41. Sacrifice: Dreyer's Gertrud and James's The Bostonians reviewed by Pippa Hammet
I have been in conference with Florian by phone during these weeks of the pandemic lockdown. He holds that at this time the only worthwhile “new” dance production would result from a return to the older classical tradition of the ballet before the current obsession with novelty, innovation, and socio-political engagement at our major companies. (As a balletomane, Florian is a certified Old Believer.) In other words, the only truly avant-garde dance forum imaginable would now be a company called simply The Ballet, promoting distinctively – what with pervading Euro, Russo, and downtown influences -- a form and a style sadly missing in contemporary new works on our stages. “Retro” becomes the only answer to the questionable state we are in.
Florian suggests we rename the revived Louise Ebersdorf company simply “The Ballet” to indicate a presumptive return to basics. That way, when people say they are “going to the ballet” on an evening, they inevitably would refer to Louise’s revived company, The Ballet, and provide automatic word-of-mouth. The sacrifice for the new enterprise, of course, would be conscious non-participation in the Innovation Olympics that most ballet ensembles around the earth are waging with endless inept, antithetical additions to the international repertory. In that sense, The Ballet would be a truly unique artistic enterprise as well as the way forward.
Florian wants a ballet ensemble that is not based on the “mixed-repertory museum” model found everywhere today. He envisions a company where dance values are explored through a really strong classical foundation in choreographic method as well as performance training, promoted in the work of one or two real dance-making talents who respect the inheritance from those Old Believers -- Petipa, Ashton, and Balanchine. Out with a claimed “versatility”; in with a Deep Classical Aesthetic. Florian is certain that this is the way that ballet always develops as an art form: concentration on renewal from an engagement with the profound tradition of the art. (There may be no Deep State, but there can be a Deep Ballet!) He is aware, as I am, that we would have to convince Louise to sacrifice the nominal reference to herself. No more Ebersdorf Ballet. Just “The Ballet” for the future. The Louise Theater, on the other hand, would continue its tribute to its only begetter.
There is a practical sense, I think, in which Florian is on the money. No large ballet company currently wants to rearrange its approach to its core rep around a strong new classical choreographic style, which is what a classically-based talent would always require and impose. Such an individual demand would mean retraining an existent company’s dancers from the ground up. Real choreographic talent with a classical bias would make fundamental demands and would be identified as an ensemble enemy to imagined stylistic stability. Large companies are expensive and always demand a version of stability even when management is otherwise directionless in its vision.
No wonder NYCB and ABT have turned in their hysteria to the works of many visiting foreign and downtown dance-makers. Such temporary imports are no real threat to their repertory pasts or to stylistic idioms (or bases) that are in place. And such dance-makers will usually not be asked to stick around for long once they gesture toward something “new”. After all, such independents can always organize dance companies of their own, like Twyla Tharp. What a state we are in: really strong creativity having to be brought into the field through the back door! The mania for stylistic eclecticism and the embrace of superficial expediencies stand in opposition to the classical imperatives which have always sustained ballet as a serious dance aesthetic and which point the way forward now.
It’s a Catch-22 quandary for the big ensembles. Don’t have a plausible new redefinition out of the classical tradition, and at best you condemn new work to weak pastiche (the Ratmansky rep fate at ABT). Turn your company into a haven for outliers and identity-politicians, and you cease being a ballet company in any serious stylistic sense (see NYCB’s demi-caractère Justin Peck, et al.). But if the two large U.S. companies continue down their current “creative” road, you might as well rename them New York City Contemporary Dance Company and American Modern Dance Theatre. Do we really want the David Koch house to become the Uptown Joyce Theater? At the moment, the Trocks have more to do with our ballet inheritance than the novelties at either NYCB or ABT. Outlier and resident choreographers may not supplant the core ballet repertory, but they weaken it by demanding rehearsal time from dancers otherwise engaged in something authentic from their tradition. In Florian’s eyes, the regimes of Baryshnikov and Martins as artistic directors opened the gates to choreographic barbarians.
Florian would present an alternative to this present situation: a smaller ensemble perhaps, but perfectly formed. I’ll have to hint at this to Louise. I’m not sure I can spring it all on her at once. In the meantime, I’ve finished Henry James’s The Bostonians, at the recommendation of Liane Beach. I can see why she is interested in it as an eventual source for a ballet narrative or inspiration for some type of “abstract” gloss: the narrative has two ballerina roles, one probably ideal for Isabella Belladonna. Here is my report on The Bostonians for our Ebersdorf Tower book club.
What a brilliant piece of novelistic construction! James takes three main characters – the wealthy Olive Chancellor, a nineteenth-century warrior for “the woman question”; her discovery, Verena Tarrant, an impoverished but eloquent young orator for women’s rights; and Basil Ransom, Olive’s impecunious Southern cousin with no patience for progressive dreams, especially women’s – and our author arranges a rich, expansive, tense battle over rights to Verena’s future, whether as a political oracle or as dedicated Southern wife. The main scene is Boston, but James shifts back and forth between that city and New York, with a side trip to a backwater New England coastal town. James sets up dramatic parallel scenes that reveal characters through contrasting hopes and dreams. The interviews and encounters are highly theatrical in their way.
For example, there is a tour of young Harvard that Verena conducts for a visiting Basil’s education, and during it the reader begins to see just how infatuated Basil is and how Verena may be intrigued despite herself. This scene is paralleled with the young man’s later guided tour of Central Park in New York City for Varena, an afternoon which he uses to separate her briefly from his rival, Olive, who has informally adopted the girl as her ward and close accomplice in asserting feminist rights to the general public. It is during the couple’s visit to the Park that we realize how Varena is both frightened of Basil and yet magnetized. She may initially evade him, but he has made his impression, despite his ultra-conservative ideas. James conveys these tensions through action and dialogue, without all that much authorial commentary. The fictional structure tells all.
When Varena demands Olive take her away from New York back to Boston, we also see that Olive uses a heavy emotional pressure on Verena, equivalent to Basil’s. Olive manages to arrange for Verena to avoid the plans that a New York socialite, Mrs. Burrage, has made to marry the girl to her son. Verena’s subsequent appeal to be rescued thus gives Olive two victories in one -- over the N.Y. matriarch and the Southern swain. But the seed has been planted for Basil to continue his courtship of Varena. Olive can believe that she has out-maneuvered all contenders for her favorite, at least for a time.
Some readers find the relation between Olive and Varena to have a Lesbic element, a subtle tone underneath Olive’s stated purpose to further the women’s “scheme of work” in tandem. If the tone is indeed there, the reader may see Olive as Varena’s seducer toward the establishment of a “Boston marriage”, which was the contemporary term used to describe two women who were partners in life. I can see suggestions of the tone in the one scene in Chapter 16 where Olive’s visit to Varena’s parents’ home ends with the two women escaping to a cold, starry night as they say goodnight to one another. There is a romantic charge in their farewells.
But for the most part, James emphasizes the Olive-Varena master-student relation, something like the described roles of teacher and student in James’s story “The Pupil”. In that narrative, a young American tutor finally gives up his bond with his touring student in Europe, partially because the boy’s vulgar parents exploit the teacher unmercifully. And because the tutor is not able to assume financial responsibility for his charge’s life away from the boy’s awful family. Olive, of course, is all readiness to assume responsibility for her prodigy beyond Varena’s unbearably vulgar parents.
In Chapter 39 of The Bostonians, a lengthy interior monologue by Olive conveys the artful power which she has wielded over her charge. And the reader by that point has come to see young Verena as the mostly passive object of Olive’s and Basil’s interests. Olive has rescued the girl. Basil now would rescue her from Olive. But James’s readers have noticed that Varena’s voice is not a creative one. We glean that her public “gift” before excited crowds is to recast cant opinions about the role of women in society, charmingly refreshing clichés. And the final comment from the narrator of the novel does not make the girl’s future as Mrs. Ransom sound promising. Varena is in tears as she takes her leave of her life with Olive, and we are told that “these were not the last that she was destined to shed.” Perhaps a further rescue operation will be needed in the future? And what of her abandoned teacher? Olive may have been unaware of the enchantment under which she has operated in her relation to her pupil.
James caps his triumph with two chapters that display the erotic intoxication that Basil finds himself driven to in rescuing his damsel-in-distress. Here is another spell, and James’s prose allows the reader to share it. The young man is the Southern chivalric hero in full-fig infatuation. James has a lot of fun with him as he fights his way through Brahmin brambles. Perhaps this is why the novel was not admired in Boston upon its serial publication. Locals did not cotton to parody of themselves. Parts of The Bostonians are Jamesian high comedy.
At certain points James uses diction that suggests the occult in describing the fascination that Olive and Basil have with Varena. In her interior monologue, Olive refers to Varena’s fix on Basil as an “atrocious spell”. In this way James makes clear his fears about two areas of common social interaction: that of power relations in intimate partnerships, and that of romantic-erotic ties that are largely delusional or exploitative. We sense strongly a skepticism in this author, doubts about human relations that could lead to the life of an anchorite for art. (James never married.) And James questions whether Olive’s sacrifice of her dreams for women’s rights and her education of her protégé were marked by an over-strictness. In another James short story, “The Marriages”, a young woman, Adela, scotches her father’s plans for a second, financially remunerative marriage following the death of his wife. The girl approaches the intended and falsely blackens her own father’s character, all in the service of remaining true to a memory of the dear departed mother and in scathing assessment of the wealthy bride-to-be as unworthy. The ploy perhaps reveals the accuser’s unconscious incestuous drives toward her begetter. At one point in her spell-casting, Adela is said to take “counsel of her uncompromising spirit”. Has Olive Chancellor been equivalently unbending?
Another example of an uncompromising female in my recent movie experience is the central character of Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1964 film, Gertrud, seen at the insistence of Master Raro on Criterion streaming. What is the sacrifice there? The central character Gertrud is a turn-of-the-century opera singer who gives up her career to marry an ambitious bureaucrat, Gustav Kanning. Approaching middle age, she now longs to leave him for an upcoming young composer, Erland Jansson. In addition, a famous poet, Gabriel Lidman, with whom Gertrud once had a youthful affair in Rome, is in town for official honors, and he demands that she run away with him. Gabriel once wrote an incriminating note to himself holding that a man’s work is always in conflict with a woman’s love. Gertrud discovered his jotting and ended their affair. The lauded poet now reveals to Gertrud that young Erland has publicly revealed his conquest of her at a recent carousel. As a result, Gertrud’s husband will be socially dishonored even as he accepts a government position as cabinet minister.
Gertrud learns that the wayward Erland refuses to devote himself to her alone. He wants his “freedom”, and in addition he has compromised a young woman who is pregnant with his child. Gertrud refuses to become a third party in a ménage à trois. Thus, all three men in her life, past and present, have disappointed our heroine. They approach her with trepidation. A fourth man, Axel, a psychiatrist friend, now offers her an opportunity to study psychology in Paris. She joins him. Decades later, Gertrud and Axel meet in her self-chosen final solitude, and she emphasizes that Love Is All in her life. That is her chosen motto. Everything else in life must be sacrificed before it.
The themes of the film are clear, and I did not find it to be slow and boring as many viewers have attested over the decades. The only stylistic tic that I found disorienting involved the eyelines of the actors, who regularly look away from one another during the many dialogue scenes. This is supposed to create a stylized, dreamlike, memory-film effect, but it almost gave me a headache. (Interesting how our assessment of actors’ eyes can cause orientation or its opposite.) Dreyer adapted his screenplay loosely from a 1906 social drama by Haljmar Söderberg. The black-and-white cinematography (including the minutely calculated camera movements) by Henning Bendtsen is exquisite. Dreyer is a formalist with filmic devices as basic as tracks and pans.
Let’s face it, men have been disappointing women in love for thousands of years, so Gertrud’s religion of amatory rites and retreat could not be more topical or universal. The question is whether Gertrud’s depicted social martyrdom makes the heroine insufferable finally both to her men and to Dreyer’s audience. She reminded me of James’s Olive Chancellor in this regard. Both women ultimately see sacrifice as part of the contract they draw up in the economy of their emotional lives. The one scene that confirms a certain rigidity in Gertrud’s character is her flashback memory of discovering Gabriel’s view of the gulf between the genders. The anger with which she furiously reacts says a great deal. Dreyer is eloquent with such touches. And his actors, but especially Nina Pens Rode as Gertrud, are beyond praise.
I have a distant memory of Dreyer’s 1924 silent movie Michael, a film about an artist-model gay relationship, which also deals with the power which teachers can command over students, here the practice of control by a Master Painter over his male protégé. As I recall, that movie deals with the theme of necessary sacrifice long in advance of Gertrud. I must ask our Sandy about Michael. He is deep into the choreography of his Joan the Maid dance for Cheryl, so I will have to find the right moment.
The dance highlight of the last weeks has been New York City Ballet’s internet streaming of Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante with Tiler Peck as lead ballerina. Talk about a portrait of a commanding female! Is there a connection between a Dreyer and a Balanchine? Sandy knows the work of both. I will ask him about this, too. And then I must approach Louise with Florian’s proposal. With trepidation.
P.H.
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