by Lucy Moore
Roy Porter, reviewing a 1991 psychiatric analysis of Nijinsky’s life, agreed with Peter Ostwald’s thesis that Nijinsky’s mutism ‘was to some degree a deliberate acting out of despair by one of the supremely gifted actors of modern times: playing parts was all Nijinsky had ever learned to do’. Ostwald broke Vaslav’s behaviour down into three dominant modes: the dancer, his core identity since childhood; the lunatic, a violent, moody, destructive role he took on in times of crisis, such as when his father was leaving his mother, when he was struggling to escape Diaghilev and later, when he was grappling with his declining mental health; and the patient, the gentle, passive obedient boy his mother and Romola adored. By this analysis the patient simply stepped into the foreground, gradually edging out the dancer and the lunatic.
The diagnosis was that Nijinsky was suffering from what we would today call schizophrenic disorders: hallucinations, delusions of many kinds (persecution, grandeur, control), distracted thoughts, disorganised language and behaviour, a loosening of connections and associations. Ostwald adds that he was probably bipolar too.* Although his psychosis was partly ‘biologically based’, writes Joan Acocella (his brother’s illness, though it too ostensibly sprang from an external source, cannot be discounted not only as a stress factor but also as an indication of a troubling shared genetic inheritance), ‘constitutional vulnerability must be combined with some potent psychological stress in order for the illness to develop’. She believes this stress was his inability to work, to dance and more specifically to choreograph – on a general level, to create.
Diaghilev, meanwhile, had replaced Anton Dolin with a new protégé, Serge Lifar, a dancer who had arrived in Paris in 1922, aged seventeen, on Bronia Nijinska’s recommendation. It took Lifar two years to persuade Diaghilev to take an interest in him but when he describes in his memoirs Diaghilev taking him off to the museums of Italy in the summer of 1924 we know a romance has begun. Diaghilev commended his young friend to Sacheverell Sitwell, their host in Florence, for reading his Baedeker at lunch – on closer inspection Sitwell found Lifar had tucked into the pages photographs of himself.
Cyril Beaumont described Lifar as lacking only pointed ears to be a faun and he embraced Nijinsky’s roles with alacrity. After dinner at Coco Chanel’s, Misia Sert would play the prelude to Debussy’s L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune while Lifar reclined on the piano. Then, languorously, he would stretch and get up to dance a one-man version of Faune: the sexiest of drawing-room entertainments. (Bronia also danced the role of the Faun for Diaghilev during this period but Ninette de Valois thought that, danced by a woman, it took on a sinister quality. Was Diaghilev hoping that through half-closed eyes he might catch a glimpse of his lost love?)
For Lifar, Diaghilev was an idol, a mentor and his ‘spiritual father’ – ‘our two souls met together in an upsurge towards the Beautiful’ – and Lifar’s influence on Diaghilev, for example persuading him to give up cocaine, was sometimes beneficent. The life of an artist was Diaghilev’s great gift to Lifar – the same gift he had given Nijinsky, Massine and Dolin. ‘I was enraptured with my life in the Theatre, my dancing, my appearances in front of the footlights …’ he wrote. But their relationship was a tempestuous one, marked by Lifar’s jostling for position with the equally possessive and adoring Boris Kochno and by Diaghilev’s obsessive desire for control. He was jealous of ‘everything and everyone – about my childhood dreams, girl dancers, my partners, people I met casually … and even my success as an artist’.
In late December 1928 Diaghilev brought Lifar to see Vaslav, who was living in a flat in Passy on the outskirts of Paris with Tessa de Pulszky – separated from her husband, still charming but increasingly alcoholic – his negligent guardian. The sad little group in the avenue de la Bourdonnais apartment had been disbanded three years earlier, with Emilia Márkus paying off the back rent and servants’ wages, long-owed, and Romola’s debts. Romola had fled to the United States to make her fortune; eleven-year-old Kyra was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland (again) and three years later went to live with a young American woman, Natalie Rodgers, who wanted to pay for her dance lessons and be her mentor, but soon abandoned her; Tamara, then five, was taken to Budapest where she was loved and looked after by her grandmother, the two of them forming an alliance against an increasingly defensive and distant Romola.
The Passy apartment smelt of chemicals and Nijinsky was looked after by male attendants of whom he was obviously frightened. It was clear that he had few visitors; Romola had not seen him since leaving Paris in 1925. When they came in he was lying in a dressing gown on a mattress, his legs stretched out in front of him. He was flabby and his nerves showed in the way he was playing with his hands, biting at his bleeding nails or making affected gestures with his wrists.
Diaghilev told Vaslav that Lifar was a dancer too and that he loved Nijinsky. ‘Loves me?’ asked Vaslav in Russian. ‘Yes, Vatsa, he loves you and so do I, and all of us, as ever.’ ‘C’est adorable!’ said Vaslav and laughed. His speech was mostly in French and it was vague and indifferent, occasionally betraying a hint of lucidity; he giggled at inappropriate moments.
That night, having helped bathe and shave and dress him, Lifar and Diaghilev took Vaslav to the Opéra to watch Petrushka. When Karsavina kissed him backstage, before the performance, she thought he knew her and was afraid to speak in case she interrupted a coalescing memory. A group photograph was taken – Vaslav smiled obediently, emptily; it is a photograph with ‘all the tragedy and horror’ of one of Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings, which Vaslav had loved. Vaslav leant forward to look into Karsavina’s eyes, but when she turned to face him, ‘he again turned his head like a child that wants to hide tears. And that pathetic, shy, helpless movement went through my heart.’ Harry Kessler saw him too. ‘With his big eyes, like a sick animal, he gave me a look that was uncomprehending and yet deeply moving.’ Throughout the evening he refused to take off his heavy overcoat. He showed no emotion during the evening except when Lifar came on stage as Petrushka. ‘Who is that?’ And then, ‘Can he jump?’
Marie Rambert heard he was there and rushed upstairs to catch him before he left, racing through a maze of passages and staircases. At the top of the last flight of stairs she saw Diaghilev holding Vaslav’s hand to lead him away; his anxious, hesitant shuffle. ‘Then I saw that absolutely blank face, and I thought, “No, I’m not going to try to talk to him or touch his hand.” It hurt me bitterly to see what had become of that marvellous human being.’ It is interesting that of all the comments on Vaslav after 1919 only Rambert mourned the man, while everyone else (even Bronia, I think, was guilty of this at times) regretted the loss of the artist. Lydia Sokolova, who had shared Rambert’s cabin on that fateful voyage on the Avon, would later write that she had often thought that if Rambert had been given the chance ‘she could have done more than anyone else to keep him sane and happy’; perhaps she was right.
Both Diaghilev (to Harry Kessler) and Lifar said that Vaslav hadn’t wanted to go home that night, saying firmly, ‘Je ne veux pas!’ They had to take him back to Passy by force.
Diaghilev died in Venice six months later. That spring he had acquired another protégé, the sixteen-year-old piano prodigy Igor Markevitch (who was perhaps the ‘modest, self-effacing, and utterly ruthless careerist who was about as fond of Diaghilev as Herod was of children’ to whom Stravinsky referred), but it was Boris Kochno and Serge Lifar who nursed him through his last illness. At the end he was a very sad and world-weary man. Among his papers Lifar later found a phrase Diaghilev had jotted down on an article he had written about the Ballets Russes earlier that year: ‘The longer the earth turns, the deader it gets.’
Misia Sert and Coco Chanel arrived in Venice to find their old friend shivering in bed in an old dinner jacket, despite the August heat. He was suffering from blood poisoning as a result of infected abscesses and it was obvious to them all how ill he was. He begged to be moved to a bed in another room, but Lifar refused to do it because of
a superstition that to change beds meant death was near; then, horrified, they found him on the floor trying to crawl from one bed to the other.
Diaghilev died at dawn on 19 August 1929 after Misia forced a reluctant Catholic priest to give him the last rites (though lapsed, Diaghilev was Russian Orthodox) and then the pent-up jealousy between Lifar and Kochno exploded: they fought each other, rolling on the floor, tearing and biting at each other, ‘like two mad dogs fighting over the body of their master’. At the funeral, both of them crawled to his grave on their knees and then Lifar tried to throw himself in after the coffin.
It was to Walter Nouvel, his friend for forty years, rather than Kochno or Lifar, that Diaghilev’s old associates chose to express their grief at his death. Benois wrote to say that even though Diaghilev had played only a small part in his life in recent years and he had become used to feeling he no longer needed him, ‘now, suddenly, it seems as if I’m still to a very great extent “filled with him”; he occupies a unique place in my spirit, in my mind and in my heart; he continues to be there and by old habit I continue to turn to him constantly, to ask his opinion and at the same time to worry about him and to live for his interest.’
And it was Nouvel, too, who best summed up Diaghilev, replying to Stravinsky’s letter of heartfelt condolence. ‘Many things united us, many things kept us apart. I often suffered because of him, I often got angry. But now, when he is in the grave, all is forgotten, all is forgiven, and I understood that one can’t apply the normal measure of human relationships to this exceptional man.
‘He lived and died “a favourite of the gods”. For he was a pagan, and a Dionysian pagan – not an Apollonian. He loved everything earthly – earthly love, earthly passions, earthly beauty. Heaven for him was just a lovely dome above the lovely earth … He died in love and beauty, under the tender smile of those gods whom all his life he passionately served and worshipped.’
Although it is likely that Romola’s first affair after marrying Vaslav was with Dr Frenkel in 1919–20 (he wanted to leave his wife for her and, when Romola refused him, developed a lifelong addiction to morphine), the first time she lost her heart after losing it to Vaslav was to the glamorous, fast-living Hungarian silent movie star Lya de Putti whom she met in the United States in the late 1920s. De Putti had made it big as a vamp in the mould of Louise Brooks and Pola Negri, but her heavy accent hindered her transition to the stage or talkies. By the time she met Romola she was trying in vain to revive her career and drinking too much; their relationship was a savagely tempestuous one.
In April 1929 Romola wrote to the Binswangers (directors of the first Swiss clinic in which Nijinsky had stayed after being diagnosed) from the Savoy in London, asking them to collect Vaslav from Paris and take him back to Bellevue. The nurses they sent found him in a cell in Tessa’s apartment, neglected, raving and smeared in faeces. At Bellevue throughout the 1930s his condition was stable but not easy to deal with, consisting of long periods of catatonia interspersed with states of frenzied excitement and regular masturbation. Romola gave orders that he should have no visitors.
Distracted by her new life, Romola visited him for the first time in three years in December 1929, and then again in 1934. By the time Kyra was eighteen, in 1932, Romola was bemoaning the fact that she could not yet hand over to her ‘the burden of taking care of her father, [because] that would be asking too much’; previously she had complained that neither Bronia nor Diaghilev wanted to help her with his care. Despite having been dropped by the American ballet-lover who had taken her out of boarding school, Kyra had persevered with her dance-training and in 1931, at the age of seventeen, was living alone in Berlin before beginning to dance for her aunt Bronia, then directing a company for Ida Rubinstein. Bronia treated Kyra badly, according to another dancer, because she ‘tries to act like she is somebody’.
Although de Putti had promised Romola she would pay Vaslav’s hospital bills (and would have been able to, five years earlier), she died in 1931 from complications after having a chicken bone removed from her throat. Romola’s next lover was a cross-dressing Dutchwoman, Frederika Dezentje. When Kyra found the two women in bed together, Romola told her that she had chosen Dezentje because she did not want to betray her father’s memory: ‘the only man in this world I will ever love is Vaslav’.
Encouraged by Dezentje, Romola decided to write Vaslav’s biography, hoping that book sales – and perhaps a movie biopic – would fund Vaslav’s care and the extravagant lifestyle to which she felt entitled. The young Lincoln Kirstein, later founder (with George Balanchine) and director for over forty years of the New York City Ballet, agreed to help her write it. As ‘supervisor cum ghostwriter’, twenty-six-year-old Kirstein accompanied Romola to London in the summer of 1933 to begin the research. Dezentje had died suddenly the previous year and Romola wanted the book they had dreamt up together to be her memorial.
In Paris, Kirstein wrote on 3 June, Serge Lifar and George Balanchine, supported by Boris Kochno, were competing for the post of maître de ballet at the Opéra, a position controlled by Misia Sert (Lifar eventually prevailed). Bitter differences continued to divide the ballet community. Marie Rambert, Ninette de Valois and Lydia Lopokova were all ranged against one another. Sergey Grigoriev hated Lifar; Bronia hated Romola; Colonel de Basil, who had taken on the Ballets Russes after Diaghilev died, was falling out with Léonide Massine, his star. Only Karsavina managed to remain on good terms with everyone. These longstanding rivalries, dating back to Diaghilev’s time, made Kirstein wonder how it would be possible to enlist the old members of Nijinsky’s circle in Romola’s project without antagonising anyone; hardly any of them were willing even to dance in a benefit to raise money for Nijinsky if the others were involved.
A month later a heavily powdered Ottoline Morrell told Kirstein that Vaslav had trusted her because they shared the same religious ideals, but then cancelled the appointment at which she had promised to elaborate further. Romola was desperate for money – partly to pay a medium, Ma Garrett, on whom she was dependent – and came up with increasingly wild schemes to raise funds. On 15 July she slid an astonishing note under Kirstein’s hotel room door, telling him that she was divorcing Vaslav to marry Lifar, who had agreed to dance in Nijinsky’s gala. ‘Long talk later,’ noted Kirstein. ‘Difficulty of obtaining a divorce, since they were married in Argentina. None of this is a caprice; it is a means of getting back into the big world; ultimately of supporting Vaslav.’ For all his sympathy for Romola, Kirstein added an incredulous ‘(?!)’ on this page.
Romola’s myth-making Nijinsky, edited in part by critic and writer Arnold Haskell and dedicated to Dezentje, was published in 1934 and became a bestseller. But while it eased Romola’s financial worries, the portrait she unwittingly painted of herself was of a manipulative, selfish and superficial woman and the book turned both her daughters against her (there was no mention of Tamara at all) and made public her old rift with Bronia. The following year, Stravinsky (aided by Nouvel) published the first volume of his autobiography in which he was bitingly derogatory about Nijinsky’s choreography for Sacre. By then his masterpiece had already been hailed (possibly initially by Diaghilev) as being what, for the twentieth century, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was for the nineteenth.
Hoping to capitalise on the interest in his old schoolmate, in 1937 Anatole Bourman brought out The Tragedy of Nijinsky. Aggressively ghostwritten by Miss D. Lyman, it placed Bourman at the heart of Vaslav’s story for almost fifteen years and present at every important event in his life. Although Bourman had been Vaslav’s contemporary at the Imperial Theatre School and had danced in the Ballets Russes’s corps, and so cannot be discounted, many of the scenes he and Lyman described, especially later in Nijinsky’s life, were entirely invented. But, as Kirstein would observe, ‘sometimes one can snatch the residue of Bourman’s actual reminiscences from the airy lies of his collaborator’.
The same year Romola published a severely cut (by almost half) and edited version
of Vaslav’s diary. The polished result was intended to make Nijinsky sound like a noble, romantic, tormented genius, so she removed all references to defecation and most references to sex and rearranged the structure to make it more coherent. Any unflattering descriptions of her – for example, ‘My wife is an untwinkling star’ – were left out.
She had asked Sigmund Freud’s advice about Vaslav, but he bluntly told her analysis was no use in dealing with schizophrenia; Carl Jung (another friend of Binswanger’s) also refused to get involved. When she approached Alfred Adler, he was willing to look at Vaslav’s case – and at her request wrote a piece intended to be the introduction to the published diary – but she disagreed with his conclusions and did not use his article. Adler theorised that Vaslav suffered from an inferiority complex. His life had been a series of punishments: ‘punishment at school for being a prodigy; from Diaghilev, his surrogate father, for creating masterpieces, as a god might challenge his creator; punishment for marrying Romola’. Adler recommended greater understanding of his problems; Romola just thought he needed better – or more – medicine.
The drama critic John Heilpern, whose 1982 article in The Times revealed Adler’s suppressed work on Nijinsky, agreed with many of Vaslav’s friends that Romola was more a part of his problem than its cure. Having trapped him into marriage, and into a cycle of needing to dance for money, he ‘fought back … finding cover from her domination behind his illness while enslaving her with his dependency’. Tamara Nijinsky could not argue with this assessment of their destructive interdependence. While her mother was fond of ‘this exceptional, gentle human being, guilt and anger must have entered her soul for maybe ruining his life’, and – though Tamara did not say this – quite possibly also for Vaslav ruining hers.