FIVE Isadora’s Baby
1906
IN 1906 ISADORA’S ‘terrible things’ began to happen. Kathleen’s first intimation was in a letter from the Hague, ‘a queer cry, childish and pathetic. Would not, could not I come to her? Her need was very great, very very great.’ (Isadora in her autobiography says that Kathleen just ‘arrived’, but Isadora was often inaccurate on details and the fullness of Kathleen’s account makes it convincing.)
In high summer Kathleen locked her studio and set off to Noordwijk, a tiny village on the coast of Holland, where her friend was staying in a little white house called Villa Maria. She found Isadora ‘very pitiful, very helpless and for the first time very very endearing.’
‘Poor darling, what is the matter?’ ‘Can’t you see?’ cried the dancer, spreading high her lovely arms. Slowly, and with many a lie, the story came out at last. A well-known Englishman with a wife, a mistress, children, dissolute habits and no money had entranced her body and mind, and her baby was due in a month or two.
The well-known Englishman was Edward Gordon Craig, the illegitimate son of the great actress Ellen Terry and Edward Godwin. His accomplishment was to revolutionize theatre design, despite producing fewer than half a dozen complete shows in his life. Simply, he was the first to propose that the set for a forest scene did not have to be bundles of foliage, and that ‘realistic’ was not the only way to present artistic truth. But he could not work with other people. He tried, and it infuriated all concerned, including him. He was astonishingly attractive and remarkably talented, one of those who don’t bother even to try to excuse egocentricity and selfishness because it is all for their work, not for them. His amours, according to Max Beerbohm, were ‘almost mythological’. Kathleen in fact slightly underestimated his involvements; he had, when he and Isadora first met in 1904, seven children by three women: his wife May Gibson (he left her during her fourth pregnancy); his mistress Jess Dorynne (he left her during her first pregnancy), and Elena Meo, who was expecting her third child by him and remained faithful to him all her life. But he and Isadora fell in love, and love, to Isadora at least, was simple and all-consuming.
‘This was the meeting of twin souls,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘The light covering of flesh was so transmuted with ecstasy that earthly passion became a heavenly embrace of white fiery flame. There are joys so complete, so all-perfect, that one should not survive them.’
Within weeks of first meeting Craig, in Berlin in December 1904, Isadora was writing to him: ‘Thank you thank you thank you for making me happy—whole complete I love you love you love you and I Hope we’ll have a dear sweet lovely baby—and I’m happy forever. –your Isadora.’
At the same time he was writing, in his special Isadora diary: ‘Do I love her? Does she love me? I do not know or want to know. We love to be together… Is that love? I do not know. She says she loves me. What does that mean from her? I do not know.’
A few weeks later they were having a conversation in note form:
5.1.05. Dom-Hotel Cologne
SHE : Isadora has decided that the father of her child shall be the man she loves.
HE: A world of thought can be given to this.
‘In after years,’ Kathleen wrote, ‘when the War had given different values to these things, she said, and probably believed, that she had done this thing deliberately, and was proud of her courage and independence, but at the time she was still nothing more than a very frightened girl, frightened and pitiful.’ Isadora did have her ideals. When asked about ‘free love’, she had written: ‘Of course, people will respond, “But what about the children?” … How can a woman go into this marriage contract with a man who she thinks is so mean that, in case of a quarrel, he wouldn’t even support his own children? If she thinks he is such a man, why should she marry him?’ Which is all very well, except that Craig was not supporting his—in fact his mother was supporting him with £500 a year.
By March 1907 Isadora’s eyes had been opened enough for her to write to Craig: ‘Why the very Goo of a baby makes you look for a Time Table book’, but at this stage she was full of romance and idealism, and once pregnant she put a brave and cheerful face on to her conflicting and socially unacceptable desires. She can hardly have known that she was already pregnant when in January 1906 she wrote to Craig: ‘I wish you would know that in all the hundreds of times you have kissed me there hasn’t been one that every thing in me hasn’t cried out—make me fertile—give me a child— not once—I have always had that constant longing, impossible to control.’ She dreamt that ‘Ellen Terry appeared to me in a shimmering gown… leading by the hand a little blonde child, a little girl who resembled her exactly, and, in her marvellous voice, she called to me—“Isadora, love. Love… Love.” The divine message sang in all my being. I continued to dance before the public, to teach my school, to love my Endymion.’
Her great love and laissez-faire indulgence allowed her to see the best in Craig. Though she worked extraordinarily hard, travelling all over Europe and feeling that she ‘lived on railway trains’, and though her earnings were helping to keep him while he was incapable of making any practical link between the talent he had and the money he needed to live on, he would say to her, ‘Why don’t you stop this? Why do you want to go on the stage and wave your arms about? Why don’t you stay at home and sharpen my lead pencils?’ And in the same breath she writes, ‘And yet Gordon Craig appreciates my art as no one else has ever appreciated it…’ No doubt he did, in some way. And Isadora was herself perfectly capable of being dismissive of the work of others. Kathleen had fallen ill (three days of high fever due to overstrain, said the doctor) during a visit to Isadora at the Hague in November 1905, and Isadora had no respect for her anxiety about ‘some statue whose clay will crack if she doesn’t get back’.
So in the summer of 1906 Kathleen found her friend at Noordwijk, in a white house with a white shell garden among the sand dunes. Isadora told Kathleen that she was all alone, that she hadn’t told even her family of her situation; but Isadora was not above a little emotional blackmail. Her family did know, and her mother thought she should be married. ‘But she had been married, had found it impossible, and had divorced her husband. Why should she want me to enter the trap where she had been cruelly bitten?’ Isadora wondered. She turned instead to Kathleen, the ‘nice quiet English girl’, as Isadora described her to Craig, ‘very sweet and gentle’.
‘Kathleen was a magnetic person, filled with life and health and courage,’ Isadora wrote later, but those qualities were not to the fore when Isadora’s story first came out. Kathleen, initially, was shocked.
I was torn and shattered. All my inborn prudery, strengthened by the convent upbringing, was terribly affronted. The sad queer happenings in the Balkans served not at all to soften this present experience. The girls of my nightmare winter there were of a so completely different civilisation that they had seemed like lovely wild animals. But here was the dancer, my friend, with an education limited indeed, it is true, but speaking my language, sharing my acquaintances, with recognizable ambitions and ideals. It was a shattering blow to me, who found exultation in audacious defiance of convention coupled with an assured control. So loudly and arrogantly had I proclaimed that complete independence for a lass was fraught with no dangers whatever, given there was character and intelligence to back it. I was very young. Daughters were still living with their mothers in dutiful subjection. Well, here then was a situation to be grappled with. My pseudo maternal heart hit my head a sharp blow. ‘Get on with the job.’
‘Daughters were still living with their mothers,’ she wrote, to define the nature of propriety. She of course
