US Edition Duncan Fallowell reviews Bloomsbury Ballerina by Judith Mackrell
As a soloist with Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, Lydia Lopokova was never in the front rank, but the English took her to their hearts and so Judith Mackrell is right that she merits a biography.
As to why Lopokova became such a hit in 1920s London, we learn that the English loved her sloppiness, the way she "frequently ended up dancing with a shoe ribbon trailing, or her clothes half buttoned".
Not that Lopokova was an amateur. She was born in St Petersburg in 1891 and received the most rigorous dance training in the world at the Imperial Theatre School. She joined Diaghilev in 1910 for his second season in Paris as the youngest member of the company.
She was sufficiently noted to receive and accept an offer from a New York impresario and she never worked in Russia again.
After three years of ramshackle shows across America, Lopokova vanished, saying she wanted to become an actress, but probably to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. When eventually she did appear on the Broadway stage, it was a disaster, but she saved herself by becoming engaged to an American journalist.
Better still, Diaghilev turned up in New York in 1916 with his company. She ditched the fiancé and rejoined the ballet without a moment's hesitation.
The company sailed for Spain, where she became Stravinsky's mistress, the pair of them communing over the agony of Mother Russia. Back in America, she partnered Nijinsky, who didn't think much of her. Next we're in Rome; then Paris for the première of Parade, the world's first Cubist ballet; followed by a tour of South America - back to Lisbon - Spain - Paris - and finally London, for a season at the Coliseum at the end of the Great War.
Aldous Huxley described the experience as "pure beauty" and the audience saw it as the herald of the joys of peace. Mackrell conveys this sense of revelation, but the context is unbalanced. She fails to assess the Russian Ballet's six astonishing seasons in London before 1914.
The important thing for the author is that Lopokova spent Victory Day dining with the Sitwells and later went on to a party full of Bloomsbury Group people.
It was with the company's triumphant return to London in the early 1920s that the economist John Maynard Keynes, at 38 years of age, fell in love with her. This, his first erotic interest in a woman, was probably the most extraordinary event in Bloomsbury Group history, but Mackrell doesn't really take it on.
The Bloomsbury Group, who regarded Keynes as their possession, were catty. Clive Bell spoke for most of them when he said Lopokova's spiritual home was Woolworths.
None the less, Keynes, a gentle don at heart, "was fascinated by her dancer's frank acceptance of her body". After her divorce, they married in London in 1925. It was a warm and successful union and they divided their time between his house in Gordon Square and Tilton on the Gage estate in Sussex.
Lopokova retired from ballet in 1933 and after Keynes's first heart attack in 1937 he became her full-time job until his death in 1946.
After a lifetime of travel, Lopokova never went abroad again, yet lived for another 35 years, a period to which her biographer devotes only 28 quiet pages. But I loved those last, elegiac pages more than anything else in this bouncy but unsurprising book.
Tilton's farm manager, Logan Thomson, became her principal companion. "Lydia liked to relax in an armchair, beside Logan, from which she could watch the changing weather from the open front door. Overhead was an electric heater towards whose heat the couple gently inclined their faces..."
She died in 1981 at a nursing home on the coast at Seaford. Her ashes were scattered from the top of Firle Beacon, as Maynard's had been.