Nijinsky (17 page)

Before they left for Paris Diaghilev wobbled again, asking Vaslav to change fundamentally his completed composition on the grounds that it would not appeal to the public and throwing his already defensive friend into a frenzy of self-justification. Angrily Vaslav insisted to Bronia that despite the complaints of the dancers who did not understand him, despite the shocking modernity of his work, he would stand by his art as he had conceived it or leave the company altogether. In a panic Diaghilev cabled Astruc in Paris to say that he had
‘never seen him
[Nijinsky] so firm and intransigent'.

It was not until Bakst saw a rehearsal and rushed up to Vaslav,
kissing him and saying loudly,
‘You will see
… how wild Paris will be for this,' that Diaghilev's nerves were calmed. Later, excitedly, he told Bronia he had never seen Bakst so enthusiastic. ‘Levushka said that
L'Après-midi d'un faune
is a “super-genius” creation and we are all fools not to have understood it.'

Initially
Faune
was scheduled for four performances in Paris but Diaghilev extended its run to eight performances, overshadowing the new ballet Fokine was to present,
Daphnis et Chloé
, unfortunately also on a classical theme. Fokine felt that Diaghilev's promotion of Nijinsky –
‘“creating” a choreographer
out of' him, as he put it – was an effort to undermine his authority among the dancers and a bid to unite the Ballets Russes under Diaghilev's leadership, not Fokine's. Though it is surprising to think Fokine could ever have imagined that he rather than Diaghilev was the real leader of the Ballets Russes, it is true that by presenting Nijinsky as his modern choreographer there was nothing else for Fokine to be, by comparison, but old-fashioned and outdated. As Grigoriev put it, by prioritising
Faune
over
Daphnis
, Diaghilev was knowingly letting Fokine go.

‘This was a very unhappy
time for the ballet,' recalled the conductor Pierre Monteux, the reason Misia Sert was able later to call the Ballets Russes just a
‘shabby, jealous little group
… [surrounding everything] with pettiness'. Fokine was furious about the lengths to which Diaghilev was going to make
Faune
a success and seething with conspiracy theories. Rehearsals for
Faune
and
Daphnis
were occasionally at the same time, so dancers who were in both had to choose which to attend; the argument between Fokine and Grigoriev over these rehearsals was so deeply felt that it ended their friendship. Spitefully, Fokine included in
Daphnis
parodies of what he was able to glean of
Faune
's choreography, worsening the atmosphere for the confused dancers and forcing them to take sides between him and his young rival. The budget for new costumes and sets was so small
Daphnis
was required to share with the previous year's production of
Narcisse
. At
Faune
's dress rehearsal, Diaghilev lavished his influential audience with champagne and caviar – an expense he had not considered worthwhile for Fokine's
premieres. By this point, Fokine was no longer speaking to Diaghilev or Grigoriev.

Nijinsky, for his part, was unimpressed by Diaghilev's efforts on his behalf: he took them as his due, or more correctly, the due owed to art. All he minded about was the integrity of the performance. Cocteau watched Diaghilev and Bakst fret over him at dinner at Larue's one night shortly before
Faune
opened because he had a stiff neck. It turned out he had been practising
‘with the weight
of real horns … This perpetual study for his parts … made him irritable and sulky'. He and Diaghilev were bickering endlessly.

Materially as well as artistically, a great deal was riding on
Faune
's success. It had been expensive to make – the dancers had to be paid for all those miserable rehearsals – and as ever, Diaghilev was sailing close to the wind, taking out high-interest, short-term loans to keep his company afloat and ensure, by expanding their repertoire, that it continued to attract large audiences. Each season had been costlier than the previous one and he was probably in debt for close to
300,000
francs in 1912 (he had even been forced to borrow money, just once, from Vaslav) and would be paying the money back for years to come even with sell-out seasons. But the first two premieres of the Paris season,
Le Dieu bleu
and
Thamar
, vehicles for Nijinsky and Karsavina respectively, were not the successes for which Diaghilev had hoped.

L'Après-midi d'un faune
opened on 29 May 1912. After months of disagreement, resentment and distrust, the mood backstage was bleak. Bronia was nervous:
‘doubts in the wings
before a premiere reach out into the auditorium, to the public, and can lead to catastrophe'. Bakst painted the Faun's dappled hide directly onto the thin bodystocking Nijinsky was wearing, making him look
‘
plus nu que nu
'. On his head was a woven cap of golden hair and two small horns, his ears were pointed and elongated with wax, and heavy make-up made his face look uncannily, languorously bestial.
‘In the costume
, as in Nijinsky's expression, one could not define where the human ended and the animal began … He did not imitate; he merely brought out the impression of a clever animal who might be human.'

Like
Petrushka
, this was Vaslav's story – a meditation, as the ballet historian Jennifer Homans writes, upon ‘
introversion
, self-absorption and cold physical instinct'. It tells of the hesitant sexual awakening of a young faun who is fascinated by a group of bathing nymphs. At his approach they flee, one returning briefly to retrieve their discarded veils and to taunt him before being frightened away. The faun bears off a forgotten veil in triumph. For now, it is enough. Apparently without having read Mallarmé's poem, Nijinsky had summed up its premise: ‘
Ces nymphs, je les veux perpétuer
.'

As the Faun, Nijinsky was
‘thrilling. Although his movements
were absolutely restrained, they were virile and powerful, and the manner in which he caressed and carried the nymph's veil was so animal that one expected to see him run up the side of the hill with it in his mouth. There was an unforgettable moment just before his final amorous descent upon the scarf when he knelt with one knee on top of the hill, with his other leg stretched out behind him. Suddenly he threw his head back silently and laughed.'

This ‘final amorous descent', in which in the last gesture of the piece an impassive Nijinsky, alone on stage, lowered himself face down onto the precious stolen scarf and shuddered with what clearly represented a masturbatory orgasm, caused a sensation.
*
The audience, already unsure whether to cheer or catcall, was stunned into momentary silence.
‘Nobody was certain
what had happened, who had won; was it a success or not?' For the only time in the Ballets Russes's history (as far as I have been able to ascertain), Diaghilev came onstage as the dancers waited to take their bows and told them to return to their places to repeat the piece. When the curtain fell for a second time the crowd applauded wildly, though loud whistles and hisses could also be heard among the cheers.

The next day
Le Figaro
did not review the ballet but ran a front-page article denouncing Nijinsky's ‘filthy' final gesture. The septuagenarian sculptor Auguste Rodin signed a letter published as a response the day after that in
Le Matin
, in which he praised Nijinsky's art, his beauty and expressiveness, and concluded,
‘I wish that
every artist who truly loves his art might see this perfect personification of the ideals of the beauty of the ancient Greeks.' Gaston Calmette from
Le Figaro
replied with an attack against Rodin himself, who was living at the exquisite Hotel Biron – funded by the French state – and creating works (according to Calmette) as indecent and shameful as Nijinsky's Faun. It was said that Calmette was seeking to obtain an injunction to prevent
Faune
being performed again, although he did publish a letter from Odilon Redon to Diaghilev regretting that his friend Mallarmé had not been at the Théâtre du Châtelet to see
‘this wonderful evocation
of his thought'.

With his eye on the box office, Diaghilev was thrilled with the debate; Misia Sert said he was so pleased with Rodin's (ghostwritten) article that he carried the cutting in his wallet for years afterwards. News of the scandal even reached the United States, with the
Pittsburgh Gazette
's headline of 5 June howling delightedly,
‘WICKED PARIS
SHOCKED AT LAST'.

Later critics have seen in the Faun's fetishization of the scarf a fundamental ambivalence towards real intimacy, a preference for imagined rather than real consummation. Instead of engaging with the nymphs he so desired – indeed, they barely touch – Nijinsky as the adolescent Faun opted for the
‘safe haven of
self-gratification', a reflection of his own ambivalent experience of sex. When the Faun and the Chief Nymph dance – briefly – together,
‘the seesaw
of angled bodies suggests a host of competing desires: lust, fear, acquiescence, timidity, evasion, a will to dominate'. Despite the eroticism of their situation, the geometry of their coupling, the severe stylisation of their movements ‘also unsexes them, as if form, like some higher morality, were a shield against instinct'.

Stravinsky saw it differently.
‘Of course Nijinsky
made love only to the nymph's scarf. What more would Diaghilev have allowed?' He
‘adored the
ballet': ‘Nijinsky's performance was such marvellously
concentrated art that only a fool could have been shocked by it.'
‘I did not think
about obscenity when I was composing that ballet,' Vaslav would write. ‘I was composing it with love.'

In many ways, the most shocking element of
Faune
was not Nijinsky's notorious gesture but the powerfully abstract quality of the choreography and the disconcerting distance between music and motion. Nijinsky used stillness consciously, just as artists like Cézanne and Picasso used blank canvas and empty space consciously; for him not-moving was as important an element of the composition as moving. Despite the difficulties they had faced learning their parts, the nymphs had achieved what Nijinsky wanted from them, a way of dancing between the bars, as he put it, with the music trickling through their consciousness.
‘Once you mastered
it, and you … could feel yourself dancing in sound, it was the most delightful thing to dance in that you could possibly imagine,' remembered one, years later.
‘The sensation
approached the divine.'

Faune
was, as its three authors had intended, an anti-ballet, but although it might seem
‘a refutation
of technique', it was in fact ‘the extreme understatement of a technique that was without parallel'. It required mastery of the classical canon which Nijinsky then rigorously, analytically, consciously broke down
‘to his own purpose
': a physical expression of what the Cubists were trying to achieve on canvas. As with the Cubists (the best visual parallel I can think of is Picasso's 1907
Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon
, shimmering with similarly disturbing, almost menacing undercurrents and a distinctive combination of primitivism and ultra-modernism),
Faune
was a pointed repudiation of everything audiences loved about ballet in general and Nijinsky as a dancer in particular: virtuosity, exoticism, romance and sensuality. There were no jumps, no spins, no razzmatazz. But Nijinsky loathed that aspect of his celebrity. Angrily, he used to say when people raved about
Spectre
, ‘
Je ne suis pas
un sauteur; je suis un artiste
'. With
Faune
he ruthlessly re-examined the traditions that had nurtured his talent, seeking to cleanse them of all their cloying decorativeness and sentiment.

Some – but by no means all – of his fellow artists understood his vision. Benois, predictably, found his work still-born: ‘in spite of
Diaghilev's
and Bakst's efforts to “feed” his creativity … novelty and strangeness are not in themselves valuable'. But Léonide Massine, who learned the role of the Faun from Nijinsky in 1916, believed Nijinsky had
‘evolved a sculptural line
which gave an effect of organic beauty such as I had never before seen'.

Diaghilev's pride was mingled with jealousy. He told a condescending story about how he had sent his protégé to look at the Greek sculptures in the Louvre for inspiration, but Vaslav had got lost and spent the afternoon in the Egyptian rooms while Bakst waited for him as arranged on the floor above. This, Diaghilev liked to joke, was why the ballet was performed in profile. Later he would tell Lifar that during the making of
Faune
Vaslav had
‘revealed not one
ounce of creative talent'.