Nijinsky (15 page)

For all the acclaim Stravinsky's score and Benois's set received, Nijinsky was
Petrushka
's undisputed star. Somehow he had managed to create the illusion that he was a puppet aping a human being, while even Karsavina and Alexandre Orlov, as the Moor, could do no more than appear as humans pretending to be puppets.

His clown-like clothes were worn and shabby and his face was ashen, the paint that gave him an expression chipped away. ‘
Of the once bright-red cheeks
only a faded trace remains … the eyebrows look as though they were hurriedly pencilled in, one eyebrow flies up across the forehead; there are no eyelashes on his blank face.' ‘
A friend
pointed out that the only role in which one recognises Nijinsky's civilian face is that of Petrushka, where he is most heavily made up,' observed the American dance critic Edwin Denby. ‘He is never showing you himself … He disappears completely, and instead there is an imaginary being in his place. Like a classic artist, he remains detached, unseen, unmoved, disinterested. Looking at him, one is in an imaginary world, entire and very clear.'

While
L'Oiseau de feu
was composed as a self-conscious attempt to bring a Russian subject to French audiences,
Petrushka
was a more sincere artistic creation. Stravinsky had meditated ‘
an entire poem
in the form of choreographic scenes … of the mysterious double life of Petrushka, his birth, his death, his double existence – which is the key to the enigma, a key not possessed by the one who believes that he has given him life, the Magician.'

Though there were political connotations too – Nijinsky was said to have ‘
amplified the crazy doll
into the spirit of the Russian people,
oppressed by autocracy, but resurgent and unconquerable after all its abuse and frustration' – this was the key to the extraordinary resonance of the piece. It is impossible to know whether Stravinsky, the primary author of the ballet, recognised the way his story mirrored the relationship between Diaghilev and Nijinsky, but observers spotted it at once. Cyril Beaumont was amazed at how Vaslav ‘
seemed to have
probed the very soul of the character with astonishing intuition. Did he, in one of his dark moods of introspection, feel conscious of a strange parallel between Petrushka and himself, and the Showman and Diaghilev?'

And even though Nijinsky, in the months before Fokine arrived to stage the ballet, had plenty of time to develop his own ideas about how to play Petrushka, one of the remarkable things about Fokine's choreography is how insightful it was. Again and again he took a stock character and made it into something vitally evocative,
distilling something
of a dancer's essence in the roles he created for them. He did it for Pavlova with the Dying Swan, and he did it for Nijinsky with Petrushka, turning a wooden puppet into an existential hero, oppressed by his fate, scrabbling for a vestige of dignity, meditating on the precariousness of freedom and the tragedy of its loss.

Lydia Lopokova agreed. Petrushka had become, she wrote, the symbol of Nijinsky's ‘
personality, the imprisoned genius
in the docile body of the puppet struggling to become human and falling back again'. He was, Richard Buckle quipped, ‘
a Hamlet
among puppets'.

If, as Valery Bryusov had proposed in an essay in 1902 in the
World of Art
magazine, the sole task of the theatre was ‘
to help the actor
reveal his soul to the audience', then it had triumphantly succeeded with
Petrushka
. Nijinsky was acclaimed not just as a great dancer, but as a great actor. On seeing his Petrushka, Sarah Bernhardt declared she had ‘
seen the finest actor
in the world'. Stravinsky said that as Petrushka Nijinsky was perfection, ‘
the most
exciting human being I have ever seen on a stage': ‘his beautiful, but certainly not handsome, face, could become the most powerful actor's mask I have ever seen'. He was haunted by Nijinsky's final, futile gesture, asking the critic Nigel Gosling years later which was the real Petrushka, the puppet or his ghost.

Nijinsky was under no illusions about who Petrushka represented and how closely they were linked. He gave a friend photographs of himself in everyday clothes and in costume as Petrushka, to have side by side, describing Petrushka as ‘
the mythical outcast
in whom is concentrated the pathos and suffering of life, one who beats his hands against the walls, but is always cheated and despised and left outside alone'. Years later he would repeatedly refer to himself in his diary as a ‘clown of god'.

In June 1911, Diaghilev took his company to London for the first time, performing at the Opera House in Covent Garden under the aegis of Sir Thomas Beecham. Accustomed to the grandeur of Paris and St Petersburg, they were amazed to find the theatre ‘
in the midst
of a vegetable market … hemmed in by greengrocers' warehouses and vast mountains of cabbages, potatoes [and] carrots'.

Like the French, the English had long given up on ballet. Just five years earlier, in
A History of Dancing
, Sir Reginald St-Johnston had proclaimed that ‘ballet is now a thing of the past, and … never likely to be resuscitated'. But London society was as overwhelmed by their first glimpse of the Russian ballet as Paris had been. ‘
People thought and talked
of nothing but ballet'; wide-eyed duchesses left the theatre ‘
with their diamond tiaras
all awry';
society girls
dreamed of dancing in the
corps de ballet
. A critic timed the applause at their last performance: the cheering, clapping and handerchief-waving went on for twenty minutes. After seeing
L'Oiseau de feu
, Osbert Sitwell knew he had found the thing that would give his life meaning. ‘
Now I knew
where I stood. I would be, for so long as I lived, on the side of the arts.'

Here, too, Diaghilev was surrounded by friends and sponsors. After Sir Thomas's mistress, society hostess Lady Cunard, known as Emerald (who had her house in Cavendish Square redecorated in the Bakst style with huge Chinese incense-burners hanging on the wall, a lapis lazuli dining table and arsenic green lace curtains at the windows), the most important of these was Lady Ripon, patron of Nellie Melba and friend of Oscar Wilde. She had arranged for the Ballets Russes to appear as part of
a Coronation programme to mark George V's ascent to the throne. Tall, elegant – she smoked cigarettes through a long amber holder – excitable and extremely kind-hearted, she was bored by politics and shooting but devoted to the arts, and to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in particular, perhaps because of her Russian grandfather.

Another friend was Muriel Draper, a young American with an English husband whose bohemian household in Edith Grove was always full of artists, writers, actors and musicians including Henry James, John Singer Sargent (who made drawings of Nijinsky and Karsavina), Artur Rubinstein and Gertrude Stein. The modern, Bakst-inspired styles Draper wore, with turbans or a jewel dangling on her forehead, suited her slender pallor. Once she asked Diaghilev how he achieved his magic on stage. ‘
Je ne sais pas
, je ne sais pas, ma chère Muriel. Je ne sais pas. Un toooout petit peu de la connaissance peut-être, et beaucoup de l'amour … Je ne sais pas.
'

Nijinsky accompanied Diaghilev to the Drapers' where ‘
he ate and drank
with incurious stolidity, moved unnoticeably from room to room, smiled without meaning, and spoke rarely. So he maintained and nourished the living automaton that belonged to him, in order to use it for living during the segment of eternity vouchsafed him on the stage. There he remains alive forever.'

Barely two years into their relationship, and despite their shared professional triumphs and plans for the future, as well as Vaslav's total dependency on Diaghilev for all the practicalities of his life, their incompatibility in private was becoming unignorable. Diaghilev was not content merely with running Nijinsky's career: he wanted to control his entire world. Lifar described him being at once the most rewarding, but also the most exacting, of friends. ‘
Always he demanded
the whole of a person, and in return would shower back everything it was in his power to give,
everything
. But on one condition, and one condition only, that all should come from him, be given by him or through him.' Later he would think nothing of sacking dancers who flirted with Lifar and Léonide Massine and everyone in the company knew that his valet Zuikov, who acted as Vaslav's dresser, was also Diaghilev's spy, posted to watch over every movement Vaslav made.

So devoted was he to his art that Vaslav seems barely to have noticed that Diaghilev kept him in ‘
the most rigorous seclusion
', but the relentless pampering and surveillance made him both spoilt and rebellious. Count Harry Kessler, who met Diaghilev and Nijinsky in the summer of 1911 to discuss Nijinsky posing for a sculptural monument to Nietzsche, was fascinated to see how slowly Vaslav made his way along the hotel's breakfast buffet, pausing before each item to ask Diaghilev in detail if he thought he, Vaslav, would like it or not.

Jean Cocteau witnessed a scene in the wings in which Vaslav, dressed in the gold harem pants of Zobéïde's Favourite Slave, was refusing
to go
on stage unless Diaghilev promised ‘to go to the hockshop tomorrow and get my Kodak'. ‘Certainly not,' Diaghilev replied, but Cocteau said he knew Nijinsky meant it and knew Diaghilev would give in. Stravinsky, too, began to find Vaslav ‘
childishly spoiled
and impulsive' and Bronia thought Diaghilev was deliberately encouraging her brother's vanity ‘
on the pretext
that it will make him work harder and develop his talent'.

Sexually they were already living separate lives, sleeping in separate rooms – rooms to which, when they were in London, Diaghilev invited at least one young male visitor whom Kessler observed him addressing as ‘
mon petit
'. When he visited St Petersburg briefly in the autumn of 1911, Diaghilev accompanied Kuzmin on the usual boy-chasing tour around the bath-houses, but his mood struck his friend as restless.

Vaslav meanwhile had spent his time offstage in Paris trying to elude the faithful Zuikov. Diaghilev ‘
thought I went out
for walks, but I was chasing tarts [
cocottes
]', sometimes several times a day. After his bout of gonorrhoea in St Petersburg in early 1908 he was wary of disease, but because the police monitored the prostitutes in Paris he thought he was safe. Still, ‘I knew that what I was doing was horrible'. Once, near the Galleries Lafayette with a girl, he noticed a man in a cab with his two children staring at him, and was certain he had been recognised. ‘
I received a moral blow
, for I turned away and blushed deeply. But I continued to chase tarts.'

He did not despise these women. On the contrary, he admired them for their beauty and simplicity and spoke of women in general – even
his use in the diary of the word
cocotte
is as un-derogatory as slang for prostitutes gets – with the greatest respect. He simply had no other way of getting close to them, guarded as he was by Zuikov, shy, immature and impractical. Probably in a way these encounters were as intimate as he had ever been with other people; he even described making love to one woman during her period. But the power of his sexual urges terrified him: ‘A man in the grip of lust is like a beast.'

As early as 1910 Diaghilev had known things weren't right. One evening he appeared in Karsavina's dressing room to apologise – most unusually – for allowing another dancer to play her role in
Les Sylphides
, a mournful monochrome spectre in her mirror.

‘
You have slapped
one cheek. Here is the other.' Then he added sadly, ‘Tata, I am desperately in love.'

‘Who with?'

‘She [sic] doesn't care for me any more than for the Emperor of China.'

NIJINSKY HAD STARTED
on
L'Après-midi d'un faune
with Bronia in St Petersburg in early 1911. They worked at home, after hours and without a pianist because no one – least of all the already disgruntled Fokine – could be allowed to know of Vaslav's plans.

As soon as Nijinsky resigned from the Mariinsky, Alexandre Benois had foreseen the future, worrying about the possibility that Fokine, jealous of his pre-eminence, might leave the Ballets Russes. When he voiced his concerns, Diaghilev replied,
‘That's not so great
a calamity. What is a ballet-master [choreographer]? I could make a ballet-master out of this ink-stand if I wanted to!' This, said Benois, was conviction, not bravado, on Diaghilev's part, but he thought it showed wilfulness and conceit. His own influence, he wrote (wrongly), ‘was still the decisive one' but because he had never believed Diaghilev really ‘
understood
the ballet' (Benois didn't tire of remembering that Diaghilev had taken longer than him to discover ballet), he did not trust him not to grasp how valuable Fokine was to what he still considered their project.

But Diaghilev had decided that Fokine was finished, and that anyway he had been the true source of whatever Fokine had been getting right. Although he later praised him to Serge Lifar for the extraordinary originality of his early works, the freshness, vividness and fire
of compositions like the Polovtsian Dances,
Le Pavillon d'Armide
,
Les Sylphides
and
Schéhérazade
, he also said that Fokine and Nijinsky, as choreographer and dancer, did no more than
‘carry out my artistic ideas'
(an odd boast, given than Fokine had created
Armide
and the early version of
Sylphides
at least, before he ever met Diaghilev). Both Benois and Bakst always thought they contributed more than Fokine to the ballets they created together. ‘
Oh, he was like the rest of them
, you know, he had no imagination,' said Bakst. ‘I had to show him what was wanted scene by scene. He just arranged the steps.' Besides, so the Diaghilev argument ran, though Fokine may have had genius he
lacked taste
. All that emotion, that poetry, that lyricism: it was, as Vaslav said dismissively to Bronia, too
‘sweetly sentimental'
.