visiting the great sculptor in his studio on Saturdays; though he had no official students at that stage he liked her and allowed her presence. The lessons she learnt from him were simple and essential, and she followed them all her life: to love the great masters, to have absolute faith in nature, and to work relentlessly. He wrote, and she followed: ‘All life surges from a centre, expands from within outwards. The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!’
I would walk with him round his studio, he would open small drawers, such as one is used to finding birds’ eggs in, and show dozens and dozens of exquisitely modelled little hands or feet, tiny things of a delicious delicacy to compare with the grand rough Penseur or his Bourgeois de Calais. He would pick them up tenderly one by one and then turn them about and lay them back. Sometimes he would unwrap from its damp cloth, generally an old shirt, his latest work and, spreading out his hands in uncritical ecstasy, exclaim ‘Est ce beau, ça? Est ce beau?’ [Is it lovely, that? Is it lovely?] Sometimes he would call a model to pose for him, and taking pencil and water draw, never taking his eyes off the model, never looking at all at his paper. Sometimes he signed one and wrote my name on the back and gave it to me.
Rodin asked if he could come and have lunch in her studio. She improvised a lunch table from a couple of boxes, fried some eggs, provided ‘some lovely coloured pomegranates’ and hoped he would not be too hungry. ‘Brave peasant that he was, he would eat bread and cheese.’ He did, but he also ate a pomegranate. ‘Suddenly I became aware that he appeared to be eating the pomegranate hard pips and all. Anxiously I watched. No pips appeared. I was deeply concerned, but much too shy to comment. Long after lunch I saw in a looking glass the old man hastily approach my open window and rid himself of the million seeds. But for his beard he could never have kept up for half an hour such good manners!’
On another occasion when he was to visit she was distracted by a neighbouring student threatening suicide: she rushed off to help dissuade him, squashing the clay statuette she had been working on as she went, and by the time she got back Rodin had been and gone.
She kept very quiet about her friendship with him, learnt from him and treasured his compliments to her work. One of her most valued possessions was the first letter in which he addressed her as Cher collègue (Dear Colleague) rather than Chère élève (Dear Pupil). He called her ‘un petit morceau grec d’un chef d’oeuvre’ (a little Greek fragment of a masterpiece), ‘and I would look at my stalwart arms and legs and not feel at all fragmentary. But I looked for the days when I was allowed to lunch with him at Meudon and watch him work. Those were days not wasted.’ She had no desire, however, for the kind of mentor with which many female artists found themselves lumbered. And Rodin was notoriously amorous. Gwen John had gone to Paris to escape the influence of her brother Augustus and had ended up with Rodin, who rendered her (in her own words) ‘un petit morceau de souffrance et de désir’ (a little fragment of suffering and desire); Camille Claudel’s reputation both personal and professional was inextricably tangled up with him. Marie Laurencin had a similar problem with the writer Apollinaire. Kathleen remained independent. Many years later some people assumed she must have ‘more than studied’ with Rodin; it would have infuriated her had she known.
On a special train taking guests to a picnic to celebrate Rodin’s birthday Kathleen noticed a young woman talking ‘exceedingly bad and ugly French’. She was most upset when she realised that it was the great and revolutionary modern dancer Isadora Duncan. Only days before she and Hofbauer had seen Isadora perform and had wept aloud at the beauty of it. ‘The dancer had seemed the most remote, the most intangible expression of ultimate beauty. And here she was sitting in a crowded railway carriage talking the most Barbaric French.’ Kathleen closed her ears and looked out of the window to deny that her ‘vision glorious had been made flesh’. Later, at the picnic, someone played the fiddle and Isadora danced in her petticoat and bare feet. Kathleen was ‘blinded with joy’; Rodin was ‘enchanted’; ‘everyone was enchanted, save the few inevitable detrimentalists who seem to creep in almost everywhere.’ If there was one thing Kathleen could not abide, it was a detrimentalist. Then ‘Rodin took Isadora’s and my hands in one of his and said “My children, you two artists should understand each other.” And so began a long-lasting relationship of the most unusual order.’
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