Dancer's Life

MY LIFE--Isadora Duncan--Boni & Liveright ($5).

The Book. "Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne. ... I was born under the star of Aphrodite. . . .

"The evening of my debut arrived. I danced before a group of people so ... enthusiastic that I was quite overcome. They scarcely waited for the end of a dance to call out, "Bravo, bravo, comme elle est exquise. . . .'

"My mother would repeat the entire score of 'Orpheus' over and over until dawn appeared in the studio window. . . .

"That evening there was in the audience calling aloud with the rest, a young Hungarian of godlike features and stature, who was to transform the chaste nymph that I was into a wild and careless Bacchante. . . .

"Afterwards I danced at the Kaim Saal. The students went fairly crazy. Night after night they unharnessed the horses from my carriage and drew me through the street--, singing their student songs and leaping with lighted torches on either side of my victoria. Often, for hours, they would group themselves outside my hotel window and sing, until I threw them my flowers. . . .

"Adieu, Old World. I would hail a New World."

Isadora Duncan was one of those people upon whom life showers a fountain of adventurous fire. In her native U. S., when she sang the Marseillaise and did a classic dance, she was a triumph equally in Manhattan and in the dusty villages of the West. In Europe she attained a high degree of notoriety by refusing to become the mistress of famed Gabriel d'Annunzio; but despite her dislike, frequently made manifest, for the convention of marriage, she permitted herself to be wedded by noted Russian Poet Sergei Yessenin. Their marriage was as brief as a liaison.

The Author, Dancer Duncan, was born in 1880. Her life shows equally the influence of iced oysters, champagne, and her uneasy but auspicious star. Having composed this detailed and candid history, she planned to follow it with a volume about a trip to Russia--for which "I would hail a New World," was a sort of preface. This second volume she did not accomplish. When she had finished My Life, in the spring of 1927, she prepared to spend the remainder of the summer at her Riviera villa. This lady who had danced a thousand times with a veil waving in her hands like a bright tenuous flag, and who had wrapped life closely about her like a brilliant shawl, one summer day tied a red scarf around her throat and stepped into her automobile. As she drove along the roads that sloped down to the sea, a warm slow wind fumbled at her scarf and blew it back so that it stretched and flapped along the body of the car. Then the wind tangled its tassels in the spokes of a wheel. Abruptly and terribly the dancer who had carried a thousand light banners lay in the dust of a summer road, completely still, a red scarf pulled tight around her neck.

The Significance. Dancer Duncan was born in 1880. As a work of literature the story of her life has merely the merits of explicitness and sincerity. These merits, inherit in the autobiography of a talented, bizarre, intelligent, beautiful and scandalously extraordinary woman, are enough to make such an autobiography a dazzling confusion of testament and tabloid true story.

FICTION

The Ugly Duchess THE UGLY DUCHESS--Lion Feuchtwanger (translated by Willa & Edwin Muir)--Viking (Pub. Jan. 3) ($2.50).

The Story. "The twelve-year-old Margarete, Princess of Carinthia and Tyrol . . . looked older than her twelve years. Her thick-set body with its short limbs supported a massive misshapen head. The forehead indeed, was clear and candid, the eyes quick and shrewd, penetrating and sagacious; but below the small flat nose an apelike mouth thrust forward its enormous jaws and pendulous underlip. Her copper-colored hair was coarse, wiry and dull, her skin patchy and of a dull greyish pallor. . . ."

This was when the ugly duchess was journeying to her marriage. Her husband, the Count of Tyrol, was a sulky child; beneath his mean but not repulsive features he concealed a small mind, as ratlike as his face, and as commonplace. The clever duchess favored her husband's page, Chretien de Laferte; but, in a few years, after she had given him castles and wide lands, the page humbled her by marrying Agnes von Flavon whose stupidity Margarete disdained, whose beauty made her furious. The bitter, hideous little woman had Chretien killed; and when the Count of Tyrol invited Agnes to her castle, ugly Margarete shut the gates and let him ride off with his hunting companions on tired horses, through a night of rain.

Ugly Margarete married next the Margrave Ludwig. He at least had sufficient hardihood to perform the technical consummation of his marriage. Three children resulted; of these, two died; remained a fat silly prince who carried a dormouse in his pocket, heir to the Margrave's wide possessions. The duchess--who called her castle with the name her peasants had given her--"Maultasch" (Sack-mouth)--found a man as ugly as herself to whom she could entrust her affairs. Konrad of Frauenberg was an albino who found his enjoyment of life in eating, drinking, taking a bath, sleeping and three other kindred but less polite pleasures. He sneered at the duchess, managed her lands, killed her husband, then her son, finally her detested enemy, the lovely and well-loved Agnes von Flavon.

The ugly Duchess, the Maultasch, grew old and more hideous and very tired of life. The wisdom and gentility that, had her face been presentable, would have made her a paragon, curdled in her mind to a meagre and ineffective savagery. First she hired many cooks. Then, finding no diversion in the products of their art, she signed away all the lands she had loved, forgot her income, relinquished her estates, retreated, sick and deserted, to sun her blistered skin in a squalid cottage on a fisherman's island.

The Significance. Historical novels fall naturally into two classes; those which are novels and those which are histories. Only the few finest of the former are more valuable than the mediocre of the latter. The Ugly Duchess is one of these few. It is a novel, not a trick; in the life of the ugly duchess is written the life of all women who are ugly and who understand beauty.

The duchess is the slow bulging hub of a wheel whose whirling spokes are a glitter of medieval cities and country castles, deaths and tournaments and plagues. Jews who lent money and princes who rode through summer dusts or winter snows, bishops who begat bastards, kings who kept mistresses and died of wounds; all the remote and entangled brightness of a century, like all past centuries full of a familiar ebb and change, and, like all, exciting and beautiful.

The Author was born 43 years ago in Munich. His youth was spent learning about philosophy and literature among the wide avenues and beer gardens of Munich and Berlin. In 1905 he organized a cabal for the furtherance of modern literature -- an institution which was glared at by the fishy eyes of Imperialism. His plays -- especially Vasantasena which played 1000 times in eight years-- made his reputation in Germany. The Ugly Duchess, published in England in the able and sensitive translation which is now to be released in the U. S., became vastly popular as had Author Feuchtwanger's previous Power.

101st

THE LIGHT BEYOND-- E. Phillips Oppenheim--Little, Brown ($2). All of Author Oppenheim's 100 previous novels have possessed that first and most important element of good or even of great novels, plots which, if not airtight, will at least hold the swift and perishable liquid of a reader's excitement. His technique has not yet vanished. The Light Beyond is about three of the most important countries in the world, represented each by one or two enormously, incredibly potent individuals. By the time that a London war conference has revealed the (imaginary) iniquities of teutonic schemes for indemnity avoidance, the rich American heroine is drawing close to the embrace of the almost equally plutocratic hero, polo-playing Mark Van Stratton. The highest quality of Author Oppenheim's work lies in the universality of its appeal--this one would be highly acceptable to a semi-cretin or a college professor. It is hardly ambiguous to say that Author Oppenheim has produced, without writing a work of literature, the best 101 novels by a single author in the English or any other language.

Miracle Boy

THE MIRACLE BOY--Louis Golding --Knopf ($2.50). Under the jacket, on which a jaundiced little shaver is pictured wading through a swamp of flowers, lies the story of a Tyrolean peasant, who, instead of a halo, carried a raven on his shoulder. Hugo Harpf, imagined as a very recent saint, toiled in his village, loved a peasant's daughter, went to Munich to learn how to paint and came home to work miracles. For this he was first killed and then worshipped. In its intention the story is not so much a satire as a critical footnote on the life of Christ. Beyond this it is a picaresque skeleton clothed with the abundant flesh of Author Golding's almost floridly graceful prolixity.