Like Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and others in the Bloomsbury circle, Keynes was rebelling. Rebelling against the Victorian ethic which demanded that individuals sacrifice their deepest feelings and desires on the altar of social duty, or that they give themselves over to what Keynes dismissed as a “love for money.” He led the way in formulating a serious philosophical defense of the “good” inner states achieved through the life of the mind and the pursuit of beauty, love—and homosexuality, what the Apostles fondly called the “Higher Sodomy.” (Keynes had passionate and serious relationships with Strachey and the artist Duncan Grant.) This was no mere indulgence, but an authentic emotional reaction bound up with an intense desire to forge a new and cultivated aristocracy freed from the stuffy conventions and “respectability” of the past. Hence the Bloomsbury taste for parties and cross-dressing, for bawdy humor (Keynes was the bawdiest of them all), and their equally intense devotion to culture, art, and private life.12
These intellectual and personal affinities converged in part on the Ballets Russes, with its vivid sexuality (Nijinsky), artistic daring, and aristocratic heritage. “Diaghilev had the cunning,” the ballerina Lydia Lopokova once explained, “to combine the excellent with the chic, and revolutionary art with the atmosphere of the old regime.” But if ballet had captured Keynes’s attention, it was the First World War that promoted it to the forefront of his concerns. The war, as Clive Bell put it, “ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done.” Keynes, who by 1915 was highly placed in the Treasury, was wrenched from his peaceful Cambridge and Bloomsbury life into a state of genuine despair. Letters to friends and contemporaries were returned marked DEAD, and as the losses mounted he strongly opposed prolonging the fighting. He applied for military exemption on grounds of conscientious objection (a symbolic protest, since he was already exempt due to his government position) and came close to resigning: “I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.” Like E. M. Forster (another Kingsman and Apostle), Keynes saw that his beloved civilization was “vanishing … this attempt to apprehend the universe through the senses and the mind is a luxury the next generation won’t be able to afford.”13
After the war, nothing was the same. The brutality of the trenches and Britain’s devastating losses left the country exhausted and embittered. For Keynes, who felt the change acutely, classical ballet became an increasingly important symbol of the lost civilization of his youth. In 1921 he was overcome by Diaghilev’s London production of The Sleeping Princess. It reminded him of childhood excursions with his father to pantomime and theater, but also added to his growing love for Lydia Lopokova, whom he had met during the war and who danced (among other roles) the Lilac Fairy. They were married in 1925. It was a close and passionate match marked by respect, affection, and, his earlier homosexual relationships notwithstanding, a deep sexual attraction (he called her “Lydochka, pupsikochka”; she called him “Maynarochka, milenki” and signed her letters playfully, “Your dog, I gobble you enormously”). With Lydia at his side, Keynes plowed his talent and considerable material resources into theater, painting, and dance, even as he was also playing an ever more prominent role in political and economic affairs on the world stage.14
The couple’s Bloomsbury home became a meeting place for ballet luminaries (Lydia’s friends) and a growing coterie of artists and intellectuals who saw ballet as a vital art and were increasingly invested—emotionally and even morally—in its future.* When Diaghilev died in 1929, many of them joined Keynes in establishing the Camargo Society, an influential if short-lived organization devoted to carrying Diaghilev’s legacy forward—and to developing a native English ballet. Lydia was a founding member and performed in many of the society’s productions; the future founders of the Royal Ballet, Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois, were also there. Keynes was its honorary treasurer.15
In the mid-1930s, Keynes also built the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, funding it largely from his own pocket. It was for his adored Lydia, but as usual with Keynes, personal and ethical motivations commingled, and he took an active interest in the details of programming and design. In a memorandum written in 1934, Keynes explained:
I believe that a good small theatre, equipt with all the contrivances of modern stagecraft, is as necessary to our understanding of the dramatic arts, with their complicated dependence on literature, music and design, as a laboratory is to experimental science. It is the outstanding characteristic of our own generation that we have gone far to restoring the theatre … to the place in the serious interests of the University which it held at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
As Britain sank into the Depression, Keynes’s interest in the arts also took on an increasingly political edge: “With what we have spent on the dole in England since the war,” he wrote in 1933, “we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world.” The theater’s opening gala in 1936 featured another newly minted dance company: the Vic-Wells Ballet, founded and directed by Ninette de Valois.16
Born Edris Stannus in Ireland in 1898, de Valois shared some of Keynes’s nostalgia for a rose-tinted Edwardian era—in her case, for the happy, languid childhood days on her parents’ estate in rural Ireland. When she was seven, however, financial constraints forced a family move to “strange and formal England,” where she stayed with her Victorian grandmother, later joining her mother in London. She studied “fancy dancing” at the Edwardian School of Deportment with one Mrs. Wordsworth, who taught in a black silk gown and white kid gloves. She took ballet at the Lila Field Academy for Children and joined the “Wonder Children.” And like hundreds of dancers of her generation, she saw and was moved by Pavlova’s Dying Swan, which de Valois later performed from memory “on every old pier theater in England.” In 1914, when she was barely sixteen, de Valois made her professional debut on the music hall stage and cut her teeth in its variety acts, alongside clowns, dancers, animal impersonators, and pantomime dames, often performing two or three shows daily.17
During the First World War, de Valois, whose father was killed in 1917 at Messines Ridge on the Western Front, volunteered at a military hospital and worked in the Victoria Station soldiers’ canteen; she also continued to perform in music halls, but found their ever-glitzy shows increasingly exhausting and unrewarding. The war had further straightened her already serious character, and her interest in ballet sharpened. When it ended, she worked with Russian émigré artists who had come to London with Diaghilev, including Lopokova, Nikolai Legat, Léonide Massine, and the indefatigable Enrico Cecchetti. Like Keynes, she saw The Sleeping Princess in 1921, and two years later she joined Diaghilev’s company in Paris. It was a decisive experience. For de Valois, Diaghilev was first and foremost “a mind of great culture, with its disciplined background of the orthodox.” The cluttered aesthetic of the music hall fell to the wayside: “For the first time in my life I sensed a condition of world theater. In addition, all Europe was before my eyes; its cities, museums, art galleries, its customs and its theaters. Everything merged into a whole.” Henceforth, she would be a tireless advocate of the strict rigor and high ideals of classical ballet. Without knowing it, and coming from an utterly different background, she was forming beliefs that would converge with those of Keynes.18
Yet de Valois was not interested only in ballet. As a choreographer in the late 1920s, she was taken up with the repertory theater movement: she worked at the Festival Theater in Cambridge, which sought to escape the predictable parlor-room dramas and commercialism of the West End and to create a “producer’s theater” with ideas drawn from Meyerhold and central European expressionism. Terence Gray, the theater’s director (and de Valois’s cousin), called his plays “dance-dramas” and emphasized gesture, masks, and ritual. There was no proscenium arch, and de Valois worked to erase the line separating performers and spectators—in one ballet she had the dancers stream onto the stage through the audience. De Valois also collaborated extensively with Yea
ts at his Abbey Theater in Dublin: he invited her there to produce and perform his Plays for Dancers, among other projects, and she was drawn to his idealism and efforts to create a national theater—but also to his old-world aristocratic ways. She later fondly recalled the pince-nez attached to the folds of his cape with a long black ribbon.
Influenced by her European encounters, and especially taken with Eurythmics and German modern dance, de Valois’s own choreography often veered toward a weighty, expressionist vocabulary: bare feet, angular arms, constructivist groupings. Rout (1927), for example, opened with a dancer reading a poem by the German poet and political activist Ernst Toller about revolutionary youth, and proceeded with women in dark tunics and soft shoes, bodies collapsed, fists clenched, legs turned indecorously inward. In a similar vein, in 1931 she created Job to a score by Ralph Vaughan Williams, inspired by Blake’s engravings on the Book of Job. There were no toe shoes or ballet steps in sight, only masks, weighted folk-dance-like steps, and groups posing in asymmetrical patterns. Job himself clawed the air, hooked his hands, and circled his arms and fists.
Yet in spite of Job and other similar works, it was Diaghilev and the Russians, with their discipline and “habitual love of ritual and tradition,” that most impressed and guided de Valois. Bringing together her disparate theatrical experiences, she determined to build a national repertory ballet grounded in the Russian Imperial classics. “I wanted a tradition,” she later wrote with characteristic forthrightness, “and I set out to establish one.” Like Keynes, she saw ballet as a beacon, with standards “high to the point of idealism,” and she had no intention of making concessions to the “vast armies of ‘nomadic’ theater-goers” with their sentimental “bric-à-brac aesthetic.” But English ballet, she insisted, must also be a democratic art—not imposed from above by an omniscient state, as it had been in Russia, but created from below by “the practical idealist” (her!) and “the children of the people.”19
Serious and exacting of character (her dancers would dub her “Madam”), de Valois wasted little time: in 1926, she opened the Academy of Choreographic Art. That same year, she approached Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, located behind London’s Waterloo Station. Baylis was cut from the cloth of Victorian social reform: devout, practical, and imbued with a missionary zeal to bring serious theater to the people. Sensing a kindred spirit, de Valois proposed to Baylis that she form a national ballet company attached to the Old Vic. In 1931 the Vic-Wells Opera Ballet (so named because its performances took place at the Sadler’s Wells Theater) gave its first full evening of ballet. Several years later the troupe took the name Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and in 1956 it would be chartered as the Royal Ballet.
There was nothing preordained about the Vic-Wells ascent to glory: in 1931 it was just one of several similar companies all working together and in competition to build English ballet, including the Camargo Society and the Ballet Club, run by the Polish émigré dancer Marie Rambert (who had eventually settled in London after her work with Nijinsky). Rambert had married the writer Ashley Dukes, and their theater in London’s elegant Notting Hill Gate drew a wealthy clientele and featured ballets alongside works by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. If de Valois’s group eventually emerged ahead of the rest, it was in part through her supreme ambition and organizational skills, but in no small measure it was also because she had the prescience in 1935 to hire Frederick Ashton, who had made ballets for them all, as Vic-Wells’s resident choreographer.
De Valois was the practical and organizational brains behind British ballet; Frederick Ashton was its creative force. Temperamentally they could not have been more different: he was complicated and impulsive, ambitious but also lazy and ironic, and looked upon Madam’s bossy uprightness with a mixture of admiration and disdain. But for all of their differences—and they were often at odds—they were also bound by what they both lacked: each had come to ballet, and to England, from the outside, with little formal education and no social credentials. Ashton was a child of the British imperial diaspora, born in Ecuador in 1904 and raised mostly in Peru. Like de Valois, he was the product of a strict Edwardian upbringing, albeit softened in his case by Peruvian warmth and long summers on the beach. His father, a cold and troubled man, was a carpenter’s son who had risen into the middle class to become a minor British diplomat and businessman. His mother, an aspiring socialite, was taken up with the parties and entertainments appropriate (as she saw it) to the life of a proper Edwardian lady. Ashton watched.
He saw King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in the royal coach during a family trip to London, and remembered his parents’ dinner guests with their “enormous hats and tango shoes … the waisted, bejeweled men and the Kaiser’s ex-mistress in coffee lace, who came back from Europe with blonde hair and wonderful gestures and photogenic attitudes.” He saw Anna Pavlova perform in Lima in 1917 and was drawn to her old-world manners (how she wrapped her sable stole, her posture and gait), which he would experience again as an adult when he studied her hands as she served him tea carefully stirred with spoonfuls of sweet jam scooped from “hundreds” of little Russian pots. Ashton was also taken with Isadora Duncan, with her “enormous grace,” “extraordinary quality of repose,” and above all her “wonderful way of running, in which she … left herself behind.” All of this impressed itself deeply on Ashton’s imagination, and like Keynes and de Valois, he too would be fascinated by the fading world of his youth; an intense nostalgia for its elegance and perfume figures prominently in his dances.20
Academically weak, Ashton failed to get into the right English boarding schools and was shipped off to Dover College in Kent, arriving just after the war in 1919 to inherit Ezra Pound’s “botched civilization.” There he languished, despising the public school ethos of enforced sports and stifling convention but finding some relief in literature, poignant homosexual encounters, and excursions to London theater. Upon graduation Ashton moved to the city and worked in an office, but when his father committed suicide in 1924, plunging the family into emotional and financial distress, he took refuge in ballet. And in London’s high bohemia.21
He studied with the Russian choreographer Léonide Massine in London and danced on the music hall circuit—training himself, as de Valois had done, to entertain. Like so many others of his generation, he also plunged headlong into the recherché party life of “Bright Young People” hauntingly depicted in Waugh’s Vile Bodies: “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else.” At events like these, Ashton was a frequent and much loved guest. A keen observer and witty impersonator, he regaled London’s social and artistic elite with hilariously irreverent evocations of Sarah Bernhardt, Anna Pavlova, and Britain’s queens. In a party act that he called “fifty years a Queen,” he pretended to be Victoria wrapped in a black kimono with a powder puff for a hat. It was a mocking world of easy sex (homosexual, bisexual, whatever) and high fashion, of extravagant poses and flippant amusements. If there was also an edge of melancholy and despair, Ashton felt only the vaguest pangs. He was in his element and having a very good time.22
Many of the artists he met would become his collaborators. They were the highbrows and wits of what Noel Annan once called “our age,” many of whom hailed from Britain’s mandarin classes. They intersected with Bloomsbury but also went their own ways, and were stylistically even more inclined to satire and camp, parties, spoofs, and send-ups of stuffy establishment views. Among them were colorful personalities such as the composer Constant Lambert (1905–1951), conductor for the Camargo Society and musical director for the Vic-Wells and Sadler’s Wells Ballet, a brilliant mind and important influence on de Valois, Ashton, and later Fonteyn, but also an incorrigible drunk; or Lord Berners (1883–1950), a composer, painter, and writer whose eccentric and extravagant gatherings at his country house in Wiltshire featured painted pigeons and meals colored entirely pink or blue. Ashton a
lso created several ballets in collaboration with Cecil Beaton (1904–1980), best known in later years for his photographs of the queen and designs for My Fair Lady, and later still for his glossy images of the Rolling Stones (the essayist Cyril Connolly called him “Rip-van-With-It”). Beaton was delighted by Ashton’s wicked impersonations and asked him to pose as the “Grand Duchess Marie-Petroushka” for his satirical album My Royal Past (Ashton did). Osbert and Edith Sitwell were also regulars, and Edith’s mocking poem “Façade” inspired one of the choreographer’s most successful early dances.23
Ashton lived between two worlds: the constant rounds of parties and indulgences were offset by the discipline and rigor of his daily morning ballet class (which he rarely missed) and the rule-driven ethic of Russian ballet. Although he began dancing at the late age of twenty, he worked in London and Paris with many of the émigré artists of the Russian Imperial ballet who had also taught de Valois, including Nikolai Legat and Bronislava Nijinska. Like de Valois and Keynes, he too admired the Russians’ “superhuman” discipline (Nijinska routinely worked her dancers from ten in the morning until midnight) and he worked very hard to master its syntax and conventions. Yet his relationship to classical ballet was more complicated than theirs, interwoven with great insecurities that had to do with his late and piecemeal training, but also with his character, generation, and biography. He had grown up on the edge: of the middle class, of the Edwardian era, of the Eton-Oxbridge circuit, of the ballet, and of England itself. The traditions he inherited were disrupted and partial, if not “botched.” Lacking Keynes’s confidence and de Valois’s backbone, he shared the Lost Generation taste for satire and a yearning for the world destroyed by Britain’s “old men.” Moreover, for all his captivating charm and giddy social life, Ashton was also very much a loner—an outsider and observer—and never quite settled or rooted in anything, except perhaps his beloved Suffolk home and the English countryside.24
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