Nijinsky (33 page)

Muriel Draper, meeting Diaghilev again in London after the war, found him
‘a shade worn
and tired'. There was ‘no conscious nobility of purpose in life and therefore no great living. No great living, and therefore less and less great art.' He was preoccupied by events in Russia,
from where he had had news that his beloved stepmother had died and that friends like Walter Nouvel, who had burned all his furniture as firewood, were barely surviving. He was disappointed that the new generation of artists and set designers in whose hands he had hoped to place the Ballets Russes's future, like Picasso and André Derain, were only using the company to promote their own interests. He was missing the creative companionship of Bakst and Stravinsky, both of whom he had alienated with his tyrannical management style and insulted by trying to pay too little. Finally, with Massine scarcely bothering to conceal his disdain for him, he was lonely too. He told the conductor Ernest Ansermet that he had been
‘living in a dream world
and not in reality, in an empty bubble of prosperity and success. It was all just masturbation, and he didn't want any part in it any more.'

In 1920, reconciled with Stravinsky, Diaghilev asked Massine to choreograph a new version of
Le Sacre du printemps
. When Lydia Sokolova (who had danced as a maiden in Nijinsky's version of the ballet seven years earlier) was told that she was to dance the Chosen Maiden, she was so excited she threw her arms around Sergey Grigoriev's neck – earning the highest fine ever paid by a member of the Ballets Russes (£5 for ‘assault' as noted in Grigoriev's little book). After her first performance, Diaghilev and Massine gave Sokolova their eczema-ridden lapdog, Mickey, which (perhaps because she was English) she had always pitied because they treated it so badly, letting it eat pots of make-up remover and getting it drunk and laughing at it.

During the rehearsals for
Sacre
, Diaghilev heard that Massine was having an affair with one of the dancers, Vera Clark, an English recruit to the company whom Diaghilev had given a Russian stage name, Savina. Desperate not to lose another lover-protégé, Diaghilev had the couple followed by private detectives to find out if the rumours were true and, when he was convinced it was, had Massine beaten up by hired thugs. Varying accounts of the fall-out described Massine ordering Diaghilev in front of the company to tie his shoelaces and Diaghilev lumbering down onto his knees to obey; and Diaghilev getting Savina drunk, telling her to strip, and then throwing her into Massine's bedroom, saying,
‘If that's what
you want, take her now.' Massine and Savina quit and started their own company and married the following year.

Once again Diaghilev was heartbroken and humiliated, complaining to Grigoriev that Massine had been nothing when they met. And once again he lost no time looking for a replacement. A young man hoping to find a position as a secretary was ushered into Diaghilev's hotel room at about this time. Diaghilev was sitting at his desk writing. He did not look up. The young man cleared his throat, and still not looking at him, Diaghilev said,
‘Take off
your clothes.' When he had done so, the young man cleared his throat again. Diaghilev screwed in his monocle, looked at the man, said, ‘Put your clothes on,' and went back to his work. The young man understood he had been dismissed; his hairiness was not to Diaghilev's taste. The successful applicant for the position, who later added the role of librettist to his responsibilities, was Boris Kochno, a darkly handsome Russian émigré of seventeen with a thing for older men.

Although the Ballets Russes continued to attract and incubate the best talents of the era,
*
no great creative or commercial triumphs consoled Diaghilev for his unsatisfactory private life during the 1920s. Stout, bored and diabetic – though characteristically he refused the insulin injections that, from 1921, would have relieved his condition – he survived on a diet largely of champagne, chocolate and cocaine, keeping a posse of fresh young men around him and compulsively touching his wooden cane to stave off bad luck.

In 1921, hoping to create a modern classic that would bring in audiences for years to come, Diaghilev decided to mount an ambitious and eye-wateringly expensive revival of Tchaikovsky's 1890 full-length ballet,
La Belle au bois dormant
. Renamed
The Sleeping Princess
by Diaghilev, it was to be shown in London that winter. Calling on all his powers of persuasion, Diaghilev gathered together his old guard: Stravinsky would
orchestrate the music, Bakst (after both André Derain and Benois had turned him down) would design the costumes and sets, and Bronia Nijinska – back in Paris and an established ballet mistress in her own right – would refresh Petipa's old-fashioned choreography.

Despite their combined talents, the ballet was not right for the time. Audiences of the 1920s wanted to be modern, and did not share Bakst's and Diaghilev's passionate nostalgia for the St Petersburg of the 1890s, a quality that had been absent from their previous, pre-revolutionary productions.
The Sleeping Princess
closed early with Diaghilev owing impresario Sir Oswald Stoll £11,000. Fleeing London to avoid his creditors, Diaghilev arrived in Paris to find that Bakst was suing him because, after having dropped everything to help with
The Sleeping Princess
, Diaghilev had rewarded him by giving Stravinsky's short opera
Mavra
, which he had promised Bakst, to a rival artist. Bakst won the lawsuit (for compensation for lost income). He and Diaghilev never spoke again and he died in December 1924.

Bronia and Stravinsky worked together again the following year with Natalia Goncharova as designer on
Les Noces
, which premiered in Paris in June 1923.
*
It was a ballet Diaghilev had originally intended for Vaslav and he would surely have been delighted by the way in which Bronia made the dancers, male and female, perform the same steps. In all her ballets Bronia worked on and expanded themes her brother had established, using the same modernist aesthetic. This is especially evident in the detached playfulness with which she dealt with the representation of gender on stage, recalling the ambiguity and fluidity of
Jeux
. In
Les
Fâcheux
(1924) she danced a male role and put Dolin
en pointe
; in
Les Biches
the Girl in Blue is dressed as a pageboy. She would later write that
Jeux
and
Sacre
had been more influential on her work as a choreographer than
Faune
as the starting points for modern and neoclassical ballet.
*
Very soon after he was admitted, the writer Robert Walser saw Vaslav at Bellevue, the comfortable Kreuzlingen sanatorium to which he had been taken in 1919 and where he lived until 1923, and again in the 1930s. He was still dancing, in a limited way, for visitors to the asylum:
‘his dancing is
like a fairy tale,' Walser wrote, as if he never would – perhaps never could – stop.

Vaslav found being institutionalised severely traumatic. Despite the humanitarian principles (for its time) by which Bellevue was run, the level of understanding of mental illness was so low that Vaslav was not assigned a Russian-speaking psychiatrist until his third stay there. At his worst moments, according to their records, he refused to eat, masturbated in public, harmed himself, begged for poison so he could commit suicide, hallucinated wildly, attacked his attendants and had to be restrained by straitjackets on iron beds; when he was lucid, he could be heard crying out,
‘Why am I locked up?
Why are the windows closed, why am I never alone?'

In 1921, Eleonora, Bronia and Bronia's two children, Irina, aged seven, and two-year-old Leo, managed to escape Russia and meet Romola in Vienna. She took them to see Vaslav in the Steinhof Sanatorium there. He sat, withdrawn and unemotional, throughout their visit. The next day Bronia returned and sat with him, telling him about her work.
‘Would you believe
, Vatsa, that … I have already devised two ballets?' He looked straight at her, saying firmly, ‘The
ballet
is never devised. The
ballet
must be created.' But that was all; once more he sat as if he had never spoken, indifferent and unmoved, and she could not reach him again.

Perhaps hoping that making him part of their normal life might prompt a recovery, in 1923 Romola brought Vaslav to Paris where they lived with their two daughters – Kyra, aged seven, and another girl, whom
Romola did not publicly acknowledge until 1971. She was rumoured to have been Frenkel's child, but she was born in September 1920, nine months after Vaslav returned to the Villa Guardamunt (against doctors' orders) from Bellevue for a few months, conceived when Romola still hoped a child might bring him back to himself. Although she was not christened Tamara, Vaslav always called her that – a silent homage to Tamara Karsavina.

Though she never knew her father as a sane man, Tamara worshipped him just as Kyra did. When she climbed onto his lap it was
‘as though an unspoken conspiracy
had developed between us. We did not need words to communicate with each other. We were so different, his two daughters, the embodiment of his own split personality: Kyra, the explosive, colourful artist already as a child and I, shy, withdrawn, peace-seeking.' Romola – highly critical and quick to lash out in anger – made Tamara nervous; only with Tataka-boy did she feel at ease.

She remembered a dinner Romola gave during these unhappy years in Paris. Afterwards Romola gave Tamara a lump of sugar dipped in coffee. When another guest gave her one, Tamara, in her eagerness to take it, jogged the spoon and dropped the morsel. Romola was furious and sent the mortified little girl out of the room. As she reached the door Vaslav called her name. He was standing by his chair holding a huge, dripping sugar-lump between his fingers.
‘I can still taste
the warm, sweet coffee in my mouth and recall wistfully Tataka-boy's gentle, understanding face.'

Vaslav was a ghost; the children were lonely and scared, and very worried about their father; Romola was desperate to find a way to make a living to support them all (during this period she started nine different businesses, including a pastry-shop, a taxi company and a remedy for toothache, none of which came to anything) and pay Vaslav's medical bills. She spent an hour a day with Vaslav and the rest of the time she was out, frantically networking, determined to live. Diaghilev came to visit him.
‘Vatsa, you are being lazy
. Come, I need you. You must dance again for the Russian Ballet and for me.' But Vaslav shook his head. ‘I cannot because I am mad.'

In 1923 Vaslav was taken to the premiere of his sister's ballet,
Les Noces
, which he watched blankly. On seeing him Bronia burst into tears, crying,
‘I can't take it
, I can't take it.' Lydia Lopokova wrote to her lover (later her husband) John Maynard Keynes that she had gone up to the box to see him,
‘but he did not know me
, nor anybody, he does not recognise anyone, but being in a quiet state the doctors want to give him a thrill, so as to move him, and then perhaps he might be cured. His wife is with him. Who is so cruel to him? Terrible, terrible …'

Anton Dolin, who danced for Diaghilev during the early 1920s, asked his mentor to take him to meet Vaslav – neither the first nor the last of Diaghilev's lovers to have a fascination with Nijinsky. He described him living in an
‘almost suburban
' third- or fourth-floor apartment (in the avenue de la Bourdonnais, near the École Militaire in the Septième) with lace curtains hanging in the windows and photographs in frames propped on every surface. Vaslav was ‘like a convalescent invalid … but somehow in this man's face there was something more expressive than a volume of words'. Dolin noticed also his ‘beautiful mouth' and ‘hands that were never still' and could not help wondering what the imperturbable Diaghilev felt on seeing him.

Ottoline Morrell visited too. She found Vaslav fat and silent.
‘I had the impression
that he knew what was going on, but was unable to break down his prison walls – Petrushka again.' His hands were the same, always in motion, the thumbs clenched into his fists; and his dark eyes were just ‘more haunted … I thought he knew me, but was not sure'.

Others have agreed with this assessment, suggesting that Vaslav's breakdown was somehow voluntary – a retreat from the struggles that had conquered him, a surrender to forces he could no longer resist. In the mid-twentieth century the maverick psychiatrist Ronald Laing posited the theory that psychotic behaviour may be an unconscious strategy enabling sufferers to shed the ‘false self' that an uncaring society has forced them to adopt. Laing liked to say that the word schizophrenia, usually translated as split personality, can also be read as broken-hearted.

When he read Vaslav's (admittedly heavily edited) diary in 1953, Cocteau compared his idealism to that of Einstein and Chaplin,
insisting,
‘Nijinsky is not mad
'. Suffering from and revolting against the dry hearts of Diaghilev and Stravinsky, diminished by his marriage to Romola, thought Cocteau, he had turned to mysticism and humanitarianism, taking a vow of solitude, a marriage with himself. Later in life Stravinsky said he often thought of Vaslav,
‘captive in his own mind
, his most perfect gift of expression in movement stricken, immobile'.

Roy Porter, reviewing a 1991 psychiatric analysis of Nijinsky's life, agreed with Peter Ostwald's thesis that Nijinsky's mutism
‘was to some degree
a deliberate acting out of despair by one of the supremely gifted actors of modern times: playing parts was all Nijinsky had ever learned to do'. Ostwald broke Vaslav's behaviour down into three dominant modes: the dancer, his core identity since childhood; the lunatic, a violent, moody, destructive role he took on in times of crisis, such as when his father was leaving his mother, when he was struggling to escape Diaghilev and later, when he was grappling with his declining mental health; and the patient, the gentle, passive obedient boy his mother and Romola adored. By this analysis the patient simply stepped into the foreground, gradually edging out the dancer and the lunatic.