Isadora: A Sensational Life
By Peter Kurth
Little, Brown, 652 pages, $29.95
” ‘A dancer can never become very great because her fame doesn’t last,’ ” Russian futurist poet Sergei Esenin once told his lover, Isadora Duncan. ” ‘[A]fter you are dead no one will remember. Within a few years all your great fame will be gone. No Isadora! But . . . I, Esenin, shall leave my poems behind me. And poems live. Poems like mine live forever.’ “
This assessment was not only brutish, it was wrong. Today, almost 75 years after her death, Isadora Duncan’s name is still a household word (at least in some households), but Esenin’s has been largely relegated to the footnotes; and one of the virtues of Peter Kurth’s excellent and engrossing new biography is to explain not only how this happened, but why. He has managed this despite the fact that, as he put it in an article in Salon magazine, when “I signed to do Isadora’s biography 10 years ago, [I] knew nothing about Isadora Duncan; nothing at all,” a defect that he manages to make into a virtue by substituting documentary evidence for dance criticism. If his book is short on discussion of Duncan’s technique, or her place in the continuum of 20th Century dance (and it is), it’s rich with quotations and cameos and historical context, most surprisingly in its portrayal of Duncan’s years in Bolshevik Russia, about which little has been written, but about which Kurth, whose previous biography is of Czar Nicholas’ daughter Anastasia, is authoritative.
Duncan was born in 1877 in Oakland, Calif. Her father, a newspaper editor, poet, speculator and bon vivant, deserted his family when his marriage and his bank collapsed about the same time. His much younger wife raised her children alone, bolstered by her free-thinking, bohemian principles. When little Isadora was sent home from school in disgrace for declaring there was no Santa Claus, her mother applauded, telling her, ” ‘There is no Santa Claus, and there is no God, only your own spirit to help you.’ “
“In fact,” writes Kurth, “there was more. There was music, and there was art–art with a capital A.” Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann and Chopin were played on the Duncans’ piano, Botticelli reproductions and prints of the Parthenon hung on their walls, and theatrical legends like Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt all appeared on the boards across the bay in San Francisco. As soon as Isadora and her three siblings were old enough, they began giving dancing lessons and performing high-minded interpretive theater pieces that combined poetry, singing and dance. And when San Francisco proved too small for their artistic ideas–or because the Duncans ran out of money, or both–the family decamped en masse to Chicago and thence to New York.
Impatient with traditional theater and influenced by the thinking of clothes-reformers and physical culturists like Rene Delsarte, Duncan was evolving an aesthetic of movement that ran counter to the ” ‘inane coquetry’ ” of contemporary theatrical dance, and particularly ballet, whose artifice and stylization she found ” ‘ugly.’ ” She wasn’t interested in mimetic or narrative dancing; to her it was enough that the dance be about itself, or about the music to which it was danced. Barefoot, her hair down, clad in diaphanous, neoclassic draperies, she “interpreted” the music of Chopin, the Greek myth of Pan and Echo, or the paintings of Botticelli, hoping ” ‘to blend together a poem, a melody and a dance, so that you will not listen to the music, see the dance or hear the poem, but will live in the scene and the thought that all are expressing.’ ” Thirty years before George Balanchine arrived in America, she foreshadowed his exhortation to “see the music and hear the dance.”
In New York, Duncan began to establish herself as a recitalist in rented theaters and society drawing rooms, but before she could achieve her goal, catastrophe intervened, as it was regularly to do in her life and career. A hotel fire destroyed the Duncans’ belongings; undaunted, they simply pulled up stakes and crossed the Atlantic, where first in London and then Paris, Duncan’s dances drew headlines and audiences. Soon she was fending off sculptor Auguste Rodin’s amorous advances and hobnobbing with George Bernard Shaw’s muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell; arts patron Winaretta de Polignac; the future French Premier Georges Clemenceau; and composer Gustave Faure.
And then, faster than you can say “superstar,” this “barefoot dancer” and “naked nymph” was thrilling and scandalizing standing-room audiences all across Europe and enjoying her first love affair, with the leading actor of the Hungarian National Theatre, a defloration she related with unblushing candor in her memoirs. Thus was the pattern set for what Kurth rightly (if somewhat floridly) calls “a sensational life,” for Duncan not only caused sensations, she sought them out.
She had a weakness, if it can be called that, for great men, at whose feet she loved to sit–and at whose heads she sometimes threw herself: Ernst Haeckl, the German biologist and philosopher; director Konstantin Stanislavsky; painter Francis Picabia; Shaw (to whom she cried, on being introduced, ” ‘Come to me . . . I have loved you all my life!’ “); photographer Edward Steichen (whose wife named Duncan as a corespondent in a divorce action); and poet and Fascist leader Gabriele D’Annunzio, among others. But she wasn’t a celebrity groupie; she was genuinely excited by their intellects and artistic achievements. She read Whitman and Darwin and Nietzsche; she knew and studied the composers whose work she danced to. In fact, she was one of the first choreographers to use music not specifically written for the dance-symphonies of Beethoven, Tschaikovsky’s “Marche Slave,” Wagner’s “Liebestod”–which earned her the condemnation of some critics, like composer Rimsky-Korsakov.
She lived large, at least when there was money to do so. There were spacious apartments and dresses from Poiret and Fortuny, alfresco banquets in the park at Versailles and oceans of champagne. When Duncan went to Bayreuth, the holy of holies of the Wagnerian cult, she arrived “in full antique regalia, riding through the fairy-tale Bavarian town in an open carriage, waving at crowds”–and crowds surrounded her here as everywhere. But she could manage in adversity, doing everything for herself if need be. When she opened a school in a stripped-to the-floorboards mansion in post-revolutionary Moscow, she laid the carpet herself and covered the only furnishings, a chandelier and a heater, in silk fabric to make them seem beautiful.
She could make the bold–the sensational–gesture, as when she bared her left breast in imitation of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” in her World War I era interpretation of the Marseillaise, but she could also display a more private kind of bravery. In 1913 her adored children, Gordon Craig’s daughter Deirdre and Paris Singer’s son Patrick, were drowned in a car accident; overwhelmed with grief, she nonetheless managed an exquisite funeral service for them at which she was determined there should be ” ‘no tears. . . . They never had a sorrow and we must not be sorrowful today. I want to be brave enough . . . to help all the other mothers of the world who have lost their babies.’ “
After dancing, love was everything to her. ” ‘I was born for love,’ ” she wrote a friend after she’d lost her virginity. When she was learning Russian so as to communicate with Esenin, she told her teacher,
” ‘I think you’d better teach me what I ought to say to a beautiful young man when I want to kiss him.’ ” She should have asked what to say when the beautiful young man did her wrong, though, for on the whole her partners treated her badly.
The narcissistic Craig, a theatrical designer whom she called ” ‘one of the most extraordinary geniuses of our epoch,’ ” had a marriage, two affairs and eight children–legitimate and illegitimate–behind him when they became lovers, but Duncan was undeterred. ” ‘You have given [me] joy and love unspeakable,’ ” she wrote him, with characteristic hyperbole. ” ‘What shall I give you in return–All that I have in my power to give & that is not enough.’ ” Craig gladly took advantage of her money and her connections; but when she was pregnant with his child he left her to her own devices in a seacoast town in Holland, and after the baby’s birth he expected her to resume her role as cash cow for his theatrical ventures while he amused himself with other women.
Then there was Esenin, her last lover, whom she met when she went to Russia in 1921 to ” ‘give my art to the Russians.’ ” The 26-year-old poet, already an alcoholic, maintained that because love ” ‘does not exist,’ ” he was justified in ” ‘sucking a woman dry, drinking her right up, then I don’t need her anymore.’ ” Duncan was 44, henna-haired and running to fat, and she allowed herself to be sucked. Esenin lived off her, made fun of her to his friends and abused her physically, until they parted for good in 1924, at which point Esenin checked into an asylum and she left Russia.
Perhaps the kindest of her liaisons was with Paris Singer, the heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and later a developer of Palm Beach, Fla., who supported Duncan, rather than the other way around. But his interest in her was primarily and almost exclusively sexual; she called him ” ‘an expert voluptuary,’ ” and she should know. Although he indulged her, he never took her seriously, which was a problem because Duncan took herself and her art very seriously indeed. Unsurprisingly, their relationship ended when Singer optioned Madison Square Garden for her use on one of her American tours. ” ‘What do you think I am, a circus?’ ” she cried.
Despite such operatics, there was a purity and seriousness to Duncan, and it’s one of Kurth’s virtues that–while he hasn’t stinted on the juicy gossip–he pays real attention to this. And he does so by letting her speak for herself, something she often did with a clarity and originality surprising for someone with a reputation for fuzzy-headed vaporizing. ” ‘The movements of the human body must correspond to its form,’ ” she told the Berlin Press Club in 1903, sounding a proto-Bauhaus note, and when the dancer of the future arrived, she would “dance the freedom of woman . . . the highest intelligence in the freest body.” No wonder the Greenwich Village radicals and feminists of the 1920s felt, as did Floyd Dell, editor of The Masses, that, ” ‘One must have seen Isadora Duncan to die happy.’ ” And she put her ideals into practice. Her first school, established in Berlin in 1904, drew on the ideas of Kant, Rousseau, Darwin, Robert Ingersoll and others, and gave pupils a grounding in humanities, languages and the arts, as well as classes in dancing and gymnastics; Kurth points out that it “predated Maria Montessori’s ‘child-directed’ learning centers by nearly three years.”
Duncan kept dancing too long, becoming at last a figure of mockery — a blowsy, middle-age woman heaving about in all-too-revealing draperies. Balanchine, who saw her in Russia, thought she was ” ‘awful. . . . a drunken, fat woman who for hours was rolling around like a pig.’ ” But Kurth makes us believe she persevered not just for applause or money but because she was truly devoted to her vision. ” ‘Even were I legless I might still create my Art,’ ” she told a reporter in 1923, when she still had her legs but not much else.
If there’s something verging on the ridiculous in her statement, there is also a kind of gallantry, on view even at the end, when she flung her blood-red, fringed shawl around her shoulders before taking off for a test drive in a racing-model sports car she was thinking of buying. “As Isadora sat down,” writes Kurth, with the pitch-perfect narrative voice that makes this hefty book a lightning page-turner, “the long fringes of her shawl fell over the side of the car and caught in the spokes of the left rear wheel. . . . [T]he car roared off, and . . . with the first, sharp turn of the wheel, her neck was broken and she was dead.”
