Nijinsky (32 page)

Later he writes that he can do everything, be anyone:
‘I am an Egyptian
. I am an Indian. I am a Red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinese. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner and a stranger. I am a seabird'; and later,
‘I am a peasant
. I am a factory worker. I am a servant. I am a gentleman. I am an aristocrat. I am a tsar. I am an Emperor. I am God. I am God. I am Everything.' One must bear in mind, reading these lists, that he had played almost all these roles on stage. His professional life had been made up in large part by inhabiting skins other than his own, by observing people's actions, understanding what they revealed about their interior states, and using that in his work.

Diaghilev appears again and again in Vaslav's writing, viewed at times with bitterness, at times with respect, and at times with compassion. He describes their meeting and his feelings for him in searing detail; he blames him for the
‘terrible things
' he taught him sexually (‘Diaghilev taught me everything'), because now he fears lust and its power over him and does not want to feel it. He gave up meat because it made him lustful. ‘Lust is a terrible thing.' At the same time, he does
‘not want people to think
Diaghilev is a scoundrel and that he must be put in prison. I will weep if he is hurt. I do not like him, but he is a human being.'

Towards the end of the diary, Vaslav addresses to Diaghilev a long letter in verse, a strange and moving poem containing snatches of half-remembered conversations or arguments, a reference to Diaghilev's
well-known preference for communicating by telegram and telephone rather than by letter, and increasingly compulsive repetitions and word associations.

‘You do not want to live with me
.
I wish you well.
You are mine, you are mine.
I am yours, I am yours.
I love writing with a pen.
I write, I write.
You do not write. You tele-write.
You are a telegram, I am a letter … You are not my king, but I am your
king. You wish me harm, I do not wish harm. You are a spiteful man,
but I am a lullabyer. Rockabye, bye, bye, bye. Sleep in peace, rockabye,
bye.
Bye. Bye. Bye.
Man to man
Vaslav Nijinsky'

I find that ‘Man to man' heartbreakingly poignant: an insistence that,
au fond
, however Diaghilev may have treated him, they are equals – not adult and child, not patron and protégé, not powerful impresario and puppet-performer.

The other person who features prominently in the diary is Romola and, as with Diaghilev, Vaslav's responses to her are not straightforward. He respects her for engaging in battle with Diaghilev and he likes the fact that Diaghilev is scared of her intelligence. He bemoans the fact that she is not careful with his money, even though he has given her everything he had. He will not go to cocktail parties with her because he has
‘had enough of this
kind of jollity to last me a lifetime'. He knows they disagree:
‘You think I am stupid
, and I think you are a fool.' But despite her flinty materialism, her craving for things he considers unimportant, he feels compassion and affection for her; he loves her
‘more than anyone else
in the world'. Beneath it all, the deep connection between
them endures.
‘I do not like
the intelligent Romola. I want her to leave you. I want you to be mine.'

Although the diary's erratic style makes it appear unreliable, I trust much of what Vaslav is saying in it. He might have been hallucinating (those dreadful trails of blood in the snow), but he was not fantasising (I believe him when he says Romola's sister flitted around in front of him in her underwear). If cubism was a way of trying to express a three-dimensional experience of the world in two dimensions, then what Nijinsky is doing in his diary is expressing the quicksilver multiplicity of emotions people simultaneously contain about events, past and future, and about one another – fragmentary, shifting, hard to pin down, very often contradictory – but no less authentic for that. We are
‘splinters and mosaics
', wrote Virginia Woolf; ‘not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes'.

He can be startlingly observant. Stravinsky seeks fame and riches; he
‘loves me in his heart
because he feels, but he considers me his enemy because I am in his way'. Diaghilev smokes to appear impressive.
‘He is a tidy man
and likes museums. I consider museums to be graveyards.' Emilia gives presents to Vaslav and Kyra:
‘She thinks that love
is expressed in presents. I believe that presents are not love.' Romola
‘wants money because
she is afraid of life' (a very Tolstoyan phrase). He is even able to shine this spotlight on himself:
‘I am an unthinking
philosopher.'

Another striking aspect of the diary is how it illuminates the way he thought and worked. Like Woolf, another modernist artist whose fractured mental state granted her extraordinary insights, the
‘whirring of wings
in the brain' she described may have stimulated Nijinsky's creativity in indefinable ways.
‘The quality of abstraction
that made his acting so remarkable may have been rooted in the same traits of mind as his communication problems,' writes Acocella. Similarly, his willingness to experiment, the radical way he viewed and analysed movement, ‘may have been connected to some neurological idiosyncrasy … Why should he worry about being understood? He was seldom understood.'

Taking risks, being obsessive and self-obsessed, being drawn to new
and extreme experiences – these were traits people had been remarking about him for years.
‘Later, too, I came to understand
the absences [in Vaslav's personality] as a kind of stigmata,' wrote Stravinsky. The tragedy was that Vaslav's spiritual insights and soaring creativity came in parallel with a paralysing inability to cope with the everyday world. Inarticulate and shy in normal life, achingly conscious of his inexperience, repeatedly told by people he admired that he was their intellectual inferior, he knew
‘he had no reason
to credit himself with unusual spiritual maturity'.

Many of the diary's characteristics are qualities of early modernist art. Repetition, elision and odd juxtapositions are hallmarks of visual artists like Picasso, of writers like Joyce and Eliot, who created stream-of-consciousness narratives akin to Nijinsky's. He revels in complex rhymes and puns like a rapper or a scat singer, moving between Russian, Polish and French, for example linking Massine with
singe
and associating the fabulously rich Misia Sert repeatedly with gold and silver. The insistently rhythmic quality of much of his writing may be
‘a verbal expression
of his experience as a dancer'. Vaslav's preoccupation with the visceral was also part of being a professional athlete: the minute details of what he ate and excreted or ejaculated, when he slept and how his body felt were all vitally important to his work.

Throughout he struggles to express and understand what is happening to him.
‘I am standing
in front of a precipice into which I may fall,' he writes. ‘He knows,' comments Acocella, ‘that something extraordinary is going on in his brain, but he does not know if this means that he is God or that he is a madman, abandoned by God.' Repeatedly he refers to artists who, like him, suffered from mental illness: Gogol, Maupassant, Nietzsche.
‘I feel so much pain
in my soul that I am afraid for myself. I feel pain. My soul is sick. My sickness is of the soul and not of the mind.' In Russia the insane are called ‘soul-sick', FitzLyon notes.
‘I have been told
that I am mad. I thought that I was alive,' he writes, six pages later. ‘I am Nijinsky. I want to tell you, humans, that I am God. I am the God who dies when he is not loved.'

There is an electric connection between the God with whom Vaslav
identifies himself and the
dieu de la danse
he had been acclaimed as by audiences ever since his professional debut ten years earlier. The sense of the dancer-artist as a semi-divine figure, capable of attaining what Erik Bruhn called
‘something
total
– a sense of total being', has been beautifully expressed by Rudolf Nureyev, and I imagine that something like this is also what Nijinsky felt when he performed. ‘There have been certain moments on the stage – four or five times – when I have suddenly felt a feeling of “I am!” A moment that feels as though it's forever. An indescribable feeling of being everywhere and nowhere.' This zen-like transcendence, a route into what Colin Wilson describes as
‘more abundant life
', was something to which Nijinsky was exquisitely attuned but could not translate into his day-to-day experience. He could not communicate it to Romola; even he could not always grasp it. It was no wonder people had always thought of him as inhabiting a different plane. Perhaps only Diaghilev had understood, in part at any rate.

And without being a performer – a future he was forced to contemplate without Diaghilev in his life – without being loved by his audience, which in many ways Diaghilev had come to represent, what would Nijinsky be? Repeatedly he refers to living as working and death as not-working, conflating the meanings of the words. For him
‘the working life
was the only real life': human relations were fraught with pitfalls, ‘probably pointless, possibly dangerous, and in the end entirely destructive'. When he describes the first time he made love to Diaghilev, he writes that he needed to live – to
work
– and was therefore willing to make any sacrifice. Now that there was no sacrifice he could make, he could feel his art slipping away from him.
‘I want to dance
because I feel,' he wrote, immediately after the Suvretta House performance, ‘and not because people are waiting for me.'

Yet another layer of the diary is the events being played out as Vaslav writes. All around him the noises of their domestic life intrude on his frenzied attempts to write out his soul: Romola calls for him to answer a ringing telephone; Kyra sings outside his room; he can hear Oskar Padany carefully enunciating his name to someone in Zurich on the other end of the telephone or the maid answering the telephone
‘with tears in her voice';
Romola talking to the servants in another part of the house, or crying and being comforted by Frenkel.
‘Before us we have
the man, and, in the background, the muffled sounds of his fate being decided.'

The night of the Suvretta House performance they are in their bedroom when the telephone rings and he won't answer it. Romola is in her pyjamas.
‘I am afraid of people
because they want me to lead the same kind of life as they do. They want me to dance jolly and cheerful things. I do not like jollity. I love life. My wife sleeps next to me, and I am writing. My wife is not asleep, because her eyes are open. I stroked her. She feels things well. I am writing badly because I find it difficult. My wife is sighing … She asked me what I was writing. I closed the notebook in her face because she wants to read what I am writing. She feels that I am writing about her, but she does not understand. She is afraid for me and therefore does not want me to write.'

At the end of the first notebook he can hear Romola speaking in another room.
‘I do not know
what they are telephoning about now. I think they want to put me in prison. I am weeping because I love life … My little girl is singing: Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! I do not understand the meaning of this, but I feel its meaning. She wants to say that everything Ah! Ah! is not horror but joy.'

The narrative comes to a desperate crescendo as Vaslav prepares for a journey to Zurich, half-understanding that he will be hospitalised there. Romola tells him to say good-bye to Kyra because he won't be coming back and then, weeping, tells him they will never leave him.
‘Come on out!
' he writes in despair, a last gasp of defiance as the waters close over his head. ‘Come on out and fight with me. I will defeat everyone. I am not afraid of bullets and prison. I am afraid of spiritual death. I will not go insane, but I will weep and weep.'

In March 1919 they went to the state asylum in Zurich, with its iron-barred windows, to consult Dr Bleuler. Vaslav seemed to accept Romola's story that they were visiting him to discuss whether she could have another child. Romola waited while Vaslav went obediently into his study. Then Bleuler invited her in while Vaslav waited outside, and
he told her that her husband was incurably insane. She raced out to the ante-room where Vaslav stood flipping absently through the magazines, his face pale and sad. He said,
‘
Femmka
, you are bringing
me my death-warrant.'

Diaghilev had managed to hold the Ballets Russes together all through the war, taking them on ramshackle tours of provincial Spain, even accepting a season for them at a London music hall. His efforts just staved off extinction: he and his dancers lived in hotel rooms for which they could not pay, ate as little as possible and dipped into the wicker costume baskets when their own clothes wore out. When Lydia Sokolova's little girl was ill Diaghilev found an old purse full of foreign coins, tipped it out on the bed and gave her his last silver and coppers to pay the doctor.

Following their long stay in Spain, Massine worked with a flamenco dancer called Félix Fernández García (his day job was as a printer) on a flamenco ballet,
Le Tricorne
, which premiered in London in 1919. Before its first night Fernández García was found naked on the altar of the church of St Martin in the Fields, having forced his way in through a locked door after being heard lamenting that the Lord was reduced to living in a brothel. He was taken to an asylum where he lived until his death in 1941. He was the Ballets Russes's second casualty in six months. Years later, weighed down by the fates of Vaslav and Fernández García, Diaghilev would tell Ottoline Morrell sadly that his company had left
‘a trail of madness
behind it'.
*