A slavishly detailed but lightsomely written life of the British
ballet-maker. Kavanagh, London editor of the New Yorker, explains
in an afterword that Ashton alternately authorized and forbade her
project, chagrined to be reminded by her of his mortality. "It's
the finality of it - knowing you're grabbing as much out of me as
you can before I die," he once complained. And she has grabbed it.
The intelligence and novelistic command of this book about the man
who helped to invent modern English ballet is equaled only by the
depth of Kavanagh's research. Her enviable ease and glamorous
settings range from Ashton's first glimpse, as a boy in Lima, Peru,
of Anna Pavlova, to his apprenticeship with Bronislava Nijinska in
Paris in the '20s, to his American stints and sundry European
wanderings, and his irrepressibly multiple sexual selves. We're
treated to the chronicle of Ashton's dances (Les Patineurs, A
Wedding Bouquet, Monotones, et al.) as he worked with Marie Rambert
of the Ballet Club and Ninette de Valois of the Vic-Wells Ballet
(later the Royal Ballet, which he eventually directed). And we're
regaled with his legendary late-night wit. Kavanagh reports high
times in the '30s: "Spotting a minor playwright performing fellatio
on a major playwright in a comer of a typical theatrical party,
Ashton quipped to Bunny Roger, 'Look! There's K - trying to suck
some talent out of E - .' "Her secondary characters alone seem
reason enough to look for this life someday in a movie theater:
Margot Fonteyn, Maynard Keynes, Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev,
Gertrude Stein, Rudolf Nureyev, and the Queen Mother. But in all
the crush of this crowd, she also singles out Ashton for memorable,
consistent portraiture. Gamin, crank, romantic, he "was not a happy
man," she says. "Most of his adulthood was spent half-consciously
seeking unrequited emotional situations." Kavanagh explores them
vividly. Both Ashton's wiles and his ballets make this irresistible
reading. (Kirkus Reviews)
Sir Frederick Ashton, Britain's greatest choreographer, was a major
figure on the cultural landscape of the twentieth century and his
influence extended far beyond the world of dance. Julie Kavanagh
traces Ashton's progress with a keen and sympathetic sense of both
the man and his milieu. The drama of his professional and private
life - among his close associates were Constant Lambert, Benjamin
Britten, W. B. Yeats, the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton - is skilfully
interwoven with vivid descriptions of the ballets themselves. 'Not
only the best biography of a ballet figure but, far more important,
a Proustian recollection of that glamorous near-mythical time, the
first half of our now setting century.' Gore Vidal
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