Dance Fever : I REMEMBER BALANCHINE: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him; <i> Edited by Francis Mason</i> ; <i> (Doubleday: $25; 604 pp.) </i>

That George Balanchine was a great artist everybody now seems to recognize. What is less talked about is what a colossal career he had.

He made his first ballet at age 5 and never stopped until age 78, when, gravely ill with a neurological disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, he finally was persuaded to check into a hospital. He died there a year later, in 1983, having created not just 400 ballets but also the finest ballet troupe in the world, the New York City Ballet, and also this country’s premier dance academy, the School of American Ballet.

Working on these three fronts--his repertory, his company, and his school--he created a wholly new style for ballet. Taking the noble old Russian style in which he was trained, he shot it through a sort of cyclotron, so that it came out re-energized, accelerated, “packed,” with the dancers doing six steps in the time it formerly took them to do one.

As he worked out this style, it spread. More than 50 American ballet companies now perform Balanchine’s works. (Indeed, most of the leading American ballet companies now are directed by his ex-dancers.) And as his style spread, it changed the way people saw ballet. To eyes used to his work, other styles, however glamorous, came to seem finicky (the English style) or stagy (the Russian). He shifted the axis of the entire art. No other artist in the 20th Century--not Picasso, not Stravinsky--has had so huge an effect on his field.

Compared with his achievement, the literature on Balanchine is still very small. There are two inadequate biographies, a superb catalogue of his works, and an assortment of memoirs by dancers who remember him with love (e.g., Gelsey Kirkland, “Dancing on My Grave”). But the list is growing, the most recent entry being “I Remember Balanchine,” a collection of mini-memoirs gathered via interview and edited by Francis Mason, the editor of Ballet Review and the co-author of “Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.”

This book is like a big cocktail party, with lots of foreign accents (the Russian friends) and lots of jewelry clanking (the ballerinas). Two of Balanchine’s four wives are there, and a number of his girlfriends. His conductors also are there, and his wardrobe supervisor and his urologist. But mostly what we have are his dancers, telling how he trained them and what he was like. Certain things they agree on: how hard his daily class was, how they scurried to please him.

Again and again they tell us how he favored women over men, how he begged his dancers not to emote but just to dance (“Nobody, dear, is interested in your tears,” he told one dancer), how what he wanted more than anything else was a fresh, clean look. They also swap stories, so that we get to find out what his favorite wine was (Chateau Haut-Brion) and what he felt was the proper way to make borscht (bake the beets, don’t boil them) and how, when he was at his country house, he so much enjoyed washing his car that when he was finished with his own, he would often proceed to wash the other cars on the block.

We are told what his morning routine was: how, after breakfast, he would sit in his underwear and iron his clothes for an hour or so while talking to his assistant, Barbara Horgan, over the phone. We find out how much money he made (not much, and what he made he often gave back to the company) and what he thought of other choreographers (“Tudor should have been a nuclear scientist or something”). We also get a lot more gossip about his marriages than we should have gotten, considering that all the wives are alive to read this book.

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of private agendas. The Soviet ballet historian Yuri Slonimsky, whose feelings about Russia’s greatest choreographer electing to spend his career outside Russia can easily be guessed, is at pains to point out that all of Balanchine’s work is directly descended from the Russian influences that he absorbed before he fled his country at age 20. Paul Mejia, who was squeezed out of New York City Ballet when he married the woman Balanchine was in love with, Suzanne Farrell, goes on at length about how much he is like Balanchine and how Balanchine had “adored” him. William Weslow, another dancer whom Balanchine got rid of, gives an interview that would make a very interesting psychoanalytic study: It is all about touching and being touched by Balanchine, hurting him and being hurt by him, and the pleasures of hurting. Readers interested in the dirty parts will want to turn immediately to Weslow’s section.

Through all this, a picture of Balanchine gradually silts up. He was a calm, quiet, unpretentious man with a beautiful, slightly Oriental face--hawk nose, high cheek bones--and a facial tic that made him seem to sniff. (When Weslow once imitated his tic in front of him, he said, “Don’t do this nose. I do this nose. You dance. “)

When he was sent off to St. Petersburg’s Imperial Theater School at age 9, he was separated from his mother--a loss that he seems never to have forgotten. Then when he fled the Soviet Union at age 20, he lost his country, his language, his world. Soon afterward he came down with tuberculosis and practically lost his life. While recovering, he lost his chance at the one job he seems most to have wanted, the directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet.

This hard story cannot explain his art, but it does help to explain his career, for it left him with an extraordinarily long view of time. Having lost everything and bounced back so many times, he seems to have felt he could do so forever. His patience was amazing.

I once heard one of his ballerinas, Melissa Hayden, tell how, when she was having trouble with a complicated turn that he asked her to do, he said, “Don’t worry, dear, you’ll get it.” “How long do I have?” she asked. “Ten years,” he replied. And when, in the ‘60s, it looked as though the company was going to lose its new theater, New York State Theater, he again told everyone not to worry: “If we have to go back to the beginning, it doesn’t matter, we’ll do it again.” This from a 60-year-old man. The value of such resilience in running a ballet company--to say nothing of an artistic career, with the usual number of slumps and bad reviews--hardly needs to be described.

By a familiar paradox, his ability to take the long view enabled him to live completely in the present. “You know, I am really a dead man,” he told one dancer. “I was supposed to die and I didn’t, and so now everything that I do is second chance. . . . I don’t look back.” This quality does help to explain his art: his quest for a totally energized look. (“What are you waiting for?” he always exhorted his dancers. “Do it now !”)

In any case, it certainly explains how he kept the company going year after year as money failed to come through, as the dancers he loved got injured, got pregnant, walked out. Simply, he made do. Whenever a dancer couldn’t do a step in a ballet he was rehearsing her in, he would just change the step. He revised his ballets continually. One of his dancers, Francisco Moncion, recalls, “You’d say, ‘Didn’t that used to be like this?’ He’d reply, ‘It used to be rotten. Much better now.’ ”

Many people do not agree with Balanchine on this score. A constantly reiterated theme of “I Remember Balanchine” is the terrible disrepair into which many of Balanchine’s ballets have fallen. Not only have steps changed, details also have been erased, accents have slackened. In some cases, such as the great “Concerto Barocco,” the whole rhythmic design has shifted, making it look like a completely different ballet.

While many of these changes occurred under Balanchine, many more have crept in since his death. Balanchine may have had the right to let his ballets slip, but we don’t, and as Mason’s interviewees keep repeating, the situation should be dealt with while the people who danced these ballets in their pristine days are still alive to fix them. In the words of one dancer, “Why not call these people back and say, ‘Reset it, let’s see what it looks like’? . . . (Maria) Tallchief is here, (Tanaquil) LeCler is here. Not to use these people is a sacrilege.”

If the present administration of New York City Ballet has anything to learn from this book, that is it. “When I go, it goes,” Balanchine said of his work. It is his successors’ job to prove him wrong.

The general reader has a great deal more to learn from “I Remember Balanchine.” It should have been a shorter book. (There’s a lot of waffling and idee-recue -repeating that could have been cut.) It should have had a biographical introduction and an index.

And I wish Mason had cast his net more widely. Of his 85 interviewees, only 16 didn’t dance for Balanchine, and that includes three of his doctors. What about the people he worked with in Hollywood and on Broadway? What about his pals from the music world? These people would have known a different Balanchine. The book is too full of one Balanchine, the dancers’ Balanchine.

Still, anyone interested in ballet will want to hear what they have to say. I can think of only one person who wouldn’t care: Balanchine. When the first biography of him came out, he handed his advance copy to Francis Mason, saying, “Take it; maybe you will be interested. I’m not.” Biographies stop time, and for him time never stopped. That is the secret of his ballets.

“His choreography goes from one thing to the next with no stop,” says Stanley Williams, head of faculty at the School of American Ballet. “It just continues.”

Balanchine too just wanted to continue. In the last interview of the book, one of his doctors puzzles over how Balanchine got Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is extremely rare, and suggests that he may have contracted it through some injections that he was receiving in Switzerland. The injections were part of a “rejuvenation” treatment. Typical.