Nijinsky (23 page)

She was delighted to find herself on the same train as Vaslav – she always instructed her maid Anna to find out when he and Diaghilev were travelling, but this was the first time Anna's information had been accurate – and, hanging out smoking (at this time a very racy activity for a woman, especially an unmarried woman) in the corridor near his compartment, was overjoyed when he asked her in his broken French if she was looking forward to being in London. It was their first conversation. On the sea crossing to Dover they spoke again and Romola triumphantly told Anna, who took a dim view of her crush on Nijinsky, that flirting was a great cure for sea-sickness.

In London she tried as much as she could to be where Nijinsky and Diaghilev were, badgering her English relations to take her to dine at the Savoy, where they were staying. Nijinsky
‘seemed now almost
to take it for granted that I was here, there, and everywhere he appeared in public. He must have wondered how I managed it. I was really glad now that I had spent so much on my clothes in Paris,' Romola wrote. ‘As I always went with some friends, it must have seemed natural to Diaghilev that I was present. He realised that I moved in the same society as he himself.' Nijinsky was unfazed by this pursuit; indeed, sometimes when he looked at her she noticed the shadow of a smile on his face.

One morning Nijinsky and Karsavina arrived early for their class with Cecchetti, before Romola's class had been dismissed. She took a long time to change so that she could watch them. Every day Cecchetti began with a little speech: ‘Tamara Platonova, Vaslav Fomich. You may be celebrated, great artists, but here in my class you are my pupils. Please forget here all your crazy modern movements, all that Fokine, Nijinsky nonsense. Please,
ras, dva, tri, chetyre …
' They obeyed without question, helping sprinkle water on the floor, executing whatever he asked of them with the precision of clocks, listening to his criticism of
the performances of the night before and his inexhaustible complaints about the terrible modern music they had to dance to. A few days earlier, for his birthday, Nijinsky had given Cecchetti a cane with a heavy gold top; Romola said she and the girls in her class wished there was less gold in it, because Cecchetti rapped them with it when they made mistakes.

The Opera House in Covent Garden was full every night for their season and again London surrendered for two weeks to the Ballets Russes's spell. Muriel Draper and her husband went to the first night of
Sacre
with the pianist Artur Rubinstein and marvelled at the sound Monteux extracted from the orchestra,
‘a sound
that is still sinking down through me with every blood-beat'. Nijinsky's geometrical, ‘beyond-human' choreography, thought Draper, intensified the music's power. When the curtain fell, ‘the house broke loose'. As they filed off to find their drinks at the bar, the audience was stunned, shaken, paralysed.

‘You call that art, do you?'

‘You call it
music
?'

‘My God!'

Rubinstein saw it differently. He found the audience merely polite (this was also Monteux's view, though the fact that the English applauded wearing kid gloves made even enthusiasm sound no more than polite) and he left the theatre
‘defeated and
unhappy' on account of the difficulty of the music and the incomprehensibility of the action on stage. ‘It took me weeks of study to understand the greatness of this work.'

Despite her loyalty to Vaslav, Lady Ottoline Morrell thought
Sacre
‘really
terrible
and intense
. Too much of Idea in it to please the public. Too little grace.' Lytton Strachey, on the other hand (who had ordered a new suit for his first meeting with Nijinsky, deep purple, with an orange stock, and who had found him
‘much more attractive
than I'd expected' despite their lack of a common language) loathed it. He had not imagined, he told a friend,
‘that boredom and sheer anguish
could have been combined together at such a pitch'.

While the French critics had wittily dismissed
Sacre
as the
massacre
du printemps
, the English were more measured. One journalist acknowledged that while many felt
Sacre
ridiculed the ideals of beauty, perhaps
‘in a few years
we shall have learned that there are other things in music and ballet than sweetness and sensuous beauty, just as there are other things in painting than domestic subjects'.

This was the way Nijinsky saw his work. In an interview published in the
Daily Mail
the day after
Sacre
's premiere, he protested against forever being associated with
Armide
,
Spectre
and
Sylphides
.
‘The fact is
, I detest “nightingale and rose” poetry; my own inclinations are “primitive”,' he told the interviewer. ‘I eat my meat without
sauce Béarnaise
.' In painting and sculpture, once-great traditions became banal through repetition, familiarity and the inevitable debasement of being copied by inferior artists, he observed. ‘Then there has always come a revolt. Perhaps something like this has happened in dancing.'

Meanwhile the shock of the new, the first experience of seeing and hearing
Sacre
, was easing and Nijinsky and Stravinsky's peers were beginning to form their judgement on the piece. Once Debussy had had time to digest its extraordinary wildness, he was less afraid, telling composer André Caplet dismissively that it was
‘primitive music with
all modern conveniences'. The influential editor Louis Laloy, who had been blown away by hearing Stravinsky and Debussy play the four-hand piano version of
Sacre
, described the score as being something people would not be ready for until 1940 and the dancing as epileptic and absurd. (In his diary Vaslav would write,
‘An artist sacrifices
his whole life for art. The critic inveighs against him because he does not like his picture.')

But Cocteau felt
‘uprooted
' by it: ‘Beauty speaks to the guts. Genius cannot be analysed any better than electricity … One has it, or one does not … The Russian troupe has taught me that one must burn oneself up alive in order to be reborn.' The painter Sigismond Jeanès wrote to tell Stravinsky that
Sacre
had been
‘one of the great
emotional experiences of my life'.

Even though they had performed in front of full houses in Paris and London – the box office had taken 38,000 francs on the night of
Sacre
's
premiere – Diaghilev was still heavily in debt and Astruc was bankrupt. His beautiful new theatre would be closed down three months later. The contract he had signed, promising Diaghilev 25,000 francs a performance had been his
‘death warrant
… But I do not regret my madness.'

Stravinsky had developed typhoid after
Sacre
's Paris opening and he had remained there to convalesce while the others went to London. He and Diaghilev were arguing by telegram about cuts Diaghilev wanted to make to the score in an attempt to make it more palatable to audiences. Diaghilev told Misia Sert that Stravinsky was ungrateful, that their success had gone to his head.
‘Where would he be
without us, without Bakst and myself?' Relations between them were so strained that Sert had to intervene. She wrote to Stravinsky telling him of Diaghilev's troubles: Bakst, who thought
Sacre
dreadful, was about to quit because he thought Diaghilev should drop it from the programme; lawsuits over Diaghilev's debts loomed; and the rebellious orchestra did not even want to play
Sacre
. Worst of all was Nijinsky,
‘intolerable and
mal elevé
… [speaking] to Serge as if he were a dog'.

Occasionally Vaslav managed to give the ever-present Zuikov the slip. It was probably around this time that a curious incident occurred, recounted many years afterwards by the porter at the
Friends of St Stephen's
, a poorhouse on the Fulham Road. He remembered a young man being brought in late at night, unconscious. The man was given a bed in which to sleep off his excesses – nothing unusual in that – but when he awoke the following morning he astonished everyone by doing the splits over his own bed and then leaping over each of the twenty beds on either side of the ward. He spoke no English but somehow he must have managed to get out word of where he was, for a little while later Diaghilev appeared with some other people in a couple of cabs, thanked everyone profusely for looking after his young friend, tipped them lavishly in gold sovereigns, and bore him off.

During the summer of 1913, while he remained alone in Paris, Stravinsky continued to declare himself delighted with
Sacre
and its choreography. A few days after the premiere he gave an interview in which he called Nijinsky
‘capable of giving life
to the whole art of ballet.
Not for a moment have we ceased to think upon the same lines.' On 20 June he wrote to his friend Max Steinberg (Rimsky-Korsakov's son-in-law), calling Nijinsky's work superb:
‘I am confident
in what we have done'. Two weeks later, nearly recovered and about to leave Paris for the summer, he wrote again.
‘Nijinsky's choreography is
incomparable and, with a few exceptions, everything was as I wanted it. But we must wait a long time before the public becomes accustomed to our language.'

Diaghilev, though, was quick to dissociate himself from
Sacre
, which had not been as successful with the public as he had needed it to be. At the end of July he summoned Bronia to the Savoy to discuss her brother – since he had become impossible to deal with directly.
‘I had to tell Nijinsky
that his ballet
Jeux
was a complete failure, and since it has not had any success it will not be performed any more. The same also applies to
Sacre
. All the friends of the Ballets Russes – from Paris, or London, or St Petersburg – all agree that
Sacre
is not a ballet and it would be a mistake to follow this path of Nijinsky's. They say I am destroying my ballet company!'

Bronia tried to explain to Diaghilev how devoted Vaslav was to his art, and how well it had been received by the people they respected, but Diaghilev was unmovable: in other genres, like painting or literature, immediate commercial success was immaterial, but a ballet had to be loved by the public from the start to have any life at all. The theatres that wanted to present the Ballets Russes's programme did not want to sponsor Nijinsky's researches into the future of dance. Sir Thomas Beecham had already made Diaghilev promise that Fokine would create two new ballets if they were to play the Opera House in 1914, one of which would be Strauss's
La Légende de Joseph
– on which Nijinsky was already working. Baron de Günzburg, on whose financial support Diaghilev depended, had also made Fokine's return a condition of his continued investment in the company.

Nijinsky received the message with such fury that Bronia understood why Diaghilev had preferred to let her break the news to him.
‘Let Diaghilev give it
[
Joseph
] to whomever he wishes … I do not care … But it does matter to me that Diaghilev has become a servile follower,
a theatrical lackey, and is destroying everything that is the heart of the Ballets Russes.'

When Bronia went back to see Diaghilev again, he urged her to sign her 1914 contract as soon as possible, obviously anticipating that a break with her brother would shake her commitment to him. He was honest with her when she asked him about the latest rumour flying around the company: that Fokine's price for returning to the Ballets Russes was dancing the lead roles – Nijinsky's roles – in all his ballets.

‘It's a possibility
.'

‘But Nijinsky would have more to dance in the Imperial Theatres.'

‘Well, something has to be arranged. Nijinsky cannot return to Russia. Perhaps he should simply leave the Ballets Russes and not dance for a year.'

If he would not accept his conditions, Diaghilev told Bronia,
‘I shall have to part
with Nijinsky'. This was when Bronia realised that their friendship was over, though despite all their differences she knew that her brother still saw himself very much as one of Diaghilev's artists.

Underlying the arguments about the creative direction of the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky's role within it was a longstanding and bitter debate over money. Vaslav had never received a regular salary and had never signed a contract. But as he became more important to the company he demanded to be paid like everyone else – if only as a mark of his independence. According to Bronia, he wanted several years' back salary, amounting to 200,000 francs per year for 1911, 1912 and 1913, minus expenses (four times what the opera superstar Fyodor Chaliapin had been paid for the month-long season of 1909). But Diaghilev, deeply in debt, didn't have the money – even if he had thought he owed it. After all, the old agreement had been that Diaghilev would look after Vaslav while Nijinsky danced. Both of them felt resentful and aggrieved.

When the London season ended in early August, the company was due to sail to South America for their first non-European tour, but although he had booked a stateroom Diaghilev had decided not to go with them; Günzburg would go in his place. He hated sea travel (whenever they went on a boat he made Zuikov pray for them both while he
lay sick and groaning on his bunk, which was why Nijinsky had been free to flirt with Romola between Calais and Dover a few weeks earlier) and believed what a fortune-teller had once told him, that he would die on water. Instead he would have a holiday in Venice, pull himself together and plan for the future.

For the first time in his adult life, Vaslav was going to do something on his own. Before he left, Bronia, whose baby was expected in October and who was therefore remaining behind, urged Vaslav to remember that he was an artist and above such spats with Diaghilev. Instead, she said, he should look on the journey as a holiday: relax, enjoy himself, not work too hard and try to make friends.