The Diary Of Vaslav Nijinsky by
Vaslav Nijinsky (1919)
Recommended by Michael
Oh, Michael Tanner! Dorset’s
foremost Renaissance Man.
He was really important to
me in the early days of writing Seasons They
Change. Not only was it so cool to know him for the music that he made, and
the stuff he loved, and the books he read, and just plain who he was, he took me along to meet Shirley Collins. Shirley Collins!
The interviewee whose words opened and closed Seasons They Change, and whose exploratory attitude made much of
the music I wrote about in my book even possible.
When I first spoke to Michael Tanner
(he’s one of those people that you somehow need
to call by their full name), he was fresh from recording this piece of
brilliance.
I loved and love this
album for its melancholy, its grace, its subtle tragedy. He sent me MP3s and I
listened a lot, but I was a lucky lady: for, at the time, Music For Smalls Lighthouse was largely unheard, unfairly stuck in
label limbo. But now, two deluxe and sensitive issues later (2010 CD on Second Language, 2013 vinyl on Clay Pipe), it has found the audience it so richly
deserves. It’s even making those best end-of-year lists.
Michael Tanner isn’t only
Plinth; he’s been in The A. Lords, Tyneham House, Cloisters, United Bible Studies, loads I've probably forgotten, and
even, sometimes, just Michael Tanner.
I was very keen to read The Diary
Of Vaslav Nijinsky. Over the past few years, I’ve become incredibly taken
with autobiography, correspondence and memoir: fascinated by
self-representation, by unwitting testimony, by how recollection erodes and
then rebuilds truth.
This diary adds another
layer to all that. It is unique in the annals of memoir, since Nijinsky wrote
it when he was entering a psychotic state. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed
with schizophrenia.
I want to write this book because I want to explain what
feeling is. I know many people will say that this is my own opinion about
feeling, but I know that this is not true, because this opinion emanates from
God’s commands. I am a man like Christ who fulfils God’s commands.
By ‘feeling’ he means
unselfish and luminous instinct, derived from God’s grace and the fundamental
decency of humankind. He saw ‘thinking’ as feeling’s opposite: thinking is
conscious, human-derived and ultimately corrupt and corrupting. Choosing
thinking above feeling leads to personal unhappiness and wider social ills.
It’s difficult not to parallel
Nijinsky’s elevation of feeling over thinking to his chosen career. Surely,
dance is that most intuitive of art forms: nimble feet are nimble feet, and
‘thinking’ won’t make leaden ones featherlight. But Nijinsky was not only (or,
by 1919, even primarily) a dancer. He was a choreographer. His works, such as Afternoon Of A Faun and Jeux, were hated and loved in equal
measure for their modernist approach. Nijinsky was fresh from a disastrous tour
of America as he wrote the Diary:
perhaps he saw the hostile reception from audiences as their failure to ‘feel’
his work, that they were too caught up in ‘thinking’ about it. Nijinsky claims to far prefer performing for poor people, believing them to
have a connection with his work that critics and learned audiences do not. Of
course, Brian Molko from Placebo also spews out that kind of
self-protecting junk whenever the music press slam his latest ‘opus’. But I suspect
time won’t prove Brian Molko's critics wrong.
And this is where The Diary Of Vaslav Nijinsky becomes an
essential part of a legend. We have not one scrap of surviving footage to judge
his dance and choreography genius for ourselves. Nijinsky must be one of the
last performers to occupy this position, so alien in our modern age, when
seemingly every gig is marred by some twat videoing the lot on a mobile phone.
Our hunger to know what Nijinsky was actually
like has even led to a painstaking reconstruction of Afternoon Of A Faun, designed and shot to
make us feel as far as possible that we are watching authentic film stock.
That is why this edition
of the Diary, the unexpurgated one
(which Michael Tanner insisted on) is so important to read, rather than the one
that is more freely and cheaply available. Romola Nijinsky, his wife, was the
diary’s original editor (in 1936). Not only did she snip out all the
unflattering references to herself (she was a ‘thinker’: enough said) and the
passages about ‘pricks’ and defecation, she also performed a more insidious
form of censorship. She rearranged Nijinsky’s words, effectively making his
madness seem dark-eyed and Byronic. An overspill of too much talent. Twenty years had passed since anyone
had seen Nijinsky dance, and the world was comfortable with cinema, newsreels,
and a seeing-is-believing approach to history. In the absence of any of this direct
evidence, Romola ramped up the circumstantial case for Nijinsky’s genius.
In this new translation,
all Nijinsky’s experiences are restored. And, yes, sometimes he is in dramatic
despair.
I am sitting at an empty table. In the drawer of my
table there are many paints. All the paints have dried up because I do not
paint anymore. I used to paint a lot, and I made good progress. I want to
paint, but not here, because I feel death.
But, often, his mental
illness manifests in far more mundane ways. He loves having a
passive-aggressive pop at people, like when he relates how Serge Diaghilev (his
former Svengali and lover) dyes his hair, and when he gossips about his
sister-in-law’s drunken benders. He’ll go on about his vegetarian diet for
several centuries, and writes pages and pages about the inadequacy of modern
fountain pens. All these are well within the realm of the usual mental health
social worker chats, rather than fitting Romola’s image of splendid cape-swinging
insanity.
However, sometimes,
Nijinsky will provide a glimpse of how difficult Romola’s everyday life must
have been.
I have told my wife that I have invented a pen that will
bring me a lot of money, but she does not believe it, because she thinks that I
do not understand what I am doing. I showed her a pen and a pencil in order to
explain to her the pen I have just invented.
So, perhaps Romola
Nijinsky did not only rejig the Diary to stoke her husband’s reputation.
It was to provide dignity to the experience of watching the man she married change
from a fulfilled and acclaimed artist into someone who relentlessly spouted
preposterous and often hurtful statements.
There is so much in this
book. Nijinsky’s devotion to the Tolstoyist religious sect (a form of anarchist
Christianity, focusing on Jesus’s pacifist and classless teachings, renouncing
fleshy, sensory and culinary pleasure) is a crucial thread, as is his
struggle to understand the Great War and its immediate aftermath. Nijinsky was
also keyed in to environmentalism, and was cognisant of the economic damage caused by unregulated stock markets, long before many gave a damn about either of
those causes.
I do not know how to plow, but I know that the earth
glows. Without its warmth there would be no bread.
I want to have millions in order to make the Stock
Exchange crash. I want to ruin the Stock Exchange. I hate the Stock Exchange.
[…] The Stock Exchange robs poor people, who bring all the money they have in
order to increase it, in the hope of achieving their goals in life.
Then there is the language
itself: circular, rhythmic, full of unusual bridges between concepts that give
the whole thing an inner logic (albeit one whose heuristic key is known only to
Nijinsky himself). At points, particularly in the final ‘Fourth Notebook’, it
becomes so infected with invented words and repetition that it is virtually
unreadable. Even the translator gives up.
Pa pi pa ti pa pi ti
Ci ci ci ci ci ci ci
Nijinsky did not see this
work as a private journal. Rather, he wanted it published and distributed for
free; he didn’t even want it typed, but sought reproduction of his own
handwriting. Thus, the text itself would not need any ‘thinking’, because in
and of itself, it embodied ‘feeling’.
I adored The Diary Of Vaslav Nijinsky. I had not
read its bizarrely sorrowful like before, and I suspect I shall never read
anything comparable again. And, perhaps, even though it was important to read
the unexpurgated edition, Romola Nijinsky was right. We want Vaslav Nijinsky to
embody a romantic, tortured genius, and it is
those passages of deep distress that are the ones that linger.
I am not a dying man. I am alive, and therefore I
suffer. My tears rarely flow. I weep in my heart.
