A Woman's Photograph
My Life. By Isadore. Duncan. (Gollancz. 15s.) " I MIGHT publish my photograph and ask the readers what they think," wrote Isadora Duncan, considering the question of whether or not she was too old for love. And, as a matter
of fact, in writing this autobiography she did do exactly this thing. For this big, extraordinary book is indeed just that • —the photograph of a woman.
This astonishing woman wrote down the story of her life, not, indeed, as it was, but at any rate as she saw it. It was not a question of her apologizing or not apologizing, excusing
or not excusing, this or that incident. The very idea of apology or excuse could never so much as have occurred to her. She just wrote down what it had all seemed like to her, and, stepping back, asked the reader, " What do you know about that ? " In this way she wrote an excellent book. In no other way could she have done so, for she was not,
one gets the impression, a particularly intelligent woman in the ordinary sense of the word. But though we may think that all her ideas about Art, her .w hole conception of the Dance,
were completely erroneous ; even though one may infinitely prefer, as does the present writer, the Russian Ballet, which she so disliked, to her own school ; somehow or other, one is bound to see that she " was somebody."
Every now and then, even in her book, in the unfamiliar sphere of writing, which she did not pretend to have mastered, she says something remarkable. Take, for example, this thought on the Puritan spirit of America. She is giving an account of her Aunt Augusta :—
" I realize now how her whole life was ruined by what would be difficult to explain nowadays—the Puritan spirit of America. The early settlers in America brought with them a psychic sense which has never been lost entirely. And their strength of character imposed itself upon the wild country, taming the wild men, the Indians, and the wild animals in a remarkable manner. But they were always trying to tame themselves as well, with disastrous results artistically."
She has said something just, which admits both the quality and the defects of Puritanism. It is an occasional passage of real wisdom which makes the reading of her book so pleasant.
Yet we must admit that a great deal of it is of a very different quality from what we have quoted. Whole chapters consist of little more than the record of a brilliant, charming, and beautiful child rushing about the Europe of the first decade of the twentieth century, hysterically admired, hysterically admiring, but quite uncomprehending of what was going on about her. And yet even these chapters have a value, for they give one a sense of what the rich, cultured, and, above all, secure European Society of that date was like. They show us the world not only of Isadore Duncan, but of
Dose, of Gordon Craig, of D'Annunzio, of Cosima Wagner, and of German princelings and Austrian Archdukes playing at being Maecenases to dozens of -musicians, dancers, painters,
and actors.
When the authoress speaks of Art she is usually, in our view, quite wrong ; but when she speaks of Life she has usually something to say worth hearing. In America the book has been described as extraordinarily daring, because she records accurately and clearly which of the famous men of her time were her lovers and which were not. Isadora Duncan, to put it bluntly, had no morals at all. She was in the broadest sense of the word a revolutionary and a complete egotist.
We have left ourselves no space to write on the tragic close of Isadora Duncan's story, the almost unbearable misfortunes which dogged her path towards the end. The death of all three of her children in infancy was a blow from which she certainly never fully recovered. Her own ghastly death in a motor accident in Nice seemed an appropriate end for this courageous woman, against whom the Fates, after showering everything that this world has to offer into her lap, turned at last with savagery.
Previous page
