The Outsider (20 page)

In the scales of the gigantic balance-pan in Nijinsky
’
s brain, the world
’
s misery bulked heavy on one side. But the other? First, there was dancing, the rhythmic, violent Dionysian upsurge of the vital energies; while he could dance regularly, every day, and restore contact with the vital, instinctive parts of his own being, Nijinsky could not go insane. Sanity lay in creation. Then there was the deep religious sense; Nijinsky had been brought up a Roman Catholic; a feeling of the universal fatherhood of God was as fundamental in him as the urge to create. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Diary is the use of the name of God.
‘
God
’
occurs five times on the first page, and, on a average, about the same number of times on every page of the book. There are certain pages in the Diary when its repetition would seem to justify the conclusion that Nijinsky was obsessed with the idea of becoming God, but it would be equally true to say that he was obsessed with the idea of becoming Christlike. He observes:

I look like him, only he has a calm gaze, and my eyes look around me. I am a man of motion, not of immobility.
³²

And this is the centre of the problem. Denied motion, the strain begins. The static personality is a prison:

‘
I want to be God, and therefore I try to change myself. I want to dance, to draw, to play the piano, to write verses, to love everybody. That is the object of my life.
’
³³

In the
Diary,
denial of self-expression has reached a point where it produces an atmosphere of physical suffocation:

‘
I like hunchbacks and other freaks. I am myself a freak who has feelings and sensitiveness, and I can dance like a hunchback. I am an artist who likes all shapes and all beauty.
’
³⁴

Denial of self-expression is the death of the soul; without creation, the balance is gone. The scale dips on the side of misery and suffering:

I believe I suffered more than Christ. I love life and I want to live, to cry but cannot—I feel such a pain in my soul—a pain which frightens me. My soul is ill. My soul, not my mind. The doctors do not understand my illness.... Everybody who reads these lines will suffer.
...
My body is not ill, it is my soul that is ill.
³⁵

Nijinsky understood himself well enough to know what he needed to keep sane. But what he did not know was how much suffering and frustration his mind could stand; the pain frightened him. His statement,
^C
I am a man of motion, not of immobility
’
, is the key to his breakdown, and at the same time, the key to his relation to Van Gogh and Lawrence. It would not be true to say of either of these, that they were
‘
men of motion
’
, for the development of the intellect or the emotions makes for immobility, for contemplation. Nijinsky knew this could not be his way. With astounding penetration he analyses his creative urges:
‘
I
am feeling through flesh, and not through the intellect?

He is always intensely aware of his physical being. Now compare with Lawrence and Van Gogh; Lawrence
’
s problem is that
^‘
he is never alive in what he does
’
, he never
feels
what he thinks. He could write:
‘
I am insight through mind, not through feeling.
’
Van Gogh could write:
‘
I am insight through feeling, not through mind.
’
It is Nijinsky who can say:
‘
I am insight through
flesh,
not through either mind or feeling.
’

I am aware that these terms lack precision: intellect is capable of a white heat of feeling as well as body or emotions. The vagueness can be overcome by keeping in mind the following concrete illustrations: In respect of intellect, the absorption of a Newton or an Einstein in some mathematical problem: in respect of emotion, the intensity of Wagner
’
s
Tristan und Isolde,
in respect of body, the ecstasy of an ancient Greek festival of Dionysus, or the Egyptian phallic God Menu, when wine and dancing bring about a temporary loss of identity of individual worshippers in the identity of the god. With this last in mind, we can understand the meaning of phrases in the
Diary
like
‘
I am God, I am God, I am God
’
,
³⁶
without falling into the misunderstanding of the provincial newspaper that stated in its obituary:
‘
Nijinsky
’
s madness took the form of a delusion that he was God.
’
Nijinsky
’
s body obeyed his creative impulses as Van Gogh
’
s brush and
Lawrence
’
s pen obeyed theirs. The body can be made drunk with its own vitality far more easily than the intellect or the emotions with theirs. Many men have experienced the feeling
‘
I am God
’
in a sexual orgasm; few have experienced it from listening to music or looking at painting; fewer still from any intellectual activity.

William James has observed that
‘
the power of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour
’
.
‘
Mystical faculties
’
here refers to that flood-tide of inner warmth and vital energy that human beings regard as the most desirable state to live in. The sober hour carries continuous demands on the energy; sense-impressions, thoughts, uncertainties, suck away the vital powers minute by minute. Alcohol seems to paralyse these leeches of the energies; the vital warmth is left to accumulate and form a sort of inner reservoir. This concentration of the energies is undoubtedly one of the most important conditions of the state the saints call
*Innigkeit\
inwardness. The saint achieves inwardness by a deliberate policing of the vital energies. He comes to recognize the energy-stealing emotions, all the emotions that do not make for inwardness, and he sets out to exterminate them in himself. As he moves towards his objective, he increases steadily his supply of surplus vital power, and so increases his powers of foresight and hind-sight, the sense of other times and other places; there is a breaking-free of the body
’
s sense of imprisonment in time and a rising warmth of life-energy that is spoken of in the Gospel as
‘
to have life more abundantly
’
.

Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh, each had his own form of discipline towards this end. Each one had, as it were, discovered in some moment of insight a source from which these supplies of
‘
more abundant life
’
flowed, and each concentrated on a discipline that would make the source accessible. Lawrence was a thinker who had found imaginative relief in his study of the past. Van Gogh
’
s religious temperament needed to accumulate
sense impressions;
his striving towards a sense of
‘
otherness
’
took the form of a sort of pictorial memory of other times and other places: a memory that was, after all, incomplete, since he could not capture the scent of the almond tree or the hot July wind, or the tension in the air of a rising
storm on his canvas. But Nijinsky
’
s kingdom was the body. People who saw him dance have testified to his amazing ability to
become
the part he was acting, whether the Negro in
Scheherezade,
the puppet in
Petrouchka,
or the Prince in
Giselle.
His discipline gave him the power to dismiss his identity at will, or to expand some parts and contract others to give an illusion of a completely new personality. It was this power that, at times, became a mystical intensity of abnegation in his dancing, that occasionally gave him glimpses into the ecstasy of the saint.

And herein lies the cause of his breakdown. Such a man is spiritually and artistically far above the level of the
‘
homme moyen
sensual’;
even above a man who was more than averagely sensual, like Diaghilef
f
. And if he happens to lack the commonplace power of verbal self-expression, and the self-assurance that most men pick up in their dealings with the
‘
world
’
, his position among other men is made completely false. He has no
reason
to credit himself with unusual spiritual maturity, and still less for refusing to credit other men with it, when their self-assurance impresses on him his own inferiority in respect of intelligence and logic. If he happens to be young and inexperienced (Nijinsky was only twenty-nine when he went insane), he has practically no defence against the world.

DiaghilefFs protectorship was intolerable; this is hardly surprising. But unfortunately, Nijinsky
’
s marriage left him no better off. For his wife he was a mixture of god and child; she understood the child part only too well, the god part, not at all. It was the same with Nijinsky
’
s colleagues. He was
‘l
e dieu de la danse
’,
but from most critical accounts, he was a bungling choreographer whose ballets either defied performance or left the audience mystified. His
Rite of Spring
contains complex dancing parts which the dancers of his day declared to be un-danceable much as the violinists in Beethoven
’
s day had declared passages in the last quartets to be unplayable. He had taken Debussy
’
s
Prelude a
L’
Aprls-Midi d
’
un Faune,
and constructed to the sensuous, fleshly, drowsy music a choreography that was hard and angular. The ballet looked like a series of
‘
flats
’
, a Greek vase design; in Nijinsky
’
s hands it lost the qualities that Diaghileff could so well understand—warmth, humanity, sensuality; it had substituted hardness, heaviness,
angularity, violence. Hulme
’
s comment on Byzantine art might be applied to it:

...
the emotion you get from it is not a pleasure in the reproduction of natural or human life. The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity,
a. perfection
and rigidity that vital things can never have, lead here to the use of forms that can almost be called geometrical.
³⁷

Hulme went on to state his conclusions from this angular art:

Man is subordinate to certain absolute values; there is no delight in the human form leading to its natural reproduction; it is always distorted to fit
the more abstract forms which convey intense religious emotion.
³⁸

Nijinsky
’
s
Diary
shows us his capacity for
‘
intense religious emotion
’
, and its style is correspondingly hard and angular. In the same way, his conception of the ballet was more than an attempt to follow Jacques Dalcroze
’
s theory that each note in the music should have a corresponding movement from the dancer; it was the effort of the Outsider to find expression for emotions that wanted to emerge like bullets from a machine-gun. With Nijinsky, the Outsider
’
s strain reached bursting-point, and his mind plunged into darkness.

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents we have referred to in this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death: notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbours. We possess no other record of the Outsider
’
s problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems. Nijinsky
’
s
Diary
is the most unpleasant document we shall have to refer to in this book.