Diamonds on your collarbone

Anne Hollander

• Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Agnes DeMille
  Hutchinson, 509 pp, £20.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 09 175219 1
• Blood Memory: An Autobiography by Martha Graham
  Macmillan, 279 pp, £20.00, March 1992, ISBN 0 333 57441 9

The death of Martha Graham on 1 April 1991, a little more than a month before her 97th birthday, finally permitted Agnes DeMille to publish her biography of the dancer, after nearly twenty-five years of work and four years of waiting. It is a measure of DeMille’s reverence for Graham that she should have withheld until after Graham’s death what is by any standards an affectionate and appreciative account of her life and art, rather than risk of fending Graham’s own sense of herself in the slightest degree. DeMille seems to feel that she is approaching something truly sacred in discussing Graham, rather than simply writing the life of a rare artist and an old friend who had become a touchy old woman. She tells us in her preface that Martha had wished to leave a legend, not a biography; and she knows she is transgressing.