Volume 44, Number 13 · August 14, 1997
'Sweet as a Fig'
By Joan Acocella
Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton
by Julie Kavanagh
Pantheon, 647 pp., $35.00
The secret muses of the book's title are the boyfriends. Like so many others of the honored dead, Frederick Ashton, great choreographer, creator of the English style of ballet, has now been made the subject of a biography that fills in the love life—a story that, because he was homosexual, was kept well hidden from the public while he was alive. What is strange and wonderful about the book, however, is that it is not the usual treatment. Julie Kavanagh does not think that the sex explains the art. Still less does she believe that her subject is somehow a lesser man, an unclothed emperor, because he didn't tell the journalists what went on in his bedroom. In other words, this is not the act of vengeance that we have come to expect from the new, tell-all biography.
Review, 4542 words
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