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Books
Biography
The beast within the beauty
Review: Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh
Julie Kavanagh's Rudolf Nureyev reveals a peerless
dancer and entrancing character but also a deeply
unattractive man, says Peter Conrad
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer
Buy Rudolf Nureyev at the Guardian bookshop
Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
by Julie Kavanagh
Fig Tree/Penguin £25, pp787
Rudolf, in a word, was rude. After a protracted spat in rehearsal,
choreographer Jerome Robbins summed Nureyev up: 'Rudi is an artist, an
animal and a cunt.'
If he didn't like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let
her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer
across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the
jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled
Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police
cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli's chintzy villa, he hurled a
wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with
which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from
the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant,
incontinent dog.
Even his admiration expressed itself as a kind of erotic
homicide. Before defecting from Russia in 1961, he fixed his fantasy
on the nobly classical Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, who became his mentor
and lover. 'Go there,' Nureyev told himself, 'and suck.' Fellatio or
vampirism? Either way, he licked his lips and, after absorbing Bruhn's
technical skills, reported: 'I receive, I am no longer empty.'
Surveying choreographers, he said: 'Go and choose brain.' Like
Hannibal Lecter, he sawed open the skull and feasted on the cerebrum.
Julie Kavanagh's biography is about a man who danced like a god, but
behaved like a violent, voracious beast. Nureyev was fond of
portraying himself as a barbarian invader, a Tatar who relished the
savagery of the Polovtsian dances in Borodin's Prince Igor. He
disliked Jews, he explained, because he was an ersatz Arab. Further
back, he claimed to be descended from wolves. John Huston wanted to
cast him as the snake, the 'homo-reptile' that introduces sin to Eden,
in his film The Bible; Francois Truffaut called him a 'man-animal', a
wild child who resisted socialisation.
But despite his feral tantrums, interspersed with indiscriminate
spending sprees and a sex life that was like a gabbling multiplication
game, Nureyev emerges from this affectionate, acutely perceptive book
as someone whose nonsense and neuroses had to be tolerated because his
conflicts fed his creativity. Long after Nureyev's leaps, twirls and
feats of athletic transcendence have faded in the memories of those
who witnessed them, Kavanagh's achievement is to persuade us that he
deserves our compassion as well as our applause.
She is the ideal memorialist, because her infatuation with the artist
is balanced by her sympathy for the wounded, self-destructive
man. Having lost his mother when he defected, Nureyev spent his life
seeking out substitute matriarchs: Margot Fonteyn was one and Maude
Gosling (half of the marital team that, under the pseudonym Alexander
Bland, wrote dance reviews for The Observer) was another. In San
Francisco, he found a third, a boundlessly hospitable Armenian who
owned an ethnic restaurant. Nureyev often arrived with a hundred
friends, who ate without paying or tipping; his hostess tearfully
waved the freeloaders goodbye and begged Nureyev to return
soon. Kavanagh has the same generosity of spirit. She shakes her head
over his excesses, but cannot condemn him. Her writing oozes
solicitude, hence her beautiful description of the ageing Nureyev's
leg muscles 'as gnarled and compacted as an ancient olive trunk'.
The touching climax of her book is his reunion with his terminally ill
mother, after an un-nostalgic trek back to the Urals in 1987. He spent
10 minutes with her, disgusted by her squalid room. She did not open
her eyes; he was convinced she had not recognised him, though it was
he who did not recognise her when he saw the foetal wraith on the
bed. After he left, a sister asked if she knew who had been to visit
her. 'Yes, it was Rudik,' she said. When Nureyev's death from an
Aids-related illness arrives, Kavanagh finds a stoical virtue in the
animality that repelled Robbins. Choreographer Rudi van Dantzig,
remembering his last weeks, marvels at his resigned patience: he was
like a sick dog that quietly crawled into the bushes to await the end.
Kavanagh astutely places Nureyev in the pop culture of the Sixties,
which made an instant celebrity of him. His moptop hairdo enrolled
him as a fifth Beatle and the 'Oriental sinuosity' of his movements
was mimicked by Mick Jagger. A little more tackily, he adored the
skin-hugging synthetic fabrics of that technological age: while still
in Russia, he dreamed of nylon shirts and on his first trip to the
West begged to be taken to a Lycra factory.
But though he managed to get arrested at a pot party in
Haight-Ashbury, he was no libertarian hippie. Politicians capitalised
on his 'leap to freedom' (which actually consisted of six steps across
a room at a Paris airport, when he softly asked the French police to
save him from enforced repatriation) and critic Arlene Croce described
him as 'Gorbachev's advance man'. In fact, he was more like a belated
tsar, a despot besotted by luxury.
Ninette de Valois, the Covent Garden ballet mistress, believed that
'the hysterical effect of freedom' in the West destroyed him, turning
him into a sexual gourmand and a self-prostituting
vaudevillian. Again, Kavanagh finds catharsis in his consumerism. At
the end of his life, he stockpiled kilims and his grave is draped in a
metallic representation of these soft, bright Turkish carpets. As
Kavanagh points out, they marked him as a homesick nomad, 'whose most
important piece of furniture was a rug' that could be folded up and
taken with him when he moved on.
Enthusiasts in the Sixties compared Nureyev to James Dean and the
high-kicking hooligans of West Side Story. His self-image was actually
derived, as Kavanagh ingeniously demonstrates, from the tragic heroes
of Shakespeare and Milton, Byron and Goethe. In Swan Lake, his
vacillation between Odette and Odile, the black and white swans, acted
out the quarrel between artistic sanctity and the profane flesh. After
dancing in Paradise Lost, he became convinced that he was the spawn of
Satan; in adapting Byron's Manfred, he dramatised the convulsions of
his own damned soul.
Stricken by Aids, he made Romeo and Juliet a ballet about the plague
and, as Prospero in his version of The Tempest, he poignantly admitted
the failure of his art, clutching the magician's staff to help him
make a few last exhausted assaults on the air. Though dance is
wordless, Nureyev's body, as Kavanagh puts it, eloquently 'spoke the
texts' of the literary works he choreographed, which added up into his
confessional autobiography.
During a decade of research, Kavanagh prised open the doors of
archives in the former USSR and charmed Nureyev's platoons of lovers
into disclosing details of their copulatory bouts. (He was, I
conclude, a wretched lay: a greedy automaton who treated partners as
dildos.) The evidence of misbehaviour and decadence she unearths is
dismal, but her comprehension of the man's motives and of the pain and
panic that drove him acts like a healing, forgiving balm.
Her book's subtitle deserves its definite article: this is the
definitive study of a man who, in his combination of aesthetic grace
and psychological grime, can truly be called a sacred monster.
Books
Biography
The beast within the beauty
Review: Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh
Julie Kavanagh's Rudolf Nureyev reveals a peerless
dancer and entrancing character but also a deeply
unattractive man, says Peter Conrad
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer
Buy Rudolf Nureyev at the Guardian bookshop
Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
by Julie Kavanagh
Fig Tree/Penguin £25, pp787
Rudolf, in a word, was rude. After a protracted spat in rehearsal,
choreographer Jerome Robbins summed Nureyev up: 'Rudi is an artist, an
animal and a cunt.'
If he didn't like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let
her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer
across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the
jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled
Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police
cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli's chintzy villa, he hurled a
wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with
which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from
the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant,
incontinent dog.
Even his admiration expressed itself as a kind of erotic
homicide. Before defecting from Russia in 1961, he fixed his fantasy
on the nobly classical Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, who became his mentor
and lover. 'Go there,' Nureyev told himself, 'and suck.' Fellatio or
vampirism? Either way, he licked his lips and, after absorbing Bruhn's
technical skills, reported: 'I receive, I am no longer empty.'
Surveying choreographers, he said: 'Go and choose brain.' Like
Hannibal Lecter, he sawed open the skull and feasted on the cerebrum.
Julie Kavanagh's biography is about a man who danced like a god, but
behaved like a violent, voracious beast. Nureyev was fond of
portraying himself as a barbarian invader, a Tatar who relished the
savagery of the Polovtsian dances in Borodin's Prince Igor. He
disliked Jews, he explained, because he was an ersatz Arab. Further
back, he claimed to be descended from wolves. John Huston wanted to
cast him as the snake, the 'homo-reptile' that introduces sin to Eden,
in his film The Bible; Francois Truffaut called him a 'man-animal', a
wild child who resisted socialisation.
But despite his feral tantrums, interspersed with indiscriminate
spending sprees and a sex life that was like a gabbling multiplication
game, Nureyev emerges from this affectionate, acutely perceptive book
as someone whose nonsense and neuroses had to be tolerated because his
conflicts fed his creativity. Long after Nureyev's leaps, twirls and
feats of athletic transcendence have faded in the memories of those
who witnessed them, Kavanagh's achievement is to persuade us that he
deserves our compassion as well as our applause.
She is the ideal memorialist, because her infatuation with the artist
is balanced by her sympathy for the wounded, self-destructive
man. Having lost his mother when he defected, Nureyev spent his life
seeking out substitute matriarchs: Margot Fonteyn was one and Maude
Gosling (half of the marital team that, under the pseudonym Alexander
Bland, wrote dance reviews for The Observer) was another. In San
Francisco, he found a third, a boundlessly hospitable Armenian who
owned an ethnic restaurant. Nureyev often arrived with a hundred
friends, who ate without paying or tipping; his hostess tearfully
waved the freeloaders goodbye and begged Nureyev to return
soon. Kavanagh has the same generosity of spirit. She shakes her head
over his excesses, but cannot condemn him. Her writing oozes
solicitude, hence her beautiful description of the ageing Nureyev's
leg muscles 'as gnarled and compacted as an ancient olive trunk'.
The touching climax of her book is his reunion with his terminally ill
mother, after an un-nostalgic trek back to the Urals in 1987. He spent
10 minutes with her, disgusted by her squalid room. She did not open
her eyes; he was convinced she had not recognised him, though it was
he who did not recognise her when he saw the foetal wraith on the
bed. After he left, a sister asked if she knew who had been to visit
her. 'Yes, it was Rudik,' she said. When Nureyev's death from an
Aids-related illness arrives, Kavanagh finds a stoical virtue in the
animality that repelled Robbins. Choreographer Rudi van Dantzig,
remembering his last weeks, marvels at his resigned patience: he was
like a sick dog that quietly crawled into the bushes to await the end.
Kavanagh astutely places Nureyev in the pop culture of the Sixties,
which made an instant celebrity of him. His moptop hairdo enrolled
him as a fifth Beatle and the 'Oriental sinuosity' of his movements
was mimicked by Mick Jagger. A little more tackily, he adored the
skin-hugging synthetic fabrics of that technological age: while still
in Russia, he dreamed of nylon shirts and on his first trip to the
West begged to be taken to a Lycra factory.
But though he managed to get arrested at a pot party in
Haight-Ashbury, he was no libertarian hippie. Politicians capitalised
on his 'leap to freedom' (which actually consisted of six steps across
a room at a Paris airport, when he softly asked the French police to
save him from enforced repatriation) and critic Arlene Croce described
him as 'Gorbachev's advance man'. In fact, he was more like a belated
tsar, a despot besotted by luxury.
Ninette de Valois, the Covent Garden ballet mistress, believed that
'the hysterical effect of freedom' in the West destroyed him, turning
him into a sexual gourmand and a self-prostituting
vaudevillian. Again, Kavanagh finds catharsis in his consumerism. At
the end of his life, he stockpiled kilims and his grave is draped in a
metallic representation of these soft, bright Turkish carpets. As
Kavanagh points out, they marked him as a homesick nomad, 'whose most
important piece of furniture was a rug' that could be folded up and
taken with him when he moved on.
Enthusiasts in the Sixties compared Nureyev to James Dean and the
high-kicking hooligans of West Side Story. His self-image was actually
derived, as Kavanagh ingeniously demonstrates, from the tragic heroes
of Shakespeare and Milton, Byron and Goethe. In Swan Lake, his
vacillation between Odette and Odile, the black and white swans, acted
out the quarrel between artistic sanctity and the profane flesh. After
dancing in Paradise Lost, he became convinced that he was the spawn of
Satan; in adapting Byron's Manfred, he dramatised the convulsions of
his own damned soul.
Stricken by Aids, he made Romeo and Juliet a ballet about the plague
and, as Prospero in his version of The Tempest, he poignantly admitted
the failure of his art, clutching the magician's staff to help him
make a few last exhausted assaults on the air. Though dance is
wordless, Nureyev's body, as Kavanagh puts it, eloquently 'spoke the
texts' of the literary works he choreographed, which added up into his
confessional autobiography.
During a decade of research, Kavanagh prised open the doors of
archives in the former USSR and charmed Nureyev's platoons of lovers
into disclosing details of their copulatory bouts. (He was, I
conclude, a wretched lay: a greedy automaton who treated partners as
dildos.) The evidence of misbehaviour and decadence she unearths is
dismal, but her comprehension of the man's motives and of the pain and
panic that drove him acts like a healing, forgiving balm.
Her book's subtitle deserves its definite article: this is the
definitive study of a man who, in his combination of aesthetic grace
and psychological grime, can truly be called a sacred monster.