Last Chapters in Unhappy Life of Isadora Duncan, Dancer

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 690, 15 June 1929, Page 18

Last Chapters in Unhappy Life of Isadora Duncan , Dancer

D U N C A N’S Kh autobiography was probJ ably the most widely--4] discussed book of memsi oirs published last year. It became, rather surprisingly, a “best seller,” probably because some of the libraries banned it from their shelves, thus driving the ordinary Englishman into that desperate pass in which he finds himself forced to buy a book or go without reading it. And so, for a month or so, poor Isadora Duncan, who a short time before had met sudden death at Nice, was the most-talked-of author of the day. “My Life” broke off in the year 1921, and thus left unrecorded the last tragic years of her life to her death in 1927. These years of tragedy, however, have now been re-told for 11s, graphically and vividly, in “Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in France.” by Irma Duncan, her iiupii and adopted daughter, and Alan Ross Macdougall, “an old friend.” Arrival in Russia Isadora Duncan set out for Russia in 1921 full of hope, for she was always an optimist. She had planned to start in Moscow a State-aided school for teaching children to dance, and preliminary arrangements with the Soviet authorities promised well. On her arrival in Moscow, after a dispiriting journey, however, there was no one to meet her. Accompanied by Irma, her adopted daughter, and Jeanne, her faithful maid, she sought refuge in an hotel, where all three had to share a single room with one | bed which boasted of neither sheets | nor pillows. Here, indeed, was disi iilusionment. Before Isadora left London for Mosi cow a fortune-teller had informed her I that she was going on a long journey and that she would marry. She hail | laughed at the mention of marriage, | for “she could not seriously listen to anyone who told her that she was to I be married this side of Paradise.” Of Sergil Essenine, her youthful husband, we are told that he was considered one of the most talented poets of the post-revolutionary group. He was a Russian peasant; tall, blue-eyed, golden-locked. There was something in ! his moral and poetic make-up of both Robert Burns and Arthur Rimbaud, le pocte Uaudit. Isadora seems at once to have been attracted by him, and at their first meeting he sat at her feet, while she caressed his curly hair, calling him “Golden head,” “angel,” and—“devil.” She began to take lessons in Russian, for her vocabulary was lamentably weak, and love-making could not be carried on in dumb-show. And so this ludicrous courtship proceeded to its tragic conclusion—in spite of Essenine’s foul treatment of his lover, in spite of the fact that his friends abducted him in an effort to prevent the marriage. They had rows in which Essenine would hurl vile curses at her, smash and break the furniture in the room, roll about the floor in a drunken stupor. But as Mariengoff, his friend, wrote of them at this time: He was a wayward, wilful little child, and she was a mother passionately enough in love with him to overlook anil torgive all the vulgar curses and the peasI ant blows. I At length, in May, 1922, Isadora and | Essenine were married at the office | of the. Moscow Registry of Civil Stai tistics and travelled by air to Berlin | for their honeymoon. In Germany, j Isadora found herself in financial difficulties. As Essenine wrote *o a friend in Moscow: Tt . l: 'S business i-s in an awful state. ! , 1 u ' ll 11 lawyer sold her house and Paul her only SO,0(10 marks! The same thing may also happen in Paris. Her property library and furniture—have all been appropriated and carried off in ail nJftb C mS nS b ’ Eul she hem as though nothing has happened, jumps into the I automobile to go to Lubeck. or to I zig. to Frankfurt or to Weimar i A disastrous trip to America fol--1 .owed. Back in Paris, Essenine gave I himself up to debauchery more than j ever: he would come into his room at his hotel and smash ail the mirrors

windows and woodwork; when Isadora had visitors he would burst into the room, crying out: "Band of bloated fish, mangy sleigh-rugs, bellies of carrion ; grub for soldiers, you awoke me! ”

In midsummer, 1923, they returned to Moscow. It was here that Isadora and Essenine parted company. One evening he rushed into her room when she was having some visitors and demanded a bust which a friend had carved of him. When Isadora refused to let him have it, and told him to come back when he was in a more fit condition to carry it, he dragged a chair over to the corner and with shaky legs mounted it. As he reached the bust with his feverish hands and clasped it, its weight proved too much for him. He staggered and fell from the chair, rolling head over heels on the floor, still clasping tightly to his breast his wooden image. .Sullenly and shakily he rose to his feet; and tben reeled out of the room to wander later about the by-ways of [Moscow and lose the encumbering bust in some gutter. That was the last view that Isadora Duncan had of her poet and husband. Sergil Alexandrovitch Essenine. Essenine’s Suicide In 1925 Isadora found herself, after a disastrous tour through the Russian provinces and Germany, at Nice. She had been living in poverty; her uouse in Paris and all her property had been sold for a song; she was being “dunned’* for hotel bills. Came the news of Essenine’s deaih. He bad hanged himself in the very room of the hotel in Leningrad where lie tad first stayed with Isadora. But still Isadora persevered, dictating her autobiography to a stenographer, dancing at Nice, in the holies that she might one day be able to return with funds for her beloved pupils in Moscow. The end, however, came quite suddenly. One

evening she had been upset at a by the sight of her host’s haired child, for it had reminded her of Patrick and Deirdre, her own two children who were drowned in fbe Seine in April. 1913. She conf.de to a friend: Mary, I cannot go on like this. fourteen years I have had thus paD my heart; I cannot go on. . . T oU ,! i find some way for me to end Jta«* cannot live in a world whievo. there beautiful, blue-eyed, golden-haired c ren. I cannot. " I cannot. . . • The Fatal Accident The next evening she insisted cn being taken for a drive fro® & studio at Nice by a young ItaI “ Her friends protested: she was • sufficiently clothed. But Isadora pc sisted, and as she went out oi studio she called out. “Adieu, amis, je vais a la gloire.” As the car started, Isadora was « to throw the long-fringed end car shawl over her left -boulder. • t >, € darted forward at full speed, n “f, shawl .... -,.••! to trail on »i<lf the wheel. -Mary “Ton c-h&le. Isadora! Ramasse tone „ I ’l 1,.. ear stom.e.l- Th« *?o pi<* : thought it was to allow -sadora , ke j up the end of her shawl. T ?sjl’s ; toward it, and saw that Isadora - lrive r had fallen forward. They ran. in n *\ing i was out of the car gesticulating. JJ , £f# in Italian: ‘ I’ve killed the Madonnakilled the Madonna!” What was the explanation? not. obviously, have been suicia- w why should she have called ! her friends as they stood in tn^ | way, “Good-bye, I go to glory -