Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  The young pianist Artur Rubinstein, whom they knew from London, was also in Madrid. He took Vaslav to watch jai alai games ‘where the violent leaping and running of the players excited him so much that once he actually fell off his chair. “They are the most perfect dancers,” he screamed. “I would like to jump down there and dance with them straight away.”’ Rubinstein held him back. He also tried to take him to a bullfight, but at the gates Vaslav stopped. He turned to Rubinstein, ashen, and whispered, ‘Let’s go back. I couldn’t stand that.’

  Then their Madrid season began, watched every night by the King,*, a devotee of the Ballets Russes, who had been part of the diplomatic efforts to obtain the Nijinskys’ release from Hungary. Though Massine had met Vaslav in New York, these performances were the first time he saw him on stage. He marvelled at Nijinsky’s transformation from the quiet, reserved man he was offstage. ‘He had an instinctive effortless control of his body; every gesture expressed the most tender and complex emotions. His movements were never broken off abruptly, but merged into one.’

  Their holidays over, the rest of the dancers had also come to Madrid for the start of the season – including Kostrovsky and Zverev, who quickly reasserted their influence over Vaslav. One day, she wrote, Romola saw Diaghilev deep in conversation with Zverev, not as a director ‘but like two accomplices’. She became convinced that Diaghilev was using him and Kostrovsky to separate her and Vaslav, deliberately appealing to his altruism, his peaceful, spiritual, innocent nature, to make him reject marriage, family, and what Romola called normal life. ‘I sensed now that Sergey Pavlovich would rather annihilate Vaslav completely if he could not own him both as an artist and as a man.’ (I have to add here that though I agree that Diaghilev was determined to use Nijinsky to his own purposes, regardless of Romola, I think it was highly unlikely that he was manipulating him through Zverev.)

  Romola was determined to win back her husband. When he tried to suggest that sex even in marriage was only virtuous if performed with the aim of producing a baby, Romola was so desperate (their intimate life, she wrote, had been perfect, ideal, ecstatic) she was willing to encourage a friend who had been pursuing Vaslav since their arrival in Spain, the Duchesse de Durcal. Despite Vaslav entreating Romola not to leave him alone with her, she made every effort to throw them together, reasoning somewhat spuriously that the love of two women would be more effective in saving him from a monastic life than that of one. When Vaslav did eventually succumb to the Duchesse’s advances he was miserable. He returned to her saying, ‘Femmka [little wife; Nijinsky has added the Russian diminutive -ka to the French femme], I am sorry for what I did. It was unfair to her … and the added experience, that perhaps you wanted me to have, is unworthy of us.’

  Despite these preliminary skirmishes between Romola and Diaghilev, it was not until they were in Barcelona and Vaslav told Diaghilev that he had decided he did not want to return to South America for another tour that the gloves came off. Diaghilev told them that, according to Spanish law, Vaslav’s telegram from New York agreeing to the tour in principle was a binding contract. That afternoon, after an argument, Vaslav and Romola were arrested as they boarded the Madrid train and informed that Nijinsky would have to honour his contract by dancing that night in Barcelona and that he would have to go to South America. Diaghilev was determined to have his money’s worth from him. No theatre in South America would take the Ballets Russes without Nijinsky and so he would go. Submission was their only option, but Romola insisted that a clause be put in the contract that Vaslav be paid in gold in full an hour before every performance.

  They left for South America in July. Vaslav was devastated. Finally he had realised that no reconciliation with Diaghilev would be possible. The promise Massine was showing as a choreographer meant that Diaghilev no longer needed Nijinsky as a creative artist; he was content simply to milk him as a performer. Someone told Vaslav how sorry they were that he and Diaghilev had not been able to make up: ‘I wanted to, I did everything, I am heartbroken about it.’ He must have understood that without Diaghilev’s encouragement his genius might never flourish again.

  At first, Vaslav seemed himself. In Rio, their first long engagement, he and Romola made friends with the French ambassador and through him, with Darius Milhaud (later to compose Le Train Bleu for Diaghilev). Milhaud noticed ‘how beautiful he was when he turned to speak to someone behind his chair. He turned his head, but his head alone, so precisely and rapidly that he seemed not to have moved a muscle.’

  Another young composer they met in Rio, Oswald d’Estrade Guerra, thought his inclination towards mysticism was merely Slavic and his highly strung temperament and intelligence artistic. ‘One of the most endearing aspects of his character was the rather childlike, natural side of his character, without the slightest pretension. He was certainly conscious of his worth and knew quite well what he was about, but he was totally without vanity. Neither in private life nor on the stage was there anything effeminate in his behaviour… When I heard subsequently that Nijinsky had become insane, I was unable to believe it. Nothing in our meetings in Brazil could have led me to foresee that.’

  But as the tour went on Nijinsky’s deteriorating mental state became increasingly obvious. Romola arranged everything for him, even writing up his interviews with the press, while Vaslav was more absent, more erratic and more irritable than ever. According to André Oliveroff, a dancer with Pavlova’s troupe, which was touring South America at the same time, his usual silence was broken only during rehearsals when he would rage at the dancers, especially the women. He treated them ‘as so many vermin’ and if a dress or a step was wrong he would scream violent and obscene insults at them. Afterwards, blankly, he would say, ‘But I meant nothing by it, nothing at all. I spoke the truth, didn’t I? She is a whore, as you know.’ All the dancers ‘hated him bitterly’.

  Oliveroff used to practise with Vaslav in Buenos Aires, the last stop of their tour. Vaslav worked in the darkest corner of the stage and was ‘feverishly concerned’ with small technical exercises, repeating them constantly. To Oliveroff his work was perfect, but Vaslav was never satisfied. Almost certainly benefiting from hindsight, Oliveroff also noticed his arresting eyes, brooding but full of life, and the perpetual, expressive use of his hands and fingers. You felt, he wrote, that only a thread connected Nijinsky to this world; and it might snap at any moment. Normal life seemed, to him, an ‘utterly foreign world to which he was forced to adapt himself’. Even with his wife it was as if he were wearing a mask.

  Sometimes he would walk round Buenos Aires with Oliveroff late at night, raging against the war, incoherent with despair at the killing and the meaninglessness of it all, the seas of blood; and he would talk too of his fears that Diaghilev and the other members of the company were secretly working to destroy him. His paranoia, in which Romola was an eager participant, led them to hire bodyguards and to believe any accident – a fire at the theatre, a nail left on the stage, a falling counter-weight near him, collapsing sets – was an attempt on his life.

  He dreaded going to the theatre; he began to hate performing. One night at the Teatro Colón, Artur Rubinstein – another artist escaping war-torn Europe with a tour around the theatres of South America – saw Vaslav refusing to go on stage. The police were called (in South America, as in Spain, performers were legally required to perform if they were not ill) and Nijinsky, terrified of being arrested, ran on stage and danced ‘better than ever’.

  In her account of this period, Romola claimed that rumours were flying around Buenos Aires about both of them having affairs with dubious people (Vaslav was barely capable of speaking to someone, let alone conducting an affair, but Romola introduced the subject to defend herself against the accusations; she had been discovered in her hotel room one afternoon with a man wearing Vaslav’s dressing gown, but it was – apparently – entirely innocent); about money being extorted from them and her fears of being accused of being a German spy.

  Vaslav was distrau
ght about the break with Diaghilev and by Romola’s role in it, the lawsuits she had taken out in his name against Diaghilev and Butt and her continual demands for money, insisting in his diary that he had never wanted anything he had not earned. ‘She was cunning and made me keen on money … I withdrew into myself. I withdrew so deep into myself that I could not understand people. I wept and wept …’

  Before returning to Europe, they made a brief stop in Montevideo where Vaslav was to dance a gala performance for a Red Cross benefit. For some reason, according to Artur Rubinstein, whom Romola had persuaded to form part of the programme, they hoped this would make them eligible for British passports. After their experience in Budapest at the start of the war they were desperate to belong somewhere, to be citizens of some state, and Russia was no longer an option.

  As the performance was about to begin, Vaslav was in a highly nervous, agitated state, complaining that his feet were wet or sore, and refusing to come out. Rubinstein alternated with the Red Cross band playing national anthems and popular arias until past midnight when finally Vaslav appeared. Another accompanist – not Rubinstein, who was exhausted after hours of playing for time – played three Chopin dances so Vaslav could perform the poet’s sequences from Les Sylphides.

  ‘Nijinsky gave a few of his incomparable jumps, which raised such dust from the stage that the people in the first rows were choking … To me he looked even sadder than when he danced the death of Petrushka.’ Rubinstein began crying. ‘The horrible mixture of a seemingly endless farce with one of the most heartbreaking tragedies was more than one could bear.’ It was clear that everyone in the room understood what they were witnessing. ‘We gave him an endless ovation.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Spectre

  1918–1950

  VASLAV AND ROMOLA sailed back to Europe in the late autumn of 1917. They knew that Vaslav would never work with Diaghilev again; and though Romola wrote of Vaslav’s hopes of continuing to dance and create ballets and perhaps, one day, of establishing a school, it must have been clear to her that he might never work with anyone again: a complete mental breakdown was a very real possibility. For the time being, the most important thing was to see out the war as quietly as possible and this they decided to do in Switzerland. They rented a chalet in St Moritz, the Villa Guardamunt, and three-year-old Kyra joined them from the children’s home where she had been living in Lausanne.

  After such a long time living out of suitcases, Romola noted with pleased surprise that ‘our house looked like a real home’. The winter of 1917–18 was ‘a very happy one’ in which she skied and skated enthusiastically and they all tobogganed and went on long sleigh-rides with Vaslav driving. When spring came, the winter visitors left and St Moritz became again a quiet Alpine village. Vaslav practised daily on the chalet’s sunny balcony, with Kyra watching her Tataka-boy delightedly, and he continued to work on his system of notation and to sketch out choreographic works. He loved domestic life – playing with Kyra, chopping wood for the winter, scraping out the mixing bowl when a cake was being made. ‘I like family life … I like playing with children. I understand children. I am a father. I am a married man.’

  A Swiss-English girl, Marta Grant, came out to live with Vaslav and Romola as Kyra’s nanny. They were, she said many years later, ‘a very happy yet serious married couple’ and ‘Romola was the most wonderful, kind, patient and loving wife any man could ever wish for.’

  She noticed, though, that Vaslav, who had nowhere except the balcony to dance, ‘looked like a caged animal at times’. It was an isolated life and in retrospect, said Grant, ‘I suppose I should have realised his loneliness.’ He had no one to talk to about his ideas but Romola and Grant, and ‘he was ages ahead of us … [he needed] someone who spoke his own language … [But] there were very few who understood.’ Sometimes he would tell her about his mother and brother – ‘It was evidently a sad life’ – and at others he would talk of his fear of being made to fight in the war, because he knew he would not be able to kill. Grant had spent some time in India, and she and Vaslav discussed yoga and Indian spirituality, in which he was interested. She thought him enlightened. Just as ‘coming generations will have a different level of consciousness, Nijinsky had it already’; for her it was evident in his dancing.

  Winter arrived early in 1918 with days and nights of continuous snow blanketing them in sleepy whiteness, far away from the rest of the world. A letter came from Bronia and Eleonora – the first for a long time – saying that after the Bolsheviks seized power the previous autumn they had fled to Kiev, but that they were well, and together. They had received the money Vaslav had sent them. A separate letter was enclosed for Romola, asking her to tell Vaslav that Stassik had died in the chaos after the Bolsheviks had opened all the prisons and asylums (later Bronia would tell Richard Buckle that Stassik had died in bed of a liver complaint after contracting pneumonia). Vaslav had last seen Stassik over a decade before, and Bronia and Eleonora four years earlier.

  Then came the news that the Armistice had been signed. ‘We decided to make our first Christmas in our own home and in peacetime a cheerful one, and we were convinced that after the sad, stormy years we were sailing at last towards a calm and happy future.’ But Romola had noticed that Vaslav had begun taking long, silent walks through the woods, during which he seemed to be meditating. He did not tell her – perhaps even at this stage he could not distinguish between what was real and what was not – that he was hallucinating violently too.

  In his diary he described a terrible walk through trails of blood in the snow. God began speaking to him, telling him to jump into the abyss; he fell and was stopped by a tree in his path. This, he was sure, was a miracle. ‘God said to me, “Go home and tell your wife you are mad.” I realised that God wished me well.’ He continued through the trees, seeing more blood-trails and imagining someone had been killed, and God gave him more and more instructions – to lie down in the snow, to run, to go and come back, and go again. Eventually he saw that what he had thought was blood was just urine, a yellow stain in the snow, and he was able to collect himself enough to go home.

  There were other signs of things not being right, but one of the tragic elements of Vaslav’s mental illness was that he ‘did not slip or “descend” into madness … he leapt in and out of it with a ferocity that bewildered those who had to witness the resulting chaos’. One day, for no reason, Vaslav suddenly attacked their nanny, Marta Grant, trying to strangle her. Romola appeared and he let her go, but Grant – traumatised – fled home to London.

  He took up skeleton-running, hurtling wildly head-first, face-down on a small sled down what was called the ‘village run’; he took Romola down with him sometimes, and, to Romola’s terror, Kyra too. When they went out in the sleigh he would drive recklessly fast, occasionally into the paths of other sleighs. He began drawing strange insects with human faces and staring eyes and weird circular rhythmic patterns. At night Romola would wake to find Vaslav staring at her. Once, very deliberately, he pushed her and Kyra down the stairs. Just as when he was under the influence of Kostrovsky, he refused to eat meat, and he tried to prevent Kyra eating it too. He took to wearing a large gold cross given to Kyra by Emilia over his clothes and trying to engage strangers in religious conversations. Sometimes he would go into the village and spend thousands of francs on paints, scents, shoes, presents, a rainbow-coloured pile of sweaters.

  But at the same time, he also had moments – even days – of lucidity. Romola’s sister Tessa and brother-in-law came to stay. At Christmas, he and Romola wrapped all the presents for their household and took packages to the children in the village. They decorated a Christmas tree with sweets, toys, silver nuts, garlands and a silver star at the top, but when they awoke on Christmas morning the tree had fallen. The decorations were scattered all over the floor and the silver star lay in two pieces. Trembling, the maid managed to stammer out that a fallen Christmas tree was bad luck.

  Their young stoker, who as a chi
ld had run errands for Friedrich Nietzsche further down the valley while he was going mad during the 1890s, hesitantly told Romola that he had acted and looked as Vaslav did just before he was taken away. Romola consulted a local doctor, Hans Frenkel, who had studied under Eugen Bleuler, the psychiatrist who eight years earlier had invented the term ‘schizophrenia’. Frenkel gave Vaslav word-association tests and prescribed chloral hydrate as a sedative, which may have made his already wandering attention worse, and recommended to Romola that she take Vaslav to see Bleuler. He also embarked upon an affair with Romola. It is not known whether Vaslav knew about this affair. Joan Acocella, the dance critic and editor of the first complete English translation of Nijinsky’s diary, has argued, I think convincingly, that he did not.

  The young French writer Maurice Sandoz met Vaslav at this time, watching a figure-skating competition. He was wearing black sports clothes with the gold cross prominently displayed on his chest, and he was pulling a toboggan on which sat ‘an exquisite little girl’, Kyra. They fell into conversation about the skaters.

  ‘He skates with his heart. That’s the right way.’ Sandoz agreed that the skater was the most graceful of the competitors. ‘Grace comes from God. Everything else can be acquired by study.’

  ‘But grace too can be acquired by study, can’t it?’

  ‘The kind that can be learnt stops short; grace that is innate never ceases to grow.’

  Sandoz asked if Vaslav’s little girl would follow in his footsteps. ‘Oh no! Her grandfather could only walk, her father can only dance. She’ll have to fly! You’ll fly, won’t you?’ Kyra clapped her hands and laughed as he threw her high up over his head.

  In early January 1919 Vaslav decided to give a recital in the village at the Suvretta House Hotel. He told Romola a few days before, when they were discussing his costume with the dressmaker, that he wanted to ‘show how dances are created. I will compose them there before the audience. I want the public to see the work. They always get everything ready-made. I want to show them the pangs of creation, the agony an artist has to go through when composing, so I will even make the costumes in front of them.’