A great dancer writes to her lover

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33959, 27 September 1975, Page 10

A great dancer writes to her lover

Your Isadora. Edited by Francis Steegmuller. Macmillan. 363 pp. Bibliography and notes. N.Z. price $11.70. The cult of Isadora Duncan, fostered by recent books and films, will no doubt receive fresh impetus from the publication of this volume. Its chief content is the major portion of the text of more than 200 letters which Isadora Duncan wrote to the artist and stage designer, Edward Gordon Craig, during the years of their association which began in 1904. In that year Isadora, the Ameri-

can who virtually alone created modern dance, was in Europe, aged 26, beautiful and famous. In Berlin she met Gordon Craig, the 32-year-old son of Ellen Terry, and a passionate love affair began almost instantly. During their frequent separations (lengthy ones while Isadora wu on

tour, or brief ones of a day or two spent apart) she wrote constantly, often two or three times a day. These letters, published here for the first time, provide a unique record of part of Isadora’s career, and of the love story of these two artists. They record also the birth of their daughter, Deidre (Craig’s ninth child, he was already the father of- eight others by three different women), Isadora’s tours in Germany and Russia, and their gradual estrangement from 1907-1909. The latter part of her story: Isadora’s affair with Paris Singer, her marriage to the dipsomaniac Russian poet Sergei Esenin, the tragic death of her two children, her financial difficulties and her bizarre death are told very briefly in drafts of Craig’s letters to her, in her now infrequent notes to him and in Francis Steegmullers connecting text. The book ends with the text of a 8.8. C. radio talk on Isadora Duncan given by Craig in 1952 in which he describes her as “the first and only dancer I ever saw.” Great dancer Isadora may have been, her judgment in matters concerning her art was rarely at fault; the same cannot be said of her judgment of men. Despite the fact that this volume contains only Isadora’s letters to Craig and not his replies it is very clear that Steegmuller’s description “the tornado of egocentricity that was Edward Gordon Craig” errs on the kindly side. The incredible demands, financial and emotional, made by him and his final rejection of her had a lasting effect on her personality and life style. The most moving aspect of this series of letters is to see the gradual change in Isadora’s attitude . from the gaiety, warmth and, it must be admitted sickly sentimentality of the early letters, to the more reserved, sometimes despairing tone of the final letters. Although Craig, in retrospect, described their love as “a big torturing thing — so desperate that at. times we felt quite mad,” neither of them ever explicitly

wrote “finis,” and both spoke frequently of their love “which would endure for ever.” Francis Steegmuller has edited the letters most capably, linking them with a sympathetically written text and providing full notes, though, unaccountably and annoyingly, no index. He expresses the hope that the publication of this correspondence may help some biographer to produce a psychologically sound portrait of Isadora instead of the disjointed flamboyant creature portrayed in many of the books and memoirs about her. While those interested in this creative dancer must still wait for this definitive biography they will be fascinated by the woman revealed in these letters with her generosity, her passionate emotions, her dedication to the dance, her humour and her flashes of self-knowledge.