US Edition Rupert Christiansen reviews Bloomsbury Ballerina by Judith Mackrell
In her latter years - she died in 1981 at the age of 89 - Lydia Lopokova became uninhibitedly eccentric. The once dazzling star of the Ballets Russes ended up as an amiably dotty old lady who sunbathed naked, attended Glyndebourne in her dressing gown, walked the streets with an upturned shopping basket on her head and heated her house to a temperature which left visitors faint and gasping.
When she started talking in Russian and had to be reminded that nobody present understood the language, she replied serenely, 'But I do.'
Although some found her irritating, nobody thought her faux. Lydia Lopokova was the real thing, possessed of what Virginia Woolf described as 'the genius of personality'. The dance critic Judith Mackrell's unfailingly vivacious and scholarly biography (marred only by sloppy proof-reading and tantalising descriptions of photographs which are frustratingly not reproduced) pays splendid tribute not only to her stature as an artist but also to her brave and loving marriage to the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Lopokova came from hardy stock. Her father, a handsome philanderer who managed the front-of-house in a St Petersburg theatre, had been born a serf; her mother was descended from a Scots émigré engineer. This ancestry endowed her with what Mackrell calls 'a survivor's temperament' and nurtured a rebelliousness and resilience which served her well over a 30-year career.
As a dancer, trained in the Maryinsky tradition, she lacked the classical elegance and poetry of the greatest imperial ballerinas such as Pavlova and Karsavina. Never a melancholy Swan Queen or ethereal Wili, her cheeky, characterful style, buoyed by a gloriously soft jump, made her a favourite of the modernist choreographers Fokine and Massine - like them, she was constantly hungry for novelty and challenge.
In her twenties, her love life matched this volatility: a miserable bigamous first marriage to Diaghilev's slimy business manager and affairs with Stravinsky and a mysterious White Russian general led to an Agatha Christie-like nervous collapse and 18-month disappearance, the details of which even Mackrell's assiduous research fails to unravel.
But after the First World War, much of which she spent touring America, she became hugely popular in London, where audiences dazzled by her wit and energy affectionately christened her 'Loppie'. Keynes first encountered her as one of her more ardent fans, watching her night after night in Diaghilev's spectacular (if financially catastrophic) production of The Sleeping Princess.
His friends were surprised by the infatuation that followed Keynes's visits to her dressing room, as his romantic tendencies had always leant firmly in the other direction, and he had a lover in the psychologist Sebastian Sprott.
But the attraction of opposites worked its chemical magic, and he was captivated by her 'intuitive, fantastical take on the world'. For her part, she adored his patience and kindness, and was wide-eyed in admiration of his intellect - 'when I read what you write,' she told him, 'somehow I feel bigger than I am'.
Presumably her familiarity with balletic bisexuals such as Nijinsky and Massine reassured him in the bedroom and their enchanting letters suggest that they soon developed a tender and passionate physical relationship, but it wasn't easy to win his exclusive commitment. Lopokova fought a long and sometimes grumpy fight to wean him away from Sprott - whom Keynes at first tried to run in tandem with her.
After their wedding in 1925, she faced even more formidable antagonism in the collective shape of his Bloomsbury circle, which for all its air of cosmopolitan culture did not take kindly to someone it regarded as a benighted chatterbox of a showgirl with an erratic command of English.
Keynes's best friend Lytton Strachey thought her 'half-witted', while Clive Bell sneered that Woolworth's was her 'spiritual home'. The women were little better: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf could barely conceal their irritation at her generous-hearted Slavic spontaneity and candour.
Being a thick-skinned trouper, Lopokova took it all in her stride and with time the animosity softened - after all, she was clearly making their beloved Maynard happy. But their continuing 'chill of condescension' makes the Bloomsberries look every bit as narrow-minded as those they elsewhere despised. One can't help feeling that Lopokova was worth the lot of them.
Marriage slowed her dancing career. In 1932 she bowed out, as Swanilda in Coppélia. Although she provided inspirational support for De Valois and Ashton in their foundation of a British ballet company, she had no interest in teaching or choreography and tried her luck instead on the legitimate stage, playing Ibsen and Molière with considerable success.
Keynes's heart attack in 1937 brought this enterprise to a halt and, until his death nine years later, Lopokova devoted herself exclusively to nursing and sustaining her husband throughout his crucial wartime negotiations with America over Lend-Lease and the establishment of the World Bank - 'the most monumental task of her career', as Mackrell puts it, and one which she worked at with saintly grace.
Through her 35 years of widowhood, she became increasingly reclusive, living like a peasant babushka at Tilton in Sussex, the farmhouse she and Keynes had made their home, just over the hill from Bloomsbury's retreat at Charleston.
She showed no resentment and no desire to dwell on past glories, but faded into her dotage without complaint, 'grandly indifferent to what anyone else thought of her', her 'genius of personality' undimmed to the last.