Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  The Opera House in Covent Garden was full every night for their season and again London surrendered for two weeks to the Ballets Russes’s spell. Muriel Draper and her husband went to the first night of Sacre with the pianist Artur Rubinstein and marvelled at the sound Monteux extracted from the orchestra, ‘a sound that is still sinking down through me with every blood-beat’. Nijinsky’s geometrical, ‘beyond-human’ choreography, thought Draper, intensified the music’s power. When the curtain fell, ‘the house broke loose’. As they filed off to find their drinks at the bar, the audience was stunned, shaken, paralysed.

  ‘You call that art, do you?’

  ‘You call it music?’

  ‘My God!’

  Rubinstein saw it differently. He found the audience merely polite (this was also Monteux’s view, though the fact that the English applauded wearing kid gloves made even enthusiasm sound no more than polite) and he left the theatre ‘defeated and unhappy’ on account of the difficulty of the music and the incomprehensibility of the action on stage. ‘It took me weeks of study to understand the greatness of this work.’

  Despite her loyalty to Vaslav, Lady Ottoline Morrell thought Sacre ‘really terrible and intense. Too much of Idea in it to please the public. Too little grace.’ Lytton Strachey, on the other hand (who had ordered a new suit for his first meeting with Nijinsky, deep purple, with an orange stock, and who had found him ‘much more attractive than I’d expected’ despite their lack of a common language) loathed it. He had not imagined, he told a friend, ‘that boredom and sheer anguish could have been combined together at such a pitch’.

  While the French critics had wittily dismissed Sacre as the massacre du printemps, the English were more measured. One journalist acknowledged that while many felt Sacre ridiculed the ideals of beauty, perhaps ‘in a few years we shall have learned that there are other things in music and ballet than sweetness and sensuous beauty, just as there are other things in painting than domestic subjects’.

  This was the way Nijinsky saw his work. In an interview published in the Daily Mail the day after Sacre’s premiere, he protested against forever being associated with Armide, Spectre and Sylphides. ‘The fact is, I detest “nightingale and rose” poetry; my own inclinations are “primitive”,’ he told the interviewer. ‘I eat my meat without sauce Béarnaise.’ In painting and sculpture, once-great traditions became banal through repetition, familiarity and the inevitable debasement of being copied by inferior artists, he observed. ‘Then there has always come a revolt. Perhaps something like this has happened in dancing.’

  Meanwhile the shock of the new, the first experience of seeing and hearing Sacre, was easing and Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s peers were beginning to form their judgement on the piece. Once Debussy had had time to digest its extraordinary wildness, he was less afraid, telling composer André Caplet dismissively that it was ‘primitive music with all modern conveniences’. The influential editor Louis Laloy, who had been blown away by hearing Stravinsky and Debussy play the four-hand piano version of Sacre, described the score as being something people would not be ready for until 1940 and the dancing as epileptic and absurd. (In his diary Vaslav would write, ‘An artist sacrifices his whole life for art. The critic inveighs against him because he does not like his picture.’)

  But Cocteau felt ‘uprooted’ by it: ‘Beauty speaks to the guts. Genius cannot be analysed any better than electricity … One has it, or one does not … The Russian troupe has taught me that one must burn oneself up alive in order to be reborn.’ The painter Sigismond Jeanès wrote to tell Stravinsky that Sacre had been ‘one of the great emotional experiences of my life’.

  Even though they had performed in front of full houses in Paris and London – the box office had taken 38,000 francs on the night of Sacre’s premiere – Diaghilev was still heavily in debt and Astruc was bankrupt. His beautiful new theatre would be closed down three months later. The contract he had signed, promising Diaghilev 25,000 francs a performance had been his ‘death warrant … But I do not regret my madness.’

  Stravinsky had developed typhoid after Sacre’s Paris opening and he had remained there to convalesce while the others went to London. He and Diaghilev were arguing by telegram about cuts Diaghilev wanted to make to the score in an attempt to make it more palatable to audiences. Diaghilev told Misia Sert that Stravinsky was ungrateful, that their success had gone to his head. ‘Where would he be without us, without Bakst and myself?’ Relations between them were so strained that Sert had to intervene. She wrote to Stravinsky telling him of Diaghilev’s troubles: Bakst, who thought Sacre dreadful, was about to quit because he thought Diaghilev should drop it from the programme; lawsuits over Diaghilev’s debts loomed; and the rebellious orchestra did not even want to play Sacre. Worst of all was Nijinsky, ‘intolerable and mal elevé… [speaking] to Serge as if he were a dog’.

  Occasionally Vaslav managed to give the ever-present Zuikov the slip. It was probably around this time that a curious incident occurred, recounted many years afterwards by the porter at the Friends of St Stephen’s, a poorhouse on the Fulham Road. He remembered a young man being brought in late at night, unconscious. The man was given a bed in which to sleep off his excesses – nothing unusual in that – but when he awoke the following morning he astonished everyone by doing the splits over his own bed and then leaping over each of the twenty beds on either side of the ward. He spoke no English but somehow he must have managed to get out word of where he was, for a little while later Diaghilev appeared with some other people in a couple of cabs, thanked everyone profusely for looking after his young friend, tipped them lavishly in gold sovereigns, and bore him off.

  During the summer of 1913, while he remained alone in Paris, Stravinsky continued to declare himself delighted with Sacre and its choreography. A few days after the premiere he gave an interview in which he called Nijinsky ‘capable of giving life to the whole art of ballet. Not for a moment have we ceased to think upon the same lines.’ On 20 June he wrote to his friend Max Steinberg (Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law), calling Nijinsky’s work superb: ‘I am confident in what we have done’. Two weeks later, nearly recovered and about to leave Paris for the summer, he wrote again. ‘Nijinsky’s choreography is incomparable and, with a few exceptions, everything was as I wanted it. But we must wait a long time before the public becomes accustomed to our language.’

  Diaghilev, though, was quick to dissociate himself from Sacre, which had not been as successful with the public as he had needed it to be. At the end of July he summoned Bronia to the Savoy to discuss her brother – since he had become impossible to deal with directly. ‘I had to tell Nijinsky that his ballet Jeux was a complete failure, and since it has not had any success it will not be performed any more. The same also applies to Sacre. All the friends of the Ballets Russes – from Paris, or London, or St Petersburg – all agree that Sacre is not a ballet and it would be a mistake to follow this path of Nijinsky’s. They say I am destroying my ballet company!’

  Bronia tried to explain to Diaghilev how devoted Vaslav was to his art, and how well it had been received by the people they respected, but Diaghilev was unmovable: in other genres, like painting or literature, immediate commercial success was immaterial, but a ballet had to be loved by the public from the start to have any life at all. The theatres that wanted to present the Ballets Russes’s programme did not want to sponsor Nijinsky’s researches into the future of dance. Sir Thomas Beecham had already made Diaghilev promise that Fokine would create two new ballets if they were to play the Opera House in 1914, one of which would be Strauss’s La Légende de Joseph – on which Nijinsky was already working. Baron de Günzburg, on whose financial support Diaghilev depended, had also made Fokine’s return a condition of his continued investment in the company.

  Nijinsky received the message with such fury that Bronia understood why Diaghilev had preferred to let her break the news to him. ‘Let Diaghilev give it [Joseph] to whomever he wishes … I do not care … But it
does matter to me that Diaghilev has become a servile follower, a theatrical lackey, and is destroying everything that is the heart of the Ballets Russes.’

  When Bronia went back to see Diaghilev again, he urged her to sign her 1914 contract as soon as possible, obviously anticipating that a break with her brother would shake her commitment to him. He was honest with her when she asked him about the latest rumour flying around the company: that Fokine’s price for returning to the Ballets Russes was dancing the lead roles – Nijinsky’s roles – in all his ballets.

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘But Nijinsky would have more to dance in the Imperial Theatres.’

  ‘Well, something has to be arranged. Nijinsky cannot return to Russia. Perhaps he should simply leave the Ballets Russes and not dance for a year.’

  If he would not accept his conditions, Diaghilev told Bronia, ‘I shall have to part with Nijinsky’. This was when Bronia realised that their friendship was over, though despite all their differences she knew that her brother still saw himself very much as one of Diaghilev’s artists.

  Underlying the arguments about the creative direction of the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky’s role within it was a longstanding and bitter debate over money. Vaslav had never received a regular salary and had never signed a contract. But as he became more important to the company he demanded to be paid like everyone else – if only as a mark of his independence. According to Bronia, he wanted several years’ back salary, amounting to 200,000 francs per year for 1911, 1912 and 1913, minus expenses (four times what the opera superstar Fyodor Chaliapin had been paid for the month-long season of 1909). But Diaghilev, deeply in debt, didn’t have the money – even if he had thought he owed it. After all, the old agreement had been that Diaghilev would look after Vaslav while Nijinsky danced. Both of them felt resentful and aggrieved.

  When the London season ended in early August, the company was due to sail to South America for their first non-European tour, but although he had booked a stateroom Diaghilev had decided not to go with them; Günzburg would go in his place. He hated sea travel (whenever they went on a boat he made Zuikov pray for them both while he lay sick and groaning on his bunk, which was why Nijinsky had been free to flirt with Romola between Calais and Dover a few weeks earlier) and believed what a fortune-teller had once told him, that he would die on water. Instead he would have a holiday in Venice, pull himself together and plan for the future.

  For the first time in his adult life, Vaslav was going to do something on his own. Before he left, Bronia, whose baby was expected in October and who was therefore remaining behind, urged Vaslav to remember that he was an artist and above such spats with Diaghilev. Instead, she said, he should look on the journey as a holiday: relax, enjoy himself, not work too hard and try to make friends.

  CHAPTER 7

  Roses

  1913–1914

  HAVING BID FAREWELL to Diaghilev, Benois and Nouvel, Vaslav boarded the SS Avon in Cherbourg on the afternoon of 15 August 1913. Except for Karsavina, who was travelling separately, the rest of the company had boarded earlier that morning in Southampton. Romola de Pulszky was with them. Without paying much attention to whether or not she could dance (her lessons with Cecchetti had been sporadic, consumed as she was with her pursuit of le petit), Diaghilev had engaged her for this tour as a member of the corps, providing that she could keep up with the routines. She had been lucky that not all the regular dancers wanted to go to South America and that Diaghilev was preoccupied by other matters.

  Giving the second-class ticket bought for her by the company to her maid Anna, Romola had reserved a first-class cabin for herself, hoping it would be close to Nijinsky’s. ‘Twenty-one days of ocean and sky – no Diaghilev,’ she told herself. ‘He can’t escape.’

  The Avon’s passengers soon slipped into ‘the agreeable routine of deck life’. Each morning before most of them were up, Vaslav, attended by his masseur and Zuikov, who stood beside the watering can and rosin box holding his towel, went through his daily class on deck, apparently unaffected by the motion of the sea. Sometimes a small crowd of curious admirers would gather, but he was relaxed and well rested, and for once he did not mind being observed. He would smile and occasionally explain a movement or answer a question. Then he would dress and take a stroll on deck before lunch, or read in a deck chair.

  He spent the afternoons in a small hall with a piano off Deck C with the conductor, Rhené-Baton (Monteux’s replacement for the South American tour). Baton played Bach, while Nijinsky was in the very early stage of creating something that was intended ‘to be as pure dancing as his [Bach’s] music is pure sound’,* something he had been discussing with Diaghilev and the others in Baden-Baden. One afternoon Romola found them and sat down on a stair to watch before being ushered away by the chief steward. The next day she was there again and Baton asked her to leave. Then Vaslav looked up from his reverie and pantomimed to Baton that she could stay.

  From then on, she was there every afternoon; and after rising unusually early one morning and noticing Nijinsky practising on deck, she was there every morning too. He noticed the awe with which she watched him and attributed it to her loving ballet, ‘our art’. In his last letter before they began their crossing of the Atlantic, postmarked Madeira, Vaslav told Bronia and his mother about one of the other passengers, a beautiful blonde girl with blue eyes. ‘She is also alone and we are often together.’

  Romola, meanwhile, was making friends with Vaslav’s masseur, cultivating the Batons, pumping the other dancers for information – Marie Rambert remembered having ‘endless talks about Nijinsky, whom we both adored’ – and in short finding out everything she could about him. She knew that ‘he was only absorbed in one thing – his art. Society, success, wealth, fame, and flirtations did not seem to mean anything to him … [and] we had all heard that he had no interest for us women … But didn’t I catch, in spite of this, here and there a smile, a glance which he threw to me? Where others had failed, why shouldn’t I succeed?’

  It is hard to describe Romola de Pulszky without slipping into the language of melodrama. Her parents were Emilia Márkus and Karoly, or Charlie, de Pulszky. The Pulszkys, though aristocratic, were liberal, artistic and above all political, prime movers in the struggle against the Austrian Empire for Hungarian autonomy. After the failed revolution of 1848, Romola’s paternal grandparents fled to London, where Charlie was born (hence the nickname). One of his godfathers was Giuseppe Garibaldi. Neither the Pulszkys nor the Márkuses particularly approved of the marriage between Charlie and Emilia, and though Charlie doted on his beautiful, flirtatious wife, it was not an especially happy union. In 1896, while he was buying paintings for the National Gallery of Hungary, which he had co-founded, Charlie was accused of misappropriating state funds. He was disgraced and briefly imprisoned before fleeing to England and then travelling on to Australia, where three years later he committed suicide. It is possible that he had been framed, but the evidence even at the time was inconclusive. Romola was eight when her beloved ‘Charlie-Papa’ died.

  She always blamed her mother for her father’s tragic fate and throughout their lives the two women, mother and daughter, were entwined in the most destructive kind of filial relationship in which bonds of intense love and interdependence were joined on both sides by jealousy, competition, contempt and selfishness. From childhood, wrote her daughter, Romola ‘harboured a burning ambition to prove to her father’s memory that she, Romola de Pulszky, was somebody in her own right’. When she saw Nijinsky, she seems to have decided that capturing him would achieve this aim.

  Evenings on board the Avon had a carnival atmosphere. As they neared the equator, Baron de Günzburg donned a white dinner jacket, wrapping a Bakstian shawl in wild colours, purple, green and orange, around his waist. He and his elegant mistress, Ekaterina Oblokova, had been charged by Romola’s mother and stepfather with looking out for her on the voyage.

  One night there was a fancy-dress ball. The Russian
dancers, determined to have the best costumes, spent the afternoon racing between cabins, borrowing and lending clothes to one another. Romola put together a Hungarian gypsy outfit, but then Günzburg advised her – surely deliberately – to go as a boy, with her hair slicked back and wearing a pair of his tailored apple-green pyjamas. At the last minute she lost her nerve and came down to dinner in an evening gown. The only other person who had not worn fancy dress was Nijinsky, for whom costumes possessed a special magic: they were not something to be assumed and cast off on a whim. Besides, he didn’t like parties. He had once been so nervous at an official reception that he began eating his glass. When he looked at Romola, she saw a sigh of relief in his eyes.

  Still they had barely spoken. One evening soon after this, out on the moonlit deck, they were formally introduced by a Monsieur Chavez, an Argentinian couturier who had befriended the Russians. Josefina Kovaleska – the most chic of the dancers, who had been the Aga Khan’s mistress, and the only one Romola considered her peer in looks and style – translated for them, telling Nijinsky how passionate Romola was about ballet. They talked, or rather Romola talked in the simplest French she could manage about music and dance and her passion for Wagner, for a long time as they watched the phosphorescence sparkling on the waves beneath them. She had no idea how much he understood, but she was so nervous she couldn’t stop speaking.

  It was perhaps on this night that Rambert saw Nijinsky lighting Romola’s cigarette with a ‘courteous, elegant gesture’. Once someone shook her hand too vigorously in greeting her and Vaslav cried out, ‘Pas casser! Pas casser!’ Rambert also noticed Romola’s glorious ash-blonde hair, which Anna brushed out every evening. When Vaslav told her he was in love with Romola, she asked him how he could speak to her, having no language in common. Smiling wistfully, Vaslav replied, ‘Oh, she understands everything’. But Rambert consoled herself, certain it could not be serious. ‘We all knew he was Diaghilev’s lover.’