Isadora Duncan's Last Days.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17661, 12 August 1929, Page 7

Isadora Duncan's Last Days.

The Tragedy of Her Marriage to Essenine, the Hooligan Poet The Mystery of Her Death.

SADORA DUNCAN’S autobiography was probably the most widely-discussed book. I of memoirs published l»et year. It became a “bestseller” probably because some of the libraries banned it

seriously listen to anyone who told her that she was to be married this side of Paradise.” Of Sergil Essenine, her youthful husband, we are told that he “Was considered one of the most talented of the poet-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 Poete Maudife.” Isadora seems at once to Jiave 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 dwmb-show. The teacher, a lady in a muff, howi 2r. lacked imagination and tried to teach her such sentences as “What is this ?” “This is a pencil.” “What kind of pencil?” “This is a red pencil.” Whereupon Isadora shocked her by interruping and saying:— ‘‘Yes, that’s very amusing. I’m sure the children must enjoy that sort of lesson. But I think you’d better teach me what I ought to say to a beautiful young man when I want to kiss him . . . and things like that.”

from the.. shelves, thus driving the ordinary Englishman into that desperate pass -in whi'ch 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 dav.

“My Life” broke ' in the year 1921, and thus left unve;._ .d the last tragic years of her death in 19.-7. These years of tragedy, however, have now been veto’ for us, graphically and vividly, in “Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in France,” by Inna Duncan, her pupil and adopted daughter, and Alan Ross Macdougall, “an old friend,” (writes H. L. Morrow in “John o’ London’s Vvct

Arrival in Russia. Isadora Duncan set out for Russia in 1921 full of liope, for she wa;> always an optimist. She had planned to start in Mo-cow 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 a hotel, where all three had to share a single room with one bed which boosted of neither sheets nor pillows. Here, indeed, was disillusionment.

The Abducted Lover. . ; 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, roll about the floor in a drunken stupor. But, as Mariengoff, his friend, wrote of them at this time:—

• “He was a wayward, wilful child, and she was a mother passionately enough in love with him to overlook and forgive all the vulgar curses and He peasant blows.” At length in May, 1922, Isadora and Essenine were rnnr>* ; -v! at the office of the Mqscow Registry c Civil Statistics and travelled by air to .Berlin for their honeymoon. In Germany Isadora found herself in financial difficulties. As Essenine wrote to a friend in Moscow:— “Isadora’s business is in an awful state. In Beilin the lawyer sold her house and paid her only 90,000 marks! The same thing may also happen in Paris. Her property —library and furniture—have all been appropriated and carried off in ail directions. Pier -money from the bank has been stopped. . . . But she acts

Even the intelligentsia of Moscow seemed hardly to have heard of h r, and when she went to a party at the famous Karakhan mansion, monstrously overdecorated in the Louis Quinze style, she found a woman singer blithely warbling the “Bergerettes” of Weckcrlin, as if she had been at a “musical evening” in any bourgeois drawing-room. A “Scene.”

This was too much for poor Isadora. She strode into the middle of the floor and told them all what she thought of them :

“ 'What do you mean.’ she cried, ‘by throwing out the bourgeoisie only to take their places and indulge in the same ridiculous antics as they used to do here in this very room ? Here you all are sitting as they used to do. in this place full of bad art and, furnishings of mauvais gout listening to the same insipid music that they used to listen to. Nothing is changed. You have merely usurped their places. You are not revolutionists. 'You are bourgeois in disguise. Usurpers.’ ” And then “In a deadly silence. Isadora, like an avenging angel, flame-clad, fiery tongued, sailed out of the room, followed by her astonished escort.” The Fortune-teller’s Prophecy.

as if nothing has happened, jumps into the automobile to go to Luheck, or to Leipzig, to Frankfurt, or to Weimar.” At Ellis Island.

Came in October, 1922, the momentous visit to the United States which she and Essenine were not allowed to enter until they had been detained on “political grounds” at Ellis Island. Ppor Isadora was suspected of carryi”~ Bolshevik pro-paganda-—the newspapers denounced her as 'a degenerate “Red.” At Boston, the home of American snobbishness, she could bear the apathy of her audience no longer. At the end of her performance she burst out passionately, waved her red silk scarf above her head, and cried out : “This is red. So am I! It is the

Before Isadora left London for Moscow a fortune-teller had informed her that she was going on a long journey and that she would marry. She had laughed at the mention of marriage, for “she could not

colour of life and vigour. You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.!” & The rest of her tour was marred by fierce controversy—in the Press—and by the tippling of Essenine on “bootlegged” whisky—and so Isadora was eventually forced to leave the country, penniless, having had to borrow her fare from a friend. Back in Paris, Essenine gave himself up to debauchery more than ever —he would come into his room a-t the hotel and smash all 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 wa* 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 to his breast his wooden image. Sullenly and shakily he rose to his feet, and then 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 house 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 death. He bad hanged himself in the very room of the hotel in Leningrad wh-re he had first stayed with Isadora. But still Isadora persevered, dictating her autobiography to a stenographer, dancing at Nicin the hopes that she might one day be able to return with funds for her beloved pupils in Moscow, The end, however, > me quite suddenly. Oqje evening she had been upset, at a party, by the sight of her host’s golden,haired child, for it had reminded her of Patrick and De”*dre, her own two children. who were drowned in the Seine in April, 1913. She confided to a friend:— “Mary. I cannot go on like this. For fourteen years I have had this pain in my heart; I cannot go cn. . . . You must find some way for me to end it all. I cannot- live in a world where there are ! beautiful, blue-eyed, golden-haired children. I cannot., I cannot. . ..” The Fatal Accident. i

The next evening she insisted on being taken for a drive from her studio at Nice by a young Italian. Her friends j protested; she was not sufficiently clothed. But Isadora persisted, and as she went out of the studio she called out, “Adieu, mes amis, je vais a la gloire.” “As the car started, Isadora was seen to throw the long fringed end of her shawl over her Shoulder. The car darted for-, ward at full speed, and the shawl seemed to traii on the grouud beside the wheel. Mary Desti screamed: ‘Ton chale, Isadora! Ramasse ton chale.’ “The car stopped. The watchers thought it was to allow Isadora to pick! up the end of her shawl. They walked towards it and saw that Isadora’s head had fallen forward. They ran. The driver was out of the car gesticulating, howling in Italian: “I’ve killed the Madonna! I’ve killed the Madonna!’” What was the explanation? It can-, not, obviously, have been suicide, but why! should she have called to her friends as' they stood in the doorway, “Good-bye, I. go to glory” ?