Rudolf Nureyev is the central character in Colum McCann's latest novel, Dancer. But, the Dublin author tells Eileen Battersby, it's not really a novel about ballet - in fact, he knows nothing about ballet
Colum McCann often looks surprised, not least when referring to the Dublin writer who has written a book about a Russian ballet dancer. The Dublin writer is, of course, himself, and the dancer is Rudolf Nureyev. Except that the book is not about ballet - "I don't know anything about ballet," he says with an uncomplicated directness.
And the novel is not really a book about Nureyev, or rather "it is not an attempt to present the facts and figures of his life - we already know them". Instead it is a fiction engaged with telling a story, the story of one man's life, a contradictory, volatile individual who happens to be a famous Russian ballet star, and the impact that one life had on the lives of those who hovered in his wake.
He could as easily have written about a crazed ruler, and his Nureyev - part artist, part athlete, part animal - comes across as a capricious despot. "He, this famous dancer, became as contradictory as any fictional character I could have invented. But it's not like I changed the facts and put him on a ranch in Argentina." With Elvis. He laughs, "Yes. Nureyev and Elvis ending up together on a ranch in Argentina, now there's a story."
Story is all to McCann. "We all have stories and I suppose the important thing is how we tell them, and who tells them. I mean, who would you like to tell your story?" It is the directness of McCann that makes you want to listen to him. He has ideas and dreams, a notion begins to interest him and he pursues it all the way, including to places such as the Piskarovskoye Cemetery on the outskirts of St Petersburg, where he happened upon a woman tending her mother's grave. From this chance discovery, he found the key to completing Dancer.
There is no pretence, McCann does not hold court. "I'm trying to write about what it means to tell a story and who has the right to tell that story." He thinks about this and continues: "Increasingly, I've begun to have qualms about the word 'fiction'."
Age has begun to catch up with his face. But he has a young man's voice and small, neat hands like a boy. He still has a sense of wonder. There is a freshness about his observations. At 38 he has done very well: he responded to his dreams and took risks when he was young enough to make them and has established himself as a writer. A father of two, he has settled in New York. "It is possible to become a New Yorker. I am one. But I can't become American, I'm not one. Allison [his wife] is, the kids are, but I'm not." He pauses and considers this. In conversation, McCann speaks readily and well but he is also busy thinking. It is not that he weighs his words and phrases - he doesn't - but he does consider what he is saying. At times, it seems that a chance comment might appear as if from his subconscious and having presented itself, he then assesses it more closely. He is certainly a writer but he is also a very good reader and his instinct has always kept his intelligence well at bay.
He is also an Irish writer who quietly, without either rebellion or shows of defiance, broke out of the parish. As early as This Side of Brightness (1998), based on the construction of New York city, he was proving that he didn't have to rely on the usual themes; neither knowing comedy nor Irish childhood were going to make him a writer - and they didn't. He chose the outside world instead.
This new novel, his third, takes many risks. It is sustained by a variety of voices, some more appealing than others. There is excess and there is goodness - some of the characters ordinary and real, others flamboyant and surreal. It has the chaos of life, catches the angers and the sorrows, and is shaped by a grasp of the small gestures that determine a life - and tell a story. One of its strenghts is that McCann never attempts to climb inside Nureyev's mind - his approach is too sophisticated for that. McCann could well be the last of the romantics, except his feel for the harsh and the ugly, both of which play a role in Dancer, is sharp. This novel is not a romance, it is not a tragedy. He does not see Nureyev as a tragic figure, or as a victim of fame.
Dead at 54 of AIDS, Nureyev, despite the fact that most of us now recall the last pictures of a god transformed into a grotesque ghoul with a terrifying grin, according to McCann, "had no regrets, he had a great time, a great life". Still, the book is about fame, how it effects people, how it creates myths and legends, how it indulges and destroys.
Most importantly, though, it draws on what has become a recurring McCann theme, that notion of exile. It is also about alienation, the history of the 20th century as seen through the lives of the famous from different contexts, the arts, politics, society and how these worlds converge. "And I hope that this doesn't sound pretentious, but it is also an attempt at a portrait of an artist. It's not so much a book about Nureyev as the quest for the unknowable. He is all sorts of things. A dancer, a sex symbol, a gay icon. But it is a book about storytelling and history and fiction."
Facts are present in the sense that yes, there was a young Tartar boy who became a dancer. Yes, he defected from Russia. There was all that drama at Paris airport. Yes, he formed a remarkable dance partnership with the British ballet legend, Margot Fonteyn, 20 years his senior. Yes, he was granted a 48-hour visa allowing him a final visit home to see his dying mother who didn't recognise him. Yes, Nureyev engaged in a frenetic off-stage world of high living and casual sex, and having destroyed his beauty and killed his genius, crashed to earth like a damaged bird and died.
The Nureyev McCann creates is a street urchin, a peasant-shrewd opportunist poised to grab anything that comes within reach. It is characterisation as impression or glimpse, rather than as direct portraiture. It works - these glimpses prove far more effective than a slavishly detailed narrative of the bio-pic style. We observe the dancer through the impact he has on those around him, and also through his own words as written by McCann. "I worked hard at getting the voice. At first I wasn't going to go near it," he makes a "not" with a bargepole-like gesture, but then recalls how in the course of the dancer writing a letter to his sister, "I caught the voice". It is that of a spoilt, petulant character; McCann points out how Nureyev's language in the novel becomes more coarse as he grows in confidence and fame but "he could also be entertaining". He was however loud, theatrical, always on the make, calculating.
McCann makes no apologies for Nureyev. He does not sentimentalise him, not even in the passage in which he admits his mother does not recognise him. McCann refers to the dancer as being intent on reading great literature, loving great music, admiring beautiful things. "He had a great eye." Nureyev understood that the true artist valued all art. No claims for his personality are made, yet when I ask him, "do you think he had a sense of humour?", McCann's face brightens and he says enthusiastically: "Oh, he did, he certainly did."
Nureyev, in his prime, had such a strong, bold face, full blooded, angry, slightly crazy, always moving that bit out of control - a face that evoked comparisons with a stallion.
Ballet book or not, we begin discussing an earlier Russian ballet dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky (1888-1950); McCann mentions Nureyev buying pictures of Nijinsky. Both dancers possessed a manic energy and grace. McCann mentions that there are some commentators who have said that Nureyev was technically not the greatest of dancers, but Nureyev had presence and a sexual power. Nijinsky became insane and died in a mental hospital.
While making no claims to have become an expert on dance, McCann is alert to the agony and anger that creates a great dance performance - "It is athletic and artistic." He shows me the US edition of Dancer, a beautiful hardback with an opulent fabric like a brocade jewel box, as if a relic from the days Tsarist Russia. He says the book was given to the New York Times dance critic to review, causing both of us to say at once, "but it's not a ballet book, it's a novel".
Facts, facts, facts: no matter how hard a novelist tries to avoid them, they tend to infiltrate. "I've invented things and people to suit the story. Even Anna [the former ballet dancer who in the novel helps the young dancer], I invented her." There is nothing wilful about McCann the novelist. He is not defiant either. He took a story and stories, and has made a story and stories out of it. At no stage does he make his Nureyev a political symbol, though he does give a sense of the Russia he left and then regretted losing the right to return to. The dancer remains human, no saint, indeed closer to devil but at all times an individual, however remote, however elusive.
"I don't think anyone really knew him . . . he treated his lovers so badly. All of these women who came to him, gave him presents, he had contempt for them."
Dancer is episodic and at times there is a sense of a roll call of famous names. But then, McCann has grasped that society appears to revolve around the names of the moment and Nureyev was certainly one of them..
Writing the book has encouraged him to go to the ballet. "I went with my daughter, she's five and there was one thing she said, looking at the dancers, you know, and the girls in the corps. She said: 'Daddy are they real, like us; do they walk down the street as well?' I thought it was very true. The dancers look so beautiful on the stage; could they really be just like us?"
In Dancer, McCann has certainly evoked some sense of the man behind the magic. "It's all about story and storytelling," he says, as certain as a preacher is of the existence of heaven. "Nureyev and Elvis on a ranch in Argentina, that's a story - now to tell it."
- Dancer by Colm McCann is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £12,99