An Unquiet Heart

When she went to take the boat fare from her bank account, the cashier told her it was empty. Isadora was profligate; she paid little attention to money, but this time it was Yesenin who had spent it. He had withdrawn every cent and could hardly say where it had gone.

Sol Hurok was angry on her behalf, but Isadora made excuses. Sergei was a child. He was naïve. He had never known what it was like to have money or how to use it.

She cabled Paris Singer, her former lover and father of her dead son, Patrick. Singer was living in Florida now, constructing the Spanish Revival buildings that would leave his mark on Palm Beach and Boca Raton. His affection for Isadora was undiminished. He wired the funds by return.

Their departure, from Hoboken on board the SS George Washington, was accompanied by a media scrum as lively as the one that greeted their arrival.

‘Isadora and Russian Husband Vow Never to Return!’ headlined the New York Sun. ‘Better Freedom, Black Bread and Vodka in Russia, Says Dancer, than Life in Capitalistic USA!’

Paris Singer’s money that had rescued Isadora financed Sergei’s drinking. On board the George Washington, freed from the constraints of Prohibition, he was rarely sober. He was drunk when they arrived in Paris and drunk when Isadora checked them into the city’s finest hotel. The manager of the Crillon, who came to welcome his guests, found them fractious and inebriated.

They had dinner in the Crillon’s chic restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs. Mary Desti, who ate with them, sensed that Sergei was on a knife edge, quivering between exultation and fury.

Sergei drank until it tipped him over the edge. He ran from the restaurant and did not return. Isadora, anxious and upset, confided in Mary.

‘When he drinks, he becomes mad. Quite, quite mad. He gets to thinking that I am his greatest enemy. He can be violent . . .’

Mary asked her why she put up with it. Isadora said, ‘I can’t explain. It would take much too long. There’s something about it that I like, something deep, deep in my life . . .’

It was after midnight when Sergei came back. Isadora was in their third-floor suite with Mary. He seized a chair and threw it through the glass door of the balcony on to the street below. He picked up a gilt-covered standard lamp and used it to smash windows and a mirror, then clambered on a dressing table and swung it at the chandelier.

The women ran into the corridor. They called the hotel’s management, who called the police.

The gendarmes found Yesenin standing in the centre of the room, covered in glass from the mirror he had smashed. He was peering at his reflection in a fragment that had survived, weeping, laughing and talking to himself.

A night in a police cell failed to calm him. Doctor Jules Marcus, called to inject him with a sedative, diagnosed alcoholic psychosis and delirium tremens. He asked Isadora if she would sign the papers for her husband to be committed to a clinic. She agreed.

The police recognised the newsworthiness of the story. Reporters from the news agencies were tipped off.

‘Isadora’s Poet Stirs Riot in Paris Hotel’ cabled a correspondent of the New York Times.

The International News Service splashed the headline, ‘HE’S CRACKED! POET SMASHES UP FURNITURE. Dancer Declares Marriage Between Artists Impossible.’

The Crillon asked Isadora to pay for the damage and leave. With Yesenin confined in the Bicêtre asylum, she and Mary Desti found rooms at the Hotel Réservoir in Versailles. She spent the day writing to the press.

Isadora gave an interview to a Paris-based American correspondent, Lorimer Hammond, who concocted a maliciously mocking piece about her and her husband. She wrote despairingly to Hammond’s editor:

Sergei’s refuge was poetry, the art that justified his life. He clung to it. ‘The Dark Man’, the chronicle of his struggle with alcohol, conscience and psychosis, grew:

My friend, my friend

I’m ill; so very ill.

Nor do I know

Whence came this sickness.

Either the wind whistles

Over the desolate unpeopled field;

Or, as September strips a copse,

Alcohol strips my brain.

The black man,

The black, black,

Black man

Sits by me on the bed all night,

And will not let me sleep.

The black man

Runs his fingers over a vile book,

And, leaning over me,

Like a sleepy monk over a corpse,

Reads a life

Of some drunken wretch,

Filling my heart with longing and despair.

‘Listen!’ he whispers,

‘This book contains the key

To exquisite plans,

Seductive visions.

For this man lived out his life

In repulsive vice,

In deceptions and derision.

His December fields

Were dressed by snow,

Masked in the devil’s white.

The winter storms would help him spin

His verse of artifice and sleight.

Sure he was handsome,

A poet, a boy;

But his gifts were facile,

His genius faded.

He went with a woman

Of forty, or more;

She called him her sweetheart,

He called her a whore.

He thought to be happy

You had to be smart,

That the world would love him

For the sheen of his art.

He didn’t know

That lies and pretence

Are the things that leave

All human hearts rent.

In storms and tempests,

In life’s sad routine,

When losses are heavy

And the soul is dejected,

The art of appearing blithe and serene

Is the one of the skills

Our poet perfected.’

I yelled back at the man in black:

‘Do not dare to be so cruel!

It’s none of your business to dig in such dirt.

Don’t slander me behind my back;

The poet is not me that you take for a fool!’

The man in black

Stares in my face.

His blue eyes are clouded

With the grey sheen of vomit.

Calmly he tells me

I’m a thief, a disgrace,

Who’s knifed a good friend

And slept soundly upon it.

My friend, my friend

I’m ill; so very ill.

Nor do I know

Whence came this sickness.

Either the wind whistles

Over the desolate unpeopled field;

Or, as September strips a copse,

Alcohol strips my brain.

The night is calm;

I am at the window.

The frost lies like balm

On the trees and the grass.

I’m expecting no one;

My heart is at rest;

My thoughts have been freed

From the sins of the past.

Then the bird of night stirs,

An ill-starred cry on frosty air.

From an unseen hoof, a sharp wooden note,

And the black man takes his place in my chair;

Lifts his top hat, doffs his coat.

‘Listen to me!’ he croaks in my face.

‘I have never seen a man so base

Whose conscience plagues him as he sleeps.

Were you expecting me, or was it her,

Thirsting for your cynical, doggerel verse,

For your bleeding heart that makes her weep?

You poets make me laugh,

With your tales of sorrow and damnation

That lure the girls between your sheets

Then leave them panting in frustration.

Am I wrong? Have I forgotten?

Was there not once in some village or other

– Perhaps Ryazan; once I knew –

A shy young boy and his grandmother?

His hair was yellow, his eyes pale-blue . . .

What happened to that child?

Did he grow so evil and so wild?

Why did he throw away the heart

Of the woman he loved, who took his part?

She loved him; she was his happiness.

Yet he sacrificed her with all the rest.’

‘Black man!’ I curse my loathsome guest,

But recognise the truth of what he’s said.

My throat is choked with wormwood and disgrace;

Angered, distressed, I hurl my stick at his face . . .

. . . the moon has died.

It’s dawn. The dark blue sky

Of awful night.

Night and day and dreams are dashed.

I stand alone, no soul nearby.

Alone forever . . .

And the mirror smashed.

The French authorities declared Yesenin a danger to himself and to others. They agreed he could be released from custody, but only on condition that he leave the country.

Isadora booked them on the Paris Simplon-Orient-Express from the Gare de l’Est. Sergei was sedated, and she, Lola and Jeanne, the maid, took turns watching over him. The train sped south towards the Alps and the Simplon Tunnel. Emerging into Italian sunshine, Isadora squeezed his hand. In a day they would be in Venice, with the privacy and tranquillity that would restore his sanity.