” that lay everywhere in wait. Volatile, headstrong, overbearing, Tchelitchev saw himself (as Kirstein once put it) as “a modern magus,” a cosmological messenger privy to nothing less than the mathematics of time and space, a cabbalistic master of the universe.

Yet Kirstein stuck around, drawn by Tchelitchev’s high energy and intelligence, and his entrancing talk—along with a truckload of talent that Kirstein believed augured a major artistic career. In the coming years—indeed, until Tchelitchev’s death in 1957—Kirstein (who always took on too much) knocked himself out acting unofficially as both Tchelitchev’s agent and publisher, praising and promoting his work in every possible direction, publishing his drawings, writing articles extolling his “mastery,” setting up gallery shows, even publishing a full-length book on his work.

But it was not enough, in Tchelitchev’s view—not enough to satisfy his gigantic ego. He complained to Kirstein that the latter’s commentary showed an insufficient understanding of the profound metaphysical importance of his major paintings, Hide-and-Seek and Phenomena. For years Kirstein swallowed these complaints without bothering to contradict them. While he’s often portrayed as a person of volatile self-absorption, he was in fact that rare friend who went about quietly doing a multiplicity of favors and kindnesses, often for people who lacked his own considerable gifts—and neither sought nor expected gratitude.

Tchelitchev’s churlishness did produce at one point at least a muffled protest from Kirstein: “I am not pretentious enough to say that I understand Boehme or Paracelsus. I said I had read them, and I had no comparative reading material upon which to base a cosmology for a study of Phenomena.” That mini-storm passed over, but a few years later a mutual friend repeated to Kirstein comments that Tchelitchev had publicly made about how “bored” he’d become with Kirstein’s “impossible” posturing in regard to the precarious situation of the New York City Ballet—even though it had just had a triumphant engagement at Covent Garden. The unjust remarks hurt Kirstein deeply. In truth, for the upcoming season the company couldn’t even afford new costumes, and the repertory had to be dictated by what already existed in wardrobe. Tchelitchev lacked the grace even to add a compliment about Kirstein’s remarkable accomplishment in making ballet a viable and reputable enterprise in the U.S.

Only once before had Kirstein let Tchelitchev know that his “megalomania every so often is a hard cross for even your most devoted friends to bear … you forget that other people besides yourself … need reassurance and encouragement, too; oh well, it’s of no importance.” But it was, and this time, with Tchelitchev badmouthing him to friends, Kirstein expressed his resentment in a letter—though, remarkably, in rather gentle terms. He reminded Tchelitchev that he “never falters” in admiration for his art, nor in doing “what I can to further” it. Perhaps, he poignantly added, “you will even admit that I have feelings just like you, and they can be hurt, just like yours.” And he went on: “You are an expert in USE. … USE is a very ugly word, and while we all need each other, it seems to me a pity that it’s reduced to that level.” He then retreated to the philosophical: “We all pay for our preoccupations in one way or another; yours is paid by your monastic isolation and your separation from people, and I know this [is]necessary, but in your remoteness and clarity, think of those who are condemned to be in the middle of a howling mob [a ballet company]and who continue their work in getting ephemeral things done not exactly out of delight.”

The two managed to avoid an explicit break. Kirstein even wrote the catalogue for Tchelitchev’s 1951 show, and Tchelitchev made Kirstein (not his longtime companion Charles Henri Ford) the executor of his estate. Yet as Kirstein wrote to Tchelitchev: “the time has long past when you and I could talk to one another,” and within a year or so even their correspondence petered out. On occasion, when Tchelitchev was low on funds, he would still appeal to Kirstein for help; a check was always sent. At least once, when Kirstein was “very close to a complete breakdown,” a mutual friend appealed to Tchelitchev to invite his former friend to come and stay with him in Italy; he refused.

Only two people come to mind who invariably met Kirstein’s high standards, who entirely escaped his pungent wit, and captured his admiration without qualification: E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden. He had briefly met Forster via Mina’s Bloomsbury connections way back in the 1920s. After a more substantive meeting a few years later, he pronounced both Forster and his longtime companion, the married policeman Bob Buckingham, “charming.” (As Kirstein campily wrote to Mina: “I’m not tired of policemen and he was adorable.”) Although Kirstein and Forster saw each other infrequently thereafter, when they did, Kirstein was always smitten with the author’s shy sweetness and his unassuming wisdom. He was, Kirstein pronounced, an “angel.”

One of Forster’s visits to the U.S. coincided with one of Kirstein’s bouts of acute depression, from which he was just emerging. Forster had had his own experience with depression, and, in a letter to Kirstein after seeing him, he cautioned against “frenzied activity,” adding “you are not well enough … for my taste and hopes. … You were so overtired and accused yourself of things that did not exist.” Kirstein had also told Forster that in his despair he’d found himself drawn to Catholicism, a temptation Forster discouraged. Catholicism, Forster told him, isn’t “for those who do not grow up in it … its assertion that it has worked, that it is a success, ought to be rejected in the realm of the spirit.”

But if Kirstein thought of anyone as a “hero” (as opposed to an “angel”), it was W. H. Auden. Of all his many friendships, none would prove more satisfying and durable than his connection with Auden. Before he’d ever met him, Kirstein had read “The Orators” and considered it the greatest poem in English since Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” He later became certain that Auden was “the greatest English poet of our time”—and also something of a secular saint. (He referred to Auden’s longtime companion, the volatile Chester Kallman, as “a sort of hair-shirt that Auden put up with as penance for his ‘sins.’”)

One episode in particular epitomized for Kirstein Auden’s remarkable human qualities. In 1949 Kirstein became smitten with one of the company’s principal dancers, “Herbie” Bliss, and while Kirstein (unlike Balanchine) rarely became personally involved with members of the ballet company, he felt that he genuinely loved Herbie, and the two men began an affair. Temperamentally, though, Bliss was unstable to the point that Kirstein feared he was a potential suicide. Once, when Herbie disappeared, not even showing up for rehearsals, Kirstein became frantic and called in the police. Herbie did finally turn up, but with “no explanation.” At another, particularly frightening point, Herbie became so distraught that Kirstein called on Auden for his help. Auden spent three hours with Herbie, telling him (so Kirstein reported) “many useful things.” “Auden is wonderful,” he added, “so kind, sweet and gentle.” But within less than two years, the affair with Herbie was over. “I never see Herbie,” he wrote Tchelitchev in June 1951; “he is muted, decent, accurate, and not very interesting.” Kirstein could have been referring either to Herbie’s dancing—the London critics had generally found him lacking in “personality”—or to the manner he had adopted towards Kirstein. Or both.

When Auden died in 1973 at age 66, Kirstein told a friend that ever since their meeting in 1937, Auden had been “the strongest influence in my life.” He felt certain that “the glory of [Auden’s] … verse and the wisdom of his presence” would survive. “He was a magician who continually rehabilitated the commonplace. He undercut pomposity by his common-sense and no-nonsense candor.”

Kirstein himself would live on until 1996, leaving behind a different sort of legacy, a compound of turbulent suffering, profound integrity, and immense achievement. No saint was he, secular or otherwise, but a human being, tormented, gifted, and unaccountably brave.

Martin Duberman’s latest book is a historical novel, Jews Queers Germans, which is reviewed in this issue.