Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss

Author:Carol Loeb Shloss [Shloss, Carol Loeb]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2005-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Vaslav Nijinsky, age fifty-one, jumping in his asylum. (Courtesy of the Roger Pryor Dodge Nijinsky Photograph Collection, the New York Library of the Performing Arts)

11

LOCKING UP DANCERS

LONDON 1935

I. NIJINSKY’S FATE

Lucia spent Christmas Day 1934 with her parents at the Hotel Carlton Elite in Zurich. They had a dinner of ham, turkey, plum pudding, and champagne and then went for a drive. Joyce wrote to Giorgio and Helen that people were charmed by her grace. “She was all dressed up and powdered and perfumed.” On Boxing Day, she came back again from the clinic, this time to sing in the music room of the hotel, entertaining the other guests with what her father referred to as “all my Irish songs to my Liszt-like accompaniments.”1 Despite the loveliness of her concert, it was Lucia the dancer whom the circle of her parents’ friends had in mind that winter. They were reading the biography of Vaslav Nijinsky written by his wife, Romola, that had just been published that season, and wondering if Lucia’s fate was to be like his.

Since its publication in 1934, Romola’s account of her husband’s fight against schizophrenia has been severely criticized. Peter Ostwald, a contemporary psychoanalyst who reviewed the documents chronicling Nijinsky’s supposed madness, decided that Nijinsky had had strange attitudes but was basically sane. He believed, as many of his doctors at the time had also done, that nothing prevented Nijinsky’s return to domestic life except his wife’s refusal to live with him.2 But Joyce’s friends saw a sad analogy between two dancers whose aberrant energies had brought them from the stage to the asylum. On 11 November, Harriet Weaver told Joyce she had just finished the book and had found its epilogue “depressing reading.”3

At the end of the biography Romola Nijinsky presented the scene of diagnosis at the Burghölzli as a bitter melodrama, describing Dr. Bleuler’s brittle smile, false heartiness, and a judgment that followed after ten minutes of conversation: “Now, my dear, be very brave. You have to take your child away; you have to get a divorce. Unfortunately, I am helpless. Your husband is incurably insane.” Nijinsky himself responded, as she dashed from the consultation room, “Femmka, you are bringing me my death-warrant.” The epilogue that followed began with the words, “Fourteen years have elapsed since the day that Nijinksy’s mind became shrouded in darkness, when he withdrew from this world.”4 It continued with a scenario that would have seemed darkly familiar to Harriet Weaver and to anyone else who tried to follow the Joyces’ long-suffering concern for Lucia—the saga of Romola’s attempt to find a cure and to return Nijinsky to the semblance of a normal life. “The greatest specialists in Europe and America were called in,” she reported. “They all agreed it was a case of Schizophrenia.… Then I turned to desperate means—fakirs, healers, Christian Science—but everything failed. We took him to the theatre, to see the Ballet, to Balieff’s Chauve-Souris, to clubs where Cossacks danced, and, when he saw these, his expression changed, and for a few minutes he became his old self again.

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