the Dance
and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth in a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream with Ada Rehan.
The family followed her to New York. They rented a big room in Carnegie Hall, put mattresses in the corners, hung drapes on the wall and invented the first Greenwich Village studio.
They were never more than one jump ahead of the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeople out of bills, standing the landlady up for the rent, coaxing handouts out of rich philistines.
Isadora arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin
danced to readings of Omar Khayyam for society women at Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned they lost all their trunks and the very long bill they owed and sailed for London on a cattleboat
to escape the materialism of their native America.
In London at the British Museum
they discovered the Greeks;
the Dance was Greek.
Under the smoky chimneypots of London, in the soot-coated squares they danced in muslin tunics, they copied poses from Greek vases, went to lectures, artgalleries, concerts, plays, sopped up in a winter fifty years of Victorian culture.
Back to the Greeks.
Whenever they were put out of their lodgings for nonpayment of rent Isadora led them to the best hotel and engaged a suite and sent the waiters scurrying for lobster and champagne and fruits outofseason; nothing was too good for Artists, Duncans, Greeks;
and the nineties London liked her gall.
In Kensington and even in Mayfair she danced at parties in private houses,
the Britishers, Prince Edward down,
were carried away by her preraphaelite beauty
her lusty American innocence
her California accent.
After London, Paris during the great exposition of nineteen hundred. She danced with Loïe Fuller. She was still a virgin too shy to return the advances of Rodin the great master, completely baffled by the extraordinary behavior of Loïe Fuller’s circle of crackbrained invert beauties. The Duncans were vegetarians, suspicious of vulgarity and men and materialism. Raymond made them all sandals.
Isadora and her mother and her brother Raymond went about Europe in sandals and fillets and Greek tunics
staying at the best hotels leading the Greek life of nature in a flutter of unpaid bills.
Isadora’s first solo recital was at a theater in Budapest;
after that she was the diva, had a loveaffair with a leading actor; in Munich the students took the horses out of her carriage. Everything was flowers and handclapping and champagne suppers. In Berlin she was the rage.
With the money she made on her German tour she took the Duncans all to Greece. They arrived on a fishingboat from Ithaca. They posed in the Parthenon for photographs and danced in the Theater of Dionysus and trained a crowd of urchins to sing the ancient chorus from the Suppliants and built a temple to live in on a hill overlooking the ruins of ancient Athens, but there was no water on the hill and their money ran out before the temple was finished
so they had to stay at the Hôtel d’Angleterre and run up a bill there. When credit gave out they took their chorus back to Berlin and put on the Suppliants in ancient Greek. Meeting Isadora in her peplum marching through the Tiergarten at the head of her Greek boys marching in order all in Greek tunics, the kaiserin’s horse shied,
and her highness was thrown.
Isadora was the vogue.
She arrived in St. Petersburg in time to see the night funeral of the marchers shot down in front of the Winter Palace in 1905. It hurt her. She was an American like Walt Whitman; the murdering rulers of the world were not her people; the marchers were her people; artists were not on the side of the machineguns; she was an American in a Greek tunic; she was for the people.
In St. Petersburg, still under the spell of the eighteenthcentury ballet of the court of the Sunking,
her dancing was considered dangerous by the authorities.
In Germany she founded a school with the help of her sister Elizabeth who did the organizing, and she had a baby by Gordon Craig.
She went to America in triumph as she’d always planned and harried the home philistines with a tour; her followers were all the time getting pinched for wearing Greek tunics; she found no freedom for Art in America.
Back in Paris it was the top of the world; Art meant Isadora. At the funeral of the Prince de Polignac she met the mythical millionaire (sewingmachine king) who was to be her backer and to finance her school. She went off with him in his yacht (whatever Isadora did was Art)
to dance in the Temple at Paestum
only for him,
but it rained and the musicians all got drenched. So they all got drunk instead.
Art was the millionaire life. Art was whatever Isadora did.
She was carrying the millionaire’s child to the great scandal of the oldlady clubwomen and spinster artlovers when she danced on her second American tour;
she took to drinking too much and stepping to the footlights and bawling out the boxholders.
Isadora was at the height of glory and scandal and power and wealth, her school going, her millionaire was about to build her a theater in Paris, the Duncans were the priests of a cult, (Art was whatever Isadora did),
when the car that was bringing her two children home from the other side of Paris stalled on a bridge across the Seine. Forgetting that he’d left the car in gear the chauffeur got out to crank the motor. The car started, knocked down the chauffeur, plunged off the bridge into the Seine.
The children and their nurse were drowned.
The rest of her life moved desperately on
in the clatter of scandalized tongues, among the kidding faces of reporters, the threatening of bailiffs, the expostulations of hotelmanagers bringing overdue bills.
Isadora drank too much, she couldn’t keep her hands off good-looking young men, she dyed her hair various shades of brightred, she never took the trouble to make up her face properly, was careless about her dress, couldn’t bother to keep her figure in shape, never could keep track of her money
but a great sense of health
filled the hall
when the pearshaped figure with the beautiful great arms tramped forward slowly from the back of the stage.
She was afraid of nothing; she was a great dancer.
In her own city of San Francisco the politicians wouldn’t let her dance in the Greek Theater they’d built under her influence. Wherever she went she gave offense to the philistines. When the war broke out she danced the Marseillaise, but it didn’t seem quite respectable and she gave offense by refusing to give up Wagner or to show the proper respectable feelings
of satisfaction at the butchery.
On her South American tour
she picked up men everywhere,
a Spanish painter, a couple of prizefighters, a stoker on the boat, a Brazilian poet,
brawled in tangohalls, bawled out the Argentines for niggers from the footlights, lushly triumphed in Montevideo and Brazil; but if she had money she couldn’t help scandalously spending it on tangodancers, handouts, afterthetheater suppers, the generous gesture, no, all on my bill. The managers gypped her. She was afraid of nothing, never ashamed in the public eye of the clatter of scandalized tongues, the headlines in the afternoon papers.
When October split the husk off the old world she remembered St. Petersburg, the coffins lurching through the silent streets, the white faces, the clenched fists that night in St. Petersburg, and danced the Marche Slave
and waved red cheesecloth under the noses of the Boston old ladies in Symphony Hall,