The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘After the Ball Was Over’, by Joan Acocella

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella. The next essay is called ‘After the Ball Was Over’, about legendary Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Vaslav Nijinsky was born in the late 19th century and was recognized early at the ballet school in St. Petersburg as a wunderkind of dance. He was chosen by legendary choreographer and ballet master Serge Diaghilev to be the lead dancer in his company, the Ballets Russes. (See the fantastic documentary, The Ballets Russes for the story of this phenomenal and influential company.) Nijinsky was in his early 20s, but he quickly began creating his own work, three ballets that one can say without exaggeration changed the world: The Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, and The Rite of Spring. The Rite of Spring is, perhaps, the most famous, with its score by Stravinsky, because when it was first performed in Paris riots of outrage broke out, an event dear to ballet lovers and music lovers. The old forms were changing, breaking up. This was true in all of the arts at this extraordinary time. Writers were moving away from 19th century tradition, and incorporating Freudian elements in their work, experimenting, breaking apart the conventions. The same was true in architecture, fashion, music, not to mention the fact that a fledgling industry called the “motion picture industry” was starting to find its legs. I am not an expert in ballet, but I do know that it is a form that reveres its past, and reveres its tradition. You talk to any semi-illiterate ballet student and she’ll be able to rattle off information about Pavlova and Nijinsky. (I wish that this were true of young actors, but, alas, it is not. Young actors can be the most un-curious people on the planet, who think that movies began to be great with, oh, Inception or Pulp Fiction. You say “Mary Pickford” to them, and they blink at you uncomprehendingly. It’s a shame. You want to be good at your craft? Realize, first, that you are standing on the shoulders of giants. Have some perspective. You’ll be a better actor if you do.)

Nijinksy was not only the star of Ballet Russes, but he was Diaghilev’s lover. Nijinsky had a short period where he was famous and creative before everything went south. He and Diaghilev broke up, stormily. He married a woman named Romola, who sounds truly awful. He was fired from the Ballet Russes. He began to lose what it was that made him a genius (although that will be debated by those who think madness is a kind of genius). He went mad. Perhaps he had always been a little bit mad, but as long as he had the outlet of his career, and the protection of Diaghilev, his madness was not in a malevolent form. Who knows. These are things people still argue about when it comes to Nijinsky. He was hospitalized repeatedly. The treatment for madness was brutal. Romola would park him in a sanatorium and then travel the world, living it up, and keeping her husband’s name alive. She would lie to the press: “He’s doing much better, he’s getting ready for a comeback.” Meanwhile, he was so drugged up that he would fall asleep in his bowl of soup. He painted the walls of his room with his feces. He was given hundreds of shock treatments and insulin treatments, which probably caused irreversible brain damage. It’s devastating.

His diaries were published: The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. I consider them a must-read, although they are tough tough stuff. It is a never-ending rant about what it is like to be mad, what it is like to be inside his own skin, his hallucinations, his fantasies. He felt that he was God-like, he was incredibly paranoid, he felt persecuted (understandable), and in moments of lucidity mourned all that he had lost. He knew he was going crazy, he knew that his mind was not under his control, and the prose of his journal is a searing testament to that. It is one of the all-time great documents of insanity from the inside that has ever existed. But again: excruciating reading. You ache for this man.


Nijinsky and Romola, Vienna, 1945

Romola, in her tireless promotion of her mentally ill husband, published the diaries in a highly expurgated form, taking out all references to homosexuality, and editing his actual sentences, so that it seems as though Diaghilev had seduced him against his will, when obviously that was not the case. Whatever the reality may be, Nijinsky continues to be argued about, and at times it is difficult to separate the reality from the myth. People love their mad artists. Madness is still something that has a stigma attached to it, and people want to locate a defining event that “makes” someone go mad (when actually, Jeez, it may just be a biochemical abnormality, you ever think of that? There is still such resistance to that explanation). Nijinsky’s journey is part of the culture, and even those who are not ballet fans probably know a bit about him. That’s rare. There’s something about his story that touches on elemental truths, and primal anxieties and questions we have about the confluence of art, genius, and madness.

In Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical last play, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, one of the characters is a young dancer whose idol is Nijinsky (he is based on one of Williams’ earliest lovers, perhaps the great love of his life). The following exchange occurs in the play:

CLARE. [to Kip] I’m about to deliver a lecture to him on making concessions in art.

KIP. For or against?

CLARE. I think any kind of artist — a painter like Van Gogh, a dancer like Nijinsky –

AUGUST. Both of them went mad.

CLARE. But others didn’t, refused to make concessions to bad taste and yet managed survival without losing their minds. That’s purity. You’ve got to respect it or not.

This is obviously something Williams worried about, in terms of himself, in play after play after play. His sister Rose had gone mad and been lobotomized. How close had Williams come to going mad? Had his art saved him as it could not save his doomed sister?

Auden, in his great poem, “September 1, 1939”, writes:

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

The other thing that is fascinating about Nijinsky, and perhaps one of the keys to his enduring status as a legend, is that nobody alive has seen him dance, and there is no complete footage of him in action. So it’s like the great acting stars of the past, Gerrick, and Sarah Siddons, and Ellen Terry and all the rest. These were the biggest stars of their eras, and we only have the first-person accounts and the reviews of the plays they appeared in as evidence of their great and enduring power. We have to take their contemporaries’ word for it: these people were amazing. The words used to describe Nijinsky in action, by those who saw him dance, make one ache for a time machine. People, professional writers, professional dance critics, strive and struggle to find the words to describe his effect on audiences, and what it was he was actually doing. People talk about him being energy in the flesh, but also speak of him in a transcendent manner, that his persona onstage, and his ability as a dancer, touched the Gods. His influence is enduring. He is one of the greatest dancers of all time, and nobody has seen him dance. Additionally, with ballet: unless someone wrote down all the steps, the actual ballets are lost to us. This has been the case with Nijinsky. Attempts have been made to re-create his choreography, to varying degrees of success. Although he was classically trained, his ballets were pushing the form towards modernism. The silhouettes were different, primal, flat, angled. He moved away from the flow and grace of ballet’s tradition. This was one of the things that was seen as so outrageous with his ballet for The Rite of Spring (but, as Acocella points out in her essay: the furor that erupted around The Rite of Spring is often painted as a result of Stravinsky’s score – and that makes sense because the score still exists, we can listen to it, we can judge for ourselves. But the dance itself is lost. We only have eyewitness accounts as to what Nijinsky had created, and tiny bits of footage. But it was BOTH the music and the dance that helped explode the assumptions around ballet and music, and helped create a modernist style. It was that huge.)

Acocella’s amazing and in-depth essay is a review of Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap Into Madness, a biography of Nijinsky by Peter Ostwald, a professor of psychiatry. The madness aspect of Nijinsky’s story has been handled either clumsily or with too much reverence. He was mad because he was actually gay and couldn’t live that way. OR he was mad because he was actually straight and was abused and used by Diaghilev. He was mad because his art flung him so high into the atmosphere that his wax wings melted. He was mad because he sensed the entire thrust of the 20th century and how it would change, and he felt he was the agent of that change. And blah blah, etc. Reductive. Ostwald does not go that route, although he does give Nijinsky the props for being a genius at what he did. Ostwald travels to St. Petersburg and goes through hospital records from when Nijinsky was a kid, looking for clues, clues that the madness had always been there. He finds a lot. A lot of it had been suppressed by Romola. But many people just never asked the right questions when it came to Nijinsky, because of a base misunderstanding of what mental illness is and how it operates. The diagnosis for Nijinsky, when he was hospitalized, was schizophrenia. Ostwald examines the treatments he got, examines the effects that those treatments had, and appears to ache for how brutally Nijinsky was treated. “If only he had the advantage of modern medicine …” appears to be Ostwald’s view, something that Acocella finds “endearing”. She appreciates the fact that Ostwald treats Nijinsky with respect, but also understands that much of life is between the lines, and that nobody’s biography lines up neatly with a nice little theory. She appreciates the fact that he does not look for underlying motivation or causes – because that is the least interesting question to ask about Nijinsky. As Acocella writes:

Most psychobiography, in keeping with its Freudian origins, deals with the psychology of motivation: it attempts to unearth the traumas, the sexual strivings that are presumed to underlie and explain the achievements of the man or woman in question. But in Nijinsky’s case there is little to unearth. There is no “latent homosexuality”; it was overt. There are no sexual obsessions to uncover; they are there in the ballets. (And they are there, everywhere, in the diary – endless ruminations on lust, on masturbation, on fornication.) As for traumas, there are certainly enough of them on the surface of Nijinsky’s story. Never has s uch a quiet man led such a lurid life.

What we need to know about Nijinsky is not what was on his mind but how he transformed this material into art – how this tongue-tied introvert managed to become not only a great, eloquent, and (by all accounts) surpassingly glamorous dancer but also the first modernist choreographer in the history of ballet. In other words, we need a psychology of creativity. And that is exactly what most psychobiographers do not concern themselves with. Creativity – the thing that actually distinguishes their subjects from the rest of humankind and therefore needs explaining – is to them a given. They work backward from there, to libido and aggression, the things that in no way distinguish their subjects from the rest of humanity.

I want to cheer when I read that.

Here is an excerpt from Acocella’s essay.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘After the Ball Was Over’, by Joan Acocella

Of Nijinsky we have only one twelve-minute ballet, The Afternoon of a Faun. Still, it is a great ballet – a watershed – and, together with Nijinsky’s other, missing ballets, it influenced later choreographers, notably hi sister, Bronislava Nijinska, whose reputation has had a tremendous reflowering in the past decade, and who claimed that everything she did came out of his work.

Beyond the question of his place in ballet’s historical record, Nijinsky’s life commands our attention by the sheer romantic force of its events. What a story this is! An awkward young boy who practically overnight becomes a world-famous dancer, then creates three ballets that change dance history, then jilts the world’s foremost ballet impresario, switches sexual orientations, marries a groupie, and goes raving mad, not without leaving behind an account of his conversations with God and a thorough inventory of his sexual practices: no wonder Romola thought this should be made into a movie. (It was, after her death – Herbert Ross’ dreadful 1980 Nijinsky.)

Whatever Nijinsky was in reality, he is by now a legend, a major cultural fact, and not just because of his extraordinary story but because of the way that story ties in with certain critical issues in ballet. Ballet’s relationship to time – the fact that the repertory, unanchored by text, is always vanishing, just as the dance image on the stage is always vanishing – forms a large part of the vividness and poignance of the art. We are always losing it, like life, and therefore we re-create it, mythologize it, in our minds. Nijinsky’s life – his rapid self-extinction and the disappearance of his ballets – is like a parable of that truth. If dance is disappearance, he is the ultimate disappearing act. Accordingly, he is held that much dearer. If many people today still believe that he was t he greatest dancer who has ever lived, that is partly because there are so few records of his dancing. Until recently, there were no known films of him. (Ostwald says that a short 1912 film of Nijinsky dancing in The Afternoon of a Faun was recently televised in Russia.)

His ballets have likewise been mythologized in their absence. Who can say whether The Rite of Spring was in fact the great modernist masterpiece that it is now claimed to be? Perhaps it was something more like the shaggy, dull, pseudo-folkloric thing that we saw in the Joffrey Ballet “reconstruction”. Many of those who were disappointed by the Joffrey version simply concluded that its flatness was due to its having been put together from such scrappy evidence – in other words, that it wasn’t really Nijinsky. But who knows?

Nijinsky’s life also has something to say about the connection between ballet and sex. His self-absorption, his imprisonment within himself and his body, is an experience that many dancers must have in some measure, given that they are required from puberty to live wholly within the body – caring for it, training it, studying it in the mirror – and then, as adults, have to go out night after night in front of thousands of people and practice an art that, however scientifically codified, however painstakingly inculcated, nevertheless depends entirely on the body’s energy, its beauty, its responsiveness, its capacity to create symbols, incite dreams: in other words, the very things that we bring with us to bed. This is not to suggest that dancers are particularly sexy people, or prone to mental illness. In my experience, they are patient, hardworking, exceedingly disciplined people who are more likely at the end of the day to go home and soak their feet in Epsom salt than to try to expand their sexual horizons. Nevertheless, they do live within their bodies, and it is by their bodies’ actions that we know them. On the stage, particularly when they are moving to music, they can seem to us a dream of the perfect physical life, in which the body is capable of saying all that needs to be said. If that is the dream, then Nijinsky’s self-imprisonment can be seen as the nightmare, and his sexual obsessions as the bogeyman. Nijinsky eventually developed a horror of sex. (This is a constantly reiterated theme of the diary, and it is the reason he took up vegetarianism: meat was thought to incite lust.) After years of having his body gazed at and exclaimed over every night in the theater and discussed every morning in the paper, such a recoil is no surprise.

Furthermore, in Nijinsky’s day the connection between ballet and sex was not just symbolic. Up through the early decades of this century, it was common in Russia and also in Western Europe for ballet dancers to supplement their incomes by informal concubinage. That was one of the reasons wealthy men went to the ballet – to pick out new mistresses or boyfriends. Nijinsky was picked out early – at eighteen, during his first year as a professional dancer – by a wealthy sports enthusiast, Prince Pavel Dmitrievitch Lvov, and, for a fee, one of Nijinsky’s fellow-dancers made the appropriate introductions. While Nijinsky’s mother had strenuously opposed any interest he took in girls – she was worried that marriage would get in the way of his career – she smiled on the wealthy and generous Lvov, and Nijinsky became his lover. Lvov soon tired of him and handed him over to various friends – Nijinsky in his diary recalls a “Polish count” who “bought me a piano” (that detail was left out by Romola) – until, finally, again through Lvov, the young dancer was introduced to Diaghilev.

Then, there is the matter of homosexuality and its connection to ballet. Nijinsky is often seen as a paradigm of the homosexual male dancer. Not only did he live openly with Diaghilev – they shared the same hotel rooms, they were invited to parties together, they were a “couple” – but onstage he was repeatedly shown in androgynous roles: the Specter of the Rose in the ballet of that name, the Golden Slave in Scheherazade, the “poet” in Les Sylphides, all creations of Michel Fokine, Diaghilev’s first house choreographer. Nijinsky triumphed in these roles – he had a real gift for them – and as they accumulated he became a kind of sacred figure of androgyny. If to many homosexuals ballet was (and is) a kind of enchanted world in which the mixing in one person of male and female, reviled elsewhere, could be shown and glorified, then he was the presiding genius of that realm. At the same time, all the evidence points to the fact that Nijinsky was not by inclination homosexual. For every homosexual contact that can be documented – Lvov, the Polish count, Diaghilev – a clear practical gain, usually a professional gain, was involved. (“I went in search of fortune,” he says of his first rendesvous with Diaghilev.) In every contact where there is no apparent professional gain – Romola, the many prostitutes he chased while he was living with Diaghilev – his choice is a woman. This, in any case, is what one can deduce from the published diary, together with what Ostwald tells us of the unpublished version. And it is unlikely that between these two sources anything important is being left out. Considering that Nijinsky tells us about masturbating with dogs (as a child) and having incestuous thoughts about his infant daughter, he is probably not suppressing evidence of homosexuality. There is also the fact that once Nijinsky’s roles were being mad e by himself, and not by Fokine, they were unequivocally masculine. In three of his four ballets, Nijinksy created starring roles for himself, and in none of them was there any ambiguity about his sexual orientation.

Over the years, there has been some nasty quarreling about Nijinsky’s sexual identity, with certain homosexuals blaming Romola for causing his madness by trying to “turn” him (this, together with Romola’s feelings about her own lesbianism, was probably the source of her notion that she and Nijinsky were being plotted against by a cabal of homosexuals) and some heterosexuals claiming that Diaghilev caused Nijinsky’s madness by seducing him and then discarding him when he reverted to his true, heterosexual nature (this was the position taken by the Herbert Ross movie). But, self-serving as everyone around him was, Nijinsky’s sexual compromise was his own choice, and it is one that many young men have made with no unhappy consequences, let alone madness. Which is not to say that in his case it wasn’t psychologically damaging.

Nijinksy taps into a final myth, that of the genius-madman. He was tagged with this label long before he went mad, just on the basis of the contrast between his onstage mastery and his offstage ineptitude. Diaghilev’s friend Misia Sert called Nijinksy an “idiot of genius”. And after he went insane the formula was pumped for all it was worth. Some writers described him as a kind of Russian yurodivy, or “holy fool”, a man who, like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, was incompetent in life because his vision of divine truth was too clear. Others invoked the moth-to-the-flame metaphor: Nijinsky was a man who tested the limits – in dancing, in choreography, in sex – and paid the price; he went farther out on the limb than the rest of us, and fell off; he died for our sins. The shadow of Christ – and of van Gogh, that modern avatar of Christ – hovers at the edge of all these images. As with van Gogh, the metaphor is reflexive: he went mad because he was a great artist, and he was a great artist because he went mad.

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