Using the scaffolding of Isadora Duncan’s life and the stuff of her spirit, Amelia Gray delivers an incredibly imaginative portrait of the artist
In 1913, the restless world sat on the brink of unimaginable suffering. But for one woman, the darkness of a new era had already made itself at home. Isadora Duncan would come to be known as the mother of modern dance, but in the spring of 1913 she was a grieving mother, after a freak accident in Paris resulted in the drowning death of her two young children.
The accident cracked Isadora’s life in two: on one side, the brilliant young talent who captivated audiences the world over; on the other, a heartbroken mother spinning dangerously on the edge of sanity.
Isadora is a shocking and visceral portrait of an artist and woman drawn to the brink of destruction by the cruelty of life. In her breakout novel, Amelia Gray offers a relentless portrayal of a legendary artist churning through prewar Europe. Isadora seeks to obliterate the mannered portrait of a dancer and to introduce the reader to a woman who lived and loved without limits, even in the darkest days of her life.
Release date:
May 23, 2017
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
400
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On a sunny street in the Paris neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris Singer takes a dire inventory of their flat
None of it turned out as he had imagined. He blamed this on his own distraction, which kept him from looking too closely at the details when his agent found the place. There had been problems at the time with the property in Paignton, and in the way a simple pendulum swing can describe the boundaries of a man’s entire life, his attention to one meant neglect of the other.
In the Paignton home, which his father had named Oldway and lately had come to live up to its title in the failure of its various fixtures, Paris had sunk months into work. There were problems with the old foundation, sun-stained paint flaking on the tennis court, plans for an updated garden, which would need a season to seed—there would be no spring party, the girls would be disappointed—and all of it had made him eager to find something simple in France, somewhere close to the theater district, but not so close that they were sleeping in the wings. He wanted it ready to move in, large enough for the children to have their own room.
He allowed his local agent to convince him to look for furnished flats. Working out the details personally would have ensured a more precise result, but his agent made the point that as much as they all would have liked to see it, they truly didn’t need the chaise to be covered in worsted serge so that Isadora reclining might resemble a handkerchief laid across the breast of a royal officer. Paris meant to trust people more, and as an exercise, he allowed the local man to make the arrangements.
And so, of course, they arrived in November to find his rented flat on the drafty third floor of a thin-walled walk-up, the soft wood of the stairs sinking under their feet. The entry door was painted thickly shut in its frame and he had Isadora and the children stand back as he threw his weight against it, cracking it open to reveal a junkman’s collection of furniture and fittings scattered across a dismal set of rooms, a cemetery view on two sides, and an ominous spot on the kitchen floor that smelled strongly of kerosene. In the children’s room, an old window had been jammed open and nailed into place, ensuring that the street’s black ash would leave a leaden crust on their beds and a ribbon of filth would ring the tub after every bath. The only advantage was a view of the river, which wound its way across the west-facing windows. Isadora seemed to appreciate the jagged strips of half-torn wallpaper, speaking brightly of the bohemian aspect and going on about her early days in Europe, though later, when she couldn’t find a proper punch bowl, she sank into a malaise that required three days and a trip to Printemps to cure.
They stayed through the winter, stuffing rags into the children’s open window to keep out the cold. The nurse reported that the children had invented a game they called Urchin, wherein they covered themselves in soot from their toy chest, and spent many happy hours cleaning the fireplace. Patrick was too young to understand the game, but Deirdre was an observant one, and though the nurse tried her best to press Little Lord Fauntleroy and other mannered texts into her hands, she was interested only in the children she saw in alleys, speculating constantly about their lives and begging their humiliated nurse to introduce them. Deirdre had naturally decided that the other children were also playing a game, that they already had their breakfast and would run around and dirty themselves heroically like this until they were well tired, at which point they might find their nurse and go home to have a rest before afternoon lessons.
Leaving Isadora to deal with it all in her disinterested way, Paris spent most of February addressing labor concerns at the factory in London, but he returned again in March, hating the flat even more on his second arrival. It was worse than a hotel, where at least the things were cared for and a pleasant anonymity greeted him each morning. In a hotel, broken dishes would be cleared and thrown away, but at the flat, Isadora liked to keep shards of china in a paper bag on the counter. She talked of arranging the delicate filigreed pieces to make something even finer than what was broken, but she had no technique for it, and the bag ultimately gathered more of the ever-present black soot, as it waited for its chance to upend shards over whichever child found it first.
The accident happened early in the afternoon, after lunch. Paris had enjoyed a satisfactory pot-au-feu with beer. The other patrons exercised their usual theatrical shock over the children seated among them, but they all looked away when Paris turned to confront anyone directly. Isadora seemed near tears when she returned from the ladies’ room, and he understood in her expression the feeling of endless scrutiny.
With lunch coming to an end, they worked out the schedule for the rest of the day. She wanted to return to her studio, citing some vague assignment that would keep her there for hours. It was obvious when she wanted them all to leave her alone. But Paris didn’t want to be saddled with the children either—quite literally, as ever since Ted Craig had uncovered a pint-size saddle in some filthy Florence shop, Deirdre took every opportunity to strap Paris in and goad him across the hardwood. So he ordered their nurse, Annie, to take them home for a nap, and he trusted that she would tidy the place before he returned.
The afternoon settled, they parted with kisses. Isadora went one way up the street, Paris went the other, and the children went with the nurse to their death.
* * *
He would learn almost right away. He hadn’t even sat down behind his heavy desk—a pity, they would have to move it back to England—when he saw from his window an officer running up the road, pushing gentlemen and ladies aside and sprinting knees-up like the anchor in a four-man relay. The door downstairs swung open, and he heard the man taking the stairs two at a time. As the steps came closer, they grew curiously softer, and there was a strange silence until the officer burst in, at which point the noise of the room returned, accompanied by a low humming tone that reminded Paris of the waterlogged feeling of coming out of a swimming pool. He was tapping his own head curiously as the man delivered the news.
He gathered his things, canceled his afternoon meetings, and followed the officer back to the flat. Though the officer would later report that Paris had been terribly dignified about the whole thing, there wasn’t a single noble urge in his mind at the time. It was relief he felt, as plain as day. The tragedy he knew would ruin him had come at last, and he didn’t have to dread it any longer.
The children and their nurse had been riding in the back of the car when it stalled. There was some trouble with the engine, an issue Paris had known about and should have had fixed; he and the driver had briefly spoken of it the week before, passing the time.
And so when the car stalled that afternoon, the driver thought nothing of it. He left it in gear when he got out to crank, and it wasn’t long before the engine roared to life. The car lurched forward; he had failed to block the tire or account for the angle of the road. The driver leapt away in terror as the whole cursed thing rolled its three screaming passengers across the street, lurched over the thin ridge of curb, and tipped face-first into the river, where it bobbed once and sank like a fat stone, ten meters down.
The officer told him all this on the walk between office and flat, having taken the report from the driver. He seemed particularly pleased about the fat stone bit, the officer did, and opined that the whole automotive craze was perhaps too dangerous for women and children.
They arrived at the flat to find that half the city had come to gather and were walking from room to room in their street shoes. Someone set out a plate of hasty sandwiches, and Paris watched in humiliation as everyone took appraisal of the place. To distract himself from their judgment, he tried to remember the old catalog of fears he had once felt for the children’s safety. The bag of broken plates, for example; he always thought one of them would turn it over their heads, ceramic shards working into their eyes. He was certain that Patrick would squeeze himself through the open window or that Deirdre would choke on a button in the back of the closet where she liked to hide. When they went off with their nurse to the park, he thought of the mangling lower branches of the trees, of steep drops from rocky ledges, and he was never fully soothed even when they returned home as safely as they always had. Isadora always teased him for his concern, but in the end it was as if he had known all along.
The room’s nervous conversation dwindled to silence. Isadora had arrived on the arm of one of the neighbor ladies to find twenty strangers staring back at her. She put her bag down by the door and looked around, uncertain why everyone was there, and why they all seemed to be waiting for her to speak.
“But where did they go?” she asked.
The women around her collapsed into hysterical tears, and she reached for them, confused. Paris thought she had lost her mind entirely, but it turned out that her question was only natural; the neighbor who brought her said only that the children had gone.
Finally, someone told her, whispering in her ear as she brought her hands to her face. She stared at Paris as though he were a stranger to her, and in that moment, she was a stranger to him as well.
The room started up again, as if everyone felt ashamed by their own witness. Paris was swept away by the details of the coming days. There was the official inquest, the coroner’s report. The press had a particular interest. And then the public events; there would be a viewing, a ceremony, an interment.
A downstairs neighbor kept trying to get Isadora to eat something, and though they all had lunched not an hour before, it seemed crucial to the woman, who came to Paris in tears, pleading with him. He added it to his list of things to do, along with selecting the music for the funeral program and setting up a meeting with the coroner. The neighbor insisted on following him into the children’s room and watched while he dug among the dolls and books until he found a cup from Deirdre’s tea set, rubbing the soot from it with the corner of her bedspread and leaving a black mark on the quilt. This further upset the neighbor, who fussed over the mark, spitting on it and rubbing it onto itself, which only served to set the stain.
Defeated, the neighbor turned her attention to the little cup, remarking that confronting Madam with the child’s things so soon might damage her in a permanent way. Paris dismissed the idea. Miss Duncan would be all right, he said, careful to stress her unmarried name as he always did with people he didn’t trust. The formality inspired a comfortable decorum. And anyway, he reasoned to himself, Isadora was far too strong to be felled by a symbol.
Finally the woman left, taking the teacup with her and leaving the quilt behind for the maids. He heard her calling for Isadora in the other room, employing a tone of voice as if she were trying her best to coax the other woman into a cage.
The press report arrived with the late edition, and someone read it aloud: The three victims could be heard screaming pitifully for just a moment before they went silent, and though a number of men dove in after the car at their own peril—Paris knew this to be true, having personally shaken the wet hands of those would-be heroes—their actions came with no result. The current was too strong, the water dark and cold.
Hours passed. Women poured wine into Isadora’s teacup, and she drank it daintily, asking for more. They presented her with tarts from the shop below, which she mostly ignored. When she refused food on the second day, they mixed a little melted butter into her wine and she took it just the same.
While she was turning up her nose at cheese and charcuterie, Paris dealt with the inquest against the driver. He thought that learning more about the mechanical failure behind the accident would bring him some peace, but it only troubled him more. He returned again and again to their casual conversations about the engine, and remembered saying nothing on other occasions when he saw the driver leave the car in gear. He pitied the man, who was no doubt grieving in a lonelier room, his children looking up at him with wide and wondering eyes that would soon enough hold the knowledge of what their father had done.
Through it all, the flowers. They came by the cartload, and visitors arriving with their own bouquets were instantly shamed to silence by the cut garden that greeted them, every countertop and closet in full bloom. Isadora made a path through a pile of white lilies on the floor, calling for more wine in her little cup, though she knew full well where it was kept and could pour it herself if she wanted. It disturbed Paris to see her so obedient, but it did give him the freedom to arrange things without her looking over his shoulder.
The days bled together. He thought pleasantly of an hour draining into a surgical tray as he prepared himself for the coroner’s early report, which arrived in a crisp ivory envelope. Inside, he found a description of the water in the children’s lungs and the fact that they were discovered clutching Annie, which Paris took to mean they had learned enough of death to fear it. It wasn’t specified in the report, but he heard from the coroner’s assistant that the strength of the nurse’s grip in death was such that two men had to use an iron bar to pry her off the children, that the prying broke both her arms, and though she had been dead for twelve hours, the coroner still set them in splints as if they might somehow mend.
Paris wanted to keep Isadora from all this, and so he saw to it that she spent her days writing letters and taking a series of luxurious baths, which seemed just fine with her. The women kept her teacup filled until she was quite well tippled, and soon enough she took on the affect of a lesser monarch receiving dignitaries, propped up in an overstuffed armchair, to hear condolences from friends and neighbors, gossips and well-wishers, officers, and aspiring members of the artistic community, everyone coming through to say their piece and touch her hand. She entertained them all, swaying a bit as she fingered a golden tassel affixed to the hem of her robe. He watched her from a distance as she smiled gently at her guests, speaking of the children in a low voice, as if they were only asleep in the other room.
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