Nijinsky (18 page)

The strains of the last few months were obvious to their English friends when they arrived in London in late June 1912. Nijinsky was observed listening to Diaghilev's anecdotes with
‘ill-concealed impatience
' and others noticed how
‘very nervous
and highly-strung' he was, perpetually watched over by his ‘guardian and jailer'. One afternoon, after an argument, Diaghilev appeared alone at Lady Ripon's and
‘sat in the garden
with tears dripping down his face, and would not be comforted'.

Usually Diaghilev kept Vaslav away from parties that might upset his delicate temperament (or where he might meet women – so unsettling for poor Vatsa), but he did permit him a few freedoms and in London Vaslav had something of a social life, despite his English being even more limited than his French
*
and his complete lack of polish.
‘I do not know
how to be polite,' he would write later, ‘because I do not want to be.' He was
‘naively
– appallingly – honest', as Stravinsky put it, remembering playing a parlour game at Lady Ripon's in which everyone was compared to an animal. Diaghilev was a bulldog, Stravinsky a fox.

‘Now, Monsieur Nijinsky, what do you think I look like?'

‘
Vous, Madame – chameau
.' The answer was as unexpected as it was precise, even though his hostess was a celebrated beauty; one has to assume that he did not know how rude it was in French to call a woman a camel. ‘In spite of her repeating: “A camel? How amusing! I declare. Really. A camel?” – she was flustered all evening.'

Vaslav and Diaghilev would go down to stay for the weekend at Lady Ripon's house in the country and Vaslav actually became friends with Lady Ottoline Morrell, who courted him assiduously when her friends became his enthusiasts that summer. He came to tea with her – perhaps encouraged by his success with Lady Ripon, he was overheard by Diaghilev during one meeting comparing her to a giraffe – and thrilled her five-year-old daughter by dancing with her around the drawing room.
‘He was so different
from all the smart people at luncheon [at Lady Ripon's],' she wrote, ‘for he was such a pure artist, a drop of the essence of art, and quite impersonal.' He had an air of being lost, as if he were looking on normal life
‘from another world
', but she could see that he noticed everything.

Lady Ottoline's friend Lytton Strachey sent Nijinsky a huge basket of flowers in the hope of attracting his attention and John Maynard Keynes – resolutely homosexual at this point, but eventually the devoted husband of Lydia Lopokova – was another obsessed fan.
‘There were
at this time fantastic fables about him; that he was very debauched, that he had girdles of diamonds and emeralds given to him by an Indian prince,' wrote Lady Ottoline, ‘but on the contrary, I found that he disliked any possessions or anything that hampered him or diverted him from his art.'

It was in Lady Ottoline's garden in
Bedford Square
that the idea for Nijinsky's next ballet,
Jeux
, came to him. It was to be a contemporary ballet – actually a futuristic one, set in 1920, eight years away – depicting a game of tennis in a tree-filled garden at dusk, as moths danced in the arc-lights high above. There would be
‘no
corps de ballet
, no ensembles, no variations, no
pas de deux
, only boys and girls in flannels, and rhythmic motions,' Vaslav told an anxious Diaghilev as they dined later at the Savoy Grill, while Bakst frowned at the sketches Vaslav was making on the tablecloth to illustrate his idea.

Stylistically, it would be as radical as
Faune
. At this early stage, Nijinsky planned for his three dancers, regardless of gender, to dance in the same way, as uniformly as possible. For a short time during rehearsals he worked in pointe shoes, but then discarded them because they were wrong for the athletic mood he wanted to create. As he would write in his diary, years later,
‘A woman and a man
are the same thing': human. Again, the facial expressions would be blank, giving nothing away. Everything he wanted to say would be in the movement.

The
Figaro
journalist Hector Cahusac was present at a lunch in the Bois de Boulogne in the spring of 1912 when Diaghilev, Cocteau, Bakst, Reynaldo Hahn and Nijinsky were discussing the difficulty of finding subjects for ballets and the virtues and shortcomings of historical as opposed to contemporary scenarios. When the talk moved on to movement, the normally silent Nijinsky came alive.
‘The man that I see
foremost on the stage is a contemporary man. I imagine the costume, the plastic poses, the movement that would be representative of our time,' he said.
‘When today one sees a man stroll
, read a newspaper or dance the tango, one perceives that his gestures have nothing in common with those, for instance, of an idler under Louis XV, of a gentleman dancing the minuet, or of a thirteenth-century monk studiously reading a manuscript.'

‘Childish nonsense,' spat Bakst; but these were the ideas stimulating Nijinsky when he was creating
Jeux
. For the first time a ballet was to be about modern people going about their everyday life. In his
‘waltz with changing partners
', the three dancers would gossip, play tennis, show off, bicker, smoke, embrace – even briefly dance the turkey trot.

As with
Faune
, the mood was to be one of erotic anticipation, the theme desire – and Nijinsky's view of both, coloured by his life with Diaghilev, was ambivalent.
‘The Faun is me
, and
Jeux
is the kind of life Diaghilev dreamed of. Diaghilev wanted to have two boys. He often told me about this desire of his,' but Vaslav had always refused to go along with it. In
Jeux
he would play Diaghilev and the two boyish girls he flirted with would be the boys with whom Diaghilev dreamed of making love. He may also have been inspired by what he saw of the fluid love
lives of Lady Ottoline and her friends – the androgynous Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, and their relationships with their husbands and lovers; and Lady Ottoline's own idiosyncratic approach to romance. As choreographer and dance historian Millicent Hodson writes,
Jeux
was a Bloomsbury ballet in theme as well as setting. On his copy of the piano score, where the music comes to a climax and the three figures embrace, for an instant bound together in ecstasy, Vaslav wrote,
‘Sin
'.

Despite his persistent concerns about Nijinsky's experimentalism, Diaghilev wrote to Debussy describing the ballet and asking him to provide a score. After the scandal of
Faune
, Debussy needed some persuading: Diaghilev had to promise to double his fee to get him to do it. Although the music Debussy would produce was sumptuously beautiful, fresh and youthful, he was scathing about ‘
le terroriste
Nijinsky' and his ‘
nyanya
[nanny] S. de D.' when they visited him later in the summer to hear how he was progressing.

Diaghilev had no option but to support Nijinsky because he had burned his bridges with Fokine, who had waited only for the premiere of
Daphnis et Chloé
at the tail end of the Paris season to resign, telling Diaghilev that his company (and his relationship with Vaslav) was making the fine art of ballet into a
‘perverted degeneracy
'. More worryingly for Diaghilev, his invaluable
regisseur
Grigoriev had also handed in his notice. Now there was only Nijinsky, whose style was hardly commercial and who had no idea of how to produce, as Fokine could, sure-fire successes at short notice with limited rehearsal time. Harry Kessler and Lady Ripon – both fans of Nijinsky's, but aware too of his limitations – had tried to convince Diaghilev that there was space for Nijinsky and Fokine in the company, but he was unrepentant and rudely refused to consider making concessions to popular taste.
‘If we don't lay down the law
for them [the public], who will?' He did, however, pull out all the stops to persuade Grigoriev to stay.

The summer of 1912 saw Diaghilev and Nijinsky touring Europe, half working, half holidaying: Deauville, Bayreuth, Lugano, Stresa, Milan and, as ever, Venice. They returned to Paris briefly so that Nijinsky could sit for Rodin, who had so publicly admired him as the Faun. For some
reason the piece was never finished. Bronia said that Diaghilev, coming one day to collect Nijinsky from his sitting, discovered Nijinsky asleep on a sofa and Rodin asleep at his feet, and, jealous of this intimacy, refused to let Nijinsky return; in his diary Cocteau related a fruitier tale, in which Nijinsky heard strange noises as he posed with his back towards Rodin. Turning round he saw Rodin masturbating – a story Diaghilev found funny but Nijinsky hated hearing.
‘
Il ne supporte plus les désordes sexuels
': he could no longer stand such debauchery.

In Paris, presumably spending a bonus Diaghilev had given him for
Faune
, Nijinsky went on a shopping spree. Instead of buying dress clothes or
objets
, he ordered hundreds of pairs of dancing shoes, light braided kid sandals to practise in and practice shirts made to his own design from the softest crêpe de Chine in whites, creams, pale blues and greens, the same pastel colours in which the girls from the Ballet had their dancing dresses made. He also ordered himself a very thin watch from the watchmaker Benson, with which he was
‘happy and proud
as a child'. The gold watch awarded to him by the Tsar while he was at the Imperial Ballet School had long ago been pawned and this was its replacement, a present to himself upon reaching his artistic maturity.

Diaghilev and Nijinsky parted ways in the autumn of 1912, Diaghilev returning to Russia and Nijinsky going to Monte Carlo to begin work on
Jeux
. Bronia, who had married one of the dancers in the company, Alexander (Sasha) Kochetovsky, in London in July, was waiting there for him. She was delighted to find that for the first time since he had become involved with Diaghilev her brother was himself again, the Vatsa of their childhood: free from tension, expressing himself openly, his creativity flowing.

But the strains of Vaslav's life were increasingly intense. Diaghilev was always short of money – not because he was personally extravagant but because the needs of his company were so great – and so he was happy to commit to any engagement they were offered to bring in extra funds. Vaslav danced all the principal roles but also needed rest and stability in order to create new work. He found moving constantly, always among strangers and speaking unfamiliar languages, exhausting
– besides which Diaghilev disapproved of him making friends or learning new languages, even (according to Bronia) of spending time with his mother, as distractions from his work. Cocteau described them migrating
‘from hotel to hotel
, expelled by theatre closings' and Grigoriev remembered Vaslav fruitlessly demanding a more permanent home, if only for a few months. The Ballets Russes was a demanding mistress.
‘I gave my whole heart to it
,' Vaslav would write. ‘I worked like an ox. I lived like a martyr. I knew that Diaghilev had a hard life.'

All too soon they were on the road again, performing in Cologne in late October 1912 at the start of another European tour. Just before the curtain went up for their first performance, Vaslav and Bronia received a telegram from Eleonora informing them that their father had died. Vaslav had not seen or spoken to him for five years. Bronia was grief-stricken, but Vaslav appeared almost unmoved; the only person he was worried about was his mother, who had remained behind in Russia to plead (to no avail) with the government to release Vaslav from his military service. Until he was freed from this obligation, he would not be able to return home.

The company performed in Budapest again and once more a breathless Romola de Pulszky sat in the audience. Since seeing the Ballets Russes for the first time the previous year, she had broken off her engagement, abandoned her acting training and begun studying dance. This time she concentrated her energies on winning over Enrico Cecchetti.
‘I soon discovered
I could win his heart through flattery. I had a genuine admiration for him and a very real affection, but I had to use him in order to achieve my purpose – to become permanently attached to the ballet.' Through Cecchetti she watched not only every performance and every rehearsal, but also every class he gave. She managed to manouevre an introduction to Nijinsky, though after a brief misunderstanding – he thought at first that she was the Hungarian Opera's
prima ballerina
– he showed no interest in her.

Adolph Bolm advised Romola's mother to send her with them to Vienna to meet the Wiesenthal sisters, concert dancers who might take Romola on as a student. There she was able to observe Nijinsky more
closely, watching him listen to gypsy music one night
‘with an aloof, distant air
. His half-closed eyes gave an extraordinary, fascinating expression to his face.' To her indignation he refused to acknowledge Romola or show that he recognised her. ‘Occasionally I caught his eyes resting on me, but as soon as I looked at him he quickly turned his glance elsewhere.' Bolm told her that even the other dancers did not dare approach him. He was always guarded by Zuikov and only spoke to them about work. Romola realised that if she were to remain with the company she would have to keep her passion for Nijinsky a secret, especially from Diaghilev. Only Cecchetti guessed, whispering to her, ‘Beware, Nijinsky is like a sun that pours forth light but never warmth.'