“Isadora Duncan”, were the only words Edward Gordon Craig noted in his 1904 diary for the day they first made love. The next entry, after two days of the same, was equally brief: “God Almighty.”

This is the sort of juicy snippet you would expect to find in a book with such an attention-grabbing title. Expect more. Peter Kurth has written the best biography we have of an astonishing and often underrated woman. He writes so well that only the weight of paper will occasionally remind you of his subject’s amplitude. Working from an assembly of sources vast enough to make you dizzy, he succeeds in making you love, hate and honour America’s greatest dancer, sometimes all at once. His voice ranges from the agreeably sardonic (his account of Isadora’s family dancing their way, barefoot and tunic-clad, through the villages of Greece is not to be missed) to the stern (it was probably her relentless self-display, he suggests, which caused Isadora’s extreme unpopularity at Bayreuth, rather than her rash criticisms of Wagner).

Kurth’s tone is never censorious and this, given the wildness of Isadora’s excesses, the hard time she gave her pupils, the demands she made on her friends, the ruthlessness of her genius, is impressive. All views are offered; distance is, on almost all occasions, maintained. The exceptions are understandable. Her courage after the terrible drowning in a runaway car of her two children in 1913 demands admiration. The ridicule she heaped on the nervous pupil whom she forced to perform an impromptu dance in a moonlit temple does not. The suffering of others left Isadora untouched.

Kurth’s best decision was to give room to Isadora’s own voice. For anybody who has not read the astonishing memoir she wrote when desperate for money in 1927, shortly before her crimson scarf caught under a car-wheel and broke her neck, this is a treat. Nobody wrote with more vivacity about Isadora than she herself, or with more amusement. A Boston reporter was urged to draw attention to her striking beauty. And remember, she added, “that I wore diaphanous draperies. I don’t know what I should do if I had an interview where my draperies were not called diaphanous”. When in doubt on a tricky date, she counselled: “Go to the best hotel.” Tongue in cheek, she informed one startled observer that she was dancing, not for some empty benches but 4,000 attentive spirits. She was heroic to describe her young Russian husband as “a wee bit eccentric” when he made the fourth, fifth or sixth attempt to kill her; she was great, given the tragedies she had experienced, to teach her Russian pupils to dance with joy. “Happiness,” she explained, “is always convincing.”

Her influence was immense and not always good. Young girls all over America and Europe draped themselves in yards of cheesecloth and gambolled on lawns at the height of the Isadora craze; more serious dancers adopted stiff attitudes in classical drapes. This was not to Isadora’s liking; occasionally, invited to watch a display of “plastic” or “Greek” attitudes, she wept with despair at the misinterpretation of her teaching. Fluid movement and expressiveness were key to her method. She had, remembered Sir Frederick Ashton, “a way of running, in which she what I call ‘left herself behind’ and you felt the breeze running through her hair, and everything else”. She danced, and Kurth conveys this well, in a way that looked free, but was technically demanding.

Kurth is good at unpicking facts from the anecdotes that sprang up around Isadora, with no apparent discouragement from her. From her family history, however, he has had only to subtract the tale of a mother born in a covered wagon heading through “redskin” country for San Francisco. Isadora’s mother was born in St Louis before the family went in search of gold — by ship. But the story of a father whose bank crashed the year she was born, who hid from his creditors in a wig and dress, and who was turned away by his furious wife and ended by dying in a shipwreck: this was all true. So, although it reads like a comic fantasy, was the subsequent pilgrimage made by Mrs Duncan and her dancing family to Athens, where they bought land and built a hilltop home facing the Acropolis.

When Isadora declared that she began dancing in the womb, the exaggeration was small. She was 11 when she and her sister began giving the dancing lessons which, years later, led to the school for little “Isadorables” over which the siblings fell out, having different ideas about what the education should comprise. Isadora’s idea for liberating children was laudable; the problem, as Kurth makes clear, was that she was both neglectful and egocentric. It was thoughtfulness that caused her to give the girls (many were German) her own surname during the war years; it was bloodymindedness that caused her, even when they reached 20, to deny them the chance of any independent glory. And yet — Kurth always allows the other side to be heard — even the pupils who had most cause for resentment remained passionately loyal. Isadora, however badly she behaved, however brutal in her affections, was a genius. And when she dances, wrote one young Russian critic, “Her body is as though bewitched . . . It is as though you yourself were bathing in the music.” From that performance, came Fokine’s idea for Les Sylphides.

Earlier biographies have tended to focus on her, just as Isadora herself did. Kurth does better by giving vivid portraits of the lovers, friends and pupils whose voices make up a diverse chorus in the book. Gordon Craig, the father of her first child, is shown (no surprises here) as a cold egotist, but Kurth also quotes the diaries and letters that show how the memory of Isadora haunted him years after her death. Paris Singer, her patient millionaire, is hard to condemn for walking out on her when she jeered at his princely gift for her homeless school in Madison Square Garden. Sergei Esenin, the most famous poet in Russia when Isadora married him, is the evil genius of the story; Kurth has no sympathy with the idea that Isadora destroyed his power. He suggests that she was lucky to escape with her life. Shrewdly, he gives space not only to Isadora’s wonderfully feckless chum, Mary Desti, the creator of the scarf that throttled her, but to Preston Sturges, Desti’s film- making son. Preston’s amused, slightly spiky voice is, you will find, the one closest to Kurth’s own in this marvellously rich and well-told book. Isadora deserves to be taught as well as read; this is how biography should be written.

Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of £20 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Read on...

Websites:
www.isadoraduncan.org
Information, books, videos, archival photos and more on the life and art of Isadora Duncan