Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  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’.

  The strains of the last few months were obvious to their English friends when they arrived in London in late June 1912. Nijinsky was observed listening to Diaghilev’s anecdotes with ‘ill-concealed impatience’ and others noticed how ‘very nervous and highly-strung’ he was, perpetually watched over by his ‘guardian and jailer’. One afternoon, after an argument, Diaghilev appeared alone at Lady Ripon’s and ‘sat in the garden with tears dripping down his face, and would not be comforted’.

  Usually Diaghilev kept Vaslav away from parties that might upset his delicate temperament (or where he might meet women – so unsettling for poor Vatsa), but he did permit him a few freedoms and in London Vaslav had something of a social life, despite his English being even more limited than his French* and his complete lack of polish. ‘I do not know how to be polite,’ he would write later, ‘because I do not want to be.’ He was ‘naively – appallingly – honest’, as Stravinsky put it, remembering playing a parlour game at Lady Ripon’s in which everyone was compared to an animal. Diaghilev was a bulldog, Stravinsky a fox.

  ‘Now, Monsieur Nijinsky, what do you think I look like?’

  ‘Vous, Madame – chameau.’ The answer was as unexpected as it was precise, even though his hostess was a celebrated beauty; one has to assume that he did not know how rude it was in French to call a woman a camel. ‘In spite of her repeating: “A camel? How amusing! I declare. Really. A camel?” – she was flustered all evening.’

  Les Nymphes et le Faune by Ernest Oppler, c.1912.

  Vaslav and Diaghilev would go down to stay for the weekend at Lady Ripon’s house in the country and Vaslav actually became friends with Lady Ottoline Morrell, who courted him assiduously when her friends became his enthusiasts that summer. He came to tea with her – perhaps encouraged by his success with Lady Ripon, he was overheard by Diaghilev during one meeting comparing her to a giraffe – and thrilled her five-year-old daughter by dancing with her around the drawing room. ‘He was so different from all the smart people at luncheon [at Lady Ripon’s],’ she wrote, ‘for he was such a pure artist, a drop of the essence of art, and quite impersonal.’ He had an air of being lost, as if he were looking on normal life ‘from another world’, but she could see that he noticed everything.

  Lady Ottoline’s friend Lytton Strachey sent Nijinsky a huge basket of flowers in the hope of attracting his attention and John Maynard Keynes – resolutely homosexual at this point, but eventually the devoted husband of Lydia Lopokova – was another obsessed fan. ‘There were at this time fantastic fables about him; that he was very debauched, that he had girdles of diamonds and emeralds given to him by an Indian prince,’ wrote Lady Ottoline, ‘but on the contrary, I found that he disliked any possessions or anything that hampered him or diverted him from his art.’

  It was in Lady Ottoline’s garden in Bedford Square
that the idea for Nijinsky’s next ballet, Jeux, came to him. It was to be a contemporary ballet – actually a futuristic one, set in 1920, eight years away – depicting a game of tennis in a tree-filled garden at dusk, as moths danced in the arc-lights high above. There would be ‘no corps de ballet, no ensembles, no variations, no pas de deux, only boys and girls in flannels, and rhythmic motions,’ Vaslav told an anxious Diaghilev as they dined later at the Savoy Grill, while Bakst frowned at the sketches Vaslav was making on the tablecloth to illustrate his idea.

  Stylistically, it would be as radical as Faune. At this early stage, Nijinsky planned for his three dancers, regardless of gender, to dance in the same way, as uniformly as possible. For a short time during rehearsals he worked in pointe shoes, but then discarded them because they were wrong for the athletic mood he wanted to create. As he would write in his diary, years later, ‘A woman and a man are the same thing’: human. Again, the facial expressions would be blank, giving nothing away. Everything he wanted to say would be in the movement.

  The Figaro journalist Hector Cahusac was present at a lunch in the Bois de Boulogne in the spring of 1912 when Diaghilev, Cocteau, Bakst, Reynaldo Hahn and Nijinsky were discussing the difficulty of finding subjects for ballets and the virtues and shortcomings of historical as opposed to contemporary scenarios. When the talk moved on to movement, the normally silent Nijinsky came alive. ‘The man that I see foremost on the stage is a contemporary man. I imagine the costume, the plastic poses, the movement that would be representative of our time,’ he said. ‘When today one sees a man stroll, read a newspaper or dance the tango, one perceives that his gestures have nothing in common with those, for instance, of an idler under Louis XV, of a gentleman dancing the minuet, or of a thirteenth-century monk studiously reading a manuscript.’

  ‘Childish nonsense,’ spat Bakst; but these were the ideas stimulating Nijinsky when he was creating Jeux. For the first time a ballet was to be about modern people going about their everyday life. In his ‘waltz with changing partners’, the three dancers would gossip, play tennis, show off, bicker, smoke, embrace – even briefly dance the turkey trot.

  As with Faune, the mood was to be one of erotic anticipation, the theme desire – and Nijinsky’s view of both, coloured by his life with Diaghilev, was ambivalent. ‘The Faun is me, and Jeux is the kind of life Diaghilev dreamed of. Diaghilev wanted to have two boys. He often told me about this desire of his,’ but Vaslav had always refused to go along with it. In Jeux he would play Diaghilev and the two boyish girls he flirted with would be the boys with whom Diaghilev dreamed of making love. He may also have been inspired by what he saw of the fluid love lives of Lady Ottoline and her friends – the androgynous Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, and their relationships with their husbands and lovers; and Lady Ottoline’s own idiosyncratic approach to romance. As choreographer and dance historian Millicent Hodson writes, Jeux was a Bloomsbury ballet in theme as well as setting. On his copy of the piano score, where the music comes to a climax and the three figures embrace, for an instant bound together in ecstasy, Vaslav wrote, ‘Sin’.

  Despite his persistent concerns about Nijinsky’s experimentalism, Diaghilev wrote to Debussy describing the ballet and asking him to provide a score. After the scandal of Faune, Debussy needed some persuading: Diaghilev had to promise to double his fee to get him to do it. Although the music Debussy would produce was sumptuously beautiful, fresh and youthful, he was scathing about ‘le terroriste Nijinsky’ and his ‘nyanya [nanny] S. de D.’ when they visited him later in the summer to hear how he was progressing.

  Diaghilev had no option but to support Nijinsky because he had burned his bridges with Fokine, who had waited only for the premiere of Daphnis et Chloé at the tail end of the Paris season to resign, telling Diaghilev that his company (and his relationship with Vaslav) was making the fine art of ballet into a ‘perverted degeneracy’. More worryingly for Diaghilev, his invaluable regisseur Grigoriev had also handed in his notice. Now there was only Nijinsky, whose style was hardly commercial and who had no idea of how to produce, as Fokine could, sure-fire successes at short notice with limited rehearsal time. Harry Kessler and Lady Ripon – both fans of Nijinsky’s, but aware too of his limitations – had tried to convince Diaghilev that there was space for Nijinsky and Fokine in the company, but he was unrepentant and rudely refused to consider making concessions to popular taste. ‘If we don’t lay down the law for them [the public], who will?’ He did, however, pull out all the stops to persuade Grigoriev to stay.

  The summer of 1912 saw Diaghilev and Nijinsky touring Europe, half working, half holidaying: Deauville, Bayreuth, Lugano, Stresa, Milan and, as ever, Venice. They returned to Paris briefly so that Nijinsky could sit for Rodin, who had so publicly admired him as the Faun. For some reason the piece was never finished. Bronia said that Diaghilev, coming one day to collect Nijinsky from his sitting, discovered Nijinsky asleep on a sofa and Rodin asleep at his feet, and, jealous of this intimacy, refused to let Nijinsky return; in his diary Cocteau related a fruitier tale, in which Nijinsky heard strange noises as he posed with his back towards Rodin. Turning round he saw Rodin masturbating – a story Diaghilev found funny but Nijinsky hated hearing. ‘Il ne supporte plus les désordes sexuels’: he could no longer stand such debauchery.

  In Paris, presumably spending a bonus Diaghilev had given him for Faune, Nijinsky went on a shopping spree. Instead of buying dress clothes or objets, he ordered hundreds of pairs of dancing shoes, light braided kid sandals to practise in and practice shirts made to his own design from the softest crêpe de Chine in whites, creams, pale blues and greens, the same pastel colours in which the girls from the Ballet had their dancing dresses made. He also ordered himself a very thin watch from the watchmaker Benson, with which he was ‘happy and proud as a child’. The gold watch awarded to him by the Tsar while he was at the Imperial Ballet School had long ago been pawned and this was its replacement, a present to himself upon reaching his artistic maturity.

  Diaghilev and Nijinsky parted ways in the autumn of 1912, Diaghilev returning to Russia and Nijinsky going to Monte Carlo to begin work on Jeux. Bronia, who had married one of the dancers in the company, Alexander (Sasha) Kochetovsky, in London in July, was waiting there for him. She was delighted to find that for the first time since he had become involved with Diaghilev her brother was himself again, the Vatsa of their childhood: free from tension, expressing himself openly, his creativity flowing.

  But the strains of Vaslav’s life were increasingly intense. Diaghilev was always short of money – not because he was personally extravagant but because the needs of his company were so great – and so he was happy to commit to any engagement they were offered to bring in extra funds. Vaslav danced all the principal roles but also needed rest and stability in order to create new work. He found moving constantly, always among strangers and speaking unfamiliar languages, exhausting – besides which Diaghilev disapproved of him making friends or learning new languages, even (according to Bronia) of spending time with his mother, as distractions from his work. Cocteau described them migrating ‘from hotel to hotel, expelled by theatre closings’ and Grigoriev remembered Vaslav fruitlessly demanding a more permanent home, if only for a few months. The Ballets Russes was a demanding mistress. ‘I gave my whole heart to it,’ Vaslav would write. ‘I worked like an ox. I lived like a martyr. I knew that Diaghilev had a hard life.’

  All too soon they were on the road again, performing in Cologne in late October 1912 at the start of another European tour. Just before the curtain went up for their first performance, Vaslav and Bronia received a telegram from Eleonora informing them that their father had died. Vaslav had not seen or spoken to him for five years. Bronia was grief-stricken, but Vaslav appeared almost unmoved; the only person he was worried about was his mother, who had remained behind in Russia to plead (to no avail) with the government to release Vaslav from his military service. Until he was freed from this obligation, he would not be able to
return home.

  The company performed in Budapest again and once more a breathless Romola de Pulszky sat in the audience. Since seeing the Ballets Russes for the first time the previous year, she had broken off her engagement, abandoned her acting training and begun studying dance. This time she concentrated her energies on winning over Enrico Cecchetti. ‘I soon discovered I could win his heart through flattery. I had a genuine admiration for him and a very real affection, but I had to use him in order to achieve my purpose – to become permanently attached to the ballet.’ Through Cecchetti she watched not only every performance and every rehearsal, but also every class he gave. She managed to manouevre an introduction to Nijinsky, though after a brief misunderstanding – he thought at first that she was the Hungarian Opera’s prima ballerina – he showed no interest in her.

  Adolph Bolm advised Romola’s mother to send her with them to Vienna to meet the Wiesenthal sisters, concert dancers who might take Romola on as a student. There she was able to observe Nijinsky more closely, watching him listen to gypsy music one night ‘with an aloof, distant air. His half-closed eyes gave an extraordinary, fascinating expression to his face.’ To her indignation he refused to acknowledge Romola or show that he recognised her. ‘Occasionally I caught his eyes resting on me, but as soon as I looked at him he quickly turned his glance elsewhere.’ Bolm told her that even the other dancers did not dare approach him. He was always guarded by Zuikov and only spoke to them about work. Romola realised that if she were to remain with the company she would have to keep her passion for Nijinsky a secret, especially from Diaghilev. Only Cecchetti guessed, whispering to her, ‘Beware, Nijinsky is like a sun that pours forth light but never warmth.’

  Spring 1913 saw the company back in Monaco and Nijinsky working again on Jeux, this time with his two ballerinas, Karsavina and Ludmila Schollar, who was to replace Bronia. Debussy had finally finished the music, after wrestling through the autumn to convey ‘a rather risqué situation! Even though in a ballet immorality passes through the ballerina’s legs and ends in a pirouette.’