The Books: Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘Isadora’, by Janet Flanner

Next up on the essays shelf:

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

Finished up with the excerpts from The Fun of It, a collection of “Talk of the Town” pieces from The New Yorker. Before that, I posted some excerpts from The New Gilded Age, a collection of financial writing from The New Yorker during the late 1990s, a heady insane time. There are many of these compilations out there from the magazine: humor pieces, food writing, sports writing, and fiction. I love the layout and the editorial choices. They are elegant collections. The Fun of It is my favorite, due to the breadth and depth of the subjects covered in the “Talk of the Towns” since the 1920s.

But this collection, called Life Stories, is also superb. It is a collection of “profiles” from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick. There are some bona fide celebrities covered, but not the usual suspects. Joan Acocella’s famous profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov, called “The Soloist”, included in her magnificent book of essays Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, is here, but so too are profiles of regular people: an unforgettable piece from 1956 involving a visit to a Staten Island cemetery and a long chat with a man named “Mr. Hunter”, two brothers holed up in their Upper West Side apartments trying to get to the end of the mystery of “Pi”, and a host of others. The pieces span the 20th century, one of the best parts of these compilations. You can see how the writing style in the magazine started, changed, developed.

Today’s piece is by Janet Flanner, the Paris editor of The New Yorker in the 1920s. It is from 1927 and is about Isadora Duncan (who, incidentally, died in 1927, in Nice). The eerie thing about Flanner’s piece is that Isadora is still alive at the time of the writing, and discusses what she will be doing in Nice. It discusses her history, which was tumultuous to say the least. She was a serious “Red” (she moved to Russia, but found the actual “Reds” too middle-class for her taste), she had kids out of wedlock by two different fathers (one of them being Gordon Craig, the famous set designer/visionary son of great English actress Ellen Terry) – and, horrifyingly, both of her children died in an accident with a car (the nanny stopped the car and forgot to put the emergency brake on: the car slid into a nearby pond, drowning the nanny and the two children. Difficult to comprehend the tragedy).

While her personal life is fascinating, and she intersected with many famous people, her legacy of modern dance (and her death, which has become a punch-line, unfortunately, for people who probably don’t even know who Isadora Duncan is) is what she is known for. A pioneer, in the same vein as Martha Graham (also profiled by Joan Acocella), she was part of the great Modernist push of the early 20th century. Classical forms, in the novel, in music, in dance, started fracturing. WWI pushed the cracks further apart, never to be put back together again. Isadora Duncan started out with typical dance classes (which she also taught), but form always fascinated her, and how form can be stretched, and sometimes even broken. She danced bare foot (a huge scandal at the time), with bare legs, and flowing skirts.

A far cry from bound-up corseted ballerinas in tights and stiff tutus.

Reviews were mixed. But many saw in her the future. There were many who saw her perform, in London, Paris, other places in Europe, who began experimenting in their own ways with the typical forms. Like Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan thought the Form needed a lot of work to express what was inside the dancer. A revolution in dance, where choreographer is King. Of course, when a woman is a pioneer, it is often about Sex. So, too, with Isadora. Hard to believe it was so controversial that she danced in bare feet, but that was what happened.

Her personal life is marked by tragedy. Suicides, untimely deaths, scandal. Maybe because of all of this, her success began to wane in the 20s. She lost money. She had opened a school in Moscow, and then dropped it. She wandered around.

There is a memorable sketch of her from F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who encountered her in Nice in the mid-1920s. She was on her way down at that point. Gerald and Sara Murphy met up with the Fitzgeralds and Isadora Duncan was at the next table.

Here is an excerpt from Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda:

The Fitzgeralds joined the Murphys one evening for dinner at an inn located at St.-Paul-de-Vence in the mountains above Nice … It was perhaps ten o’clock and they had just finished their meal … At a nearby table sat Isadora Duncan surrounded by three admirers. Gerald Murphy said: “Scott didn’t know who she was, so I told him. He immediately went to her table and sat at her feet. She ran her fingers through his hair and she called him her centurion. But she was, you see, an old lady [she was 46] by this time. Her hair was red, no, purple really – the color of her dress – and she was quite heavy.”

Zelda was quietly watching Scott and Duncan together and then suddenly, with no word of warning or explanation, she stood up on her chair and leaped across both Gerald and the table into the darkness of the stairwell behind him. “I was sure she was dead. We were all stunned and motionless.” Zelda reappeared within moments, standing perfectly still at the top of the stone stairs. Sara ran to her and wiped the blood from her knees and dress. Gerald said, “I don’t remember what Scott did. The first thing I remember thinking was that it had not been ugly. I said that to myself over and over again. I’ve never been able to forget it.”

Rather a disturbing and illuminating incident, which then is described quite differently in a piece co-written by Scott and Zelda, called ‘Auction – Model, 1934′.

Two glass automobiles for salt and pepper stolen from the cafe in Saint-Paul (Alpes-Maritimes). Nobody was looking because Isadora Duncan was giving one of her last parties at the next table. She had got too old and fat to care whether people accepted her theories of life and art, and she gallantly toasted the world’s obliviousness in lukewarm champagne. There were village dogs baying at a premature white exhausted August moon and there were long dark shadows folded accordion-like along the steps of the steep streets of Saint-Paul. We autographed the guest-book.

One of the best things about that time is that the people who were essentially gossiping were all excellent writers. The stories resonate, from all different perspectives. But it is a sad picture of a woman who is seen as an “old lady”, although she was only 46, patting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s head (he who had just published The Great Gatsby to bad and indifferent reviews), and calling him her “centurion”.

Whatever actually happened that night in Nice, one thing is clear: Isadora Duncan was a legend in her own time.

And so this piece by Janet Flanner, written in the same year as Isadora Duncan’s sudden and violent death, is a bit haunting, because she gives us background of who Isadora is, where she has gone, where she is going, and wonders what she will do next?

Here is an excerpt.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘Isadora’, by Janet Flanner

Like a ghost from the grave Isadora Duncan is dancing again at Nice. A decade ago her art, animated by her extraordinary public personality, came as close to founding an esthetic renaissance as American morality would allow, and the provinces especially had a narrow escape. Today her body, whose Attic splendor once brought Greece to Kansas and Kalamazoo, is approaching its half-century mark. Her spirit is still green as a bay tree, but her flesh is worn, perhaps by the weight of laurels. She is the last of the trilogy of great female personalities our century produced. Two of them, Duse and Bernhardt, have gone to their elaborate national tombs. Only Isadora Duncan, the youngest, the American, remains wandering the European earth.

No one has taken Isadora’s place in her own country and she is not missed. Of that fervor for the classic dance which she was first to bring to a land bred on “Turkey in the Straw”, beneficial signs remain from which she alone has not benefited. Eurythmic movements now appear in the curricula of girls’ schools. Vestal virgins frieze about the altar fire of St.-Marks-in-the-Bouwerie on Sabbath afternoons. As a cross between gymnasia and God, Greek dance camps flourish in the Catskills, where under the summer spruce, metaphysics and muscles are welded in an Ilissan hocus-pocus for the female young. Lisa, one of her first pupils, teaches in the studio of the Champs-Elysees. Isadora’s sister Elizabeth, to whom Greek might still be Greek if it had not been for Isadora, has a toga school in Berlin. Her brother Raymond, who operates a modern craft-school in Paris, wears sandals and Socratic robes as if they were a family coat-of-arms. Isadora alone has neither sandals nor school. Most grandiose of all her influences, Diaghileff’s Russian Ballet – which ironically owed its national rebirth to the inspiration of Isadora, then dancing with new terpsichorean ideals in Moscow – still seasons as an exotic spectacle in London and Monte Carlo. Only Isadora, animator of all these forces, has somehow become obscure. Only she with her heroic sculptural movements has dropped by the wayside where she lies inert like one of those beautiful battered pagan tombs that still line the Sacred Road between Eleusis and the city of the Parthenon.

Isadora arrived in our plain and tasteless Republic before the era of the half-nude revue, before the discovery of what is now called our Native Literary School, even before the era of the celluloid sophistication of the cinema, which by its ubiquity does so much to unite the cosmopolisms of Terre Haute and New York. What America now has, and gorges on in the way of sophistication, it then hungered for. Repressed by generations of Puritanism, it longed for bright, visible and blatant beauty presented in a public form the simple citizenry could understand. Isadora appeared as a half-clothed Greek. . . . A Paris couturier recently said women’s modern freedom in dress is largely due to Isadora. She was the first artist to appear uncinctured, barefooted and free. She arrived like a glorious bounding Minerva in the midst of a cautious corseted decade. The clergy, hearing of (though supposedly without ever seeing) her bare calf, denounced it as violently as if it had been golden. Despite its longings, for a moment, America hesitated, Puritanism rather than poetry coupling lewd with nude in rhyme. But Isadora, originally from California and by then from Berlin, Paris and other points, arrived bearing her gifts as a Greek. She came like a figure from the Elgin marbles. The world over, and in America particularly, Greek sculpture was recognized to be almost notorious for its purity. The overpowering sentiment for Hellenic culture, even in the unschooled United States, silenced the outcries. Isadora had come as antique art and with such backing she became a cult.