The Dreamy Impresario

By Paul Gray

Lincoln Kirstein's career as a cultural impresario began early, grounded in two attributes rarely found together in the same person: good taste and money. The latter came from his indulgent father, a partner in a Boston department store, and it enabled Kirstein, during his freshman year at Harvard in 1926, to found Hound & Horn, an influential literary quarterly that ran seven years, published original work by the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and lost approximately $8,000 an issue. Somewhat less expensively, Kirstein also began the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, an organization that provided much of the impetus for the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art.

Those were heady accomplishments for someone in his early 20s, but Kirstein's greatest coup lay a few years ahead, in 1933, when he persuaded choreographer George Balanchine to come to America. The brilliant Russian emigre and the well-heeled native son built up what became the New York City Ballet, in its prime the most influential dance company on earth.

It may at first seem peculiar that Kirstein's autobiography, Mosaic (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 270 pages; $25), concludes just prior to his successful approach to Balanchine. But he has written other books (Portrait of Mr. B, Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet) about their long collaboration. This time the author, 87, tries to recapture the influences and experiences that led him to Balanchine in the first place.

The result is both eccentric and oddly endearing. Kirstein portrays himself as a child with "an inborn greed for artificed splendor," mesmerized by patterns and designs. One of the longest episodes in the book recounts his intense quest for just the right emblem to paint on his canoe paddle at summer camp. Citing an occasion when his father gave him a $20 bill, Kirstein remembers "the papery cash, its tough fibrous thinness inlaid with bits of red and green silk." The dreamy young man did not take much interest in academics, but he passed Harvard's entrance exam anyway. Once enrolled, he writes, "I felt like a minnow with the freedom to swim in whomever's wake I wanted."

Kirstein never lacked for accomplished or famous people in his near vicinity; Mosaic records the steady patter of dropping names, starting with his father's lawyer (Louis D. Brandeis) and running through most of Bloomsbury ("Maynard Keynes guided me to a show of Cezanne's water-colors at the Leicester Galleries") and a Who's Who of 20th century artists, writers and performers. This recitation seems forgivable. Kirstein recognizes that some of these big names were "glad enough to suffer rich idiots like myself," but he genuinely knew, learned from and helped many of the others. His own youthful dreams of being an artist went unfulfilled, but he had the sense and the dedication to help others -- principally Balanchine -- work wonders.