All of this accumulated irritation added up to an increasing conviction that life was too short to continue this sort of thing indefinitely, despite my love for and my interest and faith in ballet both as an art and as a popular form of entertainment.
As I have said, Leonide Massine’s difficulties and relations with de Basil were becoming so strained that each performance became an ordeal. I never knew when an explosion might occur. There were many points of difference between Massine and de Basil. The chief bone of contention was the matter of artistic direction. Massine’s contract with de Basil was approaching its expiration date. De Basil was badgering him to sign a new one. Massine steadfastly refused to negotiate unless de Basil would assure him, in the contract, the title and powers of Artistic Director. De Basil as steadfastly refused, and insisted on retaining the powers of artistic direction for himself.
There was, as is always the case in Russian Ballet, a good deal of side-taking. Granted that, for his purposes, de Basil’s insistence on keeping all controls over his company in his own hands, had a point. But let us also regard the issue from the point of view of ability and knowledge, the prime qualifications for the post. From the portrait I have given, the reader will gather the extent of the “Colonel’s” qualifications. This would seem to be the time and place for a sketch of Leonide Massine, as I know him.
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One day there must be a book written about Massine. Not that there is not already a considerable literature dealing with him; but there is yet to appear a work that has done him anything like justice. For me to attempt more than a line drawing would be presumptuous and manifestly unjust; but a sketch is demanded.
Leonide Massine was born in Moscow in 1894. He graduated from the Moscow Imperial School in 1912. It was a year later that Diaghileff, visiting Moscow, was taken by Poliakov, the famous Moscow dramatic critic, to see a play at the Ostrovsky Theatre. It happened that Massine was appearing in the play in the role of a servant. There is no record as to what Diaghileff thought of the play or the performance. The one fact that emerges from this chance evening Diaghileff spent at a theatre is that he was impressed by the manner in which the unknown boy, Massine, carried a tray. Diaghileff asked Poliakov to take him back-stage and introduce him to the talented young mime.
Artistically, Diaghileff was in the process of moving onward from the exclusively Russian tradition that was represented by Benois, Bakst, Stravinsky, and Fokine. He was moving towards a greater internationalism, a broader cosmopolitanism. He was in need of a creative personality who would carry forward this wider concept. Diaghileff’s intuition told him this seventeen-year-old boy with the enormous brown eyes was the person. Diaghileff took Massine from Moscow into his company and fashioned him into a present-day Pygmalion. Diaghileff took over the boy’s artistic education. As part of a deliberate plan, Diaghileff pushed a willing pupil into close contact with the world of modern painting and music, with the finest minds of the period. Picasso, Larionov, Stravinsky, and de Falla became his mentors; libraries, museums, concert halls, his classrooms. The result was a great cosmopolitan choreographer, perhaps the greatest living today.
An American citizen, he will always have strong Russian roots. Some of his best works are Russian ballets; but he is no slavish nationalist. He is as much at home in the cultures of Italy, Scotland, or Spain. His was a precocious genius, discovered by Diaghileff’s intuition. Massine began at the top, and has remained there.
Massine is difficult to know, for he is shy, and he has a great wall of natural reserve that takes a long time to penetrate. Once penetrated, it is possible to experience one of life’s greater satisfactions in the conversation, the intelligence, the knowledge of the mature Massine. Massine’s poise and sense of order never leave him. There is a meticulousness about him and a neatness that indicate the possession of an orderly mind. Everything he reads which he feels may be of even the slightest value to him at some future time, he preserves in large clipping-books. About him is a calm that is exceptional in a Russian—a calm that is exceptional in any one associated with the dance, where the habit is to shout as loudly as possible at the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all, and to become violently excited and agitated over the most unimportant things. There is about him none of the superficial “temperament” too often assumed to be the prerogative of artists. He has a sharp sense of humor; but it is a sense of humor that is keen and dry. His wit can be sharp and extremely cutting. He has not always been loved by his associates; but very few of them have ever really known him.
Filled with fire, energy, enthusiasm, his constant desire is to build something better.