Errand into the Maze by Deborah Jowitt

Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham

By Deborah Jowitt

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

There are many challenges facing any biographer of the great choreography innovator Martha Graham, and they aren’t the normal challenges of documentation and sourcework but rather are all about legitimacy and perhaps recognizability. Graham is the subject of Errand into the Maze, the big new biography from long-time Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt, and since this is far from the first book studying Graham’s life or works, undertaking the research in the first place must have been daunting. “Looking back on myself of ten years ago,” Jowitt acknowledges, “I realize that I had some nerve attempting this book, assuming that as a dancer, choreographer, and writer, I had one foot up the ladder.” 

And beyond this there’s recognizability: Graham was a powerhouse specialist changing the landscape of a particular art form that’s almost unknown to the general public. Classical music may likewise be a very particular art form, but even so, most people can whistle a bit of Beethoven or Mozart. Broadway musicals might not have the kind of cultural cache they once did, but an indifferent gaggle of friends probably wouldn’t turn down a set of free tickets to a revival of Brigadoon. 

Those same friends would likely turn down a set of tickets to a staging of Graham’s 1947 ballet Errand into the Maze even if the tickets came with dinner and helpful infusions of whiskey before, during, and after. Even more than a century, there’s something forbiddingly alien about modern dance. This raises the same immediate question about all those earlier Martha Graham biographies that it raises about this one: can it possibly be accessible to general-interest readers, or will it be the particular kind of members-only experience that stagings of Graham’s work can often be today?

As might have appealed to Graham herself, the key will be the works themselves. Thankfully, Jowitt knows this thoroughly and is able, in words, to place those works before even dance-ignorant readers in ways that will give them ample sense of what the fuss was all about. Time and again in the book, when some new work of Graham’s comes into focus, Jowitt pauses the crowded narrative of the woman’s life and complicated personal relations and describes what’s happening on the stage, what show-goers would have seen and something of its interpretation. Non-specialists might find a work like Frontier tough to penetrate, but they’ll follow Jowitt’s gripping description of the dancer’s movements with mounting fascination:

It is also in exhilaration that she embarks twice on a curving path, tipping her body forward as she kicks up one leg behind her. Once, she clasps both hands behind her back when she does this; the second time, one bent arm hovers near her brow. This woman, so dedicated to carving out her own path, has suddenly had another attack of girlish glee.

The Martha Graham who’s built steadily in Jowitt’s book is a sharp, difficult person, a touchy genius with a magnetism that bends the orbits of even the strongest personalities around her. All of those personalities are equally well-drawn, especially Louis Horst, the pianist who accompanied Graham through so many years and so many nervous performances. Jowitt fleshes out all these triumphs and disappointments with insight and a kindly wit drastically different from that of her subject. When one critic in the 1930s dismissed a performance with Olympian finality (“Simplicity has become a formula, a pose; drabness an obsession”), Jowitt quite sensibly imagines the famously tempestuous artist’s response: “It is not reported how much crockery Graham broke upon reading this,” she writes, “or how long it took Horst to pry her out from under her bed clothes and get her back to work.”

Martha Graham lived and worked until she was nearly a century old; indeed, her tireless energy and curiosity right up into her nineties gradually makes Errand into the Maze’s 400 pages feel breezy. The work is buttressed by extensive notes and an excellent bibliography, but it never at any point feels forbidding. Jowitt’s (and perhaps reality’s) Graham very precisely corresponds with one critic’s description of Samuel Barber’s score for her Cave of the Heart: “Brilliant, bitter, and full of amazing energy,” but this biography is a wonderfully human portrait that will reach into the galleries of non-specialists in ways perhaps only an experienced dance critic make it do. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News