The lark and the economist

Mirabel Cecil

BLOOMSBURY BALLERINA by Judith Macrell Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 476, ISBN 978 0297849087 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Judith Mackrell describes her subject as ‘a star whom the world almost forgot’. Lydia herself lamented, on the death of Pavlova, that ‘a dancer can leave nothing behind her. Music will not help us to see her again and to feel what she could give us, nor the best words.’ And her own career vanished even more completely than most. That might be so, yet in this absorbing biography Lydia Lopokova comes alive again on every page.

Lopokova’s life fell into three phases: the first as an internationally acclaimed ballerina; the second as the devoted — and inspirational — wife of the great economist Maynard Keynes; and the third her peaceful twilight years of solitary widowhood. Born Lydia Lopukhov in St Petersburg in 1891 and trained at the renowned Imperial Theatre School, she soon came to the notice of Diaghilev (whom she nicknamed Big Serge) and was included in his corps de ballet in 1910 when she travelled with the Ballets Russes to Paris and from there toured extensively in America, both the North and the South. She was not to return to her native land for 15 years, long after the upheaval of the first world war, the Russian Revolution and her two marriages, one mistakenly, and bigamously, to the opportunistic business manager of the Ballets Russes, and the other, after her divorce, to Keynes. When the company arrived in London, at the tail end of the war, in 1918, it was a sensation, and Lydia was its star, nowhere admired more than among the Bloomsbury coterie, and among them, no one was more smitten than Maynard Keynes. Their unlikely, idyllic union forms the heart of this book, as it did of both their lives. He was in his mid-thirties, formidably clever, hard-working and successful. He was the chief Treasury representative at the 1919 Peace Conference, and his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was a bestseller and brought him international recognition. He was also a practising homosexual, and Lydia was the first member of the opposite sex to whom he felt any deep attraction.

Still more fascinating as he got to know Lydia better were the odd, intuitive, occasionally startling insights of her conversation. For Maynard, who had been schooled in intellectual precision since he could first read, there was a constant novelty in the way Lydia’s mind darted between ideas, and in the vividly reminted English with which she expressed them. Maynard believed that she was a natural poet, and Lydia, quick to sense his admiration and to prove herself more than just a pretty ballerina, set herself assiduously to beguile him with her ‘Lydian English’.

Among his attractions for her were his protectiveness, his financial generosity and the promise he held of security for this itinerant artiste so far from home. In addition, Mackrell suggests,

one other factor in Maynard’s appeal to Lydia may have been the resemblance that he bore to Big Serge. Both men possessed protean intellects, with a rare talent for synthesising ideas; both men were autocrats, worldly, articulate and charismatic. It is surely significant that whilst Lydia never stopped revering Diaghilev, his mystique for her diminished after she had met Maynard and acquired a lover who was his equal.

An entertaining sub-plot for the reader (although it must have been far from entertaining for Lydia and Maynard) was the inveterate dislike that many of his Bloomsbury friends, especially Vanessa Bell, took to her. As Noel Annan, one of the Keynes’ most devoted admirers, later said, in another context, in a lecture on Keynes and Bloomsbury in 1998:

They pleaded with him not to marry this parakeet — a mistress, yes, but not a wife. [Lytton] Strachey called her a half-witted canary. Vanessa, who regarded Keynes as part of her landscape, could not endure this chatterbox who interrupted her as she painted ... the change spelt death to his intimate relations with Vanessa, Duncan [Grant] and Charleston.

But the intimate relation with Lydia, which endured until his tragically early death just after the second world war, meant a new life for him, which was frequently remarked upon by those who were not jealous of it. Beatrice Webb, for instance, as capable of disobliging remarks as anyone in Bloomsbury ‘was impressed by Lydia’s intelligence, took an interest in her views and was quick to perceive how she had enlarged and stimulated

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Maynard’s own mind.’ She wrote in her diary that having found him brilliant, supercilious and not sufficiently .08 422/08 45 PM Page 45 patient for sociological discovery even if he had the heart for it ... I think his love marriage with the fascinating little Russian dancer has awakened his emotional sympathies with poverty and suffering.

Gradually Lydia realised that whilst she would never be fully accepted by some of Maynard’s old friends, it no longer rankled. What mattered was her intimacy with her husband, his well-being and his uplifting love for her: ‘I am prosaic with the society and romantic with you tete-à-tete’, as she wrote to him just before their wedding. Maynard moved easily between the intellectual world and the artistic one; Lydia sometimes had the worst of both.

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This was symbolised at the time of their marriage. Duncan Grant was best man. Having remembered to shine his shoes, an unusual occurrence, for the great day, he forgot the ring. Luckily Maynard had remembered to bring it. Then, on their honeymoon, Maynard, with a rare lack of consideration, had invit ed guests to stay, including the philosopher ��#�!"! "�� � Wittgenstein: He used the whole of his six-day visit to exhibit his most antisocial traits. He dominated the conversation ... and Lydia he treated with unconcealed contempt. When she ventured a mild remark about the beauty of a tree, he crushed her with the blistering epistemological

challenge, `What do you meanT Lydia, who was already unnerved by the philosopher's incomprehensible monologues, burst into tears, and even Maynard was appalled by his behaviour.

Ironically, it was the critical Virginia Woolf who supplied the most telling description of Lydia. After a visit to the theatre with her she wrote in her diary, ‘Little Lydia I liked: how does her mind work? Like a lark soaring, a sort of glorified instinct inspires her’. The ‘little’ might not have been as condescending as it sounds. Lydia was only five foot tall and her diminutive stature was often remarked on, especially in contrast to her great stage presence. And Virginia Woolf was right: Lydia harnessed her prodigious talent as a dancer, and all the discipline and physical rigour of touring and performing, to a spontaneous grace and lyricism which lasted all her life.

As happy as her marriage was, it was also testing, especially for the nine years she nursed Maynard during and after the second world war, whilst he worked tirelessly with America to structure the economies of wartime and post-war England, and, indeed, the world. Utterly drained by negotiations and frequent trans-Atlantic journeys, he finally collapsed and died in their beloved Sussex house. For the next 35 years Lydia lived on there with grad ually diminishing excursions to London and Cambridge. Her death, in 1981, was peaceful.

Judith Mackrell has had a treasure trove of family letters and photographs, as well as reminiscences from the wide circle of the Keynes’ friends, to draw upon. She has used them well. As for the illustrations, her publishers have done neither her, nor her photogenic subject, any favours in the production of this book. The photographic promise of the front cover, with Lydia in full fig, complete with golden crown, as the Lilac Fairy in the Sleeping Princess, 1921, has not been followed up within the book. It appears to have been printed on paper recycled from the bottom of a hamster’s cage, and the photographs are printed straight onto it. On paper of this inferiority they do not reproduce properly, so Lydia’s distinguished fellow artists, from Stravinsky to Balanchine, from Constant Lambert to Frederick Ashton are reduced to dusky blurs. If publishers are going to go down the production route of printing photographs straight onto the page, instead of having separate glossy plate sections, they need to spend the extra few thousand pounds on good quality paper.

" �A �&��#!$� But it is not the author’s fault that she has been so ill-served, and it must not be allowed �A�� D� to detract from the vividly told story of an �#!�$� extraordinary, and extraordinarily sympathetic, subject.

Mirabel Cecil’s latest book, Mlinaric on Decorating, co-authored with David Mlinaric, will be published in September by Frances Lincoln.