Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,91
breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off,” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
INTERVIEWER: Where you discovered ballet.
EZRA BLAZER: Ballet and ballerinas. These were Balanchine’s great days, after all. Spectacular stuff. All new. I discovered Stravinsky, I discovered Bartók, Shostakovich. That changed everything.
INTERVIEWER: Your first wife was a dancer.
EZRA BLAZER: My first two wives were dancers. Who didn’t like each other, as you can imagine. But that was another education. I married Erika—
INTERVIEWER: Erika Seidl.
EZRA BLAZER: Yes, Erika Seidl. Later she became famous, but when we married she was still a girl in the corps and I was enchanted. Everything was new. Everything! It just burst upon me. And the newness, the thrill of discovery, became embodied for me in this exquisitely beautiful young woman. Born in Vienna. Trained in the Vienna State Opera Ballet School and her family lived there until she was fourteen and then her parents divorced and her mother, who was American, took her to New York, and she just disappeared into Balanchine. It was about a year after we married that she soloed in The Seven Deadly Sins and that was it, I never saw her again. It was like being married to a boxer. She was always in training. When I went backstage to see her after a performance she stank like a boxer. All of the girls stank; it was like Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue. She had this little monkey face—not onstage; onstage it was a great skull, all eyes and ears, but backstage she looked like she’d gone fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. Anyway, I never saw her. I’d found what few men found in that era, which was a woman wholly occupied by what she did, and wedded to it. So we parted. And I drifted to another dancer. Not smart. Dana.
INTERVIEWER: Dana Pollock.
EZRA BLAZER: Dana was never the dancer Erika was, but she was something. I don’t know why I did it again. I did the same thing again, and the same thing happened. So next I married a bartender. But she was out nights, too.
INTERVIEWER: You never had children?
EZRA BLAZER: After the fact, I consider my girlfriends my children.
INTERVIEWER: Do you regret never having children?
EZRA BLAZER: No. I love my friends’ children. I think about them and I call them and attend their birthday parties, but I had other fish to fry. And monogamy, insofar as it’s conducive to good parenting . . . Well, I’ve never been inordinately fond of monogamy. But ballet, and ballet music, that was the next education. And then came everything else. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, the Schubert piano pieces I love, the Beethoven quartets, the great Bach sonatas, the partitas, the Goldberg variations, Casals playing those growling cello pieces. Everyone loves those; by now they’re a little like “Mam’selle.”
INTERVIEWER: Let’s hear about your sixth record then.
EZRA BLAZER: A friend recently gave me a copy of Nijinsky’s diary, the first edition, which was put together by his widow, Romola, who I’m told suppressed what she didn’t like. Having to do with Diaghilev, I suppose. Because she was jealous of Diaghilev and his power over Nijinsky and she blamed Diaghilev for Nijinsky’s illness. Anyway, there’s a new edition out now, where the edited-out parts have been restored, but it’s the widow’s I read, and whatever may have been done to it it’s still marvelous. All of this sent me back to “Afternoon of a Faun,” another first love. [Laughs.] But now I can hear the rebellion in it—the perversity, the enslavement to imagined forces. Alas, we don’t have any footage of Nijinsky dancing the Faun, so we have to make do with what we do have, which is Debussy.
INTERVIEWER: That was Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” performed by Emmanuel Pahud and the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado. Ezra Blazer, you’ve written that depression is “the inevitable crash after an untenable happiness.” How often has that been true for you?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, it’s true whenever depression hits, which fortunately for me has been only two or three times. Once when I was left by a woman I hugely loved. Twice when I was left by a woman I hugely loved. A third time