Dancing in the dark

I didn't crack until 1994, when I stopped caring what kind of drugs I was taking and nearly died of pneumonia at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. I don't remember how I got admitted to such a place; I lived nowhere near it, and I was delirious when my closest friend brought me there. The doctors said later that I had "the same pneumonia that killed Jim Henson," creator of the Muppets, and that when I came in I was "six to eight hours from death." I wondered how they knew. Only 25 more T cells lost and I'd have tipped over into "full-blown" AIDS. I had an affair with my roommate, who was full-blown already. We smoked cocaine and had sex standing up, hooked to IVs, wheeling our bags around.

When I left the hospital, I had another book that I'd agreed to write -- short book, long story -- and I got it done, by golly! I wrote, drove, scrambled, flew, drank, snorted, smoked, took pills, ran wild and broke friendships, whole alliances, to get it done. I honestly believe this saved my life, hard though it was for my family and friends to witness. "He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect," says the poet Cavafy. "Half the house will have to come down." Or Heraclitus, speaking of Greeks: "It is the opposite which is good for us."

Few understood what I was up to, and neither did I until after the fact. I only knew that I had to keep going and I didn't care how it was done. Rumors flew, some partly true and the rest mostly false. When I was suddenly dumped from a high-paying magazine gig, where my earlier work had earned me nothing but mash notes from its blond, boyish, stinking-rich editor -- "Marvelous! Fabulous! You're a genius! Brilliant!" -- I gave up on New York, crawling back to Vermont. It took a long time to get back on my feet, and I only began to feel some confidence again after my health rebounded on protease inhibitors and I met John Hannah, the man I love and live with now. And escaped drowning myself by the skin of my teeth.

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So Dougie is to issue a Biography of Isadora. Well, well -- well -- That's easy -- the difficulty is to write it as it deserves -- as Montaigne or Byron would have written it.

-- Edward Gordon Craig

I've kept that quote out of the book -- wouldn't you? Isadora wanted Cervantes for her biographer, and William Faulkner, after reading her memoirs, said that "Shakespeare himself could hardly have done that volume justice." Nevertheless, I had to write something, sooner or later. Six chapters came out in 1996 -- awkward, nervous and woefully incomplete, as I also felt myself to be in those days.

After six, I stopped. Was it money again? I don't remember. Certainly it always came to that when my editor called. I'd told her everything by that time; she's a brick, but every now and then she did have to ask -- where was the book? I didn't know. I began to get well on the new drugs, which were expensive and, frankly, mind-blowing, and about which I wrote a great deal. I took on the mantle and persona of "Lazarus" for a small but national audience, wrote columns about AIDS, went to Washington, that sort of thing. Being a spokesman for survival tired me pretty quickly and I quit it abruptly, angrily, "swearing never to desert Art for love again," as Isadora put it -- whereupon I met John, who now answers all questions of that kind. We like to say that we met sneaking cigarettes under the bridge to the 21st century.

In 1998 I went back to the book, buffed up my chapters and finished number seven, "Myth," which follows Isadora Duncan to Athens and Bayreuth, where she turned the Wagner Festival on its head in 1904 and earned a reputation, not yet deserved, for licentiousness and debauchery. She was just about to meet the love of her life, English stage designer Gordon Craig, when my whole family came together in crisis, after my sister Barbara's two daughters, who had been kidnapped by their father 20 years before, surfaced in Florida with their delinquent parent and refused to have anything to do with Barbara, or with the rest of us.

Next Page: "A summer night, a car in wrong gear, a dock with no rail"

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