Prince of the City.(Lincoln Kirstein)(Biography)

"A world wholly, profoundly dedicated to the realization of the unreal": this was the Bayreuth Festival in 1924, as it impressed a seventeen-year-old aspiring artist named Lincoln Kirstein. It was the Wagner shrine's first opera season since the war had forced it to close, a decade earlier; Kirstein's mother, Rose, had eagerly bought tickets for herself and her two sons, and they set out from Boston for a summer of cultural touring. The younger of the boys, George, found his mother's interests dull; but Lincoln was in his element--he was discovering that he had an element--his passion for music and theatre indulged as never before. The family's arrival in Bayreuth, however, was disturbing: they were turned away from their hotel, and sent to lodge instead with a local "co-religionist"; public anti-Semitism came as a shock, no matter how accustomed they were to the private kind. Still, even this ordeal could not efface Lincoln's pleasure in the old, outmoded opera productions, which seemed to reflect the composer's exact wishes, and convinced the young aesthete that such devotional work was "the aim of my life." Although brute reality won out when, at the conclusion of "Die Meistersinger," the crowd rose and, stirred to a patriotic fury, roared out "Deutschland Uber Alles," this demonstration appears only to have confirmed Kirstein's dedication to the construction of a full-scale unreal world--magic, music, color, genius--far superior to the world in which he lived.

But what sort of unreality would it be? He had so many choices, so many talents and interests. Although Kirstein was a terrible student, and had all but flunked out of a couple of prep schools, he had a good hand for drawing and a strong desire to paint. ("I know I must be a painter first of all," he pledged in 1927, after a visit to the Prado.) But he was also "deeply addicted" to ballet, and he had literary ambitions that were nearly as pressing: while a freshman at Harvard--he was admitted on his third attempt--he started a magazine, Hound & Horn, that drew support from Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and he went on to write criticism, poetry, at least one "moral tragedy," and a novel. In his junior year, he helped start the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, which was a forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art, where he signed on as an adviser in 1930, when he was not quite twenty-three. Three years later, he brought the young Russian choreographer George Balanchine to America, and together, in due course, they founded both the School of American Ballet and its attendant company, New York City Ballet. In the nineteen-fifties, he played an important role in the American Shakespeare Festival. And at one time or another he paid the bills for all of these magnificently unreal (and extremely expensive) worlds. Kirstein was never rich enough simply to write the checks himself, however, and education--teaching people who were rich enough, while also preparing future members of a newly enlightened American audience--was among the most essential of his lifelong tasks. His bibliography amounts to hundreds of works on painting, photography, literature, drama, film, and dance. The sheer breadth of Kirstein's endeavor--so unthinkable in the present age of specialization--has made him appear to many people to be the last historical example of the Renaissance man.

Martin Duberman's new biography, "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" (Knopf; $37.50), is a necessarily intrepid work. It is the first book entirely devoted to this prodigious life and career--Kirstein died in 1996, at eighty-eight--and Duberman's mission has been made especially daunting by the quantity of material that Kirstein left behind (his extensive diaries begin in summer camp), as well as by Kirstein's tendency, in his autobiographical work, to obfuscate, exaggerate, and lie. (Kirstein's official memoir, "Mosaic," takes his story to 1933; its odd deceptions extend to an anonymous magazine photograph that Kirstein represents as an old love.) The happy news is that Duberman has proved equal to the difficulties both of the job and of the highly outspoken, often irascible man. He dispels the fog of myth that has spread around Kirstein's early years; he gleans hard facts from tricks and poses; he stands up to Kirstein's prejudices and carefully explicates his most gleefully outrageous opinions--Martha Graham's dancing is "a cross between shitting and belching," Kirstein fumed in his diary in 1931; in print he was hardly kinder, if less vulgar--in a way that informs us broadly about the subject as well as about the workings of Kirstein's mind and psyche. (Kirstein's grudging respect for Graham as a true American primitive--he more than once compared her work to Shaker furniture--eventually grew to the point that he invited her to teach at the School of American Ballet.) Like all good biographers, Duberman is part detective and part judge, but the most appealing aspect of his book, if on occasion the most problematic, is that he seems to love his subject more than Kirstein ever loved himself.

Even the physical aspect of the man was intimidating. Six feet three, with a somewhat hulking sense of being heavy on his feet, Kirstein was for many years a familiar presence in New York, particularly at New York City Ballet, where his appearance was almost as iconic as that of the dancers onstage: clad in a uniformlike black suit, his head close cropped and his jaw jutting out, he ...