The Outsider (19 page)

The season made both Diaghileff and Nijinsky world-famous. Critics named Nijinsky
^‘
le dieu de la danse
’
; they acclaimed him the greatest male dancer the world has ever seen. The Russian Ballet followed up its success with seasons in all the capitals of Europe. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Nijinsky plotted with Diaghileff to break his contract with the Mariinsky. In 1912 and 1913, Nijinsky produced choreographies for Debussy
’
s
L’
Apres-Midi d
’
un Faune
and Stravinsky
’
s
Sacre du Printemps
; in the first the scandal was caused by Nijinsky
’
s choreography, in the second, by Stravinsky
’
s score; but both added to the commercial success of the Russian Ballet.

Nijinsky found the overheated emotional atmosphere of the Diaghileff
menage
a strain; Nijinsky had a deep-rooted religious tendency that made the unending theatre atmosphere of art and sensuality unsatisfying to him. He quarrelled with Diaghileff several times; he was getting tired of the
‘
artist and lover
’
business. In these quarrels, Stravinsky always supported Diaghileff; Nijinsky, after all, was only a brainless child-prodigy, while Diaghileff was the Connoisseur, the Artist with a capital A.

In 1913, Nijinsky took the opportunity of a sea voyage away from Diaghileff to get married; he proposed to a young dancer who was obviously in love with him; they were married in Buenos Aires. Diaghileff sent a telegram dismissing him from the Russian Ballet.

The five years that followed were years of strain and confusion. Nijinsky
’
s wife was a Hungarian, and Hungary was at war with Russia. They went to live in Budapest, at her home, and the next year was full of petty spite, of relatives who tried to force her to divorce Nijinsky, family plotting and quarrels. In the years following his marriage, Nijinsky was badgered by
the Outsider
’
s greatest enemy, human triviality. There was a ballet season in New York, with Nijinsky
’
s own company and a new Nijinsky ballet, and endless difficulties and annoyances to be overcome. Nijinfcky had no business ability; his temperament was almost completely introverted, contemplative (various observers have spoken of him as having the face of a Tibetan Llama, of
‘
a Buddha in meditation
’
, of an Egyptian statue); these endless, unimportant demands by the outside world were an immense strain. In this state of strain, the war began to weigh heavily on him; he was haunted by visions of dead soldiers.

In December, 1917, the family (they now had a child) moved to St. Moritz; and the last stage began. Nijinsky worked on the choreography of a new ballet, and read a great deal; he and his wife went for long walks o
r went for sleigh rides, or ski
ing. But the inactivity began to tell on Nijinsky; he needed something to do. He began to write a Diary, a sort of rambling exposition of his ideas on things in general, and perfected a technique of drawing with curves and arcs. He had made friends with a Tolstoyan, and now began to speak of the idea of giving up dancing and retiring somewhere in Russia, on a little farm, or perhaps to a monastery. His wife was impatient, and had little sympathy with the ideas that were now absorbing her husband. But Nijinsky thought a great deal about Tolstoy, and about Dostoevsky and
Nietzsche
. One Sunday, a young servant informed Madam Nijinsky that her husband had been standing in the middle of the village street, wearing his cross outside his shirt, and asking passers-by if they had been to church; as a child, the young man had known Nietzsche, and he added,
‘
Mr. Nietzsche used to behave like that just before he was taken away.
⁵
Madame Nijinsky consulted a psychiatrist. There were other disturbing signs; his study was fu
ll
of drawings coloured in red and black
‘
like a bloodstained mortuary cover
’
. They are dead soldiers
’
faces,
’
he told his wife.
‘
It is the war.
...
’

On two occasions he was violent with her; then, she notes,
‘
he seemed like a stranger
’
. Finally, there was the incident of the
‘
marriage with God
’
. He had been asked to dance; in front of a crowded audience, he stood and stared for nearly half an hour.
‘
The audience behaved as if hypnotized
’
, his wife records. Finally he told them:
‘
I will dance you the war, with its suffering and death ... the war which you did nothing to
prevent, so for which you are also responsible.
’
‘
His gestures were all monumental. The public
...
seemed to be petrified.
’
He danced them a sort of choreographic counterpart of Picasso
’
s
‘
Guernica
’
.
²⁰

The end was not long in coming. A few weeks later, a psychiatrist in Zurich told her:
‘
You must try to be brave…
Your husband is incurably insane.
’

The same day, her parents arrived in Zurich; when they heard that Nijinsky had been pronounced insane, they waited until his wife had left the hotel, then called the police to remove
‘
the madman
’
. Their rough treatment brought on a catatonic attack, and Nijinsky never recovered from its consequences. He retreated into a world of his own, and nothing was interesting enough to bring him out; for years afterwards, in various sanatoriums, he stared into space, never replying to questions, taking no interest in what went on around him. His need to retreat into himself had been denied too long; in disgust and fatigue, he retreated permanently, disowning all responsibilities. On Good Friday, 1950, he died at last in a London institution, still in a mental twilight.

The
Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky,
published in English in 1937, provides us with the insight we need to judge what went on in his mind in those last days at St. Moritz. It is a strange document, typical in its jerkiness and vagueness, of a mind approaching insanity. There are signs of various delusions: for instance, in the opening sentences:

People will say that Nijinsky pretends to be mad on account of his bad deeds. Bad deeds are terrible and I do not want to commit any. I made mistakes before because I did not understand God
…
²¹

It is impossible to say what
‘
bad deeds
’
Nijinsky had in mind, or what mistakes he made; we have no record of anything discreditable in his adult life; he seems to have been harmless and very sincere, with a sort of Prince Myshkin-like simplicity about him. A few pages later, he records:
‘
I feel a piercing stare from behind
’
, which, his wife explains in a footnote, was one of his visual hallucinations.
²²
He begins to tell a story:
‘
I invited some friends on a sleigh ride to Maloja...
’
, but a few sentences later he has forgotten about it
and is talking about something else. This sort of evidence of insanity, fixed ideas, incoherency, etc., would incline most readers to give up reading the
Diary
after the first few pages. But, as we persist, a curious kind of sanity begins to make itself felt underneath this surface of aimlessness.

I do not want the death of the senses. I want people to understand. I cannot cry and shed tears over what I write, but I cry within me.
²³

I will tell the whole truth, and others will continue what I have begun. I am like Zola, but I want to speak, and not write novels. Novels prevent one from understanding feeling.
²⁴

I am in a trance, the trance of love. I want to say so much
and cannot find the words I write in a trance, and that
trance is called
wisdom.
Every man is a reasonable being. I do not want unreasonable beings, and therefore I want everyone to be in a trance of feelings.
^2
5

The whole fife of my wife and of all mankind is death
^2
6

I want ... to heal my wife, but I cannot be healed. I do not want to be healed. I am not afraid of anything except the death of wisdom. I want the death of the mind. My wife will not go mad if I kill her mind. The mind is stupidity, but wisdom is God.
²⁷

These passages are chosen almost at random from the early part of the book, yet a kind of reason can be discerned running from one to the other. Nijinsky has his own terminology: there are Teeling
’
,
‘
wisdom
’
,
‘
God
’
, and these are roughly synonymous; and then there are
‘
mind
’
,
‘
death
’
,
‘
stupidity
’
. The important sentence for understanding of Nijinsky
’
s way of seeing
‘
mankind
’
is that comment:
‘
The whole life of my wife and of all mankind is death.
’
He records, in passing a lighted hotel after a night walk:
‘
I felt tears, understanding that life in places like this is like death. Mankind makes merry and God mourns. It is not the fault of mankind.
’
²⁸

Again, what we are witnessing is the Outsider, with his intenser and deeper insight, feeling a Jansenist disgust with mankind. They are shallow; they are
‘
thinkers
’
who feel no need to retreat into themselves; consequently, they have no idea of their own real identities, nor of their possibilities:

‘
I am God in a body. Everyone has this feeling, but no one uses it.
’
²⁹
and later:
‘
God is fire in the head.
’
³⁰

It is a permanent sorrow to Nijinsky that his wife, for whom he feels so much affection, is just another shallow
‘
thinker
⁵
, another butterfly on the surface of life. After the sentence about his wife
’
s way of life being death, he adds,
‘
I was shocked, and thought how lovely it would be if my wife were to listen to me.
’
But no one will listen to him, just as years before, in the Russian Ballet, Diaghileff and Stravinsky treated him as a brainless child. This is what worries Nijinsky. He is a natural contemplative, used to withdrawing deep into himself, gathering his energies into a tight coil, then unleashing them in self-expression. But these people—they know nothing of self expression, nothing of what lies inside them. Nijinsky knows:
‘
I am God in a body
’
, he knows because it is a realization that has come to him many times while dancing, the self-transcendence, the Outsider
’
s glimpse of a
‘
power within him
’
. He has seen that power, and he knows:
‘
I am God, I am God, I am God.
’

Dancing is his natural form of self-expression, but outside dancing, he meets all the Outsider
’
s usual problems. Like Barbusse
’
s hero, he has wandered around the Paris streets staring at the women who pass, but once, when he picked up a prostitute who
‘
taught him everything
’
, he was suddenly sure that this was not what he needed:
‘
I was shocked and told her it was a pity to do things like that. She told me that if she didn
’
t do it she would die of hunger... .
’
³¹

And always, there is the tearing, excoriating demand, of pity. This is the worst of Nijinsky
’
s problems. He loves his wife, he pities her unhappiness, yet he knows that her life is death. Misery and death are moulded into the very stuff of the world. He had known them as a child when the family almost starved. He had known them even in the school of dancing, for he had been present in the 1905 revolution in Petersburg, when the soldiers had slashed down unarmed civilians with swords, or crushed their skulls with knouts; after the reign of terror, Nijinsky and his schoolfellows had walked along rows of bloodied corpses in the morgues, looking into the faces of the women to try to identify the sister of Babitch, a beautiful girl of seventeen with whom they were all secretly in love; she was never seen again. In the revolution of 1917, Nijinsky
’
s brother
had been accidentally killed when the madhouses were thrown open by the Bolsheviks. Of Nijinsky
’
s schoolfellows, one was killed in a duel, another shot by a jealous husband, another committed suicide.... Deaths, miseries, privations, these were of the common stuff of life, and Nijinsky knew as well as Van Gogh:
‘
Misery will never end.
’