BLOOD MEMORY, by Martha Graham, Doubleday, 279 pages, $25.

Fortunately, I had a careful and caring father who saw to it that I, even as a child, had glimpses of the surviving greats from his era — Dame May Whitty, Katharine Cornell, Grace George, Laura Hope Crews, Ethel Barrymore, Lynne Fontaine and Alfred Lunt among many others. But for some reason, probably inane, I missed Martha Graham, a force in the theater of American dance since the time of my birth. This really was an unforgivable omission.

Though denied her physical presence, her company, still carrying her high standards, was in excellent shape when I caught two of their performances last October, a short time after its founder’s death at 94. Crisp delineation, robust and imaginative interpretations and great, stark beauty still adhere to Graham’s landmark ballets — “Primitive Mysteries,” “Night Journey,” “Embattled Garden” and, particularly, that most quintessential of American ballets, “Apppalachian Spring.” All were conceived and clothed in a metaphysical aura.

In her autobiography, “Blood Memory” (the title suggests the emotional high-water marks in the dancer’s long life), lucid and cogent, Graham traces the genesis and development of many of her most successful ballets. She confirms the fact that the music — which often came from such legendary composers as Aaron Copland and Darius Milhaud — must be subservient to the dance itself, its real raison d’etre. As she says, “… you either accept the composer’s music or you do not. I think that it’s important to state that the dance does not interpret the music; the music is a setting for the dance.”

She pointedly rejects the term “modern dance” as applied to her work since “modern” implies that certain dances date quickly. Her preference was for the word “contemporary.”

As she traces the evolution of her career from the early days when she was a member of the Denishawn Dance Company through the bleak Goldwyn Follies years to the founding of her own company, Graham mentions a host of celebrated people from all walks who crossed her path and sometimes illuminated it: Indira Gandhi, George Balanchine (with whom she once happily cooperated in a ballet), Anthony Tudor, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II, Harry Truman and so on and on. These allusions are neither name-dropping nor frivolous gestures. Each one who confronted her altered her life in a significant way and sometimes was the inspiration for a ballet.

Early on, Graham made the conscious decision that she would forgo marriage and children for the sacred calling of the dance. Erick Hawkins, her partner at one point, hustled her into an ill-advised marriage that came to a grinding end rather quickly. For her, sex was not fashioned for procreation, but for a delicious fulfillment. She writes that she “could never give a child the careful upbringing which I had had as a child.” Dance won out over motherhood.

Lavishly illustrated, “Blood Memory” is an index to the genius of its author as a dancer, a teacher and choreographer (though she disliked the term). No other dancer has had quite the clout and the dynamism that have distinguished the career of Martha Graham, a true original.

Robert H. Newall is a free-lance writer who resides in Hampden.