Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America

7. EPILOGUE: TWILIGHT OF AN AMERICAN GODDESS

7. Isadora Duncan—both the woman and the legend—found herself out of step with her homeland by the time of her last tour. She was met with hostility, not only because her body politic was perceived as seditious by an anticommunist public, but also because her dancing body was considered old-fashioned by the postwar avant-garde and because her female body failed to resonate with the youth-oriented, pleasure-loving culture of flappers and Ziegfeld girls. Sol Hurok described her as "Hera, the queen goddess, ripened to the full curves of maturity, with the shadows of twilight already dark on her face."{ After she left America, the papers continued to carry news of Duncan's life in Europe, covering her financial woes, her marital exploits, her protest against the electrocutions of Sacco and Vanzetti, even her pitiable suicide attempt. She made good copy, a bizarre curiosity whose colorful EPILOGUE: TWILIGHT OF AN AMERICAN Sfoocfe ess life could be rehashed for entertainment and shock value. In photographs she was no longer pictured fulllength , as a dancer; instead she became a head shot, the disembodied journalistic shorthand for celebrity. Duncan was no longer an "Artist" but a mere "personality." By the twenties, America was much more complex than Duncan's philosophy allowed. Walter Lippmann, who had helped promote the cult of experience before the war, described its naivete from several decades' distance: We had vague notions that mankind, liberated. from want and drudgery, would spend its energies writing poetry, painting pictures, exploring the stellar spaces, singing folk songs, dancing with Isadora Duncan in the public square, and producing Ibsen in little theaters. We seem completely to have overlooked the appetite of mankind for the automobile, the moving picture, the radio, bridge parties, tabloids and the stock market.2 Indeed, the twenties was an era of conspicuous consumption for the well-to-do, the dawn of the advertising industry, and, with the expansion of radio, movies, and print media, the start of a mass media culture. Trends were set by the young, "on the dance floor, in the beauty parlor, and the sports field."3 The simple certainties of the late nineteenth century and the progressive movement had begun to disintegrate by the time the country entered the war, and by the twenties they had disappeared completely. Darwin was supplanted by Einstein, and Nietzsche by Freud. Instead of utopianism, intellectuals tended toward disillusion. Such were "the lost generation" of authors including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the thirty writers who contributed to literary critic Harold Stearns's 1922 volume Civilization in the UnitedStates. They concluded that the country did not practice what it preached, deluded itself with an Anglo-Saxon self-image, and suffered from "emotional and aesthetic starvation."4 Avant-garde artists were less insistent on the unity of art and life, more interested in artistic experimentation for its own sake. They were no longer driven by a need for self-expression and spontaneity, but by a need for the discovery of the new. The kind of vague, Utopian blend of arts and politics that characterized TheMasses and the Dodge salon disappeared as cultural nationalism gave way to formalism. In the paintings of Max Weber, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove, nature moved from the ideal to the abstract. In poetry, William Carlos Williams symbolized that gradual shift from a love of the beautiful (he was an early admirer of Duncan's) to a more rigorous interest in creating new form. As early as 1917, Margaret Anderson had accused Duncan of being a "pseudo-artist": "a woman of small intelligence, a monument of undirected adolescent vision, an ingrained sentimentalist."5 Anderson was founder (in 1914) and editor of the Little Review, a prestigious literary magazine whose embrace of modernism was most profoundly exemplified by its serialized publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Anderson had waited five years to see Duncan, and her report, in the April 1917 issue, of "Isadore [sic] Duncan's Misfortune" recorded her bitter disappointment. Self-consciously speaking for her entire generation, Anderson had no patience for Duncan's DONE YHTO&ance expressive body, which, "moving always inside the music, never dominating it, never even controlling it, never holding or pushing it to an authentic end,"6 failed to foreground its own formal means. The dancer's privileging of effect over form was anathema to the modernist editor, for "the best—perhaps the only...