As my first novel, No Winter Angel, comes to a close, there is one outstanding debt that I have not written about here--in part, because I read it so long ago, but it has stayed with me, probably informing lots of things I don't even realize.
It's a short story by Arthur Miller called "The Performance," and actually, I discovered it by way of a song that I heard in 2003 by Erin Mckeown, entitled "An Innocent Fiction." She'd read Miller's story and wrote this beautiful homage to it.
"The Performance" is about a Jewish tap dancer from the United States who travels to Europe in the 1930s and winds up dancing in a private show for Hitler, who subsequently falls in love with the performance without realizing that the performer is Jewish. Just the idea itself is so powerful. And I was--and continue to be--struck by the "breathtaking idea of a government" taking interest in a dance. And how intoxicating that must feel to the dancer, even if the government is repugnant and vile.
I had to explore the complex way this must play out in the artist's mind. When you read the dance scene in No Winter Angel, this is the image I want to convey. The terror and the power and the intoxication that make any simple moral judgment suspect.
And this image of Hitler, almost childlike in his awe and carnal in his enthusiasm, stays with me: "The troupe went into the stomp, shoes drumming the stage floor, and Hitler seemed transfixed now, swept up in the booming rhythms, both clenched fists pressing down on the tabletop, his neck stretched taut, his mouth slightly agape. 'I thought we were looking at an orgasm,' Harold said." Indeed!
