Felix Cherniavsky - Contemporary Articles about Maud Allan

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Maud Allan 1329b 51 2008-2-74.jpg
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Felix Cherniavsky - Contemporary Articles about Maud Allan

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Maud Allan Research Collection
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51.2008-2-74
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DUCITA VUOR VY OD SLAR WILDL LIIN " O sumes source War I , is contained in Michael Kettle's marvelously reasoned and elegant “ Sa lome's Last Veil : The Libel Case of the Century ” ( 1977 ) . What Hoare has done , in addition to offering many more anecdotes of right - wing obloquy and mal ice , is to shift the focus from general sex ual censorship to the particular censor ship of homosexuality that he contends was part of a continuing cultural war . Hoare is a very clever writer , and he makes his new prism plausible . My reser in - although the British secret service was , in fact , compiling a list of British busi nesses engaging in trade with Germany through the Netherlands and actually subjecting them to blackmail . Neverthe less , the notion of a bible of turncoats took hold in the atmosphere of chaos , terror , grief and distrust . Extremists lumped all British residents of German ancestry ( including the House of Windsor ) with an " international conspiracy ” of Jews and homosexuals whose purported aim was to deliver Britain to the Kaiser . Public outcries for the deportation of the lot for the racial purification of the British people were lobbed like canisters of mustard gas into various editorial pages . In the midst of this , The Imperialist , now calling itself The Vigilante , a self - ap pointed watchdog of British morality on all fronts , published a little boxed item about an upcoming theater performance . The star of the show , a Canadian - Ameri can dancer named Maud Allan , slapped the journal's editor , Noel Pemberton Billing , with a libel suit , thereby precipi tating a sensational five - day trial whose outrageous conduct and Alice - in - Wonder land newspaper coverage proved , as Philip Hoare makes brilliantly and acer bically clear in “ Oscar Wilde's Last Stand , " " that the casualties of war were not only the bloodied bodies of a genera tion of young men , but also the notions of truth , justice and toleration . " The Vigilante item , complete with headline , read : “ The Cult of the Clitoris " To be a member of Maud Allan's private performances in Oscar Wilde's ' Salome , ' one has to apply to a Miss Valetta , of 9 , Duke Street , Adelphi W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of these members have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000 . ” Translated , this meant that by ap pearing in Wilde's drama , which had been vilified for some 25 years as a de generate's hymn to Sodom and Gomor rah , Allan was encouraging the practice of lesbianism and might be suspected of lesbianism herself . No matter what her actual sexual orientation ( and Hoare speculates about it sufficiently to make one's head spin ) , Allan was reviled merely for assuming the role of Salome . At the trial , she would be damned mere ly for having been born : Billing ( who con ducted his own defense ) introduced evi dence that in 1898 Allan's brother , Theo , had been executed for the murders of two young women whose nude bodies had been discovered in the belfry of a church ; Allan's perverted tendencies were encoded in her blood . The jury , in agreement , cleared Billing . Eighty years later , one can afford to be amused by it all , and Hoare , the biog rapher of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward , is keen to the comic elements , especially those connected with lan guage . For example , a 1990's reader in the United States , for whom detailed sexual discussions are all too available , may smirk at the fact that much of the British public in 1918 could not have been counted on to know what a clitoris was . Or an orgasm : during the testimo ny of one witness who used this term , the cross - examinating barrister , puzzled , asked if it were “ some unnatural vice . ” The parade of witnesses , prominent figures in British culture among them , STAND ” contains no bibli ography , and so one pre from the notes that Hoare has relied on one book for his account of Allan's life and work : “ The Salome Dancer ” ( 1991 ) , by Felix Cherniavsky , a relative of a musician who toured with Allan early in her ca reer and whose book is based on closely held family papers , including Allan's journals and letters . Yet Cherniavsky himself published a much better study of Allan in 1983 , one more tempered , more richly detailed and considerably more careful about the parallels it drew between her life and her dancing . The 1991 book omits some of these key points and is more acidulous in tone about its subject , which may have led Hoare to his narrow thinking . To take one point : Hoare's heated descriptions of Allan's performances as Salome are couched in a feverish rhetoric derived from contemporary re views , which he quotes : “ In naked sensu ality , her body calculating , she meets the eyes of Herod ; the rhythm of her mo tion accelerates ; she knows what she wants . ” As Cherniavsky showed in 1983 , such language may be traced to a pro motional booklet written by Allan's Lon don manager to stir up interest in her Palace Theater debut . Allan never spoke of herself publicly as a temptress ; when it came to her art , she was earnest to the point of sanctimoniousness , and she had to be promoted , marketed , as a siren . If Hoare wants his intuitions about Maud Allan to be taken seriously , he must reconcile the paradoxes of her dance history , and that requires all the available information . He needed one more trip to the library . FROM OSCAR WILDE'S LAST STAND " Mindy Aloff is the dance critic of The New Republic Noel Pemberton Billing in 1916 . THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13 SUNDAY APRIL 26 1998

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