A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young

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       1902–1905

      ‘AS AN ARTIST I thought of the dancer as a resplendent deity,’ Kathleen wrote, ‘as a human being I thought of her as a disgracefully naughty child. As an artist I exulted in her; as a tiresome child I could not abandon her.’ In 1902 Isadora was twenty-four, and well on her way to becoming ‘a household name in St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Munich, Copenhagen, and Stockholm’, as Martin Shaw described her a couple of years later. She hadn’t yet had a duel fought over whether her free, unfettered modern form of dancing was better than the classical ballet, but she soon would have.

      The friendship between Isadora and Kathleen was based on idealism, but though their ideals of independence, love, joy and art were similar, they had very different ways of manifesting them. In the beginning this did not matter. They both believed that inherited money limited a child’s freedom; that marriage limited a woman’s freedom; that adventure was the root of true wealth; that art and babies were the greatest achievements. Neither could understand why, in Isadora’s words, ‘if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it’. In the end their different ways of treating these ideals drew them apart. Kathleen grew up; Isadora didn’t.

      Even those who wanted to dislike Isadora’s dancing found it difficult. Some, because she had bare legs and loose tunics, wanted it to be lewd, and came away having to admit that these bare legs were the most innocent. Kathleen’s brother Rosslyn was very impressed by the fact that she ‘could dance in her petticoat without it seeming improper’. Some, because she was American, wanted it to be naive and pretentious, and came away admitting that it might be genius. Kathleen had no such problems. She wanted it to be art, and it was art, and for love of the dance she loved the dancer, and travelled with her across Europe. Hers was one hand held out from which Kathleen did not turn away.

      ‘Come with me to Brussels,’ said she, and I went. ‘Come with me to the Hague.’ At each place and many more she gave her grand performance. The greatest conductors led the finest orchestras for her; the houses were crowded out. At Liège one night the audience stood up in their seats and waved their hats and roared. I sat quietly on my seat, disposing of my preposterous tears, before going round to see that my dancer had her fruit and milk, and a shawl over her whilst she cooled off, before facing the wild enthusiasts who surged around the stage door and yelled their delight.

      We got up early, ran in the park that was near, and did a few gymnastics. Whatever happened later, and terrible things did happen, at that epoch the dancer was a healthy, simple-living, hard-working artist, neither beautiful nor intelligent apart from her one great gift for expression. She was open handed, sweet tempered, pliable, and easy going. ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ she would say if I, who hated to see her put upon, wanted to stand out against over charges etc. ‘What’s the difference?’

      Kathleen mothered her, and she needed it. At that stage Isadora was more or less keeping her family (mother and three siblings—her father had not been in evidence for years) financially; later she would keep her lover and her dancing school too, all on the money made from performing. She had a wild, romantic imagination and a saleable talent, but she was not practical. When the ‘terrible things’ started to happen, it was to Kathleen that Isadora turned.

      Though she loved travelling about with her friend, Kathleen did not wish to become ‘vicariously engulfed in dancing’. Back in Paris she worked hard at her own talent, but Isadora’s life touched upon hers in more ways than one. Among Isadora’s disciples was a pair of German Jewish brothers with whom Kathleen was rather impressed, as they seemed very literary. The younger, aged about twenty-eight, ‘hung himself round with mysteries’ and wanted to involve her in a ‘grand scheme he had’ for shipping revolvers to Russia hidden behind false bottoms in petrol cans. Writing in 1932, married to a cabinet minister (her second husband, Edward Hilton Young, later Lord Kennet), Kathleen claimed ignorance:

      I thought this great fun and most exciting. I had no notion of the purpose of the firearms, nor why they should be sent thus. One day when the young man came round to my studio with a couple of suitcases full of I knew not what, saying that the police were going to search his rooms, I very gaily said, ‘Rather, leave them here. Stuff them out of sight somewhere.’ Later these young men introduced me to a middle-aged Englishman who, they told me, shared my enthusiasm for the Greek dramatists and philosophers. He was a prim little man, always neatly and conventionally dressed, but he seemed even poorer than me and I therefore took to making an evening meal at home and letting him share it, in return for which hospitality he would read the Greeks aloud to me. I knew little, indeed nothing, about him, so I was not in the least ruffled to hear that a bomb had been thrown at the King of Spain in a Paris street and that the Englishman had been arrested as the maker of this murderous bomb. All my standards of right and wrong had suffered such an upheaval since I left England that this seemed no queerer than many other things. Perhaps this sort of thing was quite usual, like having lots of mistresses and yet being quite nice. Perhaps it was only a matter of getting used to it. Still it was rather a ruffling affair to get a letter from the courts of justice to ask me to appear at the trial, as I was understood to be one of the accused’s few friends in Paris. The trial lasted several days. I crept off each morning, returning in the evening. I dared tell no one what I was up to. I was terrified that my name would get into an English paper, and I imagined aunts and uncles toying with the word anarchist. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what the word meant. But it made me feel uncomfortable.

      This sounds to modern ears almost unbearably naive, but Kathleen was not political, not a newspaper reader. Her world was apart from such things, and she was dangerously cavalier about it all. ‘I was young enough not to have discerned the difference between knowledge and wisdom,’ she admitted later, ‘and nearly got myself into very hot water.’ As it was, all she had to do was stand up in court and say yes, she knew the accused, that he visited her studio and read Sophocles. Laughter in court. Did he ever talk about the King of England? Oh dear no. What did he talk about? Socrates. More laughter in court, and it was all over.

      Her other adventure with the mysterious German Jew was a trip to the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died. Kathleen had read some Wilde, and found it ‘very amusing’. She still didn’t know what it was that he had done. Rosslyn had known Wilde’s lover Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, at Oxford (he had once appeared on the football pitch wearing a wreath of flowers and patent leather shoes) and had met Oscar Wilde, but he had not enlightened his little sister. Nigel Playfair told a story of how in 1894, when Kathleen had been visiting Rosslyn at Oxford, a clergyman had been hideously embarrassed when she, aged sixteen, had asked whom Holman Hunt had married. ‘My dear fellow,’ said the clergyman later, out of her earshot, ‘I could hardly tell a young lady that Holman Hunt had married his deceased wife’s sister!’ ‘Deceased wife’s sister’ became a joke term among them for something unmentionable. Times had changed and she was in very different company, but homosexuality still dared not speak its name.

      The German talked about Wilde with awed voice as about a prophet or a martyr. I, amiable and acquiescent, said I would love to come down with him to the little place, where he was acquainted with the hotelkeeper. After a few preliminary civilities we were shown a rough wooden box full of books with a coat and waistcoat on the top of it. These were Oscar Wilde’s. In the coat pocket was a hypodermic syringe and a used handkerchief. Underneath were several signed photographs, and about fifty books, many of them signed by their authors. The hotelkeeper said, if the English lady would like the contents of the box she was welcome. I hesitated, and then went through it and took a selection of half a dozen of the most interesting. Would I not like the syringe? No thank you! It would be better to throw that away.

      This adventure I innocently recounted to Hofbauer, who, to my amazement, detonated in violent rage. What right had the damned German Jew even to speak of Wilde to me, and to let me rummage about with his disgusting possessions, that, it seemed, was СКАЧАТЬ