![]() She was no doubt undone by grief and not eager to write about it. These passages are some of the more reserved pieces of Isadora’s autobiography and-with the exception of the paragraph above-heartbreaking in their austerity. Is it not that in all the Universe there is but one great cry containing Sorrow, Joy, Ecstasy, Agony-the Mother Cry of Creation? I do not know why, but I know they are the same. Why the same? Since one is the cry of supreme joy and the other of sorrow. For when I felt in mine those little cold hands that would never again press mine in return, I heard my cries-the same cries as I had heard at their births. ![]() Only twice comes that cry of the mother which one hears as without one’s self-at birth and at death. One slim paragraph in Isadora’s telling of the tragedy contains the world I wanted to explore: Rescue was impossible in the swift water. Their car stalled on the way, the driver got out to work on the engine, and when he got it running again, the whole thing rolled past him over the low embankment and into the Seine. ![]() It was an accident, after a late lunch in Paris she had gone ahead to work in her studio that afternoon while her two children, ages six and two, departed with their nurse to spend the afternoon at home. Isadora was at the height of her career when her children drowned, in 1913. His knees gave way-he fell before me-and from his lips came these words: “The children-the children-are dead!” was there, staggering like a drunken man. As Isadora herself said, “No woman has ever told the whole truth of her life.” As I pored through the layers of research and fabrication, I realized that the real truths were less important, and I chose to follow the spirit of her autobiography closer than the biographical studies of her life, sometimes even using her exact words, despite their probable inaccuracy. In writing Isadora, a novel set during a particularly dark year and a half of her life, I found myself having to pick through that reality, reality as Isadora wished to create it, and a third, emotional reality, which aspired to contain recognizable truths. Isadora spent her whole life straddling the gap between public perception and private reality. Isadora Duncan with her children Patrick and Dierdre. No matter why she did it, the result was a personal life shrouded in mystery presented as pulpy gossip. There’s a frenetic bit about her first audition and a man with “a big cigar in his mouth and his hat over one eye” sounding for all the world like a deranged circus ringleader the story of a girl named “Nursey” attempting to murder Isadora on what she claimed were God’s orders and a memorable passage about Gordon Craig, a lover with whom, Isadora wrote, she felt a “criminal incestuousness.” Some Isadora acolytes claim she was encouraged by her publisher to embellish for the purpose of sales. My Life is a potboiler of a tale written to rival the serialized romances of her time, featuring declarations of love and grief, men and women falling to their knees in ecstasy and agony. My Life has the guideposts of reality, but those guideposts are placed irregularly across a landscape of a fabulously fictionalized life. I would soon find the gulf between the two was even wider than the distance she put between her home state of California and the apartment she kept in Paris. ![]() Only by reading her autobiography, My Life, did I begin to understand the distance between her life and her image. I knew that she was considered a spontaneous dancer, despite the methodical repetition, the hours of work behind that effortless flow. When I started writing about Isadora, I knew only the product: her body of work, classical figures draped in silks. The story of your life arrives in three parts: your self, your image, and the product of the two. ![]() I’m going out on the desert … Remember that I said this mysteriously.” There’s a story of Isadora Duncan and the press that has stuck with me since I read it years ago: “I’m going to Egypt to lay flowers at the feet of the Sphinx,” she told reporters in Boston. ![]()
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