[In the following review, Mencken excoriates Duncan's autobiography, her dancing, and her lifestyle.]

[My Life] I assume, was planned as the first of two volumes. It stops short with the fair (and, by that time, somewhat fat) author's invasion of Russia in 1921. That invasion turned out to be as ill-starred as Napoleon's, and she was presently back in France, where she was to die in 1927. What she has to say in her first volume about her curiously banal love affairs has made the book a roaring success, and it is now being read by all the flappers who devoured The President's Daughter six months ago. But what gives it solid interest is not this pathetic and almost mannish mulling over cold amours, but the author's laborious and vain effort to explain the principles of her so-called Art. This effort leaves it revealed as precisely what it was: a mass of puerilities, without any more rational basis than golf or spiritualism. Isadora simply loved to prance around in a shift; all the rest was afterthought. The daughter of a music-teacher, she began this prancing very early in life and to the tune of relatively respectable music: in the fact lay the seeds of her future success. It gave the world, and especially the world of artists, a pleasant shock to see the shift waving and billowing to the tunes of Chopin and Tschaikovsky; there was another shock later on when it began to flap to the tunes of Wagner and Brahms. It was an era of painfully correct ballet-dancing, and to worn-out, tin-pan music. Here, at least, was something new—and straightway it became converted into something portentous. But its meaning, at bottom, was exactly that of any other dancing, which is to say it had scarcely any meaning at all.

Isadora lived and died without anything properly describable as an education, but she was quick, woman-like, to take color from her surroundings, and so she picked up a great deal of profound prattle, and some of it she unloaded into her book. On analysis, it turns out to be very hollow. With one breath she connects her dancing with the figures on Greek urns, and with the next she protests that it was completely American, and had Walt Whitman for its pa. At other times she talks darkly of Beethoven, Wagner and Nietzsche—"the first dancing philosopher." But what had Nietzsche to do with her melodramatic performance of The Marseillaise, and what had Wagner to do with her writhing to The Beautiful Blue Danube—her two most solid successes?

The more she goes into this matter, in fact, the more absurd she becomes. Her tragedy was that she was not content to be a first-rate bare-legged dancer: she also yearned to be an intellectual. The same folly has engulfed many other ladies of the stage. It is responsible for the ghastly Ibsen revivals that drive dramatic critics to cocaine and heroin, and it is responsible too for the dreadful memoirs that their Heddas and Noras write. Let it be said for La Duncan that her own tome, though it is full of buncombe, is nevertheless very interesting. In it, for the first time, a lady of many loves discusses them realistically, if at the same time somewhat gurglingly. It presents one fact hitherto unnoticed by science: that even a professional charmer sometimes finds it immensely difficult to snare her man. Isadora conquered a great many, but her flops were almost as numerous as her conquests. It was her ambition to bear children to men of eminence, and to that end (according to her own account) she tackled such whales of science as Ernst Haeckel and such sound artists as George Grey Barnard. But they were beyond her seductions, and so, of her actual offspring, two out of three were fathered by dismal nonentities. A foolish woman, and a sad life.…