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Who is the G.O.A.T., the greatest of all time? Tennis fans and pundits alike will consider that question anew now that Roger Federer has retired and Serena Williams has decided to “evolve” away from the sport. Chances are, if you’re a tennis fan, you already have strong opinions on the matter. Perhaps you believe that Federer, who elevated the game to a quasi-mystical level (David Foster Wallace famously likened watching him play to a religious experience), and Williams, who transformed the sport in her own way, are indeed the G.O.A.T.s.
Maybe you harbor strong opinions about the G.O.A.T.s in other sports, too: Michael or LeBron, Tiger or Jack, Marta or Mia Hamm, Brady or Montana, Taurasi or Swoopes. How would LeBron James have fared in Michael Jordan’s bare-knuckle NBA? Would Tiger have vanquished Nicklaus’s rivals—Gary Player, Tom Watson—golfers who didn’t fade into oblivion on the Sunday of a major? Did Lionel Messi, in delivering World Cup glory to Argentina, rise above Maradona and Pelé? These debates can make for a nostalgic trip into the sporting past, giving talking heads an excuse for ratings-driven histrionics. Witness the latest TV sparring over the newly retired Tom Brady.
But I’d contend that we’ve grown overly infatuated with bestowing G.O.A.T. status on our sporting heroes, and that this obsession has become a hollow sideshow, a lot of empty sound bites, signifying (almost) nothing. Forget that in its annual tongue-in-cheek Banished Word List, Lake Superior State University just called out “G.O.A.T.” as the most egregious for its “overuse, misuse, and uselessness.” The point is, there’s no way to compare players from different eras without resorting to wild speculation, and in most cases, a recency bias plagues these discussions—it’s almost always a player from this generation who wears the crown. When did we become so obsessed with this reductionist ritual, this anointing of the chosen one?
By nearly every account, we can trace things back to Muhammad Ali, who had no qualms about telling the world where he stood in boxing’s pantheon of champions. More specifically, according to Patricia O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman, authors of the Grammarphobia blog, we can pinpoint the debut of the acronym to September 1992, when Ali’s fourth wife, Lonnie, used the term “G.O.A.T. Inc.” to license her husband’s intellectual property. Rap and hip-hop circles were quick to catch on. “G.O.A.T.” appears in De La Soul’s 1993 track “Lovely How I Let My Mind Float,” and it arguably entered the mainstream in 2000, when L. L. Cool J dropped his album G.O.A.T.
On the sporting front, the first online use of G.O.A.T. occurred in 1996 on an Orlando Magic forum, as reported by Merriam-Webster, which added the term to the dictionary in 2018. “Penny [Hardaway] is the GOAT” is what history records. With all due respect to Hardaway, the former Magic point guard, this is but evidence that the moniker was meaningless from the beginning. G.O.A.T. mania spiked in February 2017, according to Google Trends, undoubtedly inspired by Tom Brady and the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl comeback against the Atlanta Falcons. It continues to infect nearly every corner of the sporting world: even Simone Biles donned a leotard with a bejeweled image of a goat on its sleeve. And after Serena Williams gave birth to her first child, her husband designed four billboards near Palm Springs advertising his wife as the G.M.O.A.T.: the greatest momma of all time.
As for the pundits now elevating Serena and Roger to G.O.A.T.-dom, how many of them saw Steffi Graf or Martina Navratilova play on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, let alone Rod Laver or Björn Borg? Pull up old YouTube footage of Wimbledon and watch Laver serve and volley with his wood racquet, his game predicated on touch and angles and placement, and be reminded that he was practically playing a different sport: no polyester strings, no outrageous topspin or bulging biceps, no access to contemporary training methods or nutrition, nothing resembling the intense physicality of today’s game. Rather, his matches have a garden-party feel to them, as if a couple of club pros were battling for bragging rights, before retiring to the pub for a pint.
Laver dominated his era, winning two Grand Slams and 11 majors. This, even though he effectively lost five years of his career because, after turning professional, he was shut out from the majors, which permitted only amateur players until 1968. How can one compare eras, draw meaningful conclusions about how, say, a time-traveling Laver—his physique newly buff, his racquet graphite—would fare against Federer at Wimbledon? The truth, of course, is that each successive tennis generation built on the accomplishments of the previous one, a kind of evolutionary cycle that continues, to this day, to reveal unimagined levels of the game—witness the recent arrival of a 19-year-old Spaniard named Carlos Alcaraz, who, having become the youngest world number one in ATP history, embodies the future of the sport. After Laver came Borg’s reign of dominance, which forced John McEnroe to dig deep to break through; and then McEnroe inspired Ivan Lendl to get superhumanly fit and usher in the modern power game, a magical era in which baseliners and serve-and-volleyers still coexisted: Pete Sampras and Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg pushing forward at Wimbledon, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier and Mats Wilander hanging back.
One finds a similar progression in the women’s game: Navratilova elevating the sport with her powerful athleticism at net, the intensity of her rivalry with Chris Evert foreshadowing the one between Monica Seles and Graf. Never mind Graf’s forehand; it was the German’s mental fortitude, says Serena, that inspired her as she reshaped the game into what we know today. In remembering the players of eras past who had a profound and transformative effect on the sport, who helped remake it in their image, an abiding fact emerges: none of them won majors much past their early 30s. Borg retired at 26 with 11 slams; Laver and Sampras won their last at 31; Graf was 29, Navratilova 33. Compare that with the current era. Serena won her final major at 35, Federer at 36. Novak Djokovic (at 35) and Rafael Nadal (at 36) seem poised to add to their total. Much of the apparent statistical dominance exhibited by players today, therefore, is based on their longevity, which in turn is based on the advances made in fitness and nutrition—yet another reminder that it’s all but impossible to compare generations without resorting to fuzzy math and biases born of recency (or nostalgia).
Before the arrival of the acronym, “greatest of all time” was, according to a search of historical newspapers, applied to all manner of athletes in the prewar era, but unfailingly with an extra word thrown in: among the greatest of all time. A caveat. A qualifier. Which may offend someone with the sensibilities of baseball’s Ted Williams, who was never coy about his desire to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, but which otherwise seems to be enough of a rarefied designation to make the need for further classification seem, well, a bit Type A American. As for Muhammad Ali, much of his “greatest of all time” banter was shtick—part personal motivation, part psychological warfare, part business strategy: “I like to be the villain,” he once told the Irish journalist Cathal O’Shannon. The allure of G.O.A.T. is the pleasing clarity, the idea that one player is the undisputed best, the finest manifestation of sporting greatness, with a certain tribalism infecting the debates—you’re either team Federer or team Nadal, for instance. But of course, as in life, there’s no real clarity, no reassurance that your best years are still to come, or aren’t already behind you.
If you remain intent on ranking athletes, I will grant you this: the rubric should be framed around not who is the greatest of all time, but who is the greatest of a particular generation, which doesn’t much lend itself to the acronymic tidiness of G.O.A.T.—or the title of a rap album. But it’s a more reasonable lens through which to view the current debate over, say, Roger, Rafa, and Novak. Does Rafa’s claim hinge too much on his dominance on clay (14 French Opens)? Will Novak’s Covid vaccine stance, which caused him to miss two majors last year (but didn’t prevent him from winning this year’s Australian Open), hurt his numerical case? Did Roger get tight and choke away a couple finals, undermining his claim? Have at it.
But also remember that even this debate doesn’t adequately explain why the recent golden era of tennis mattered so much—not only to the fans but also to the players themselves. Here’s Federer, back in 2012, after winning Wimbledon, on the possibility that Nadal might one day surpass his slam total: “If he does beat my record, it almost doesn’t matter. Because I did things he can never do. He did things that I can never do. It’s the moments that live and the memories that are with me that are most important.”
In his final match, at the Laver Cup last fall, Federer lobbied to play not singles but doubles with Nadal, a symbolic gesture that emphasized how their rivalry, one that had pushed them both to extremes on the court they could never have achieved alone, had also created a lasting friendship. They held a match point before losing to Jack Sock and Francis Tiafoe, but the result in the end mattered little. In classic Federer style, he had orchestrated a celebration of the game itself. On hand were Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, Jim Courier, and Novak Djokovic. Nadal, meanwhile, appeared to shed as many tears as Federer himself when it was all over. Never mind our G.O.A.T. infatuation: this spectacle was a reminder of how each generation has built on the previous one, and how in this most individual of games, it is your opponent across the net who makes everything possible. Federer stepped into the spotlight one last time, and then retired into the shade, to wait for the next generation to assume the crown.
The post Milking the G.O.A.T. appeared first on The American Scholar.
Death is not only the ultimate dissolution of identity, as all the physical, psychological, and social ligatures that tether it in place are severed; death is also that in the face of which we make our identity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T. S. Eliot put it in The Waste Land. Habits, interests, love, the hourly, the daily, and all the busyness of life. Above all, art.
It was the philosopher Bernard Williams who argued, in an essay on Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case—about a woman gifted, or rather cursed, with immortality—that life makes sense only in the face of its finitude. We are “lucky in having the chance to die,” Williams concluded. This does not require that death itself be desirable: death can destroy meaning while, at the same time, the prospect of mortality creates the very meaning that death destroys. That, at least, is one reading of Williams’s long and complex argument.
It is somehow appropriate that Williams’s discussion centers on an opera. This is not just because Janáček’s Makropulos Case is about a 16th-century court physician’s daughter who, having taken an elixir of life, is now 342 years old and, consequently, in “a state of boredom, indifference and coldness.” Music is expressive without being denotative. It is material and precise but at the same time metaphysically suggestive, the closest thing this side of revelation to a glimpse of the divine. It is in music that this paradox of Williams’s can be contained and engaged with; that which creates meaning also destroys it. Music helps us to deal with death, with its inevitability, its incomprehensibility, its necessity. In certain pieces of music, we face death within a sound world that is resolutely alive even as it is transitory, fleeting, and always decaying. Music has, in Shakespeare’s words, a dying fall.
Silence is the ultimate symbol of death in terms of sound, but “until we die,” as John Cage (composer of the notoriously silent 4’33” ) supposedly had it, “there will be sounds.” Utter soundlessness, true silence, is not available to the living subject.
Gestures toward silence, however, are part of our cultural encounter, while we remain alive, with the nothingness of death—with our own horror vacui (the fear of that sense of emptiness and loss that we feel in the face of others’ deaths) or the peace and calm that silence seems to offer.
This relative silence, this imagined silence, can be an evocation of things that are inexpressible. There is that organized and audible silence with which many societies mourn their dead: the silence at a funeral, the two-minute silence in memory of the war dead that has been observed in the United Kingdom since the end of the First World War. These silences encourage us to think of the departed, to memorialize them, but they also necessarily and inevitably ask us to think about our own mortality. They bind together the living and the dead in a contemplation of a common end.
Silence is essential to music, the rests as important as the notes. But beyond that, in classical music’s engagement with finality, with death, there are especially significant silences that gesture toward nothingness. I think especially of Winterreise, Schubert’s great cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano written in 1827 and 1828. This work was composed in the face of impending death. Schubert had likely contracted syphilis in 1822, and although his death in 1828 came unexpectedly, possibly from typhoid fever, he spent the last six years of his life under the shadow of an early demise, producing works in his last 18 months that speak to a sense of mortality. Winterreise is a journey into the snow, white blankness, a journey away from a failed love affair in which the journeyer looks deeply into himself and, plumbing the depths of loneliness and isolation, finds metaphysical despair. He learns a lesson that Samuel Beckett (who loved the cycle) took up in the 20th century. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—this is how Beckett’s novel The Unnamable ends.
In the 14th song in Winterreise, “Der greise Kopf,” the wanderer discovers that the frost has turned his hair white. The music in the piano expresses a sort of horror at this transformation, with a leap of an augmented fourth, that unholy interval that late medieval musicians christened the diabolus in musica. The wanderer reacts with an expression of grim satisfaction: he is one step closer to the end of his journey, the journey that we all take toward death. Then the frost melts, and our hero is a young man again—“How far it is still to the grave!” (Wie weit noch bis zur Bahre! ) Schubert’s repetition of this statement at a lower pitch, barely harmonized, is followed by a pause that, when I perform the cycle, always seems to demand a longer than usual duration, an extended, unnatural, almost unmusical silence in which Schubert, the musicians, and the audience look into the abyss. And if we want to understand this biographically—which is to say, to understand it as the expression of a suffering human being, Franz Schubert, rather than a creator-genius—it is as if Schubert is repeating the phrase not to underline our distance from dissolution but so that we may grasp its inevitability and contemplate our own mortality. Silence points deathward here.
Schubert had a particular gift for what we might call deathly music even before his illness. One unfinished early song is called “Leichenfantasie” (“Corpse Fantasy”); another song, a miraculous setting of a poem by Goethe, “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” is a paradoxical evocation of stillness through a particular sort of quiet music:
Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
… Balde
Ruhest du auch.Over every mountaintop is quiet,
In each and every treetop you can
hardly feel a breath.
The birds are silent in the woods …
Soon you too will be quiet[translation mine]
The instrumental music that Schubert wrote in the last years of his life is not all drenched in contemplation of mortality—there’s a lot of dance music for piano, for example, an excellent distraction, surely, from morbid thoughts. But many of the late works, though anything but morbid, seem to speak to the listener as intimations and explorations of the evanescence of human life and the ever-present defining limit that is death. Here is the critic and philosopher George Steiner, in his book Real Presences, struggling to express these ideas, which are so hard to get a handle on:
What we can say, a saying both exceeding and falling short of responsible knowledge, is that there is music which conveys both the grave constancy, the finality of death and a certain refusal of that very finality. This dual motion, instinctual to humanity but scandalous to reason, is evident, it is made transparent to spiritual, intellectual and physical notice, in Schubert’s C-major Quintet. Listen to the slow movement.
The post Mortal Music appeared first on The American Scholar.
It would be nice to be a doctor, I’ve sometimes thought. If you began to feel something go wrong, you could diagnose yourself. You’d know what you were in for. There’d be no surprises, and all pain and discomfort would be mitigated by an awareness of the path ahead, the forks you’d come to, and the choices to be made. I don’t think being a doctor would make your stomach hurt less, or your head or your leg not ache, or your heart not break. But surely, with a fund of knowledge about symptoms, causes, effects, and—yes—pain, you would be better prepared. If not to cure your troubles, then at least to face them. This, anyway, was my feeling as I awoke one morning to what promised to be another day of pain. It wasn’t crippling, but it was limiting, and with each day, more draining, more demoralizing. It had started with two weeks of intermittent back and hip discomfort, which wasn’t bad enough to see a doctor about. Then I stooped to retrieve a pencil, and what had been discomfort now became constant pain, and after another two weeks, I was ready to give up. “Okay, you’ve got me, I’m a wimp. You win. Now take the pain away.” But the pain did not go away, and I couldn’t even wonder why, because all I knew was that it hurt. Why was this happening to me?
The doctor was of no help. This kind of complaint often cleared up, she told me. Patience. Meanwhile, there were painkillers. She also pointed out that many people evince similar pain with their slow gaits, their bent backs, their gritted teeth and grimaces. Surely I had noticed them? Join the crowd, she seemed to be saying. I stared at her. I’m active and fit. I’m never sick, and I never take medicine. I don’t eat meat. I hardly drink, don’t smoke, have coffee only in the morning, and run 50 kilometers a week. Run, not trot. You don’t know me, I thought.
It was true, she didn’t. I live in Asturias, in northern Spain, and because I had recently moved, this was my first visit to her office. My medical history was on her computer, but she hadn’t read it and couldn’t know that what I was suffering was not simply the trial of advancing age. Such is the reality of the overburdened Spanish medical system. But thanks to that same system, the painkillers I was prescribed were practically free. It hadn’t cost me a penny to see a doctor.
Knowing how long the trouble would last or whether it would ever clear up—or if, on the contrary, I was likely to be forever impaired—might have made it all easier to bear. After a month, the pain did seem to lessen slightly, and after another week, I could manage without painkillers. I began to believe my doctor. I cheered up. Had I been a doctor myself, though, I would have faced the ordeal with more equanimity. The weather forecaster who knows where a system has come from and how long before it will move on will get just as wet in a downpour, but the drenching won’t seem an insult on top of a hardship, as it might to me, not having realized I was in the path of the storm.
So when one day, as I was walking slowly down a sloping street and saw an elderly couple coming even more slowly up it, I paid attention. They shuffled along, shoulder to shoulder, as if holding each other up. As I got closer, I saw that the man was bearing the weight of the woman, who was tilted against him, not so much leaning on him as tipping over onto him, her body listing like a boat that’s taken on water. They paused beside a bench, and she looked around, her gaze vacant and dazed. Pulling on her hands to turn her toward him while keeping close to give her body the support of his, the man got her aligned with the bench and then seated, all apparently without her help. She was small, but even so, maneuvering her into place must have been awkward. Perhaps she was just too tired to collaborate, but it seemed that she was not even aware of what was going on. No words passed between them, and he did not seek eye contact, nor did she look at him. What was I witnessing? Rather than a sinking ship to succor, or a large package to transport, she was in her constant closeness more like an appendage: a useless arm in a sling or a bandaged foot to drag along as you move—a part of him that had now become burdensome and extraneous.
As he got her seated, the man, probably her husband, eased down beside her. He was still holding her hands. I imagined him facing the problem of his wife’s condition alone, and I felt sorrier for him then I did for myself. I hope, I silently said to him as I continued past, that you are a doctor and know what ails your wife, and haven’t got the stress of uncertainty on top of everything else.
And yet, a store of knowledge about a thing does not necessarily prepare you to experience it. The vet to whom we took our dog many years ago listened calmly as we described what happened when Chimbo had a seizure. On the history of the dog we were sketchy, because we’d found him abandoned beside the road 10 days earlier. Within 48 hours, we said, he’d had his first seizure. Then more.
The dog was quiet but anxious. The vet scratched Chimbo’s ears in a friendly way, which seemed to be a message to him: “Yes, I know about you, and your worries are over.” He was a beautiful dog, a German shepherd, strong and svelte like Rin Tin Tin, except that Chimbo’s eyes showed not pride and confidence but worry and confusion. He did not seem comforted by the vet’s caresses. I was, though. I believed her, even if Chimbo did not.
The vet’s diagnosis was epilepsy, and she gave us some pills to help with the seizures. We had gone for a solution to the problem but also to be reassured that what he was going through wasn’t too much to suffer, that he would get better, and that everything would turn out okay. Maybe also so that someone who knew about these things would hear our story and say, “Oh my!”
We thanked her, paid her, then turned to leave. Chimbo, fearful of going first and fearful of being left behind, was glued to my leg; he squeezed beside me through the door into the waiting room. He was as nervous as he always was. The only moment in the day when he appeared to be free of fear was when I put his bowl in front of him. It was as if his fear were tied to hunger. But the instant he finished, he looked nervously around, fearing an attack, which is what his seizures were. Although he had been visibly nervous in the vet’s examination room and then in her waiting room, he was not more so there than anywhere else. Yet before we’d opened the door to the street, Chimbo started to pant, then twitch. His legs tensed, his eyes rolled back, and he fell to the floor in the full throes of a seizure, his head already knocking against the hard, cold tiles while his limbs jerked. I crouched beside him, put my hands under his head to cushion it from the hard floor, and looked up at the vet, who had followed us from the examination room. Her mouth was hanging open. “This is what he does,” I said. “This is what happens.”
“Dios mío, Dios mío,” she said, staring at the dog as he thrashed on the floor. Then she turned her horrified eyes on me. “It never lasts more than a minute,” I said.
It did, however, last longer than usual. And even after we started the medication, the seizures kept getting worse. Adjusting the dosage didn’t help. We didn’t know then that nothing would.
In the waiting room, Chimbo’s legs were still, with an occasional twitch, and his head was no longer banging. He opened his eyes.
The worst of those months with Chimbo—worse than the shock of the first out-of-the-blue seizure, worse than witnessing and trying to alleviate subsequent attacks, even worse than the decision to put him down after a summer of pills and more pills that did not stop the seizures, worse than when the vet said she didn’t know what to try next, when we accepted that there was no cure—the worst was every time Chimbo opened his eyes and looked around after a seizure, and cringed, as if expecting a new seizure to start right up. When he looked around, first dazed, then fearful, and then looked at me. What’s happening to me? his look said. What’s happening to me? Old people shuffling slowly along; a child wailing in a downpour while his parents impatiently shove him along, seeking shelter; even people strong and healthy who seem to think the aging body is for the already old—they often have something of the same dismay, the same question. What’s happening to me? But it’s not. It’s just happening.
The post Knowledge Before the Fall appeared first on The American Scholar.
Fifty-one years ago, to be exact. I met a blond angel at a health food store on the Upper West Side. The angel smiled at me. I smiled back. She was a dancer, a soloist at George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. She was startled when I recognized her stage name, Deborah Flomine. She was even more startled when I talked about my favorite dancers—Allegra Kent, Jacques d’Amboise, Eddie Villella, and Patricia McBride, all of whom she’d danced with at Lincoln Center and other venues around the world when the company went on tour.
You weren’t supposed to meet a stranger at a health food store who could examine one of Balanchine’s ballets with all the incandescence of an x-ray machine. I was Debbie’s dark angel, I suppose. I must have reminded her of Nureyev, with my high cheekbones. We fell in love. Eventually we moved in together, into an apartment house on West 67th Street originally built for artists—it had magnificent studio space with northern exposure. Our landlady offered us a reasonable rent because she liked having a “young couple” in her domain.
Unluckily, we lived on the same block as Balanchine, or Mr. B, as all his dancers and everyone else called him. He was famously possessive of his female dancers and didn’t like them to have boyfriends. Marriage might come next, and then a baby, and that could mark the end of Mr. B’s interest in that dancer’s career. A marriage might be forgiven, but a baby was most often a kiss of death.
And so, we were mortal enemies at first sight, Mr. B and I. He was never overtly impolite, though he would smile at Debbie and merely stare at me with his mournful eyes. His nose would twitch like a rabbit. I’d had the same nervous twitch as a child. I couldn’t even tell Mr. B how much I admired him and his ballets. Before I met Debbie, I’d had a girlfriend who was a balletomane. We went to the ballet as often as we could, depending on our pocketbooks and the program. My favorite pas de deux was “The Man I Love,” performed by Patricia McBride and Jacques d’Amboise in Balanchine’s homage to George Gershwin and the Jazz Age, Who Cares? The splendor and sheer sexual joy in the fluid courtship of the couple’s fast and slow steps perfectly matched the syncopations in George Gershwin’s music. Words weren’t necessary. The dance steps were far more lyrical than the lyrics Ira Gershwin had written.
I felt that the passion the two dancers had delivered onstage belonged wholly to me. As Jennifer Homans writes in her monumental recent biography of Balanchine, Mr. B, the choreographer and his dancers struggled with the perpetual question: How “to live in the real world when the unreal world of the stage was so much more alive?” The dilemma was mine, as well.
As a novelist, I believed in the almost mystical magic of words, that the meaning of a sentence was derived from its music, and here was an art form that robbed me of my own delight. Balanchine’s ballets, the steps themselves, were more musical than anything I could ever write. I would have gladly watched Jacques and Patricia do “The Man I Love” every day for the rest of my life. Robert Sealy of Ballet Review seemed to agree. In March 1970, he wrote that the dancers, in their own angular, cat-wary way, provided us with “the memory-burning dance of a lifetime.”
I loved Eddie Villella’s leaps, Jacques d’Amboise’s poise, Patricia McBride’s elegance and versatility en pointe, but the dancer who moved me the most was Allegra Kent. She was a wild child, utterly unpredictable. Allegra had three babies, not one, and still she danced for Mr. B. I first saw her in Bugaku, which was a courtship dance inspired by seventh-century Japan. There’s no corps de ballet onstage during the iconic pas de deux, only two dancers: a nobleman and suitor-husband, played by Villella during the performances I attended, and his concubine-wife, played by Allegra, dressed in tights and a kind of white bikini under the kimono that she sheds. And their ritualized romance occurred right onstage. Their bodies twisted and contorted, and it seemed as if Allegra had vacated her own psyche, as if she had fled from us and was performing in a dream state; for a moment she had made the invisible visible, and we were peering at an angel rather than a dancer in Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Mr. B was a great believer in angels, who were plentiful in the Russian Orthodox Church in which he was raised, but much rarer in Manhattan. Indeed, Allegra was possessed, a demonic angel who wrapped herself around her suitor-husband with all the fervor of a sexy python.
And then there was Agon, perhaps Balanchine’s greatest work, set to a score by Igor Stravinsky. It’s a “leotard ballet,” in which the dancers perform in practice clothes on a barren stage, engulfed in a panorama of blue light. The word agon comes from the Greek—it means “contest” or “struggle.” The ballet consists of four men and eight women who dance with an almost inhuman, mathematical precision. They could be icons or angels in distress. No narrative or costumes surround them, nothing but blue light. In the ballet’s single pas de deux, Allegra danced doll-like with Arthur Mitchell, the first Black member of the company. Allegra seemed made of rubber as Mitchell manipulated her movements. We were in a landscape we’d never seen before, where motion itself made its own music. As Homans writes in Mr. B: “Agon was more than a dance ‘to’ Stravinsky’s music. [Balanchine’s] ballet was a musical composition unto itself—a composition that at times competed, agon-style, with Stravinsky’s own score, which was stronger and more complex with the dances than it was alone.”
Through Debbie, I got to know Allegra, a voracious reader who developed a fondness for my fiction. I interviewed her at the very end of 2022, nearly 40 years after she had retired from Balanchine’s company. She talked about working with Mr. B, how the choreography “flowed out of him. It just seemed to arrive. He was a true magician. … He put us into another realm. We entered that realm because of him.”
Balanchine loved to build his ballets around the female form. Male dancers, however graceful, were “second-class citizens,” according to Homans. In the years before I met Debbie at a health food counter, Balanchine was bewitched by Suzanne Farrell, another long-legged beauty with a demonic quality to her dancing. He was 41 years older than Farrell. He began mounting ballet after ballet for her. “Balanchine disappeared into Suzanne,” as Homans writes. In 1969, he divorced his fifth wife, “Tanny” Le Clercq, one of his finest dancers, who had contracted polio while the company was on tour. He’d choreographed Don Quixote (1965) for Farrell, playing the half-crazed Don to her Dulcinea. His performance was heartbreaking.
He wanted to marry Suzanne. But in 1969, she married Paul Mejia, one of Balanchine’s protégés. When Mr. B found out, he banned Mejia from the theater, and when Suzanne told Mr. B that she wouldn’t dance without Mejia, he stripped her of her roles. She fled to Europe with Mejia and joined another company. Balanchine was bereft. And seeing me on 67th Street with one of his soloists must have deepened his despair.
After Stravinsky died in 1971, Balanchine mounted a festival at Lincoln Center devoted to the composer. Stravinsky had been like a spiritual father to Balanchine, or an older brother perhaps. Mr. B hadn’t come from an aristocratic line, like Stravinsky or Vladimir Nabokov. He was raised in an impoverished household and was plucked into St. Petersburg’s imperial ballet school at the age of nine. He rarely saw his parents again. It was the grueling, military-like training he received in St. Petersburg that drove him to train young dancers at the School of American Ballet.
Balanchine claimed to have talked to Stravinsky every night while he mounted new ballets for the festival. Mr. B liked talking to the dead. Once, while the company was performing at the Salzburg Festival, Mr. B told his dancers, “Last night I spoke to Mozart.” “Then,” Allegra Kent recalls, “we started laughing. And then we started crying.” It was like an epiphany that they all felt and believed. The dance steps he created “flowed out of him like Mozart’s music.”
Thanks to Debbie, I attended every performance of the Stravinsky festival. The men whirling about and the women dancing en pointe were indeed a band of angels. “The pointe shoe has its own particular music,” Allegra told me. “It lifted ballet into another realm. Pointe shoes are the slippers of the imagination.”
I believed every word she said.
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In the mid-1950s, the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance in New York City authorized the demolition of a working-class Black and Hispanic neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side—a culturally rich community that included among its residents Thelonious Monk, Benny Carter, and Zora Neale Hurston. The clearance, part of Robert Moses’s widespread campaign of urban renewal in the city, saw homes, schools, and about 800 businesses razed to make way for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Throughout the 1960s, the fortresslike arts campus arose on 18 city blocks, its buildings designed by such architects as Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Pietro Belluschi. Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall and now called David Geffen Hall) opened in 1962 as the new home of the New York Philharmonic. The Metropolitan Opera House, the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater), Alice Tully Hall, and the Juilliard School were completed soon afterward. Meanwhile, the 7,000 families that had been displaced during construction were forced to relocate to already overcrowded areas in Harlem and the Bronx. Segregation worsened on Manhattan’s West Side, as the gleaming new complex seemed to turn its back on the Black neighborhoods to the west of Amsterdam Avenue.
Lincoln Center’s origin story had been glossed over or ignored entirely in the decades since. But a recently completed $550 million renovation of the Philharmonic’s concert hall, meant to address its dreary acoustics and décor, has also spurred some much-needed introspection. Increasing diversity at Lincoln Center was one of three urgent priorities for the organization’s chief executive officer, Henry Timms, when he began his appointment in the spring of 2019—a process that took on greater urgency during the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd. “What we’re trying to do,” Timms told me, “is bake in a greater commitment to inclusion in everything we do, from who’s on our stage to how we spend our money to how we think about space.” Forty-two percent of the construction contracts for the hall’s renovation, for example, were awarded to minority- and women-owned businesses.
The Philharmonic’s new season began on October 8 not with the standard glitzy opening-night gala for black-tie patrons, but with a pay-what-you-can event where tickets started at five dollars. The concert featured San Juan Hill—A New York Story, a premiere by the jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles, who performed the work (named for the neighborhood that was demolished to make way for Lincoln Center and other new construction) with the Philharmonic and the ensemble Creole Soul.
On October 12, the orchestra began its subscription season with equally atypical fare. Instead of the kind of celebratory work often programmed for such an occasion (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example)—or even the usual concert format of overture, concerto, and 19th-century symphony—Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, conducted Oyá by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter and the Cuban-born Tania León’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Stride. León’s piece premiered in 2020, when the Philharmonic commissioned 19 women composers to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Oyá was named after the Yoruba goddess of rebirth, and in Balter’s program notes for the performance, he expressed the hope that the piece would “baptize and claim this new hall,” in clear reference to Lincoln Center’s controversial beginnings. The program also included My Father Knew Charles Ives by the American composer John Adams. The only work on the program from the standard repertory was Ottorino Respighi’s colorful showpiece Pines of Rome, which concluded the evening.
The Philharmonic performed with a dynamism sometimes missing in recent years. The orchestra’s red-blooded interpretation of the Respighi received an enthusiastic ovation, the clear and vibrant acoustics of the hall showcasing both the bombastic brass and the gentler woodwind lines. The subtleties of Adams’s gorgeous piece were also elegantly highlighted, as were the contrasting moods of León’s Stride, a work influenced by Louis Armstrong and West African percussion. The performance of Oyá, a vibrantly scored, engaging work for light, electronics, and orchestra, was marred only by the gimmicky effects, with strobe lights bathing rows of listeners in a harsh glare. Overall, the crisp acoustics proved a dramatic improvement over the muffled sound of the old hall, and the audience seemed as pleased as the orchestra to be back after an absence of more than two years.
Shanta Thake, chief artistic officer of Lincoln Center, has collaborated with Timms to develop programming directly addressing the institution’s mission to artistically explore equity and social justice. A program examining the theme of liberation, designed in response to Floyd’s murder and directed by Tazewell Thompson, will highlight Black artists, and the Philharmonic has embarked on community partnerships with organizations including El Puente, a North Brooklyn–based community human rights institution, and Harlem’s Mother AME Zion Church, the oldest Black church in New York State and a former stop on the Underground Railroad. The orchestra will also address the environmental crisis with works by composers Julia Wolfe and John Luther Adams.
The renovation comes at a precarious time for classical music, which (like many of the performing arts) is still struggling to recover from pandemic shutdowns. The Philharmonic, for example, lost an estimated $27 million in ticket revenues during that time. The hope is to attract a wider audience via thoughtful and inclusive programming, as well as with pay-what-you-can events such as the NY Phil @ Noon concerts in the intimate new performance space called the Sidewalk Studio. (Although the audience at David Geffen Hall on October 12 was, generally speaking, middle-aged and white, the 2022 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center attracted younger and more diverse audiences with pay-what-you-can concerts.) David Geffen Hall will host “The 65th Street Session,” a series of performances curated by mandolinist Chris Thile. Concerts there will be live-streamed to a 50-foot digital wall in the lobby, so passersby can drop in and enjoy the music for free. New amenities at the hall include an Afro-Caribbean–inspired restaurant headed by the James Beard Award–winning Kwame Onwuachi.
In the world of classical music, diversity didn’t suddenly become a buzzword in 2020. The industry has been trying to diversify and attract new listeners for many years, with a particular emphasis on increasing the number of Black and Latino orchestral musicians. But the social justice protests of 2020 led to many more concerts addressing themes of racial inequity. In Everything Rises, a multimedia stage piece performed in October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Black bass-baritone Davóne Tines sang: “I was the moth, lured by your flame. I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access, and fame.”
There has also been renewed interest in Black composers such as Florence Price, George Walker, William Grant Still, and William Levi Dawson, as well as in Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose music has been championed recently by the violinist Augustin Hadelich. The Metropolitan Opera opened its 2021–22 season with its first performance of a work by a Black composer—Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow. In the spring, this institution, famous for its performances of the standard repertoire, will present Blanchard’s Champion—an “opera in jazz” based on the life of the Black welterweight boxer Emile Griffith.
It’s one thing, of course, to alter an orchestra’s repertoire, quite another to change the perception that the concert hall is a stuffy place governed by unwritten codes of conduct. Take the most recent Mostly Mozart Festival, at which newer patrons happened to clap between movements of a symphony. The audience members applauded, Timms told me, “because they were enjoying themselves so much and didn’t know” about the tradition of reserving applause until the end of a piece. (That tradition came about in the Romantic age; in Mozart’s and Beethoven’s time, symphonic works were often punctuated with eruptions of raucous applause.) Some patrons and musicians at Mostly Mozart, however, were irked by the enthusiastic outbursts. Meanwhile, at the opening night of Carnegie Hall’s season in late September, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, there was silence between movements of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 and the other works on the program.
It’s still too early to tell what effect the New York Philharmonic’s renovated theater and laudable programming will have in drawing a wider audience. But for Timms, these projects are essential. “From a moral perspective, it’s the right thing to do,” he said, “but from a strategic perspective, it’s also the right thing to do, because you simply cannot be an excellent organization if you have a very narrow focus in terms of your personnel and your program.”
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In 1887, when real estate developers Harvey and Daeida Wilcox founded the Hollywood subdivision outside Los Angeles, there were already two famous Hollywoods in America: a luxury hotel in New Jersey and a cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. The cemetery was especially well known, celebrated in newspapers nationwide as a kind of Confederate Valhalla for secessionist luminaries. So it’s surprising that if you search online for the origins of Hollywood’s name, neither of the two appears.
Why has there been a collective forgetting of the 19th-century history of “Hollywood”? Is it because both famous Hollywoods had intimate ties to the Old South, and Californians are attempting to prune Confederates from Hollywood’s family tree?
That’s getting harder to do, now that Kevin Waite has produced West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (2021). Waite writes that in the mid-19th century, Southern California experienced an influx of settlers from slaveholding states who sought to extend slavery all the way to the Pacific. As a result, during the Civil War, Los Angeles was a hotbed of secessionists. “Let it never be forgotten,” declared the San Francisco Bulletin’s Southern California correspondent in 1862, “that the county of Los Angeles, in this day of peril to the Republic, is two to one for Dixie and Disunion.” Hundreds of these rebel sympathizers went east to fight for the Confederacy, and about 80 joined the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles, the only Confederate militia to be organized in a free state. Meanwhile a federal garrison was stationed in Los Angeles County, after General Edwin Vose Sumner, commander of the U.S. Department of the Pacific, complained that he was struggling to contain tens of thousands of pro-Confederate Californians. Even in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat, L.A.’s secessionists continued to push a white-supremacist agenda: California was the only former free state, during Reconstruction, to reject both the 14th and 15th amendments, which granted citizenship to former slaves and gave Black men the vote.
After reading Waite’s book, I began to understand why Southern California responded so enthusiastically, in 1915, to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, and why the film industry so readily embraced Margaret Mitchell’s Lost Cause epic, Gone With the Wind. As James Baldwin later wrote, “There is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.” Yet for all of his excellent research, Waite does not address the Confederate history of “Hollywood”—an important story if we hope to understand the nationwide legacy of the Lost Cause.
Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery was established in 1847 by a pair of wealthy Virginians who had visited Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wanted to build an equally grand garden cemetery for the South. They got the name from the property’s holly bushes, which flourished in southeastern soil and had inspired a host of smaller Hollywoods, including a Hollywood resort in Mobile, Alabama, a Hollywood vineyard in Natchez, Mississippi, and Hollywood Plantation in Benoit, Mississippi.
In 1858, Hollywood became firmly established in the national imagination when President James Monroe’s body was disinterred from a New York City grave and transported to Virginia. Details of the commemorations surrounding the president’s reburial, which attracted thousands of southerners and lasted several days, were publicized in The New York Times and other newspapers across the country.
Hollywood continued to make news during the Civil War whenever a favorite son of the South was buried. Most notable was the funeral of President John Tyler in 1862. Although Tyler had requested a simple burial, Jefferson Davis devised an elaborate political event to celebrate the southern cause. Two years later came the burial of J. E. B. Stuart—the much-idolized young cavalry commander—and Hollywood was on its way to becoming the holy wood for Confederate heroes.
In May 1866, just over a year after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, a vast crowd of Richmonders gathered to place flowers on the cemetery’s Confederate graves, which numbered in the thousands. The Richmond Times, in an article reprinted in newspapers as far afield as the Dallas Herald and New Orleans Times, described the event as “the pilgrimage to Hollywood, the Mecca of the South.” Attending the following year’s “pilgrimage,” the Richmond correspondent of The New York Times wrote, “There is not this morning, we suppose, a single flower left upon its stalk in Richmond or its environs,” since “troops of little girls” gathering flowers had completely “traversed the city.”
Meanwhile, southern women went about transforming the cemetery into the official city of the Confederate dead. The Lee-Custis family estate, Arlington, had been appropriated by the federal government in 1861 and was later made into a national veterans’ cemetery, but Confederates were banned from that ground. The Ladies Hollywood Memorial Association embraced the mission of bringing to Hollywood the remains of Confederates that were, at that point, scattered across the country. In 1869, they erected a 90-foot granite “Confederate Pyramid” at Hollywood, which today is surrounded by the graves of 18,000 Confederate enlisted men, including most of the almost 3,400 soldiers who, by 1873, had been disinterred from Gettysburg. Hollywood eventually became the final resting place of 28 Confederate generals, as well as Jefferson Davis.
By the mid-1880s, Hollywood Cemetery’s fame had spread to California. The Los Angeles Times first mentioned “Hollywood” on May 21, 1885, almost two years before the Wilcoxes founded their subdivision, in a brief item about the new Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Richmond. The name would also have been familiar to the Confederate veterans who dominated local politics. When the Wilcoxes arrived in California in 1883, the mayor of Los Angeles, Cameron Thom, was a Confederate veteran from Virginia who had fought at Gettysburg. None of this necessarily means that Daeida Wilcox or H. J. Whitley—a real estate developer known as the “Father of Hollywood”—borrowed “Hollywood” from Richmond’s cemetery (Daeida reportedly said she liked the word because holly brings luck). But it demonstrates that the word was an established part of American culture long before Daeida and other Californians adopted it.
Another famous Hollywood that preceded California’s was John Hoey’s Hollywood Hotel, in Long Branch, New Jersey—one of the most extravagant properties of the Gilded Age. In the 1880s, wealthy New Yorkers spent their summers reveling in Hoey’s extravagant gardens, and their winters marveling at his “miles of greenhouses,” described by The New York Times as a tropical paradise. According to one Times correspondent, “travelers from all parts of the country went to Long Branch to see Hollywood.” H. J. Whitley and Daeida Wilcox, therefore, might have associated the word with Gilded Age excess rather than unpleasant ties to the Old South. But if so, this would merely introduce one degree of separation: Hoey had made his fortune with money he earned in the Old South, when he extended the operations of the Adams Express Company south of Washington, D.C., to establish what became known as “Hoey’s Charleston Express.”
Hoey’s extensive southern business ties probably wouldn’t have troubled the New Yorkers who frequented his hotel. Like the early leaders of Los Angeles, members of New York’s elite were quite comfortable with southern culture. Many of them had prospered as loyal subjects of King Cotton. On the cusp of the Civil War, the city’s mayor, Fernando Wood, actually pushed for New York to secede from the Union and establish itself as a sovereign city-state so that it could maintain its lucrative business with slaveholders. The idea didn’t get far.
The New Yorkers at John Hoey’s hotel almost certainly would have known that it shared its name with Virginia’s cemetery. Before the war, New Yorkers visiting Long Branch had mingled with southern aristocrats, including Jefferson Davis, whose wife, Varina, was the granddaughter of New Jersey’s governor. After her husband’s death, Varina settled in Manhattan but was ultimately buried at Hollywood, along with her husband and children. When she died, her coffin processed through Manhattan before journeying to the much-romanticized cemetery. According to a piece published in The New York Times almost 40 years earlier:
Thousands visited the beautiful graveyard, wandered through its valleys and over its hills, and lunched on sandwiches and strawberries by the side of its cooling brooks. … Love-making, too, during the entire day was carried on to an unlimited extent, and many a troth was plighted, and many a doubting, fearing heart made glad, beneath the trysting shades and amid the grand mausoleums of romantic Hollywood.
It is difficult to imagine that the founders of Los Angeles’s Hollywood Cemetery, which opened in 1899, could have been unaware of its resonance with Confederate mythology. The Long Beach chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy made the connection explicit in 1925, when it put in place a six-foot granite monument to the Confederate dead, which was surrounded by 37 graves of Confederate veterans, including several who had been residents of the Confederate rest home “Dixie Manor,” in nearby San Gabriel. Yet today, the cemetery—now called Hollywood Forever Cemetery and home to a who’s-who of dead celebrities—doesn’t outwardly acknowledge any southern roots.
Neither did Hollywood’s Chamber of Commerce, when in 1989 it filed a trademark claim seeking royalties from other Hollywoods throughout America. One of them—Hollywood, Alabama (named in 1887, incorporated in 1897)—responded by painting “we’re the real hollywood” on its water tower. Ultimately, a judge balked at the idea that trademarks could be applied to names of incorporated cities and towns. However, the chamber of commerce did manage to trademark the all-caps Hollywood sign that presides over the Hollywood Hills, even though it looks suspiciously like the similar all-caps sign that already stood outside New Jersey’s Hollywood Hotel in the early 20th century.
All of this brings us back to Kevin Waite’s research for West of Slavery, which he outlined in a 2017 Los Angeles Times op-ed. There, he drew attention to the Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery and explained why he hoped it would not be taken down:
It serves as a needed corrective to a self-congratulatory strain in the stories Californians tell about themselves. Angelenos might be tempted to view the current controversy over Confederate symbols, and the ugly racial politics they represent, as a distinctly Southern problem. But a visit to Hollywood’s cemetery plot and some historical perspective teach us otherwise.
Waite’s op-ed was published on August 4, 2017, just eight days before the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Four days after that national trauma, the monument at Hollywood Forever was taken down, and in 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, almost all of California’s remaining Confederate monuments were removed. Perhaps the monument at Hollywood Forever needed to go, but the inscription on its granite marker contained a valuable message that still bears thought: Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget.
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