by Colin Wilson
In 1913, Nijinsky took the opportunity of a sea voyage away from Diaghileff to get married; he proposed to a young dancer who was obviously in love with him; they were married in Buenos Aires. Diaghileff sent a telegram dismissing him from the Russian Ballet.
The five years that followed were years of strain and confusion. Nijinsky’s wife was a Hungarian, and Hungary was at war with Russia. They went to live in Budapest, at her home, and the next year was full of petty spite, of relatives who tried to force her to divorce Nijinsky, family plotting and quarrels. In the years following his marriage, Nijinsky was badgered by the Outsider’s greatest enemy, human triviality. There was a ballet season in New York, with Nijinsky’s own company and a new Nijinsky ballet, and endless difficulties and annoyances to be overcome. Nijinfcky had no business ability; his temperament was almost completely introverted, contemplative (various observers have spoken of him as having the face of a Tibetan Llama, of ‘a Buddha in meditation’, of an Egyptian statue); these endless, unimportant demands by the outside world were an immense strain. In this state of strain, the war began to weigh heavily on him; he was haunted by visions of dead soldiers.
In December, 1917, the family (they now had a child) moved to St. Moritz; and the last stage began. Nijinsky worked on the choreography of a new ballet, and read a great deal; he and his wife went for long walks or went for sleigh rides, or skiing. But the inactivity began to tell on Nijinsky; he needed something to do. He began to write a Diary, a sort of rambling exposition of his ideas on things in general, and perfected a technique of drawing with curves and arcs. He had made friends with a Tolstoyan, and now began to speak of the idea of giving up dancing and retiring somewhere in Russia, on a little farm, or perhaps to a monastery. His wife was impatient, and had little sympathy with the ideas that were now absorbing her husband. But Nijinsky thought a great deal about Tolstoy, and about Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. One Sunday, a young servant informed Madam Nijinsky that her husband had been standing in the middle of the village street, wearing his cross outside his shirt, and asking passers-by if they had been to church; as a child, the young man had known Nietzsche, and he added, ‘Mr. Nietzsche used to behave like that just before he was taken away.5 Madame Nijinsky consulted a psychiatrist. There were other disturbing signs; his study was full of drawings coloured in red and black ‘like a bloodstained mortuary cover’. They are dead soldiers’ faces,’ he told his wife. ‘It is the war....’
On two occasions he was violent with her; then, she notes, ‘he seemed like a stranger’. Finally, there was the incident of the ‘marriage with God’. He had been asked to dance; in front of a crowded audience, he stood and stared for nearly half an hour. ‘The audience behaved as if hypnotized’, his wife records. Finally he told them: ‘I will dance you the war, with its suffering and death ... the war which you did nothing to prevent, so for which you are also responsible.’ ‘His gestures were all monumental. The public... seemed to be petrified.’ He danced them a sort of choreographic counterpart of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’.20
The end was not long in coming. A few weeks later, a psychiatrist in Zurich told her: ‘You must try to be brave…Your husband is incurably insane.’
The same day, her parents arrived in Zurich; when they heard that Nijinsky had been pronounced insane, they waited until his wife had left the hotel, then called the police to remove ‘the madman’. Their rough treatment brought on a catatonic attack, and Nijinsky never recovered from its consequences. He retreated into a world of his own, and nothing was interesting enough to bring him out; for years afterwards, in various sanatoriums, he stared into space, never replying to questions, taking no interest in what went on around him. His need to retreat into himself had been denied too long; in disgust and fatigue, he retreated permanently, disowning all responsibilities. On Good Friday, 1950, he died at last in a London institution, still in a mental twilight.
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, published in English in 1937, provides us with the insight we need to judge what went on in his mind in those last days at St. Moritz. It is a strange document, typical in its jerkiness and vagueness, of a mind approaching insanity. There are signs of various delusions: for instance, in the opening sentences:
People will say that Nijinsky pretends to be mad on account of his bad deeds. Bad deeds are terrible and I do not want to commit any. I made mistakes before because I did not understand God…21
It is impossible to say what ‘bad deeds’ Nijinsky had in mind, or what mistakes he made; we have no record of anything discreditable in his adult life; he seems to have been harmless and very sincere, with a sort of Prince Myshkin-like simplicity about him. A few pages later, he records: ‘I feel a piercing stare from behind’, which, his wife explains in a footnote, was one of his visual hallucinations.22 He begins to tell a story: ‘I invited some friends on a sleigh ride to Maloja...’, but a few sentences later he has forgotten about it and is talking about something else. This sort of evidence of insanity, fixed ideas, incoherency, etc., would incline most readers to give up reading the Diary after the first few pages. But, as we persist, a curious kind of sanity begins to make itself felt underneath this surface of aimlessness.
I do not want the death of the senses. I want people to understand. I cannot cry and shed tears over what I write, but I cry within me.23
I will tell the whole truth, and others will continue what I have begun. I am like Zola, but I want to speak, and not write novels. Novels prevent one from understanding feeling.24
I am in a trance, the trance of love. I want to say so much and cannot find the wordsI write in a trance, and that trance is called wisdom. Every man is a reasonable being. I do not want unreasonable beings, and therefore I want everyone to be in a trance of feelings.25
The whole fife of my wife and of all mankind is death26
I want ... to heal my wife, but I cannot be healed. I do not want to be healed. I am not afraid of anything except the death of wisdom. I want the death of the mind. My wife will not go mad if I kill her mind. The mind is stupidity, but wisdom is God.27
These passages are chosen almost at random from the early part of the book, yet a kind of reason can be discerned running from one to the other. Nijinsky has his own terminology: there are Teeling’, ‘wisdom’, ‘God’, and these are roughly synonymous; and then there are ‘mind’, ‘death’, ‘stupidity’. The important sentence for understanding of Nijinsky’s way of seeing ‘mankind’ is that comment: ‘The whole life of my wife and of all mankind is death.’ He records, in passing a lighted hotel after a night walk: ‘I felt tears, understanding that life in places like this is like death. Mankind makes merry and God mourns. It is not the fault of mankind.’28
Again, what we are witnessing is the Outsider, with his intenser and deeper insight, feeling a Jansenist disgust with mankind. They are shallow; they are ‘thinkers’ who feel no need to retreat into themselves; consequently, they have no idea of their own real identities, nor of their possibilities:
‘I am God in a body. Everyone has this feeling, but no one uses it.’29 and later: ‘God is fire in the head.’30
It is a permanent sorrow to Nijinsky that his wife, for whom he feels so much affection, is just another shallow ‘thinker5, another butterfly on the surface of life. After the sentence about his wife’s way of life being death, he adds, ‘I was shocked, and thought how lovely it would be if my wife were to listen to me.’ But no one will listen to him, just as years before, in the Russian Ballet, Diaghileff and Stravinsky treated him as a brainless child. This is what worries Nijinsky. He is a natural contemplative, used to withdrawing deep into himself, gathering his energies into a tight coil, then unleashing them in self-expression. But these people—they know nothing of self expression, nothing of what lies inside them. Nijinsky knows: ‘I am God in a body’, he knows because it is a realization that has come to him many times while dancing, the self-transcendence, the Outsider’s glimpse of a ‘power within him’. He has seen that power, and he knows:
‘I am God, I am God, I am God.’
Dancing is his natural form of self-expression, but outside dancing, he meets all the Outsider’s usual problems. Like Barbusse’s hero, he has wandered around the Paris streets staring at the women who pass, but once, when he picked up a prostitute who ‘taught him everything’, he was suddenly sure that this was not what he needed: ‘I was shocked and told her it was a pity to do things like that. She told me that if she didn’t do it she would die of hunger... .’31
And always, there is the tearing, excoriating demand, of pity. This is the worst of Nijinsky’s problems. He loves his wife, he pities her unhappiness, yet he knows that her life is death. Misery and death are moulded into the very stuff of the world. He had known them as a child when the family almost starved. He had known them even in the school of dancing, for he had been present in the 1905 revolution in Petersburg, when the soldiers had slashed down unarmed civilians with swords, or crushed their skulls with knouts; after the reign of terror, Nijinsky and his schoolfellows had walked along rows of bloodied corpses in the morgues, looking into the faces of the women to try to identify the sister of Babitch, a beautiful girl of seventeen with whom they were all secretly in love; she was never seen again. In the revolution of 1917, Nijinsky’s brother had been accidentally killed when the madhouses were thrown open by the Bolsheviks. Of Nijinsky’s schoolfellows, one was killed in a duel, another shot by a jealous husband, another committed suicide.... Deaths, miseries, privations, these were of the common stuff of life, and Nijinsky knew as well as Van Gogh: ‘Misery will never end.’
In the scales of the gigantic balance-pan in Nijinsky’s brain, the world’s misery bulked heavy on one side. But the other? First, there was dancing, the rhythmic, violent Dionysian upsurge of the vital energies; while he could dance regularly, every day, and restore contact with the vital, instinctive parts of his own being, Nijinsky could not go insane. Sanity lay in creation. Then there was the deep religious sense; Nijinsky had been brought up a Roman Catholic; a feeling of the universal fatherhood of God was as fundamental in him as the urge to create. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Diary is the use of the name of God. ‘God’ occurs five times on the first page, and, on a average, about the same number of times on every page of the book. There are certain pages in the Diary when its repetition would seem to justify the conclusion that Nijinsky was obsessed with the idea of becoming God, but it would be equally true to say that he was obsessed with the idea of becoming Christlike. He observes:
I look like him, only he has a calm gaze, and my eyes look around me. I am a man of motion, not of immobility.32
And this is the centre of the problem. Denied motion, the strain begins. The static personality is a prison:
‘I want to be God, and therefore I try to change myself. I want to dance, to draw, to play the piano, to write verses, to love everybody. That is the object of my life.’33
In the Diary, denial of self-expression has reached a point where it produces an atmosphere of physical suffocation:
‘I like hunchbacks and other freaks. I am myself a freak who has feelings and sensitiveness, and I can dance like a hunchback. I am an artist who likes all shapes and all beauty.’34
Denial of self-expression is the death of the soul; without creation, the balance is gone. The scale dips on the side of misery and suffering:
I believe I suffered more than Christ. I love life and I want to live, to cry but cannot—I feel such a pain in my soul—a pain which frightens me. My soul is ill. My soul, not my mind. The doctors do not understand my illness.... Everybody who reads these lines will suffer.... My body is not ill, it is my soul that is ill.35
Nijinsky understood himself well enough to know what he needed to keep sane. But what he did not know was how much suffering and frustration his mind could stand; the pain frightened him. His statement, CI am a man of motion, not of immobility’, is the key to his breakdown, and at the same time, the key to his relation to Van Gogh and Lawrence. It would not be true to say of either of these, that they were ‘men of motion’, for the development of the intellect or the emotions makes for immobility, for contemplation. Nijinsky knew this could not be his way. With astounding penetration he analyses his creative urges: ‘I am feeling through flesh, and not through the intellect?
He is always intensely aware of his physical being. Now compare with Lawrence and Van Gogh; Lawrence’s problem is that ‘he is never alive in what he does’, he never feels what he thinks. He could write: ‘I am insight through mind, not through feeling.’ Van Gogh could write: ‘I am insight through feeling, not through mind.’ It is Nijinsky who can say: ‘I am insight through flesh, not through either mind or feeling.’
I am aware that these terms lack precision: intellect is capable of a white heat of feeling as well as body or emotions. The vagueness can be overcome by keeping in mind the following concrete illustrations: In respect of intellect, the absorption of a Newton or an Einstein in some mathematical problem: in respect of emotion, the intensity of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in respect of body, the ecstasy of an ancient Greek festival of Dionysus, or the Egyptian phallic God Menu, when wine and dancing bring about a temporary loss of identity of individual worshippers in the identity of the god. With this last in mind, we can understand the meaning of phrases in the Diary like ‘I am God, I am God, I am God’,36 without falling into the misunderstanding of the provincial newspaper that stated in its obituary: ‘Nijinsky’s madness took the form of a delusion that he was God.’ Nijinsky’s body obeyed his creative impulses as Van Gogh’s brush and Lawrence’s pen obeyed theirs. The body can be made drunk with its own vitality far more easily than the intellect or the emotions with theirs. Many men have experienced the feeling ‘I am God’ in a sexual orgasm; few have experienced it from listening to music or looking at painting; fewer still from any intellectual activity.
William James has observed that ‘the power of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour’. ‘Mystical faculties’ here refers to that flood-tide of inner warmth and vital energy that human beings regard as the most desirable state to live in. The sober hour carries continuous demands on the energy; sense-impressions, thoughts, uncertainties, suck away the vital powers minute by minute. Alcohol seems to paralyse these leeches of the energies; the vital warmth is left to accumulate and form a sort of inner reservoir. This concentration of the energies is undoubtedly one of the most important conditions of the state the saints call *Innigkeit inwardness. The saint achieves inwardness by a deliberate policing of the vital energies. He comes to recognize the energy-stealing emotions, all the emotions that do not make for inwardness, and he sets out to exterminate them in himself. As he moves towards his objective, he increases steadily his supply of surplus vital power, and so increases his powers of foresight and hind-sight, the sense of other times and other places; there is a breaking-free of the body’s sense of imprisonment in time and a rising warmth of life-energy that is spoken of in the Gospel as ‘to have life more abundantly’.
Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh, each had his own form of discipline towards this end. Each one had, as it were, discovered in some moment of insight a source from which these supplies of ‘more abundant life’ flowed, and each concentrated on a discipline that would make the source accessible. Lawrence was a thinker who had found imaginative relief in his study of the past. Van Gogh’s religious temperament needed to accumulate sense impressions; his striving towards a sense of ‘otherness’ took the form of a sort of pictorial memory of other times and other places: a memory that was, after all, incomplete, since he could not capture the scent of the almond tree or the hot July wind, or the tension in the air of a rising storm on his canvas. But Nijinsky’s kingdom was the body. People who saw him dance have testified to his amazing ability to become the part he was acting, whether the Negro in Scheherezade, the puppet in Petr
ouchka, or the Prince in Giselle. His discipline gave him the power to dismiss his identity at will, or to expand some parts and contract others to give an illusion of a completely new personality. It was this power that, at times, became a mystical intensity of abnegation in his dancing, that occasionally gave him glimpses into the ecstasy of the saint.
And herein lies the cause of his breakdown. Such a man is spiritually and artistically far above the level of the ‘homme moyen sensual’; even above a man who was more than averagely sensual, like Diaghileff. And if he happens to lack the commonplace power of verbal self-expression, and the self-assurance that most men pick up in their dealings with the ‘world’, his position among other men is made completely false. He has no reason to credit himself with unusual spiritual maturity, and still less for refusing to credit other men with it, when their self-assurance impresses on him his own inferiority in respect of intelligence and logic. If he happens to be young and inexperienced (Nijinsky was only twenty-nine when he went insane), he has practically no defence against the world.