U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [378]
BODY TIED IN BAG IS FOUND
FLOATING
Chinatown my Chinatown where the lights are low Hearts that know no other land Drifting to and fro
APOPLEXY BRINGS END WHILE WIFE
READS TO HIM
Mrs. Harding was reading to him in a low soothing voice. It had been hoped that he would go to sleep under that in-fluence
DAUGHERTY IN CHARGE
All alone
By the telephone
Waiting for a ring
Two Women's Bodies in Slayer's Baggage
WORKERS MARCH ON REICHSTAG
CITY IN DARKNESS
RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT SUICIDE ENDS IN
FAILURE AT THE BELMONT
Pershing Dances Tango in the Argentine
HARDING TRAIN CRAWLS FIFTY MILES
THROUGH MASSED
CHICAGO CROWDS
Girl Out of Work Dies from Poison
-152MANY SEE COOLIDGE BUT FEW HEAR
HIM
If you knew Susie
Like I I know Susie
Oh oh oh what a girl
ART AND ISADORA
In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs.
Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing made her so nervous that she declared to her children that she couldn't keep anything on her stomach but a little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the
bitterness and recriminations of the family row,
into a world of gaslit boardinghouses kept by
ruined southern bel es and railroadmagnates and swing-ing doors and whiskery men nibbling cloves to hide the whiskey on their breaths and brass spittoons and four-wheel cabs and basques and bustles and long ruffled trailing skirts (in which lecturehal and concertroom, under the domination of ladies of culture, were the cen-ters of aspiring life) she bore a daughter whom she named after herself
Isadora.
The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of
his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted femi-nist and an atheist, a passionate fol ower of Bob Inger-sol 's lectures and writings; for God read Nature; for duty beauty, and only man is vile.
Mrs. Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her
children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets
-153-and conventions and manmade laws. She gave piano-lessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens.
The Duncans were always in debt.
The rent was always due.
Isadora's earliest memories were of wheedling
grocers and butchers and landlords and sel ing little things her mother had made from door to door,
helping hand valises out of back windows when
they had to jump their bil s at one shabbygenteel board-inghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco.
The little Duncans and their mother were a clan;
it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren't Catholics any more or Presby-terians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists. When the children were quite young they man-aged to stir up interest among their neighbors by giv-ing theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren't ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn't afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own.
They moved to Chicago. Isadora got a job dancing
to The Washington Post at the Masonic Temple Roof Garden for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went to see Augustin Daly and told him she'd discovered the Dance
-154-and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with
Ada Rehan.
The family fol owed her to New York. They
rented a big room in Carnegie Hal , put mattresses in the corners, hung drapes on the wal and invented the first Greenwich Vil age studio.
They were never more than one jump ahead of
the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeo-ple out of bil s, standing the landlady up for the rent, coaxing handouts out of rich philistines.
Isadora arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin
danced to readings of Omar Khayyám for society
women at Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned
they lost al their trunks and the very long bil they owed and sailed for London on a cattleboat