16
The Erotics of Distance
The phrase optimal distance has an unfortunate connotation of something fixed, static. But for many pairs, the right blend of intimacy and distance is a fluid, ongoing process. It emerges not from clarity about space but from ambiguity and uncertainty. Contrary to our simplified model, the moon is not circling the earth. Actually, the moon is in constant free fall toward the earth. The illusion of orbit is created only because the earth itself is constantly moving.
Rather than a set position, optimal distance is more like a dance. It is fitting, then, that the best illustration I’ve found is that of George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell.
When we last left them, they were the very picture of confluence. Indeed, when Balanchine walked on his knees across the stage of the New York State Theater in the costume of Don Quixote; when he laid his head in Farrell’s lap; when she washed his feet with her hair, the extent of their devotion was clear. “It was obvious that he was dancing not only with Farrell but for her,” wrote Robert Gottlieb. Farrell herself called the gala benefit performance a “spiritual consummation.” When they slipped away for coffee and doughnuts, leaving the tony crowd behind at the reception, they entered a world all their own.
In the early days, the main question of space between them was how zestfully they could charge into it. According to the psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron’s self-expansion model (which we explored in chapter 6), the joy of early connection follows a buoyant sense of one’s world getting so much bigger. It’s like that dream that, within your house, there are rooms you didn’t know before. With George Balanchine “choreographing my life,” as she put it, Suzanne Farrell could be part of a history that included imperial Russia and the Ballets Russes. With the spry, dutiful, and bold energy of his nineteen-year-old phenom, Balanchine could rediscover his own dances onstage and, afterward, the haunts of his life, like Le Cirque and the Russian Tea Room—and Dunkin’ Donuts and the Tip Toe Inn. Their shared world was as big as both of them, and bigger, and they relished it. They had dinner together most nights, and when they traveled with the company to Paris, they took long silent walks along the Seine.
Soon, though, they began to find the boundaries between them. First, the relationship began to blur the professional and the personal, and while that may have been a source of inspiration and expansion, Farrell quickly saw the potential trouble. She had “amorous” feelings for Balanchine. “I was beginning to love the man,” she wrote. But where would this lead? She was Catholic, and serious about it, and he was married, to his fourth wife, the dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had become paralyzed from the waist down by polio.
Farrell took comfort in the faith that their love, when it came down to it, was centered on work. But Balanchine advanced on Farrell, asking for more and more of her time, moving not just to engage with her but to control her. He went with her to her apartment door in the evening to “deposit” her, and he smiled at the double-entendre. When he was not with her, he sent a friend to act as escort and bodyguard. When she dared to wear a ring given to her by a young man she liked, Balanchine threw such a fit that she broke off contact with her suitor.
Balanchine had a history. Four times he had married his lead ballerina, binding up in matrimony women who had charmed him as muses. (Some reports said the number was five, counting Alexandra Danilova, though the two never legally married.) It’s not clear that his motivation was solely romantic: “If you marry a dancer,” he said, “you always know where she is—in the studio working.”
The tension between desire and control speaks to a familiar problem. Desire beckons us to try to eliminate gaps. But longing itself—and the thing we long for—depends on the gaps. “To sustain an élan toward the other,” writes the psychologist Esther Perel, “there must be a synapse to cross.” Simone Weil put it this way: “All our desires are contradictory . . . I want the person I love to love me. If, however, he is totally devoted to me, he does not exist any longer.”
There’s a word that describes this problem, the poet and scholar Anne Carson notes. The word is eroticism.
Eroticism is often considered an adjunct to sex; the dictionary definition is “relating to or arousing sexual desire or excitement.” But sex is the act of physically joining with another person—entering, being entered. Sex is copulation, from the Latin copula, for “link” or “tie.” Eroticism is not the fulfillment of yearning but the heightening of that yearning.
“The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing,’” writes Carson in Eros the Bittersweet. “The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. This is more than wordplay. There is a dilemma within eros that has been thought crucial by thinkers from Sappho to the present day. Plato turns and returns to it. Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one’s possession nor in one’s being.”
It is also a recurring theme in Greek iconography, Carson explains, where poets and painters tended to focus not on the moment a lover opens her arms wide but “when the beloved turns and runs. The verbs pheugein (‘to flee’) and diōkein (‘to pursue’) are a fixed item in the technical erotic vocabulary of the poets.”
George Balanchine’s art was replete with pursuit and flight. It wasn’t just a favorite theme; it was a central preoccupation. “Many of his works,” said his longtime lead dancer Jacques d’Amboise, “have to do with a muse, a woman, an ideal that a man attempts to own, touches and passes with for a moment in his life, and is doomed to lose it—and it’s necessary to lose it, otherwise there’s no striving for anything better anymore if you achieve what you have dreamed of. You must not achieve it. You must not possess it.”
D’Amboise was talking about the core function of a muse—to be an object of inspiration and desire who reaches into our souls and psyches, who beckons, tempts, and coaxes that peculiar mix of tenderness and ardor. The Greek Muses were goddesses, so they could always elude a mortal’s grasp and thus retain their power. Other muses, like Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura, attained similarly mythical states in their artists’ eyes by dying young.
But for many people, mostly women, who were cast in history as muses to artists, an exquisite problem presents itself—how to be flesh and spirit at once. “How brave and resourceful the muse must be,” Francine Prose writes in The Lives of the Muses, “to balance, year after year, on the vertiginous high wire that her calling requires—to navigate the tightrope between imminence and absence, to be at once accessible and unobtainable, perpetually present in the mind of the artist and at the same time distant enough to create a chasm into which the muse’s devoted subject is moved to fling propitiatory, ritual objects: that is, works of art.”
In psychology, the word for art-making as an expression of desire is sublimation ; it applies anytime an emotion finds an indirect outlet. In Jane Campion’s movie Bright Star, about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, one scene shows them on opposite sides of a wall. She stands with her cheek against it, and he holds his hand to it on the other side. Because they were unmarried, this was as close to physical intimacy as they were allowed to get. His poetry was a love song that bypassed the walls of that restraint.
Farrell and Balanchine illustrated a similar dynamic. The relationship was intensely physical, and erotic—but not sexual. Their language was a physical language. He placed her in the positions he desired. She answered his questions with her body. Before Farrell, Joan Acocella writes, Balanchine’s work had been known for its classicism. With her, it took on a “jazz-baby sexiness,” girded with a spiritual yearning—stages filled with “angels and gypsies, visions and confessions.” A photograph from these years shows Balanchine demonstrating a male part to be danced by Arthur Mitchell. Balanchine and Farrell face each other, and his left leg is extended between her knees. In all the ways they are far, and in all the ways they are near, it is the embodiment of heat.
They did not have sex, Farrell said.
And yet, their work, she said in the film Elusive Muse, “was extremely physical and extremely gratifying . . . It certainly was not the orthodox way of having a relationship,” she said with a smile. “But it was more passionate and more loving and more more than most relationships. We had”—she laughed—“it was terrific. We had a great time.” For six years, Farrell and Balanchine worked magnificently across the space between them. In the 1967 ballet Jewels, Farrell danced the lead part in the section called “Diamonds,” and she found in the ballet’s final pas de deux a “glorious blend of victory and surrender between Jacques and me, of leading and following, initiating and receiving.”
But if his work knew that the hero must lose his ideal, Balanchine himself was not as wise. Art often knows more than the artist. Perhaps, too, there is something of a child in a creator, wanting to defy all limits but drawn to just those places where limits will be most sharply defined. “Infants,” Anne Carson writes, “begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be.”
Balanchine’s pattern had long been clear. While he put women in power onstage, in his life he fixated on young ballerinas and made work on them. (Such is the language of the ballet, with its provocative syntax.) He often married them—and then moved on.
It was remarkable, then, when Farrell—only twenty-one years old at the time of Jewels—refused the master of dance, not because she wanted to push him away, but because she wanted to keep him. She didn’t chafe at the contact so much as she sought the sort of contact that requires space. She had bristled at an article in Newsweek that called her “not only the alpha but the omega” of Balanchine’s young ballerinas. “The exquisite Farrell,” the piece read, “is the latest in a forty-year series of Galateas that include Danilova, Geva, Zorina, Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq.”
“I hated being on a list,” Farrell wrote, “anyone’s list.”
Farrell’s confidence was striking given how sheltered she was. She had no real friends, no hobbies. She lived with her mother and sister and had no life at all outside of Balanchine’s company. Yet she did not cower. Wanting more of Balanchine, Farrell insisted on less. This set up a seesaw, because Balanchine reacted by moving toward her more strongly. In the fall of 1967, the Chicago Sun-Times reported—perhaps on Balanchine’s authority—that the two would wed “shortly.” Not long after this, Farrell wrote, she “decided again to try to put a little distance between George and myself.” This wasn’t easy. When she told him they ought not have dinner together every night, he soon lost so much weight that a company staff member urged her to return to his side and do whatever it took to make him happy. “Why don’t you just sleep with him?” one of the male dancers said to her. “Is it such a big deal?”
She did consider marrying him. “It would have given George what he thought he wanted,” she wrote. But she also thought that “our unique relationship . . . might not have withstood consummation. The physical side of love is of paramount importance to many people, but to us it wasn’t. Our interaction was physical, but its expression was dance.” And she danced, she wrote in her memoir, as if her life depended on it. “Dancing was the bottom line—the line that would support or hang me.”
Farrell’s impulses throughout were to create the best conditions for work. Unlike the traditional muse, whose role is to inspire the master and remain a sort of ghost, she wanted to be fully embodied, to actually coauthor a story from a place of respectful deference but with mutual authority. An effort at cultivating personal power of this sort did not need to be an affront to the union.
But it’s not easy to push someone away to keep him close. From this confused place, Farrell struck up a friendship with a dancer two years younger than she—a “nice, quiet boy,” she said in her memoir, named Paul Mejia. When he confessed that he loved her, she found herself in a crisis. Spurning him would mean a surrender to Balanchine she was loath to make, but engaging with him meant risking the master’s wrath.* She felt so desperate that she contemplated suicide. As she spent more time with Mejia, Balanchine began to treat her coldly—her own mother told her she should give the great man what he wanted, and when her daughter didn’t come to heel, she stopped talking to her. Farrell moved into her own apartment and, scared and lonely, found that Mejia was now her only real friend. She soon agreed to marry him. Balanchine, who had obtained his own divorce just two weeks before, was in Hamburg, Germany; a delegation from the company flew there to tend to him.
Even after her marriage, Farrell hoped for a relationship with Balanchine that would preserve their work together—one where she had her life, and Balanchine his, and they met on common ground. But Balanchine acted like a spurned lover, or a petulant child. Or perhaps he was a canny operator, hoping to wield the power that remained to him to force the outcome he wanted. He had never appointed an understudy for Farrell before; if she could not perform, the dance would not go on. But now he asked that she teach her role in “Diamonds” to a second. As she and the master grew more distant—he turned away from her when they crossed in the hallway—she offered to leave the company. “No, that’s not necessary, dear,” Balanchine replied. “But perhaps Paul should leave.”
Balanchine’s control over Farrell’s husband’s career turned out to be the last bit of weight under which the Farrell and Balanchine partnership collapsed. On May 8, 1969, two and a half months after Farrell and Mejia’s marriage, the New York City Ballet was to present Symphony in C, and a male dancer withdrew at the last moment from a role that Mejia had often performed. When Balanchine cast someone who was much less familiar with the role, Farrell sent him a message warning him that if Mejia did not dance that night, they would both resign from the company. She went to her dressing room early and began to apply her makeup. Soon there came a knock on the door. The director of wardrobe, Sophie Pourmel, walked in and collected her costume. “Suzanne,” she said, crying, “you’re not dancing tonight.”
And just like that, she was in exile.
Distance may feel like a rebuke. It may feel like a breakup. It may be a breakup. The luxury of observing these pairs in retrospect is that we can often see the span of their whole careers. But when you see your life through your own eyes and in the present tense, you don’t know how the story is going to end.
In 1989, after seventeen years playing with the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen decided that “we got into a rut,” that the relationships were “muddy, through codependence, or whatever.” He sat down one day and called the band members one by one. Clarence Clemons was in Japan on tour with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. As Clemons remembered the conversation, they greeted in the usual way—“Hey, Big Man!”; “Hey, Boss!” Then Springsteen said: “Well, it’s all over.”
Clemons thought he meant the Ringo tour—that he needed to come back and get to work. He said he’d get home and check in ASAP.
“Naw, naw, naw,” Bruce said. “I’m breaking up the band.” According to Springsteen’s biographer Peter Ames Carlin, as Bruce talked, “Clemons was juggling his surprise and grief with a sudden urge to reduce his hotel room to ruins. So many years on the road, so much sacrifice, the thousands of hours spent waiting for Bruce to hear just the right sound from the recording studio speakers. ‘And I’m thinking, “It’s all for this? My whole life dedicated to this band, this situation, this man, and what he believes in, then I’m out of town and I get a fucking phone call?”’”
Like Clemons, Suzanne Farrell was dazed to find herself on her own. The problem was more than emotional and artistic. She didn’t know if she could support herself. She had dim prospects as a dancer; any American company that hired her would risk alienating Balanchine. And her training had been so firmly in Balanchine’s particular style that it was unclear whether she could even fit in anywhere else. She was twenty-three years old.
She and Mejia rented cheap space to practice in. At a local high school, they danced a piece Mejia choreographed. Eventually they went to live in upstate New York. Then Maurice Béjart, the director of a dance company in Belgium, called and offered to hire them both. “Béjart’s work was not so much ballet as a sort of extravagant multimedia theater,” wrote Joan Acocella. “Many of Balanchine’s fans felt as if Farrell had run off with a biker.”
As exiles go, this was a felicitous one. Farrell felt like the utter strangeness of the environment allowed her to adapt to it without forsaking her core identity. “Although I transferred my present allegiance,” she wrote, “I did not forget who was who or what was what artistically.” She never stopped thinking of herself as a Balanchine dancer, and even though Béjart was dumbfounded at his luck—no one, he said, made him as good as she did; she was like a violin, “the music comes out from her body”—he never felt he had a claim on her. She was Balanchine’s “spiritual daughter,” he said.
In her Belgian years, in many ways, the daughter grew up. She had a new boss she could approach from a place of preexisting authority. She had a new space to play in. And she had a husband she could be with freely. Farrell said that she especially liked checking in to hotel rooms and asking for a double bed.
For his part, after Farrell left, Balanchine was devastated. It took him nearly a year to produce his next work—a ballet called Who Cares? Then in 1972 he staged a festival in homage to another of his essential collaborators, the composer Igor Stravinsky, who had died the year before. The pieces burnished Balanchine’s sterling reputation and he carried on.
Farrell made several overtures to Balanchine over the years, but he didn’t respond. In 1974, five years after their break, she went to see the New York City Ballet in its summer home at Saratoga Springs, New York. Afterward, she sent Balanchine the shortest letter she had ever written.
Dear George,
As wonderful as it is to see your ballets, it is even more wonderful to dance them. Is this impossible?
Suzi
Balanchine’s assistant arranged for the two to meet as she passed through New York City on her way to Brussels. They hugged, opened a bottle of wine, and it was “just sort of like: ‘Well, when do we get to work?’” Farrell remembered.
Balanchine cast her in Symphony in C—the piece she was to dance the night she’d left the company. In Farrell’s dressing room, Sophie Pourmel hooked her into the same white tutu she had taken away six years before.
But things had changed. A new, more durable, more reliable tension existed between them that allowed for a new kind of closeness. She was no longer his “alabaster princess” (Balanchine’s words) or “this virginal girl in white” (Farrell’s). In the first new Balanchine piece made on her, Tzigane, Farrell was a gypsy—“a grownup, sexy, alluring woman,” says the writer Toni Bentley, who cowrote Farrell’s memoir, “a powerful, solitary woman—not a child anymore.” Instead of having her wear the traditional white, he dressed her in a skirt made of shredded red, gold, and black ribbons. Even the old dances took on new life. “There’s much more substance to Diamonds than there was in the days when Farrell first danced it,” Arlene Croce wrote in the New Yorker in 1975. “Then it seemed the iciest and emptiest of abstractions with, in the woman’s part, an edge of brazen contempt. Farrell, a changed and immeasurably enriched dancer, in stepping back into the ballet has discovered it. She is every bit as powerful as she was before, but now she takes responsibility for the discharge of power; she doesn’t just fire away. And whereas she used to look to me like an omnicompetent blank, she’s now dynamic, colorful, tender.”
When the two resumed their work together, George Balanchine apologized to Farrell for coming on too strong—she said she thought it was a “confession.” She remembers him saying, “It was not right. I was an old man. I never should have thought about you that way. You should have had your freedom; you should have had your marriage.”
She refused to accept the apology, but the power of their new terms could be seen onstage. Balanchine had always idealized women and given them some authority, but he undermined them too. Now, he had a genuinely powerful woman dancing for him. “Of course,” Croce wrote, “the autonomy of the ballerina is an illusion, but Farrell’s is the extremest form of this illusion we have yet seen, and it makes Diamonds a riveting spectacle about the freest woman alive.”
The reconciliation is satisfying, as it was to watch Springsteen return to the stage with the E Street Band and Clarence Clemons in 1999. Yet there is a tinge of melancholy in the recognition that, in art and in life, there is an uncrossable expanse, that for Farrell and Balanchine, or Bruce and the Big Man—for any two people, creative potential depends on separation. One common stage in a pair’s lifespan is to come to submit to this fact. In Marina Abramović and Ulay’s early collaborations, they shouted at each other, smacked into each other, clamped their mouths together and breathed in and out to the point of near suffocation. But the signature piece of their later years was Nightsea Crossing, in which they sat across from each other at a table, silent, motionless, for an entire gallery day—fasting for twenty-four hours, to boot. They performed the piece for ninety nonconsecutive days; they once did it sixteen days straight.
Vincent van Gogh bucked and fought the distance between himself and his brother, but he, too, submitted in the end. In his teens and twenties, Vincent pined for Theo constantly; he regarded boundaries between them as birds regard fences. He shifted so fluidly between “I” and “we” that he seems to have been genuinely confused about the difference. At times he waxed romantic, calling himself and Theo compagnons de voyage. At times he turned bitter, telling Theo that if he were to withhold funds, he might as well “cut off my head.”
After two years in Paris—during which Vincent often bucked his brother like a bull—he decided he must go south, and he asked the painter Emile Bernard to help him arrange his old studio in Theo’s apartment, “so that my brother will feel that I am still here.” Once he arrived in Arles, he immediately began to pine again. “During the journey,” he wrote Theo in February 1888, “I thought at least as much about you as about the new country I was seeing. But I tell myself that you’ll perhaps come here often yourself later on.”
“It would be the paradox of Vincent’s life,” writes George Howe Colt, “that he longed for family, for friendship, for community, but was temperamentally unable to get along with people.” At Arles, he dreamed of a community of painters, with himself and Theo as first residents, then he began to fixate on the painter Paul Gauguin as the “father superior” of their art monastery. Persuaded that disciples would follow, Vincent bought twelve chairs to go in the three-room house, which Gauguin, in an answer to Vincent’s prayers—and as a grudging submission to his own need for Theo’s money—came to share.
Vincent dreamed of connections like handshakes, but his relationships often led to raised fists. Seven weeks into the experiment, Gauguin told Theo it was “absolutely necessary” that he leave. This loss for Vincent came around the same time as the news of Theo’s great romance. By December 21, 1888, he was engaged to be married. He wrote his mother and sister immediately, and Vincent, too, may have received word by December 23, 1888. That night, he quarreled with Gauguin, then cut off a portion of his left ear and left it in a box for a girl at a brothel.
Afterward, Vincent asked to go to an asylum, and he seems to have had a revelation around this time, not just that he was subject to fits of madness, but that he was essentially separate, his own vessel on vast and stormy seas. Into his letters crept a recognition of Theo as his own man. Vincent even seemed to speak of their relationship as something past: “The kindness you have had for me isn’t lost,” he wrote Theo, “since you have had it and you still have it . . . Only transfer this affection onto your wife as much as possible.”
Just as Vincent’s ear-cutting frenzy coincided with Theo’s engagement, so did he fall apart around the time of Theo’s wedding and at the birth of Theo’s child. Yet between the fuzzy madnesses of his breakdowns, his work took on a crystalline sanity, and perhaps both his mental nadirs and creative pinnacles proceeded from a sense of the only actual way he could reach others: through his work. From behind the window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, he found elements of the scene that would become De Sterrennacht (The Starry Night), where a towering cypress is itself towered over by a swirling sky and stars.
Vincent had once longed for a communion with others that I’ve described as “utopian,” It’s the perfect last word for our inquiry into distance. Derived in English from the Greek prefix εὖ (“good” or “well”), it alludes of course to a desirable or even perfect place. But, in fact, the first use of “utopian,” in a 1516 book by Sir Thomas More, meant the opposite: More coined the word with a prefix οὐ (“not”) that had the same “eu” sound, but quite a different meaning—the word originally meant “no place.” It alluded to an idea of perfection that can never exist.
Likewise, creative intimacy is a sacred ideal that we reach for and touch but never finally grasp. Emily Dickinson’s cool, decisive move to maintain her separateness and relate across an expanse is in perfect contrast to van Gogh’s erratic, sloppy trajectory. She was all cat, slinking away, arching her back. He was all dog, bounding into areas forbidden him, whimpering when put into his cage.
Yet both lived out an extreme of the essential human paradox, where intimacy coincides with separateness, and the essential creative paradox, where expression comes, at least in some measure, from frustration. When he made The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh was thirty-six years old and unspeakably lonely, and what he did from this loneliness was paint and write and send his paintings and letters north to his brother—letters that, Adam Gopnik has written, constitute “the longest, warmest, most attentive account of an artist’s life seen from the inside that has ever been written.”
After reading the letters (and responding to many), Theo tucked them in his bureau; the canvases he stowed under the bed, under the sofa, under the cupboards. He arranged and rearranged them on his walls. “In the bedroom, the ‘Orchards in Bloom,’” Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s wife, wrote. “In the dining room over the mantelpiece, the ‘Potato Eaters’; in the sitting room . . . the great ‘Landscape from Arles’ and the ‘Night View on the Rhône.’” His brother was, physically and psychologically, so very far away. But it was also as though Theo lived inside his brother’s mind.