Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  In 1937 Nijinsky’s family gathered for the first and only time at Kreuzlingen. Tamara came from Budapest with Emilia and Oskar Padany and Tessa, her aunt; and Kyra joined them with her new husband – not by coincidence, Igor Markevitch, Diaghilev’s last protégé – and their baby son, Vaslav. Although Romola had barely seen Vaslav for over a decade she still ‘complained about everything’ to the doctors at Bellevue and was as negligent about paying her bills as Diaghilev. Tamara said that when Romola was with Vaslav, ‘she was every inch the gentle, devoted and understanding wife … And then, the incredible metamorphosis – the moment he was out of sight the poised, cold, elusive Romola was back.’ She was, Tamara wrote elsewhere, ‘incapable of showing unfeigning warmth and tenderness toward a child’.

  Romola would not allow anyone else, even the nurses, to be alone with Vaslav. Once when she was called to the telephone, Tamara, aged seventeen, was left with her father for a few minutes. Nervously she picked him a bunch of flowers. ‘Silently, he gazed at the daisies, lifted them upward to the sky … like an offering, then sank back in his chair, shut his eyes, and pressed the flowers to his heart.’ Even behind the veil of madness Nijinsky’s eloquence as an actor was unmistakable.

  Later that year Anton Dolin organised a charity gala to raise funds for Nijinsky’s care, at which he danced with Margot Fonteyn and, in the most beautiful moment of the evening (for Dolin), Tamara Karsavina talked about her memories of Vaslav. Ottoline and Philip Morrell were members of the committee of the new Nijinsky Foundation, formed with the proceeds. The money was desperately needed because Romola had decided – against the wishes of the Binswangers – to have Vaslav treated with insulin shock therapy. These massive (and expensive) injections were designed by Dr Manfred Sakel (now discredited) to provoke severe hypoglycaemic shock that would jolt the patient’s system out of insanity.

  By modern standards, the amount of medication Vaslav was given was staggering – insulin, bromides, barbiturates, morphine, neuroleptics, scopolamine, opium – but Romola was determined to believe he would recover. After his insulin cure began, she let it be known that soon Nijinsky would be dancing once again and in 1940 she released a photograph of them, their faces strained in rictuses of optimism.

  In about 1939 Lifar visited him for the third time, with Romola, his brother Leonid Lifar and some press photographers; another gala was planned and they wanted to promote it. After the shock therapy, he found Vaslav more sociable and less obviously anguished – his nail beds were no longer torn and bloody – but the shy, childlike, confiding smile was gone. He talked to himself constantly, mostly unintelligibly, in a mixture of languages. When he was offered strawberries, he ate them with exquisite delicacy, exclaiming, ‘How good! How good!’

  Lifar wanted to dance for Vaslav (and the photographers) and he changed into practice clothes and began warming up at a barre which had been installed for him. Behind him Vaslav said, ‘You might fall into the air.’ Romola and Leonid Lifar were astonished when, after Lifar had performed Faune with Vaslav correcting his steps, Vaslav joined in as Lifar danced Le Spectre de la Rose, executing an entrechat-six, a bourrée and some cabrioles. When they had finished, Vaslav giggled and retreated back into his private world.

  Convinced that Vaslav was better in her care than at Kreuzlingen, and with nowhere else to go and no way of obtaining papers or passports in wartime (a particularly difficult task because most countries, including Britain and the United States, were reluctant to admit someone with a mental illness, even if he was Nijinsky), Romola took Vaslav to Budapest when war broke out.

  They arrived in 1940 to find Emilia and Oskar had left the city rather than being there to welcome them home. Though family tensions again ran nearly as high as international ones, Tamara was overjoyed to be with her father for the second time in her life. Torn between her warring grandmother and mother, aware of the violence simmering inside her father – once she watched him smash Emilia’s favourite chair to splinters – most of the time she ‘simply relished being in his presence because there he always radiated serenity and love’.

  When life in Budapest became too dangerous for Vaslav and Romola, as well as for Emilia and Oskar (though he had converted to marry Emilia, he had been born Jewish and they were sheltering Jews in their house), the Nijinskys moved for a few months to Lake Balaton before receiving a visit from the local police who suspected them of being Russian agents. They returned to Budapest and then found a rented house outside the capital. In 1943 they moved closer to the Austrian border to await the longed-for German retreat, living very humbly in a tiny hamlet in the woods.

  They survived desperate living conditions and heavy American bombing throughout 1944 and into 1945. One day Romola arrived home to find a dust-covered Vaslav standing silently in a roofless room. Sometimes he stayed at the local hospital, where she hoped he might be safer, until the afternoon when he was brought home by a nurse who told her they had received orders to exterminate their mental patients the following morning. In March 1945 the Western press reported that the Nazis had killed Nijinsky, but that August he was seen alive again. Because they were using false papers there was no way of looking for or identifying them.

  The war brought out Romola’s best qualities: charm, resourcefulness, energy and devotion. Mr Quand, the ballet-loving young general manager of the National Bank of Hungary, whom Romola had invited herself to meet when she and Vaslav needed money, always magically managed to replenish their account when it looked as though it might be empty. For five years she managed to keep them both fed, clothed and alive, while she looked after a seriously ill man in the most challenging of conditions.

  The Russian soldiers who occupied their part of Hungary near Sopron once peace was declared gave Vaslav a new lease of life. For the first time for many years he could speak Russian once again, and shyly he began to engage with them, listening to their folk songs and stories, even dancing with them as they sat around their campfires.

  With peacetime came their first move, along with Romola’s devoted cousin Paul, to Vienna where the manager of the Sacher Hotel agreed to allow them to stay. While they were in Vienna they were ‘found’ by Margaret Power, a ballet-loving widow of thirty-seven who worked for the Allied Commission in Vienna. Before she left London, Cyril Beaumont had told her to try and look out for the Nijinskys, as they would almost certainly be in need of money and help. She brought them a parcel of tea, biscuits, chocolate and toothpaste and became very close to Vaslav. Although he barely spoke, he expressed his affection for her in gentle patting. ‘I fell in love with him with Vienna,’ Power told biographer Richard Buckle, ‘and have remained so ever since.’

  In Vienna, the Russians made a bid to woo Vaslav back home, putting on a performance in his honour at the Ronacher Theatre by the company which was the descendant of the old Mariinsky, inheritors of the traditions with which he had grown up. It began with a piece from the Nutcracker Suite and went on to include Russian and Polish national dances and a gypsy divertissement, before ending with Les Sylphides. Vaslav followed the dancers with perceptible movements of his own body and at the end applauded with all the abandon of a student.

  Romola was increasingly obsessed by the hope that Vaslav might return to sanity, issuing reports in 1945 of his ‘complete recovery’ and proposing to the Met in New York that he might even be well enough to dance Petrushka for them. But her ideas were roundly condemned in a News Review article of October that year: Lydia Lopokova declared her sadness at the prospect and cabled Vaslav not to make the attempt; the Met was accused of ‘sensation mongering and bad taste’ and Tamara Karsavina was provoked to an outspoken ‘cruel, very cruel’.

  In the summer of 1946, helped by the money left over in the Nijinsky Foundation’s account and by Margaret Power and Anton Dolin, who had been raising money for Vaslav in America during the war, Vaslav and Romola went to Switzerland again. Power visited occasionally from Vienna and played table tennis with Vaslav. ‘Sometimes he would kiss my che
ek, always quite unexpectedly – not in greeting or farewell, but just out of affection.’

  Late the following year Romola obtained her British passport and permission for Vaslav to live in England too. After spending Christmas of 1948 in a hotel courtesy of Romola’s friend Alexander Korda, they rented a house near Windsor. Still focused on his recovery, Romola hoped to take Vaslav to America to consult doctors there. She and Lifar paraded Vaslav in front of press cameras to publicise a gala performance in November to raise money for the trip, but it brought in an inadequate £132 rather than the £1,000 they had been expecting; grandly Romola refused the money, donating it instead to the Sadler’s Wells Benevolent Fund.

  Encountering him at the BBC in 1950, Arnold Haskell thought Vaslav looked like ‘a plump and well-contented suburban commercial traveller. He watched the proceedings [a reheasal of a Lifar ballet] with no interest and the only reaction I saw was one of pleasure when the tea was brought in.’ A journalist who met him during this period described him as being ‘like a docile child until he flashed an eternally-wise smile that made everybody else in the room seem a thousand years behind him’.

  In early 1950 they moved to a house in Sussex. ‘Like gypsies,’ Vaslav said sadly as Romola packed their things again. Despite living a more normal life than he had done for decades, Vaslav’s physical health was declining and on 8 April 1950 he died quietly of kidney failure after a short illness, with Romola at his side. He only had £30 to leave to her. Although, because of the rift with Romola, Vaslav had barely seen her in recent years, Kyra was named as his daughter in the obituaries; there was no mention of a second child.

  His first funeral was held at the Catholic Church in Spanish Place, St James’s, on 14 April. At the last minute George Balanchine could not come, so the pall-bearers were Serge Lifar, Anton Dolin, Frederick Ashton, Richard Buckle, Michael Somes and Cyril Beaumont. Of these, Buckle noted, only Beaumont had seen Nijinsky ‘in his glory’. Lifar laid a wreath of primroses by the grave. It was a beautiful spring day; the buds on the trees were about to burst into leaf. The mourners at the burial at the Marylebone cemetery in Finchley Road included Marie Rambert, Tamara Karsavina and Lydia Sokolova, as well as Margaret Power and the Indian dancer, Ram Gopal.

  His second funeral was held in Paris at the Russian Church in the rue Daru on 16 June 1953. Three years after Nijinsky’s death, Serge Lifar had arranged for his body to be reinterred in the cemetery at Montmartre near Auguste Vestris’s grave – and perhaps more significantly, beside Lifar’s own plot. Margaret Power accompanied the coffin to Paris because Romola was in America. Bronia was there, and Mathilde Kshesinskaya, and Tamara Nijinsky. She remembered the ‘saintly’ priest in white by the grave, who ‘spoke of the beauty of Vaslav’s life, of the talent given to him by God and of the wonderful beauty and pleasure he was able to give to the people who saw him. He said that the joy which Vaslav gave to us was still with us, held in precious memory in our hearts.’

  DIVERTISSEMENT

  A libretto for a ballet based on Nijinsky’s life (with apologies)

  ACT ONE

  St Petersburg. A window-and mirror-lined

  classroom at the Imperial Theatre School.

  A teacher (Fokine) is leading a class of six young ballet students in their barre exercises. Gradually, as the class becomes more challenging, it becomes clear that one of the boys (Nijinsky) is far more accomplished than his peers. One by one they fall back, leaving Nijinsky dancing in a competition of leaping and turning virtuosity with his closest rival (Georgy Rozai). Once Rozai has reluctantly admitted defeat, Nijinsky dances alone with Fokine, following but exceeding him. Even Fokine stops dancing to marvel at him and when Nijinsky finally comes to a standstill after a dazzling solo they rush to congratulate him.

  As Fokine is shaking Nijinsky’s hand, an imposing dark man (Diaghilev) with a silver streak in his hair, wearing a black cape, enters the classroom. (Mitsouko wafts out over the audience.) He is attended by two followers (Bakst, small and fiery, with a dapper ginger moustache; and Benois, dark and heavily bearded). Fokine invites them to watch Nijinsky dance. He performs part of Le Spectre de la Rose, with Diaghilev, whom Fokine has solicitously seated in a wooden classroom chair, inadvertently acting the part of the girl. Diaghilev is cynical at first and then won over. As the curtain falls and the music dies away, he is standing, his clapping the only sound in the theatre.

  ACT TWO

  Paris. A theatre presented side on with the curtain running

  perpendicular to the stage, so that the left side of the stage

  is backstage and the right faces an invisible audience.

  Nijinsky, still in his practice clothes, and Diaghilev in white tie, are backstage as, amid the intermittent flurry of stage-setting onstage, other Nijinskys dance solos from his celebrated roles – Armida’s Slave, Zobéïde’s Slave and Petrushka. At first they are clearly together, very much a couple, but by the time Petrushka is dancing his tragic piece backstage Nijinsky is isolated, dreamily practising steps alone or sometimes with a girl (Karsavina) in a white practice tutu and pink tights, while Diaghilev is surrounded by a fawning, bickering entourage of Fokine, Benois, Bakst, Stravinsky and Misia Sert, costumed almost as caricatures of themselves (Misia, for example, very buxom, glittering with jewels and with a feather almost as tall as her sprouting from her headband; Igor, bald, bespectacled and fussy).

  During Petrushka’s solo a young blonde girl (Romola) in street clothes drags a wicker costume basket from backstage closer to where Petrushka is dancing. At first she sits on it smoking and swinging her legs, occasionally examining her nails and making eyes at backstage Nijinsky, who appears not to notice. Sometimes she jumps down and rummages through the basket, holding costumes up to herself; or smiles and waves over-animatedly to one of the other people backstage; increasingly she stares at Petrushka and then the Faun, her chin propped on her hand.

  Midway through the Faun’s piece, he notices that Diaghilev, Bakst, Fokine and backstage Nijinsky are arguing backstage. He comes backstage and dances around them, as if trying to distract them, but they do not notice him and he comes to centre-stage to finish his piece. Romola jumps up and watches him from uncomfortably close range, amazed by his performance; the others, storming off after their argument, have not seen it.

  Backstage Nijinsky sits alone in a corner at the front left of the stage, his head in his hands, while the Tennis Player from Jeux comes out and dances with Romola and Diaghilev centre-stage (an echo of Wayne Eagling’s recent version of Jeux for the English National Ballet). The curtain falls as Romola triumphantly whirls into the wings with the Tennis Player.

  ACT THREE

  New York. A studio.

  Nijinsky is rehearsing a group of dancers for Till Eulenspiegel. As he finishes demonstrating his final solo, Diaghilev, Bakst and Stravinsky walk in and begin moving the other dancers around, instructing the pianist how to play, discussing the set among themselves. Every time Nijinsky tries to contribute they wave him away like an annoying child; eventually he just continues practising alone on the side of the stage while the others carry on talking and gesticulating without him.

  Romola sweeps in, wearing a fur coat and showing off a sparkling ring. Diaghilev and his friends ignore her. She rushes up to Nijinsky and urges him to challenge Diaghilev for insulting her. They end up fighting over Nijinsky, who is trying to intervene. In a scene reminiscent of the final act of Petrushka, Diaghilev accidentally knocks Nijinsky down as he tries to hit Romola and then Romola drags Nijinsky’s limp, twitching body away.

  The stage empties and darkens. A metal bed is wheeled onto the stage, with a straitjacketed figure lying on it. As the figure rises, we see that it is Nijinsky. He struggles against his bonds and then falls back exhausted. Then, as if by magic, on his third effort he extracts himself from the constraints and comes to the front of the stage where he dances alone. At first his dancing is strange and fragmented, like the descriptions of the Montenegro or Suvretta House perfor
mances; then it becomes something else entirely. Like Petrushka’s or Till Eulenspiegel’s ghost, Nijinsky seems to be dancing as himself for the first time – perhaps something from Russell Maliphant’s AfterLight. The curtain falls.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Chosen One

  LONG BEFORE HE DIED, Nijinsky’s legend was being written. Even when she no longer needed, as she saw it, to promote her husband’s memory in order to raise funds for his care, the indomitable Romola ‘refused to accept that his name’ – and her importance as his wife – ‘might fade into oblivion’. Without her, it is almost possible to imagine that Nijinsky might live on today in nothing more than old press cuttings and photographs and in the memories of a handful of artists who danced with someone who once danced with him.

  Until she died in 1978, Romola controlled the myth she had in large part created. Richard Buckle, author of the only major English biography of Nijinsky, published in 1971, was scrupulously careful to satisfy her demands when his book came out, but after her death he issued an addendum saying that she had deliberately sensationalised and in places falsified her account of Nijinsky’s life to make money. ‘And who could blame her?’ he asked. ‘She had to look after her sick husband.’ Her daughter Tamara described her mother as imperious and self-assured, which was ‘both her strength and her weakness. Did she know when she crossed the borderline between fact and fiction?’

  This is the most generous interpretation of her actions. Others – like the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, whose 1991 account of Nijinsky’s life focused on his mental health – have portrayed her as a villainess. Reviewing Ostwald, Roy Porter described Romola as ‘truly awful … a hysterical egotist, greedy for fame but talentless’, who confined Vaslav to a series of uncaring asylums which she then blamed for his failure to recover and, when she was not looking after him – which was most of the time – swanned around the world living off his name and milking the role of martyr to art and love.