cover image Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton

Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton

Julie Kavanagh. Pantheon Books, $35 (688pp) ISBN 978-0-679-44269-1

When the preeminent English choreographer and artistic director of the Royal Ballet, Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), was 13 years old, he was overwhelmed by the bravura performance of Anna Pavlova. According to Kavanagh, London editor for the New Yorker, Ashton didn't just want to dance like her; ""he wanted to be Pavlova."" Before he died, Ashton gave Kavanagh access to his papers, and she used that access well, filling in the blanks with a deft portrait of the man's work and life. Ashton, a withdrawn and artistic child, was raised in Lima, Peru, the son of an unhappy marriage between a minor British diplomat (a suicide in 1924) and a distant mother. But it was the ""lightness, somberness, ritual"" of his Peruvian childhood that he would transmit into his ballets, particularly his work for the 1934 Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. He seemed to know everyone, from Bronislava Nijinska to Cecil Beaton, Benjamin Britten, Edith Sitwell and, of course, his prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Still, Ashton emerges as a complicated figure--unhappy, frugal, jealous--with more professional successes than private ones. His relationships with his male lovers, the ""secret muses"" of the book's title, were often unsatisfying. As the author writes, ""the unattainable was then, as it continued to be for Ashton, the only enduring attraction."" Kavanagh keeps her subject in focus and the momentum going--at least until the last years, with their endless rounds of royal lunches with the Queen Mum & Co. Secret Muses is valuable not only as an account of one man's groundbreaking contribution to English ballet, but as a record of a difficult and fertile era. Photos not seen by PW. (May)