The dancer not the dance

Warwick Collins

PROLOGUE by Joan Brady Deutsch, £14.99, pp. 224 Jo. an Brady's novel Theory of War, pub- lished last year, astonished this reviewer with its virtuosity. It subsequently won first the Whitbread Novel prize and then the Whitbread Book of the Year prize.

Prologue again exemplifies, albeit in autobiographical form, the writer's formidable talents. Like Theory of War, the prose is remarkable for its economy and power, but the subject is a more intimate one. It lays bare the soul of a ballet dancer.

Brady herself was the daughter of a gift- ed lecturer in economics at Berkeley. He was of sufficiently independent mind to jeopardise his own future by refusing the American oath of allegiance which the fac- ulty felt necessary to prescribe those days. Subsequently isolated, passed over for pro- motion, he possessed dangerously volatile temperament which led to an attempt at suicide which destroyed his kidneys, and to a lingering and painful death. Brady's own independence owes something to him, though she seems to have escaped his dark- er rages.

The author's most characteristic effect, as in Theory of War, is a combination of clear observation and understatement. The disciplines and pains of the ballet-dancer's craft become apparent at an early stage.

In class one winter evening, a girl who was a particular friend fell with her leg bent at an uncompromising angle. The class froze, the music dwindled away, the pianist's haggard face appeared around the upraised cover of the grand, and the girl lay there on the floor like a beetle on its back, flailing her arms. While we watched, Harold examined her quickly. The girl rocked herself a little in Harold's arms, saying something, it was too faint for me to hear — over and over again in a singsong voice.

Only afterwards was it clear what the girl had been saying: 'She said she was sorry,' Harold said, then, shaking his head in a puzzled way. 'What could she have had in mind?'

At an early stage, Brady's friend Suki, a brilliant dancer herself, initiates her in those feelings towards rivals which are nec- essary to power the physical commitment. When Harold Christensen, her teacher, praises Suki lavishly, Brady wonders aloud at his motives. Suki explains:

'Oh Joanie, don't you understand anything?' I shook my head; she sighed and went on patiently. 'He just wants to make you jealous of me. He makes Eugenia jealous of Pam and Susan jealous of Eugenia and me jealous of Ginny Johnson and you — well, he tries to make you jealous of me.'

'What for?'

Oh really! To make you work harder, of course. Whatever else would be the point of it?'

As she learns the physical disciplines, so the requisite mental attitude also begins to assert itself:

Suki danced with the company as an appren- tice during the opera season: rehearsals and, later, performances in San Francisco kept her way from Anna Head's. She appeared some mornings with a trace of the black body paint she'd worn in Aida only the night before still showing under her fingernails: there were excited flutters among the school- girls, and the jealousy she approved and Harold fostered grew in me vigorously. When the company went to Los Angeles, Suki went with them, and I began to wonder then how remote were the possibilities that she, like my other friend, might lose a kneecap.

For those of us unversed in the deeper arts of the ballet, she confirms our admira- tion and worst fears. It is an occupation both lush with emotion and asseverated by discipline. Brady rose to become a dancer in the New York Ballet under Balanchine, at a time when it was perhaps the greatest ballet company of its era. The cat-like poise of the 'gifted' dancers, of which she was one, and their ferocity towards one anoth- er, are borne out in numerous passages. For the others, the lesser talents:

They had been fed on small-town promises and the praise of inadequately-trained teach- ers; the sound of muffled sobbing was almost constant in the dressing room throughout the weeks of summer session, and most of the year-round students dressed as quickly as they could after class to escape into the heavy, humid air of the city streets outside.

Often, in describing her collaborators, she begins with an unsparing and ruthless physical description, which suddenly lifts

into lyrical praise for virtuosity as dancers or teachers. The pyramid of pain, both physical and emotional, beneath apparently effortless adagios, pirouettes and pas-de- chat is carefully exposed. At the peak of its profession, ballet becomes like one of those Samurai schools, in which an entire life of discipline and suffering may be devoted to a single perfect sword-cut. Brady's own emotional life is relayed with the same dispassionate clarity. She fell in love with Dexter Masters, a writer on Time magazine, when she was three. He was the lover of her mother, a formidable and admirable woman who, even though she was married and devoted to her husband, regarded Dexter as a future 'husband of my old age'. With an extraordinary nerve, Brady, as a young dancer not yet 20, chose to visit the 50-year-old Dexter directly after the death of his wife, stayed behind at his apartment after the other guests had left, cooked a meal for him (although she had no idea about cooking, even of the layout of a kitchen) and became his lover, ruthess- ly pushing aside her mother's own claims. That terrible strike and counter-strike which is only possible between people who love one another continued. Her mother, at the point at which her daughter's career appeared about to blossom at the New York Ballet, struck at Brady's self-confi- dence in a particularly brutal attack, remorselessly listing her physical and psy- chological shortcomings, arguing that her temperament was unsuited to performance, and that she was certain to fail in her cho- sen profession. Brady lost her voice, was unable to coordinate her dance move- ments, and her debut role in Balanchine's Stars and Stripes was a miserable failure. Shortly afterwards, Brady decided to leave the New York Ballet Company, enrolled in Columbia University as a philosophy stu- dent, and severed her mother's final claims to Dexter Masters by marrying him at a registry office.

Brady's mother continued to nurse her ailing father, at the same time pursuing her own active career as a lobbyist for con- sumer rights. She died not long afterwards, in apparent perfect health, and in opti- mistic mood, while eating with friends at a restaurant. The nature of her mother's attack continued to haunt Brady, and for years afterwards she was subject to recur- rent nightmares about the circumstances in which had departed the New York Ballet.

Nearly two decades later, when Brady and Dexter were living in England, she decided to return once more to the gru- elling disciplines of ballet. She trained in small houses that smelled of sweat, and with the aid of several friends and collabo- rators began once again to reach that pitch of athleticism which she had once achieved. Her body returned to its former, harder outline. She dyed her greying hair and made herself up to look 28, rather than approaching 40. After further strenuous training, she was giyen an audition for the Grand Ballet Classique by the formidable Madam Dayde, who accepted her. It was at last an opportunity to consider whether to pursue ballet on her own terms. In the course of her account, Brady describes the others who have left the profession with as much sympathy as those who have pros- pered within it. Prologue can be read with a sense of delight at the virtuosity of a major prose-writer. Her autobiography has the discipline and clarity of the ballet. This is an exemplary, perhaps a classic, work.