U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [409]
The little Duncans and their mother were a clan;
it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren't Catholics any more or Presby-terians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists. When the children were quite young they man-aged to stir up interest among their neighbors by giv-ing theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren't ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn't afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own.
They moved to Chicago. Isadora got a job dancing
to The Washington Post at the Masonic Temple Roof Garden for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went to see Augustin Daly and told him she'd discovered the Dance
-154-and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with
Ada Rehan.
The family fol owed her to New York. They
rented a big room in Carnegie Hal , put mattresses in the corners, hung drapes on the wal and invented the first Greenwich Vil age studio.
They were never more than one jump ahead of
the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeo-ple out of bil s, standing the landlady up for the rent, coaxing handouts out of rich philistines.
Isadora arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin
danced to readings of Omar Khayyám for society
women at Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned
they lost al their trunks and the very long bil they owed and sailed for London on a cattleboat
to escape the materialism of their native America.
In London at the British Museum
they discovered the Greeks;
the Dance was Greek.
Under the smoky chimneypots of London, in
the sootcoated squares they danced in muslin tunics, they copied poses from Greek vases, went to lectures, artgal eries, concerts, plays, sopped up in a winter fifty years of Victorian culture.
Back to the Greeks.
Whenever they were put out of their lodgings for
nonpayment of rent Isadora led them to the best hotel and engaged a suite and sent the waiters scurrying for
-155-lobster and champagne and fruits outofseason; nothing was too good for Artists, Duncans, Greeks;
and the nineties London liked her gal .
In Kensington and even in Mayfair she danced at
parties in private houses,
the Britishers, Prince Edward down,
were carried away by her preraphaelite beauty
her lusty American innocence
her California accent.
After London, Paris during the great exposition
of nineteen hundred. She danced with Loïe Ful er.
She was stil a virgin too shy to return the advances of Rodin the great master, completely baffled by the extraordinary behavior of Loïe Ful er's circle of crack-brained invert beauties. The Duncans were vegetarians, suspicious of vulgarity and men and materialism. Ray-mond made them al sandals. Isadora and her mother and her brother Raymond
went about Europe in sandals and fil ets and Greek
tunics
staying at the best hotels leading the Greek life
of nature in a flutter of unpaid bil s.
Isadora's first solo recital was at a theater in
Budapest;
after that she was the diva, had a loveaffair with
a leading actor; in Munich the students took the horses out of her carriage. Everything was flowers and hand-clapping and champagne suppers. In Berlin she was the rage. With the money she made on her German tour
she took the Duncans al to Greece. They arrived on a fishingboat from Ithaca. They posed in the Parthenon
-156-for photographs and danced in the Theater of Dionysus and trained a crowd of urchins to sing the ancient chorus from the Suppliants and built a temple to live in on a hil overlooking the ruins of ancient Athens, but there was no water on the hil and their money; ran out be-fore the temple was finished so they had to stay at the Hôtel d'Angleterre and
run up a bil there. When credit gave out they took their chorus back to Berlin and put on the Suppliants in ancient Greek.