by Lucy Moore
On the afternoon of the performance, Vaslav, Romola and the dressmaker drove over to the Suvretta House. As always before dancing, Vaslav was silent, his face pale and intense between the dark fur collar of his coat and the fur of his Russian hat. When they arrived, Romola asked what time she should ask the Hungarian accompanist, Bertha Asseo, a friend of her sister’s, to begin playing.
‘I will tell her at the time. Do not speak. Silence!’ he thundered. ‘This is my marriage with God.’
About two hundred people were waiting in the hotel’s ballroom. Vaslav came in in his practice clothes. According to Sandoz, who was one of the guests, Nijinsky was in good humour, greeting people easily, while, despite her slender elegance, Romola looked worried.
In Romola’s account of the evening, which differs from Sandoz’s, Vaslav ignored the guests. Instead of dancing, he picked up a chair and sat facing the audience for what felt like half an hour, staring at them as if he wanted to read their minds. Then, hoping to prompt Vaslav into action, Bertha Asseo began playing some Chopin. Still he didn’t move. Romola went up to him and urged him to begin dancing.
‘How dare you disturb me! I am not a machine. I will dance when I feel like it.’ Close to tears, Romola fled the room. When she returned Vaslav was dancing.
Sandoz did not notice this delay. What he noticed was the precision with which, when Vaslav did start dancing, each movement corresponded exactly to each chord, emphasising the fragmentary quality of the music (it was Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 in C Minor). Sandoz was surprised at the time but, over the years, thinking about it again, he realised how right Vaslav had been, how intuitive and full of musical understanding. After a brief rest, Nijinsky stood up and shouted, ‘We’re at war.’ He laid out the fabric he had brought with him – long rolls of black and white velvet – on the floor in the shape of a cross.
Romola remembered him saying, ‘Now I will dance you the war, with its suffering, with its destruction, with its death. The war which you did not prevent and so you are also responsible for,’ and standing with open arms at the head of the velvet cross, his body forming another cross above it.
‘And we saw Nijinsky [continued Sandoz], his face ravaged with fright and horror, walking to the sound of a funeral march on a field of battle, striding over a rotting corpse, avoiding a shell, defending a shallow trench which was soaked in blood that clung to his feet, attacking an enemy, running from a tank, coming back on his steps, wounded, dying, tearing, with hands that spoke volumes, the clothes which covered him and were now becoming rags and tatters.
‘Nijinsky, barely covered with the shreds of his tunic and gasping for breath was panting hard. A feeling of oppression came over the room, grew tense and seemed to fill it. Another moment and the audience would have cried out: “Enough!”
‘One last spasm shook his body which seems riddled with bullets, and another dead man was added to the victims of the Great War.
‘This time we felt too much overwhelmed to applaud. We were looking at a pitiful corpse and our silence was the silence that enfolds the dead.
‘If Nijinsky had stopped there, our memories of him would have been perfect.’
Romola said that he had danced at once gloriously and terrifyingly: ‘it was the dance for life against death’. She did not mention the last sequence of the evening, in which according to Sandoz, Vaslav turned to the wall while the accompanist played a Bach fugue and, half-listening, made strange manic movements like some kind of mad magician. ‘A shiver of fear passed through the room.’ Asseo stopped. ‘What are you doing? That’s not dancing.’ A rigid, haughty expression came over Vaslav’s face, ‘the mask of an offended idol’: ‘I am an artist.’ There was a moment of embarrassed silence and then Asseo began playing a Chopin Ballade. ‘No, I don’t want to hear that music,’ shouted Vaslav. ‘I know it. I want some music that I don’t know, some music that nobody knows.’ Asseo played something else and he danced, briefly, with ‘delicious grace’. Then she got up and the performance was over.
Afterwards Asseo had tea with Romola and said to her kindly, ‘It must be very, very difficult to be married to a genius like Nijinsky. I almost wish you could be free to marry one of our nice, charming, inoffensive compatriots.’
When they got home, Vaslav retreated to his room and carried on feverishly writing in the diary he had begun earlier that day. ‘The audience came to be amused … [but] I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I do not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous,’ he wrote. ‘I felt God throughout the evening. He loved me. I loved Him. Our marriage was solemnised. In the carriage I told my wife that today was the day of my marriage with God.’ It was also the day that Romola realised that there was nothing she could do to stop her husband’s psychological collapse.
Nijinsky’s diary is an extraordinary document. Written during a period of forty-five days between 19 January and 4 March 1919 in Russian (very bad Russian, according to his translator Kyril FitzLyon, but perhaps that is not surprising for a man who had done as little schoolwork as possible) with tremendous speed, it was, said Romola, almost illegible except for the fact that ‘the sentences repeated themselves continuously and that the two names Diaghilev and God dominated’ the pages. ‘To my knowledge,’ writes Joan Acocella in her introduction to its first full English translation, published in 1999, ‘it is the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.’
He began writing to express, describe and justify what he thought he was going through. Knowing Romola was worried about him and fearing, because of the hallucinations he was at this stage only experiencing intermittently, that he might be going mad – he wanted to show that what seemed (even to him) to be madness was in fact an ascent to a higher plane, a mystical union with God in which he would translate God’s message to the world. The message was simple, heavily reliant on Tolstoy, and throughout he never deviated from it, wherever his free-falling mind took him: materialism and opportunism were destroying the world and the remedy was not thinking, but feeling. FitzLyon notes that feeling as Nijinsky used the word ‘means intuitive perception, the ability to understand something – a person, a situation – by merging with it emotionally … akin to a spiritual experience’.
Several themes recur amid the rambling repeated phrases, disjointed memories and associations, wild swings in mood, back-to-front arguments (‘I am afraid of death and therefore I love life’), apparent contradictions and cries of existential anguish. The first is God, the closeness Vaslav feels and longs to feel to Him, and the torment he suffers when he feels detached from Him. He has no time for the Church as an institution or for the Pope; his spirituality is based on an intense personal association with the divine, through Christ in particular. ‘I am God in man. I am what Christ felt. I am Buddha. I am a Buddhist and every kind of God. I know everyone. I am acquainted with everything. I pretend to be mad for my own purposes. I know that if everyone thinks I am a harmless madman, they will not be afraid of me. I do not like people who think that I am a madman who would harm people. I am a madman who loves people.’ (This passage gives a good indication of the style of the diary. As one critic has written, ‘Reading it is like watching an autistic child rocking back and forth, back and forth, absorbed in the patterns of a speeding universe but unable to waylay them long enough to process into purposeful action. It’s a terrible sight. We want to stop him, comfort him. But we know he’s doomed.’)
His ideas recall the sense of oneness for which Buddhists strive, and remind me of The Way of a Pilgrim, a classic of Russian mysticism, about an itinerant peasant trying ‘to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly’; it is the book J. D. Salinger’s Franny Glass (in Franny and Zooey) can’t let go of. Sometimes he verges on delusions of grandeur that make him think he might actually be an omnipotent deity; most of t
he time he seems to mean, when he says he is God, that he sometimes feels attuned to a communion with the divine in which anyone could participate. ‘I am not a magician, I am God within the body,’ he writes. ‘Everyone has this feeling, only no one uses it.’
But then he is overtaken by torturous doubts: he is evil, he does not love anyone; he is an animal, a predator, a masturbator. He is the angriest man in the world. The very worst things he can contemplate he will do: ‘I will eat everyone I can get hold of. I will stop at nothing. I will make love to my wife’s mother and my child. I will weep, but I will do everything God commands me to. I know that everyone will be afraid of me and will commit me to a lunatic asylum. But I don’t care. I am not afraid of anything. I want death. I will blow my brains out if God wants it. I will be ready for anything.’
And just as he does not flinch from the darkness in his own soul, so too does he seek to understand the baser instincts that animate the world around him. The stock market is a brothel, he writes; men become rich by fraud; politics is death. Lloyd George, whom he blames for the war, is as aggressive and power-hungry as Diaghilev. They are both eagles ‘who prevent small birds from living’. Amid the flashes of insight are moments of wild delusion: he will gamble on the stock exchange to make money to give to the poor, he will invent pencils that never go blunt, he will ask Gabriel Astruc to arrange for him to dance for the poor artists of Paris, and if they understand him he will be saved.
He can comprehend everything spoken in front of him, no matter what language it is. ‘To understand does not mean to know all the words,’ he writes, referring to Romola and her sister Tessa speaking Hungarian in front of him. ‘I know few words, but my hearing is very well developed.’ This delusion is less odd than it might sound: Vaslav must have been extraordinarily good at picking up on non-verbal communication. He had spent most of his adult life speaking and listening to languages in which he was not fluent, saying little but understanding a lot. I think of those endless champagne-drenched dinners in mirrored private dining rooms, with everyone but him fighting to make their voice heard and Vaslav just listening; and of the way he could express so much on stage with a glance or a gesture.
Later he writes that he can do everything, be anyone: ‘I am an Egyptian. I am an Indian. I am a Red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinese. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner and a stranger. I am a seabird’; and later, ‘I am a peasant. I am a factory worker. I am a servant. I am a gentleman. I am an aristocrat. I am a tsar. I am an Emperor. I am God. I am God. I am Everything.’ One must bear in mind, reading these lists, that he had played almost all these roles on stage. His professional life had been made up in large part by inhabiting skins other than his own, by observing people’s actions, understanding what they revealed about their interior states, and using that in his work.
Diaghilev appears again and again in Vaslav’s writing, viewed at times with bitterness, at times with respect, and at times with compassion. He describes their meeting and his feelings for him in searing detail; he blames him for the ‘terrible things’ he taught him sexually (‘Diaghilev taught me everything’), because now he fears lust and its power over him and does not want to feel it. He gave up meat because it made him lustful. ‘Lust is a terrible thing.’ At the same time, he does ‘not want people to think Diaghilev is a scoundrel and that he must be put in prison. I will weep if he is hurt. I do not like him, but he is a human being.’
Towards the end of the diary, Vaslav addresses to Diaghilev a long letter in verse, a strange and moving poem containing snatches of half-remembered conversations or arguments, a reference to Diaghilev’s well-known preference for communicating by telegram and telephone rather than by letter, and increasingly compulsive repetitions and word associations.
‘You do not want to live with me.
I wish you well.
You are mine, you are mine.
I am yours, I am yours.
I love writing with a pen.
I write, I write.
You do not write. You tele-write.
You are a telegram, I am a letter … You are not my king, but I am your
king. You wish me harm, I do not wish harm. You are a spiteful man,
but I am a lullabyer. Rockabye, bye, bye, bye. Sleep in peace, rockabye,
bye.
Bye. Bye. Bye.
Man to man
Vaslav Nijinsky’
I find that ‘Man to man’ heartbreakingly poignant: an insistence that, au fond, however Diaghilev may have treated him, they are equals – not adult and child, not patron and protégé, not powerful impresario and puppet-performer.
The other person who features prominently in the diary is Romola and, as with Diaghilev, Vaslav’s responses to her are not straightforward. He respects her for engaging in battle with Diaghilev and he likes the fact that Diaghilev is scared of her intelligence. He bemoans the fact that she is not careful with his money, even though he has given her everything he had. He will not go to cocktail parties with her because he has ‘had enough of this kind of jollity to last me a lifetime’. He knows they disagree: ‘You think I am stupid, and I think you are a fool.’ But despite her flinty materialism, her craving for things he considers unimportant, he feels compassion and affection for her; he loves her ‘more than anyone else in the world’. Beneath it all, the deep connection between them endures. ‘I do not like the intelligent Romola. I want her to leave you. I want you to be mine.’
Although the diary’s erratic style makes it appear unreliable, I trust much of what Vaslav is saying in it. He might have been hallucinating (those dreadful trails of blood in the snow), but he was not fantasising (I believe him when he says Romola’s sister flitted around in front of him in her underwear). If cubism was a way of trying to express a three-dimensional experience of the world in two dimensions, then what Nijinsky is doing in his diary is expressing the quicksilver multiplicity of emotions people simultaneously contain about events, past and future, and about one another – fragmentary, shifting, hard to pin down, very often contradictory – but no less authentic for that. We are ‘splinters and mosaics’, wrote Virginia Woolf; ‘not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes’.
He can be startlingly observant. Stravinsky seeks fame and riches; he ‘loves me in his heart because he feels, but he considers me his enemy because I am in his way’. Diaghilev smokes to appear impressive. ‘He is a tidy man and likes museums. I consider museums to be graveyards.’ Emilia gives presents to Vaslav and Kyra: ‘She thinks that love is expressed in presents. I believe that presents are not love.’ Romola ‘wants money because she is afraid of life’ (a very Tolstoyan phrase). He is even able to shine this spotlight on himself: ‘I am an unthinking philosopher.’
Another striking aspect of the diary is how it illuminates the way he thought and worked. Like Woolf, another modernist artist whose fractured mental state granted her extraordinary insights, the ‘whirring of wings in the brain’ she described may have stimulated Nijinsky’s creativity in indefinable ways. ‘The quality of abstraction that made his acting so remarkable may have been rooted in the same traits of mind as his communication problems,’ writes Acocella. Similarly, his willingness to experiment, the radical way he viewed and analysed movement, ‘may have been connected to some neurological idiosyncrasy … Why should he worry about being understood? He was seldom understood.’
Taking risks, being obsessive and self-obsessed, being drawn to new and extreme experiences – these were traits people had been remarking about him for years. ‘Later, too, I came to understand the absences [in Vaslav’s personality] as a kind of stigmata,’ wrote Stravinsky. The tragedy was that Vaslav’s spiritual insights and soaring creativity came in parallel with a paralysing inability to cope with the everyday world. Inarticulate and shy in normal life, achingly conscious of his inexperience, repeatedly told by people he admired that he was their intellectual inferior, he knew ‘he had no reason to credit himself with unusual spiritual maturi
ty’.
Many of the diary’s characteristics are qualities of early modernist art. Repetition, elision and odd juxtapositions are hallmarks of visual artists like Picasso, of writers like Joyce and Eliot, who created stream-of-consciousness narratives akin to Nijinsky’s. He revels in complex rhymes and puns like a rapper or a scat singer, moving between Russian, Polish and French, for example linking Massine with singe and associating the fabulously rich Misia Sert repeatedly with gold and silver. The insistently rhythmic quality of much of his writing may be ‘a verbal expression of his experience as a dancer’. Vaslav’s preoccupation with the visceral was also part of being a professional athlete: the minute details of what he ate and excreted or ejaculated, when he slept and how his body felt were all vitally important to his work.
Throughout he struggles to express and understand what is happening to him. ‘I am standing in front of a precipice into which I may fall,’ he writes. ‘He knows,’ comments Acocella, ‘that something extraordinary is going on in his brain, but he does not know if this means that he is God or that he is a madman, abandoned by God.’ Repeatedly he refers to artists who, like him, suffered from mental illness: Gogol, Maupassant, Nietzsche. ‘I feel so much pain in my soul that I am afraid for myself. I feel pain. My soul is sick. My sickness is of the soul and not of the mind.’ In Russia the insane are called ‘soul-sick’, FitzLyon notes. ‘I have been told that I am mad. I thought that I was alive,’ he writes, six pages later. ‘I am Nijinsky. I want to tell you, humans, that I am God. I am the God who dies when he is not loved.’
There is an electric connection between the God with whom Vaslav identifies himself and the dieu de la danse he had been acclaimed as by audiences ever since his professional debut ten years earlier. The sense of the dancer-artist as a semi-divine figure, capable of attaining what Erik Bruhn called ‘something total – a sense of total being’, has been beautifully expressed by Rudolf Nureyev, and I imagine that something like this is also what Nijinsky felt when he performed. ‘There have been certain moments on the stage – four or five times – when I have suddenly felt a feeling of “I am!” A moment that feels as though it’s forever. An indescribable feeling of being everywhere and nowhere.’ This zen-like transcendence, a route into what Colin Wilson describes as ‘more abundant life’, was something to which Nijinsky was exquisitely attuned but could not translate into his day-to-day experience. He could not communicate it to Romola; even he could not always grasp it. It was no wonder people had always thought of him as inhabiting a different plane. Perhaps only Diaghilev had understood, in part at any rate.