Croce's Contradiction

Comparing Arlene Croce’s recent “The Great Adventure of Sergei Diaghilev" (The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011) with her great “Inside the Ballets Russes” (The New Yorker, May 12, 1980; included in Croce’s 1982 collection Going to the Dance), I think I detect a contradiction. In “The Great Adventure of Sergie Diaghilev,” she says of Sjeng Scheijen’s Diaghilev: A Life, “Scheijen’s text avoids the overload of names, dates, and places that sank Richard Buckle’s Diaghilev in 1979, but his approach is nowhere as sophisticated, his interpretive skills never as refined as Buckle’s.” But in “Inside the Ballets Russes,” which is a review of Buckle’s Diaghilev, Croce repeatedly complains about Buckle’s lack of interpretation. She says:

One has no sense from Buckle of the dimensions of Diaghilev’s world, so much smaller than our own.

One feels that for Buckle just the record – facts that haven’t decomposed into legend – is enough.

But Buckle tracks down so many day-by-day minutiae that the movements and decisions become ends in themselves, and he never gets around to states of mind.

The jottings and cullings hardly ever turn into a line of thought. Buckle has trouble sustaining any single subject for more than a page.

A text so lacking in synthesis, in interpretation, can still be useful: future biographers will refer to the million and one checkpoints assembled in this source book.

Twenty-nine years after writing the above, Croce appears more favorably disposed to Buckle’s book. She now deems Buckle’s “just the record” approach to be “sophisticated.” She no longer complains about his lack of interpretation. Instead, she praises his “refined” interpretive skills. It’s too bad Buckle isn’t around to witness her change of opinion. He died in 2001.

I have no idea what accounts for Croce’s reappraisal of Buckle’s book. But anyone reading her review of it in “Inside the Ballets Russes” should do so in light of what she says about it now in “The Great Adventures of Sergei Diaghilev.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Morgan Elliott; it appears in The New Yorker (February 28, 2011) as an illustration for Joan Acocella’s “Critic’s Notebook.”