by Peter Rader
Her poses . . . had melted into a sort of radiance in which they sent throbbing, round the person of the heroine, elements rich and complex that the fascinated spectator took not as an artistic triumph but as a natural gift.
Whether Proust’s is a true eyewitness account of Bernhardt’s acting or an embellishment for his novel we will never know. But his description is precious, suggesting that Sarah, while still using the traditional poses, had achieved a sort of transcendence with them.
Photographs of her grand gesticulations as Phèdre appeared in the Revue Illustrée: Sarah swoons, she raises her arms, she wails, she beseeches. The photos were accompanied by an article by journalist Adolphe Brisson, the son-in-law of legendary critic Francisque Sarcey, an early champion of Sarah and author of an astonishing two thousand reviews. The younger Brisson, trying to make his own name as a critic, itemized an impressive range of emotions captured by Sarah as Phèdre: “Love sensual and tender, hope, shame, hurt pride, anger, despair, dejection, bitter jealousy and, finally, resignation.” Quite an impressive range. There was clearly something unique about this performance.
“The idealized Phèdre at the Renaissance heralded Bernhardt’s middle or ‘iconic’ period,” noted scholar John Stokes, who has written several books about Bernhardt and nineteenth-century theater. “No longer the impersonation of characters so much as of presences, her performances were increasingly viewed as ritualized events.”
In the carefully choreographed pageantry, there was something almost ceremonial or Mass-like, which is how people described the silences in Eleonora’s performances. This was not by coincidence; Bernhardt, at fifty, was trying to recast herself. Sarah told a reporter: “The moment I have put on the veils of Phèdre I think only of Phèdre, I am Phèdre and I am left shattered by the performance.”
She was starting to sound a lot like Duse.
CHAPTER NINE
The Challant fiasco had been disheartening to Eleonora. She realized that she could not beat Bernhardt at her own game; she needed her own material. That’s why Duse had been so eager to discover a new playwright whose work spoke to her soul. In Italy, she had yet to find such a writer, at least not an Italian one. But there was a Norwegian.
Henrik Ibsen, with his stern face and muttonchop sideburns, had been living in Italy for decades. He was aware of Eleonora’s groundbreaking work though they had never met. Still, Ibsen chose to use “Nora”—a diminutive of Duse’s Christian name—for the protagonist of his play A Doll’s House. Ibsen despised the old, Symbolic style of acting. “No declamation!” he had once admonished a young actress. “No theatricalities! No grand mannerisms! Express every mood in a manner that seems credible and natural. Never think of this or that actress whom you may have seen . . . present a real and living human being.”
While he would later be recognized as the greatest European playwright since Shakespeare, Ibsen’s “realism” was considered radical in his day. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but never won; Alfred Nobel’s instructions specified that the literary prize be given to “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction,” which was interpreted to mean conservative idealism—church, state, and family. Chekhov, Tolstoy, Joyce, and Zola would likewise be snubbed by the Nobel committee. It’s no coincidence that many of these writers were the first to recognize Ibsen’s genius. Among the growing contingent that greatly admired the Norwegian, George Bernard Shaw wrote: “It was held that the stranger the situation, the better the play. Ibsen saw that, on the contrary, the more familiar the situation, the more interesting the play.”
A Doll’s House, perhaps his best-known work, concerns a housewife who feels trapped by her bourgeois existence and makes the radical decision—unheard of at the time—to walk out on her marriage in order to “find herself.” The play had been published in 1879, but Duse read it more than a decade later, when she was involved with the much older and somewhat stuffy Arrigo Boito; her exuberant reaction to Ibsen became a source of friction between them.
The play had astounded Eleonora. Not only did its plot reflect what she herself had done in abandoning her husband, Tebaldo, in South America, but she also recognized the suffocation of her present relationship with Boito, who did not share her enthusiasm for Ibsen: “an old Norwegian pharmacist” is what he called him. Boito’s opinion notwithstanding, Eleonora added A Doll’s House to her repertoire, introducing the Italian public to Ibsen in 1891.
Duse and Ibsen were made for each other; his plays were bold and modern. Delving into the psychology of his characters, Ibsen’s work forced actors to play the moments between the lines—the places where Eleonora’s craft shone most brightly. This was material that Sarah would never touch, which certainly figured in Eleonora’s embrace of it. She would rehearse the plays for hours at a time, refining the pauses, perfecting the nuances—leaving the members of her company perplexed and exasperated.
Certain intellectuals began to take note of Duse’s A Doll’s House. Scandinavian author Laura Hansson, who would profile Duse in her book Six Modern Women (1896), was deeply affected by her portrayal of Nora, calling her a “complete woman.” Hansson detailed the scene in which (Eleo) Nora realizes she no longer loves her husband:
She stands by the fireplace, with her face towards the audience, and does not move a muscle until he has finished speaking. She says nothing, she never interrupts him. Only her eyes speak. He runs backwards and forwards up and down the room, while she follows him with her large, suffering eyes, which have an unnatural look in them, follows him backwards and forwards in unutterable surprise, a surprise which seems to have fallen from heaven, and which changes little by little into an unutterable, inconceivable disappointment, and that again into an indescribably bitter, sickening contempt. And into her eyes comes at last the question: “Who are you? What have you got to do with me?”
When Nora finally says “no” to her husband—telling him the marriage is over—she says it quietly, almost to herself. As Hansson describes it: “I never heard anyone say ‘no’ like her. It contains a whole world of human feeling.”
With divorce still illegal in Italy and other parts of Europe, the play was deeply poignant—an impossible fantasy for those trapped, as Eleonora had been, in a loveless marriage. The courage of Ibsen’s heroine would one day be a source of inspiration for proto-feminists overseas. But the Italian middle class went to the theater to be entertained, not challenged. “There was enough horror, woe, and misery in the world without thrusting more of it upon us in places of amusement,” commented the Dramatic Mirror. Thus, as a leading Italian critic was to comment: “Ibsen very soon went out of fashion in Italy, without ever having been in fashion.” Eleonora realized she would have to travel abroad.
• • •
Eleonora took Ibsen to Moscow, and it was there, on January 11, 1892, that she received news that her father was dead. Having retired from acting many years ago, he had been living alone in Venice, where Eleonora had had little contact with him. As with her mother’s passing, the telegram had been delivered backstage between acts—the play, in this case, was A Doll’s House. With rattled nerves, Eleonora completed the show, then canceled the next two performances. She took the stage again three days later, but it was premature. Throughout A Doll’s House, there are references to Nora’s absent father, such as when she reminisces wistfully in act one: “My dear, kind father—I never saw him again. . . . That was the saddest time I have known since our marriage.” Eleonora found herself uncomfortably emotive while performing the line, and again, later, during this exchange:
KROGSTAD: Your father was very ill, wasn’t he?
NORA: He was very near his end.
KROGSTAD: And he died soon afterwards?
NORA: Yes.
KROGSTAD: Tell me, Mrs. Helmer, can you by any chance remember what day your father died?
Eleonora found herself weeping onstage, the opposite of how she would have wanted to play the moment in the modern style. She would h
ave preferred to have been understated, subdued—instead she found herself out of control and embarrassed by this rare inability to modulate her instrument.
After a few moments, Eleonora composed herself and carried on; the lapse was far more noteworthy for the actress than for the Moscow audience. The Russians may have thought it was simply part of the show—even virtuosic, perhaps. Genuine tears, genuine emotions.
But Eleonora was clearly shaken. As a spectator reported, when Duse took her curtain calls on that Moscow stage, “she came out always pale, tired, and sad. She did not reply with a smile or a kiss of the hand, or any other gesture. She remained grave, still, and only as she went off, she bowed.” There was a new and brooding power to the actress in mourning.
When Eleonora moved on to play A Doll’s House in Vienna, here is how writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, only eighteen at the time, recorded his impressions:
She plays the gaiety that is not happiness, and with a light laugh, she plays all the arid darkness behind the laugh; she plays the state of not-wanting-to-think and the state of not-being-able-to-help-thinking . . . she turned pale, cast down her chin, and her tormented eyes screamed at us in silence.
For years Duse’s black moods offstage had seemed to feed and enhance her performances. But it had been an unfocused malaise, a brooding baseline that she carried onto the stage as Camille or another overwrought heroine from the past. Now, in playing Nora, a flesh-and-blood modern heroine pushing back against millennia of patriarchy, Eleonora’s profound sadness had made her exquisite.
• • •
Tänczer, a German-Turk who went by one name and the tour manager who had cajoled Duse into playing Vienna, was one of those irresistible impresarios—obstinate yet charming, young but ambitious, clearly on the rise, ferocious, audacious, and always immaculately groomed. Vienna had proved successful for her—and now he told Eleonora it was time for a tour of the United States. The arm twist was firm, but so was the resistance. Something still spooked her about America—a forward-leaping land, certainly, but one still mired, on some level, in its puritanical roots. Duse wasn’t sure how they would respond to her work.
They will adore you, insisted Tänczer; the actress remained unconvinced. You can’t ignore America, Tänczer hammered—they will think you are scared of them. Bernhardt had already conquered America—twice—in her smash tours of 1880 and 1891. As Mark Twain had said, “There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses—and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.”
Sarah provided plenty of gossip for the papers too. The tabloid newspapers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were in constant need of provocative headlines, and Bernhardt was more than happy to oblige—any publicity, whether good, bad, or indifferent, was still publicity. In Philadelphia, Sarah had a laugh attending the cabaret show of a famous female impersonator appearing as “Sarah Heartburn.” In Boston, Bernhardt good-naturedly climbed atop a beached whale for photographers. “Are you a Jewess-Catholic-Protestant-Mohammedan-Buddhist-Atheist-Zoroaster-Theist-or-Deist?” asked one breathless reporter.
While Sarah relished the attention of the American press corps, Eleonora dreaded it. Despite consenting to Tänczer’s tour, she sailed to New York in early 1893 with trepidation, and was dismayed by what she observed, writing: “When I set foot in America, after a stormy and painful crossing and saw the great city—nothing but railroads, automobiles, and business, nothing but spectacular buildings, colossal billboards, noise, and hubbub, without a single glimmer of art or repose for the eye or the soul—I thought of entrusting myself again to the stormy sea and coming straight back to Italy.”
Tänczer had partnered with a pair of New York impresarios, Carl and Theodor Rosenfield, and they had high hopes for a media blitz upon Duse’s arrival. But the Italian foiled their plans by arriving furtively one week before her company and quietly checking into the Murray Hill Hotel.
Eleonora had always been press shy. Just as she disappeared in plain sight on the stage, she preferred anonymity in the newspapers. She found that reporters, invariably, would ask about her work; Duse wished it to stand on its own merits. In rare moments, Eleonora wrote carefully composed letters to select critics, explaining what she was trying to do onstage but always insisting that her private affairs remain so. As a media strategy, it was bound to fail.
In Vienna, she had shunned reporters altogether, which prompted theater director and drama critic Paul Schlenther to speculate as to “whether she is silent or talkative, whether she is ‘nice,’ to whom and how long she has been married, what skeleton she keeps in her closet and what are her favorite dishes.” It was the kind of gossip that drove Eleonora mad. While crossing the Atlantic, she had written a preemptive letter to the Rosenfields, her American tour managers:
I have always found it possible to succeed in my work without having to resort to methods, which are, alas! generally adopted. I intend to adhere to my resolution, even in a country like America, where, I am told, exaggerated advertising is absolutely necessary. I believe there is in the United States a public that is cultured, educated, and impartial, and that is the only public which interests me.
American journalists did not appreciate being stymied, and began labeling Eleonora as “neurotic,” “temperamental,” and “egotistical.” Mocking her desire for seclusion, they called her “the hermit of Murray Hill.”
When a reporter who spoke Italian managed to corner Duse at her hotel by joining her in an elevator ride, Eleonora’s only words to him were: “Sir, I do not know you, neither do I wish to know you. I have received no callers up to now, and my desire is to receive nobody. On Monday night I shall appear in public, and I will be seen upon the stage. Away from that I do not exist.” Her behavior was wholly antithetical to that of Sarah Bernhardt, for whom there was no distinction between offstage antics and onstage spectacle—her whole life was the performance. Sarah lived her American tours so publicly that Henry James remarked: “She may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper.”
After the uncensored and highly amusing shenanigans of Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora’s insistence on personal privacy was considered selfish and, apparently, took a toll on audience turnout. This was an era in which Americans relied on newspapers to tell them what was important. Without her name in print, Duse was less talked about. Indeed, Duse’s penchant for invisibility, both onstage and off, would eventually cause her to disappear from our memories. It began in New York.
“She opened,” sighed fellow actor Le Gallienne, “to a half empty house.” Duse had brought it upon herself; why should the public bother to get to know her if she remained unwilling to be known? Duse made a second miscalculation in a last-minute switch of repertoire.
Though A Doll’s House had been announced, Duse, in a change of heart, scrapped Ibsen from the American tour. Instead she chose to open, once again, with Sarah’s signature play: Camille. While New Yorkers had gone berserk for Bernhardt in the role, they didn’t quite know what to make of the Italian. The New York Times ran its assessment on January 24:
Signora Duse could only seem to be voluble rather than eloquent in many of those long speeches that cannot be conveyed well from the conversational French of Dumas to the Italian language. Her speech was of the sharp and staccato, where we had been used to the soft, melodious running together of French syllables.
This criticism—favoring “melodious” French over “staccato” Italian—hits upon one of the essential quirks of these tours by foreign divas: the play was given in a language the audience often did not understand. At times, the language barrier took on comedic proportions. During a Bernhardt run in Hartford some years earlier, the audience was supposed to have been given an English translation of Frou-Frou to follow the action as Sarah performed the play. By mistake, copies of Phèdre had been handed out instead; but no one noticed they were reading one play and watching another. The absurd situation would have been a nightmare for Eleonora, whose performance depende
d on the audience’s focused attention on her, not their Playbill.
This is the reason why Eleonora had chosen Camille, a play Americans knew well, and also why she had spent so much time perfecting her expression of the subtext, acting the pauses between the words in a way she felt was universal. But these gestures and expressions didn’t translate well, it seems. To a public unaccustomed to naturalism on the stage, they were their own kind of foreign language. According to the Times, Duse’s “mannered gesticulation would probably seem more effective, because [it was] more appropriate, in conventional tragedy than in prose drama of everyday life.”
When Eleonora read that criticism, it must have felt brutal. Quite the opposite of the modernism to which she aspired, her “mannered gesticulation” seemed to the Times more appropriate to the dated classics written in verse. “There were too many motions,” wrote the Times, “too much uplifting of the forearms . . . it suggested too sharply a pose for a picture.” It’s hard to imagine Duse posing, but that’s what this critic seemed to be suggesting.
Was she using too much muscle, perhaps, in attempting to impose her new style on an old play? It’s called “pushing” in acting circles, and it happens, on an off night, to the best of them. As the review concludes: “She fusses too much in her attempt to be natural.”
There was more to his comments than simply implying that Duse was overacting; the critic was also playing into a common stereotype of the era: that Italians gesticulated wildly when speaking. Even more pernicious, Italian immigrants in America were seen as intellectually inferior to their northern counterparts, being darker-skinned and Catholic. Bigotry led to hatred, and just two years earlier, eleven Sicilians had been lynched in New Orleans—a shameful, ghastly episode that remains the largest lynching in U.S. history.
Prejudice against Italians could certainly be seen in this quip from the New York Dramatic Mirror: “For giving us Eleonora Duse, we can forgive Italy for the organ grinders, the mafia, and for Burt Haverly’s ‘Banana Song’ [a reference to a racist but popular song of the time called ‘The Dago Banana Man’].” While terribly small-minded, this reporter had at least noticed something worthy in Eleonora’s art. It was becoming something of a pattern. When Duse first arrived in a country unfamiliar with her work, there was some initial head scratching. Then, with word of mouth, theaters began to fill—and the critics soon followed.
