Blood Memory, by Martha Graham and Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, by Agnes De Mille (1991)

I am not a follower of ballet or dance, but when I started leafing through Martha Graham’s autobiography, Blood Memory: An Autobiography, I soon found I had to keep going and finish it. Now, this is hardly what one would call great writing. Indeed, there are some suggestions that it was more dictated, to her companion and assistant, Ron Protas. Kirkus Reviews said the book “feels as if it were dictated a few minutes at a time and left largely unedited,” and the Los Angeles Times reviewer wrote that it reminded one of the “rambling, disjunctive quality as the dangerously long, seemingly shapeless pre-curtain speeches she insisted upon making once she could no longer dance her own repertoire.” And toward the end, the names start dropping like bits of shrapnel.

But, at the same time, you’ve got to respect the kind of passion that could keep Graham going until she succumbed to pneumonia just a few weeks short of her 97th birthday. Graham doesn’t try to sugarcoat the fact that a double helping of ego tends to be part of the package when one is a creative genius, nor is she apologetic about the fact that she liked men and went after those she wanted. When it became clear that she had to stop dancing herself, it led to too much drinking, too much brooding, and a personal crisis: “A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish.”

And she would probably have agreed with Arnold Palmer that “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” “I believe that we learn by practice,” she declares in the second line in the book, and she goes on to describe just how much practice she would put herself and her dancers through, starting with intense drilling in basics–400 leaps in five minutes, as a start. Though Graham obviously didn’t aim for this to be a self-help book like Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, the pages are full of inspirational words that any dancer, artist, or other creative person could draw ideas and encouragement from. Graham recounts more than a few situations where it was only her “damn the torpedoes” attitude that got her through.

Blood Memory: An Autobiography was published about four months after Graham’s death. It was followed three weeks later by the publication of Agnes De Mille’s biography, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, and I’d encourage anyone interested in Graham to check it out, too. De Mille and Graham had danced together and known each other as close friends for over fifty years, and De Mille had been working on the book for years, holding it back from publication out of respect. She approached it as a serious, almost scholarly work, despite her feelings for Graham, and in itself, is a remarkable book, particularly considering that De Mille was past 85 when it was finally published.

Blood Memory: An Autobiography, by Martha Graham
New York: Doubleday, 1991

Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, by Agnes De Mille
New York: Random House, 1991