I took a friend to one of the last performances of the Balanchine Nutcracker this season at the New York City Ballet. He’d never seen it before; in fact, it was his first visit to the ballet. I myself hadn’t seen The Nutcracker for several years, and, wondering what it would be like to be seeing it for the first time as an adult, I found myself remembering what it had been like seeing it as a child. How upsetting I had found the scene in which Marie’s little brother, Fritz, shatters the nutcracker-doll, the special gift that Herr Drosselmeyer has brought for her! And how inadequate the parents’ response had seemed!
Nowadays the incident seems to be staged as a sort of mishap, a result of high spirits, perhaps, or a missed dose of Ritalin. Fritz whirls the nutcracker around in the air a couple of times before letting it fall to the floor. But when I was a little girl the child playing Fritz actually stamped on the nutcracker, laid it down on the floor and deliberately stamped on it, and for this atrocity, this shocking act of violence and malice, received no more than a finger-wag in the face and a pat on the bottom before being led upstage—rather than off to bed without supper where he clearly belonged.
Critical opinion varies as to why Fritz breaks the nutcracker. Writing in The Nation on the occasion of the ballet’s 1954 premiere, the great dance critic Edwin Denby explained it as jealousy over the growing sympathy Fritz sees developing between his sister (who, following a different tradition, was called Clara then) and Drosselmeyer’s nephew. (“Clara and he get along very well, too well for Fritz. He grabs his sister’s nutcracker and stamps on it.”)
More recent accounts—including the synopsis offered on the City Ballet website—attribute the incident to jealousy over the nature of the gift itself. Perhaps it is. Drosselmeyer only brings Fritz a hobbyhorse. It’s a beautiful hobbyhorse, to be sure—presumably made by the clockmaker/magician himself—but it is only a hobbyhorse. It doesn’t move without Fritz. Nor does it have parts that move, like the nutcracker, or like the wonderful mechanical dolls that Drosselmeyer brings to entertain the guests at the Christmas party.
And toys with moving parts are what Drosselmeyer and Balanchine’s Nutcracker itself chiefly love.
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In the language of the ballet, the hobbyhorse might well be considered a second-class gift. But it seems to me that Fritz’s behavior vis-a-vis the nutcracker-doll is at least as much a part of something else in Balanchine’s staging of this story: a conflict between the respective attitudes of little girls and little boys toward the adult world.
Beginning with the opening dance-mime debate over who belongs at the keyhole to the door of the parlor that the Stahlbaum children are forbidden to set foot in on Christmas Eve, a large part of Balanchine’s first act seems taken up with the warring impulses of girls and boys, an antagonism that Balanchine only resolves in the final pas de deux between the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier.
The girls echo the behavior of the grownup world, greeting each other cordially (with just that extra bit of wild affection that characterizes friendships between preadolescent girls) and mimicking the ballet’s primary adult activities (parenting and party-giving), while the boys—after an initial exchange of bows that seems laced with parental constraint—instantly become children again. They play leapfrog, rush wildly about with their trumpets and drums, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. They pose a constant threat to the beauty and decorum, the gracious equipoise, that the annual Christmas party at the Stahlbaum’s represents. Some of this, of course, is in the music. What seems unique to Balanchine’s staging is the insightful connection he draws between the boys’ hostility toward the girls and their hostility to order and authority. It’s only dancing that allows the grownups to keep them under control.
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My visit to the ballet reminded me of another toy-soldier story, from the same era as Balanchine’s Nutcracker, that I’ve loved since childhood: Edward Eager’s Knight’s Castle, about a group of children who are given a toy fortress filled with knights and ladies, and discover that every third night they’re able to shrink magically to the size of toys and have “yeomanly” adventures. It’s the third in a series of books that Eager wrote between the mid-50s and the early 60s about ordinary children who have magical adventures.
Eager was a minor figure in the New York theater world, a playwright, lyricist, and librettist who had enjoyed modest success in the 1940s, chiefly as an adapter of light opera (he worked frequently with Alfred Drake) before taking up writing for children. As an adult, he had been introduced—by Christopher Morley and William Rose Benet and other members of the Saturday Review of Literature crowd—to the work of the pre–World War I children’s author E. Nesbit. In the early 50s, Eager began writing children’s books for his own son, (coincidentally named) Fritz, and between 1954 and 1964 wrote seven books, all of them heavily influenced by Nesbit.
The first of the series, Half Magic, was published in 1954, the same year that Balanchine’s Nutcracker premiered. The two had actually worked together; Eager had provided lyrics for a 1944 dance-musical (Dream with Music) that Balanchine had choreographed as a vehicle for his then-wife, Vera Zorina—but that’s neither here nor there. What is interesting is that Balanchine’s Nutcracker shares with Eager’s books a characteristic that Eager set great store by.
In a 1958 article extolling Nesbit in The Horn Book Magazine, Eager drew attention to what he called “the dailiness of the magic” in Nesbit’s books. “Here is no land of dragons and ogres or Mock Turtles and Tin Woodmen,” he wrote. “The world of E. Nesbit…is the ordinary garden world we all know, with just the right pinch of magic added.” The advantage of this sort of magic is that “after you finish reading…you feel it could all happen to you, any day now, round any corner.”
This is true of Balanchine’s Nutcracker. For all the strangeness of the old-fashioned surroundings, what children who are plunked down in the middle of the Stahlbaum’s Christmas celebrations love about the first half of the ballet is its ordinariness, its easy, artless reflection of what childhood is really like.
They also get something that grownups rarely seem to understand about the language of Balanchine’s staging. Because children understand someting grownups have forgotten—how stories about toy soldiers that come to life are supposed to work—they know that the tree that magically grows to gigantic proportions isn’t really growing larger. What’s happening is that Marie herself is magically shrinking down to the size of the mice and toys, so that she herself can take part in the drama.
Eager always claimed that the books he wrote himself were “second-rate Nesbit,” and, after his death in 1964, as the thinking about what constituted suitable writing for children changed, and “fantasy literature” gradually replaced “books about magic,” the critical establishment dismissed Eager as merely imitative, to the extent that it took any notice of him at all.
In fact, though, Eager never borrowed a plot from Nesbit without injecting it with a modern spin, an extra dose of ordinariness. The children in Half Magic who, like the children in Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet find a charm that grants wishes, spend a third of the book working out that their charm only grants half your wish, so that you have to figure out what to wish for.
Similarly, the children in Knight’s Castle, emulating the hero of Nesbit’s The Magic City and building around the toy castle an outlying district of ordinary household objects, discover that the changes they make to the castle by day—borrowing bits of clothing and furniture from a despised and forgotten dollhouse—affect what life in the city they create is like in the “magic” portions.
It’s comedy, not morality. Eager had an ability to write humorously for children without being arch—or perhaps it’s just that he had the grace to make his child-protagonists arch themselves. They’re voracious readers all, able to quote and lampoon at will. The children in Knight’s Castle—Roger and his sister, Ann, and their cousin Eliza—have all read The Magic City, and if they haven’t actually read Ivanhoe, they’ve seen the 1952 movie.
They decide that the toy castle is Torquilstone and designate the miniature figures within it as Sir Wilfred and Sir Cedric, Rebecca and Rowena, de Bracy and de Bois-Guilbert. But when they return to the castle having built the “magic city” around it, they find the magic world full of motorized vehicles from the toy chest and buildings of glass and chrome.
It was like the middle of New York City, only more so. Except that riding the trucks and sports cars and parts of old electric trains were knights in armor and ladies in tall headdresses. Few of them were expert drivers, and all of them were exceeding the speed limit…
A knight rode by on a motorcycle. He had his fair lady with him, in the sidecar. Roger averted his eyes. “It’s sacrilege,” he said.
A knight accidentally jostles Roger.
“I crave thy pardon, gentle sir,” said Roger.
“Get outa the way, stoopid,” said the knight, shoving past…
“This is awful,” said Roger.
There are knights and ladies, on lunch break from their factory jobs, reading comic books and movie magazines. Rebecca is carrying on like a Red Cross nurse, offering to vaccinate passersby. “A mighty sorceress cast a spell over the whole country,” she tells the children. “…And you can see for yourselves what followed.”
“All that noise and newfangled inventions, and everybody rushing and nobody getting anywhere! Nobody speaking the old ancient yeomanly talk any more, either. You can walk a whole city block without hearing a single ‘By my halidom!’ And you can imagine what happened to the siege.”
“It went to pot,” guessed Eliza.
“That’s exactly where it went,” said Rebecca. Oh, they still fire a few arrows on weekdays between two and four, but nobody takes it seriously anymore. They let the servants take care of it, mostly.” Her voice trembled with emotion. “And Wilfred of Ivanhoe’s sword grows rusty and they say he just lies in bed all day and reads science fiction!”
“Why, how perfectly disgusting!” Eliza said.
Of all the verities that govern books about toys and dolls, the most important is the rule that toys need to be played with. That is their raison d’etre—which is why stories about dolls and toys so often hinge on the universal childhood conflict between fascination with the new and love for the old and familiar.
One of the things I like best about Knight’s Castle is the way Eager incorporates this dynamic into the story. He makes the discarded and forgotten dollhouse in the corner the seat of direst yeomanly danger for the children, and he makes the angry, neglected dolls within it the villains of the piece.
He also brings about a rather moving climax in which Roger’s old stash of lead soldiers, liberated by his little sister from the bound box and bed of cotton wool in which they’ve lain forgotten throughout the book, come marching to the rescue—all different types and regiments. There are British grenadiers and modern G.I.’s and 1918 doughboys and Spanish War veterans. And Roger becomes their general, of course, and leads them to victory. Even my husband tears up when he reads that part.
The thing I like best, though, about Knight’s Castle is its definition of heroism. Like Balanchine’s Nutcracker, it’s about a brother and sister who don’t get along, largely because the boy thinks girls are beneath contempt. It’s only at the end, when Roger acknowledges the heroism of his sister in bringing about a happy denouement, that he achieves glory.
There’s a wonderful pun involved, too. Throughout the book the words “lead soldiers” (as in “They’re nothing but a lot of lead soldiers!”) have been the “words of power” that, Alice-like, return the children to their ordinary full-size lives. Now, after Roger obeys his impulse to credit his sister with saving the day, the assembled company raise their glasses in a toast:
“Three cheers for Roger…and may his name live forever, for the way he hath led soldiers!”
“He led soldiers! Led Soldiers! Led soldiers!” cheered the whole company, and these were the most beautiful Words of Power (or of anything else) that Roger had ever heard in his life.
It’s the same lesson that a child taken to see Balanchine’s Nutcracker learns, subliminally, when the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier dance their climactic pas de deux. Everything he does is about showcasing her beauty, her glory. It’s only when he has—in the language of ballet—acknowledged her herosim that he gets to dance his own heroic variation.
New York Press, February 5, 2002