I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [195]
Soon after Balanchine’s death, Lincoln wrote and requested that he be taken off the NDI board. I wrote back, “You don’t have to request. Just resign if you want, but I wish you wouldn’t, because having your name is of great value.” Several months later, he issued another communication, officially leaving the board. Somewhere along the way, he sent me a check for NDI, I think in the range of $3,000, with the statement “Now I don’t owe you anything.”
On every pathway in arts and culture, as well as many other fields, a person walking will stumble across the footprints of Lincoln Kirstein. Omnipresent, he had been there, and off the pathways, too. His Napoleonic ambition to be decision maker of all the arts and culture in the country was at odds with never-ending doubts about his own taste. Often, in a discussion with me about ballet, a book, or music, he would bellow, “GOOD TASTE IS MY TASTE!,” bolstering himself, posing as the pope pointing a finger, only his fingers had chewed-up nails.
Eric Hoffer, my longshoreman philosopher friend, tried to understand what generates creativity. He eventually said he couldn’t figure it out, but imagined that it had something to do with tremendous inner conflicts spawning energy that seeks outlets: tectonic plates scraping abrasively and generating inner volcanoes, earthquakes, and mountains. Eric would have loved Lincoln.
Lincoln had wished to be a supreme artist—in particular, a world-class painter, poet, or novelist—but he held himself up to those arts’ highest models, and could not find within himself the belief that he could equal them. So instead he turned to support others whom he felt had talent and potential. But like a juggler tossing objects or a light switch flipping, his impulsive belief and support for the chosen ones would turn on and off. Lincoln rarely remained a fan of anything.
Occasionally, at Lincoln’s command, I would be summoned to his home in Gramercy Park. He envisioned me a component, some clay for a sperm-of-the-moment plan he had conjured. Lincoln’s wife, Fidelma, was an artist and painter, and sister to the more renowned artist Paul Cadmus. Paul was one of the rare few I never heard Lincoln disparage, and I suspected they had been lovers.
At times, Fidelma would make an appearance. Large, brown eyes, rounded, hers were deepened by dark circles, as if she hadn’t slept. Staring at you or downcast, she always seemed about to tear. Her lips were dry and cracked, but her voice was soft and tentative, mumbling, as if in her attempt to verbalize, she imagined being clobbered down or ignored. Slim and graceful, Fidelma found it unbearable to be stared at or judged. She became a shade seeking out shadows. Fidelma liked me, and managed to tell me so, perhaps realizing I was not another male inhabitant of their home to whom Lincoln had taken a fancy. I thought he would probably berate me to her after I left. “What’s there to like about him? He’s just an athletic street kid who has become a dancer. All he cares about is applause and show business.”
Fidelma never stayed around long, slipping off to another room, I imagined a bedroom full of cats. She and Lincoln, incompatible in so many ways, adored the feline. Fidelma and Lincoln loved and respected each other in tormented ways (love does have a way of finding expression in roller-coaster shapes—look at the Boss and my father, and, for that matter, Carrie and me). As Yeats wrote so beautifully:
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
With Kyra Blank in class (image credit 20.1)
Fidelma died before Lincoln. Diminished away in a home somewhere, I was told Connecticut, I believe unhappy