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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
At the same time that you were writing about tragedy in Duncan's life, you were experiencing your own personal tragedies. It must have been hard not to compare yourself to her.
Well, I look at my life as sort of the same as hers; there's a big dividing line in it, before and after. With me it's HIV and with her it was the death of her children. And once I'd cleared that hurdle, somehow I felt I was tapped into her in just the right way. And I could go ahead and trust her story and not worry about mine so much.
But when the chapter about the deaths of Isadora's children was originally written, it was way over the top. As it might well be, since it was simply horrible. But Mary Tondorf-Dick, who has always been my editor, is a genius at bringing me down, bringing the writing down.
What was the chapter like before your editor got to it?
Dancing in the dark
I was racing against death when I signed up to write Isadora Duncan's biography -- and winning wouldn't even be my strangest adventure along the way.
By Peter Kurth
I was sort of second-guessing the characters. Her behavior at the actual moment of the tragedy when her children died was, I think, maybe hard for some people to understand. It was sort of quiet. She seemed unemotional at first. She was plainly in shock. But she had an idea of turning it into something beautiful if she could. And her artistic credo as it developed was always to do less with her dancing, rather than more, so I began to get that in the narrative, tried to pull back somehow and to keep it restrained and to keep it strictly to the factual evidence as I had it.
I know that from my experience, after not just being HIV positive myself, but from 20 years of losing friends, after a while, it's not that you cease to care, it's that you're speechless. The only response can be a symbolic response. People expect other people in great grief to go wailing and gnashing their teeth and throwing themselves on coffins and she wasn't like that, and I have found over time that I haven't been like that. There's something in you, a kind of quiet place for sorrow that is essential to your own survival. And I suppose it would be different for different people. I tried to keep it stark and clear. I think it's much stronger that way.
I know that my understanding of her and my sympathy for her is vastly increased by these parallel experiences in our lives. I have not lost my children, but my sister has lost her children and when that was going on, she was criticized from one end of the country to the other for being calm, stoic, not doing what people would expect a mother to do. And Isadora never did what people expected her to do.
There doesn't seem to have been any event in Duncan's life nearly as significant as the death of her children. Do you think she ever recovered?
There's a Yugoslavian proverb that says there are sorrows of God and there are sorrows of the world. And the death of Isadora's children was definitely a sorrow of God. It's Greek. It's irrevocable. Nothing could be done. Whereas I always could be rescued, and have been a couple times, with new medications. I can mourn the death of a lover and have a new lover. But she could not have her children back. And the idea of children in all of her life was central.
Duncan had a knack for choosing really bad men. And though generally you keep an emotional distance from your subject, there are some passages where it's pretty clear how you feel about her lovers, particularly Gordon Craig.
You should have seen this before we edited it! You'd see how much I didn't like him. But the thing is, I would have fallen for him too. I've had my experiences with men like that.
That was another aspect where my editor really had to pull me back. At first, I was really snide about him and it had to go. I think he treated her terribly. And granted, she was, as my mother said, not someone you'd want to have in your house. But I think he treated her badly. I think he treated all the women in his life badly. And that makes me very angry.
My editor and I agreed to look at this as a Greek tragedy. And in a Greek tragedy, the audience doesn't stand up and start criticizing, though the chorus might come on and point to things. So in the end I had to point at it rather than declare it. I really worked hard not to let my opinions intrude, although my sympathies are clear. And that's a very difficult line to draw in writing. I had pages and pages of analysis of what might have made Craig tick. And everything I said made him look worse. But I figured that's not my job. He'll make himself look bad.
