Life is tough for a dance critic. Sitting in the dark, taking notes
without looking down for fear of missing a gesture, she must have sharp
eyes, a greedy memory, and everlasting patience. Once at home, she has
to perform a kind of reverse alchemy, rendering the delicate, the
ineffable, and the fleeting into regular old words. And, because
colleges didn’t start teaching dance history until recently, most are
self-made scholars.
But if the rigors of the profession produce writers like Joan
Acocella, we should all sign up. The powerhouse dance critic for the
New Yorker can see to the core of the most opaque subjects.
She makes seeing look easy.
Acocella is also an enthusiast—perhaps another result of being
a critic for an embattled art form—and writes as lustily about
life as she does about art. Twenty-Eight Artists discusses the
work of Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Vaslav Nijinsky, but also
the amours of Simone de Beauvoir (few and tragic), the vices of Frank
O’Hara (lots of booze and three packs a day), and the way M. F. K.
Fisher’s life unexpectedly fused courage and patience with sensuality:
“I guess we should pause for a minute over the fact that she became a
writer once she had become a sexual being. But a minute is enough…
The notable thing is not that sex opened her up but that the
complications and disasters that followed did not close her down
again.” Reading through Twenty-Eight Artists is like taking a
survey course on Western culture in the 20th century—while
sitting on a blanket, sipping champagne on a summer day.
The collection is also unexpectedly encouraging. Reading 30 essays
about geniuses can make a person feel small and dumb but, as Acocella
says in her introduction: “What allows genius to flower is not
neurosis, but its opposite, ‘ego strength,’ meaning (among other
things) ordinary, Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all
the ability to survive disappointment.” Tenacity, eh? There’s hope for
us all.
