This is my first reading of Mabel Dodge Luhan. I first heard of her long ago, but I don’t know from where. It might have been something as silly as Dennis Hopper buying her Taos house with the money from Easy Rider. (It’s a really nice house. One can see photo on the internet. Historical sight now.). She was a rich lady. This might have been the most important thing about her. Even in democratic bootstrap USA, this put her is a position of privilege. This is not so unusual. What is unusual is that she was the type of rich person interested in participating in bohemian culture. There is usually a supply of rich people interested in the arts, after all, if one doesn’t have to work one must do SOMETHING for amusement, to fill the time. The book has some reference to this with people including Lawrence suggesting that she do something, anything, like her own house chores rather than having servants do it. This for her own good. Because she is bored?
This memoir is of her relationship with novelist D H Lawrence. It was not a particular intimate relationship. It seems, by her account, that this was because of the emotional walls he built. They were not lovers or anything. It is a little unclear if she wanted him for a lover or not, but apparently this did not occur.
(I read this book after reading nonfiction book that has a lot of details in it about syphilis in the late 19th and early 20th century. That book How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness mentions some notable people who had syphillis and had to deal with the marginally effective to harmfull, treaments for it as well as the disturbing capasity for the disease to vanish in the body only to reapear more horribly later, maybe. The insane asylums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with people insane from syphilis. The book mentions her as a victim of the disease and it’s treatments without going into much detail. It says that she suppressed until later the memoir material that that struggle. Yet while reading in my mind, I knew that this was somewhere in the background on her text. Sexually transmitted disease in hard to eradicate since people have problem confronting sexuality directly.)
(I read this book after reading nonfiction book that has a lot of details in it about syphilis in the late 19th and early 20th century. That book How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness mentions some notable people who had syphillis and had to deal with the marginally effective to harmfull, treaments for it as well as the disturbing capasity for the disease to vanish in the body only to reapear more horribly later, maybe. The insane asylums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with people insane from syphilis. The book mentions her as a victim of the disease and it’s treatments without going into much detail. It says that she suppressed until later the memoir material that that struggle. Yet while reading in my mind, I knew that this was somewhere in the background on her text. Sexually transmitted disease in hard to eradicate since people have problem confronting sexuality directly.)
Her story is that she invited this famous English novelist to come live in New Mexico more or less as her guest. She is quite interested in the Indians. She wanted D H to be as well, to write a book about them so apparently the white Euro people would finally understand them. She wants him to be a sort of popularizer, in between interpreter, of the spiritual aspects of Indian culture. A rather tall order for an Englishman on his first trip to the USA. Did she think of this as a sort of commission?
Frieda and DH Lawrence were a globetrotting couple when they showed up in Taos. Globetrotting then consisted of steamships, and railroads, these new 19th century travel technologies. This sped things up considerably beyond the capacities of sail powered ships and pre-railroad land travel. The Lawrences have traveled around the world before they arrive in Taos from the west. They had just gone to try to live in Australia where Lawrence produced the novel Kangaroo, which I have written about earlier.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was married to an indian. She tells of how this occurred. She says he set up his tent outside her house and wouldn’t leave because he wanted her. And apparently he got her. So she has this kind of vague character of Tony, her husband, in the book, He the strong silent type so we never really know what he is thinking through all this. In a way, while acknowledging the cultural gap between the indigious, recently from basic hunter-gatherer, and the civilized white Euro types, she separates Tony enough from the others that he always seems remote and unknowable. We get her take on what Tony thinks of the Lawrences now and then and it’s usually that he doesn’t really like them around so much.
She goes into her motivation to draw them there. First with a kind of stock disturbing view that sounds like she is well trained by the patriarchy: “Only a man can change a woman from a devourer into a creator.” Really? Isn’t this kind of the other way around?
“Perhaps I had dimily and intuitively expected Larenzo to be the Transformer for me and had summoned him for that purpose from across the continents. Well, he had come. He had vivified my life and possibly I had done as much for him. But apparently nothing significant had come of it beyond the momentary illuminations that flashed between us and that always ended in the fretful and frustrating hours of bewilderment.”
This strikes me as an odd sort of buyer’s remorse. The man was an obsessed writer and in a complicated marriage in a forgien land, and he was a poor kid from the coal country in England. Way out of any familiar elements. Her expectations of him feel extreme.
As a reader of some of the novels of Lawrence I don’t think I would look at him at all as much of a savior or answer man for anyone really, not even for himself. He questions a lot and wonders about a better path. Yes, it seems spiritual in some way, and wonders about a connection to ancient ways of human association. He doesn’t provide a path to it. I can understand that Luhan would associate that with the world of the native Americans. I think she was trying to give insight from the indians to Lawrence and get something from him in return, become her “Transformer”.
He writes to her about some confused emotions he apparently thought she had between her feelings for Tony and DH.
“You need have no split between Tony and me: never: if you stick to what is real in your feeling in each direction. Your real feeling in two directions won’t cause any disharmony.--But don’t try to transfer to Tony feelings that don’t belong to him: admit all the limitations, simply. And never again try to transfer to me: admit the limitations there too.”
Included with the memoir are a number of letters Lawrence sent her. Some are part of the memoir itself, and several are dumped into the end. None of these at the end have any explanatory notes attached to them so it’s easy to be at a loss regarding some of things and people he refers to. These letters at the end of the book are all from after Frieda and DH left Taos for more traveling. (And seeing her children. Luhan does tell us that these two have a troubled relationship. Frieda had left a husband and three children to be with Lawrence who, according to this book, did not permit her to see the children. Yet in the letters from DH he talks about Frieda being off with her children and Frieda writes of this too. I don’t know the whole story. Luhan also mentions the hard time the Lawrences had with his fellow Brits and the government authorities during WWI because she was German. He writes about this extensively in Kangaroo.)
The end of the book letters are not really letters between close intimates. This whole book has the slight distaste of a woman trying to buy access to one of the great novelists of her day and that her plan just didn’t work out. After they leave Lawrence is more of less ill for the remainder of his life. He died very young, age 44. (I would like to think that he had a flash at the end of the eternal bonding with the basic at the very end as being maybe what he was searching for all along.)
After they are gone from Taos Luhan sends him part of her memoirs that she intends to publish. He is supportive and gives her input repeating this in letters. He tells her to publish it herself in consecutive letters and strongly suggests that she ought to change all the names of others in the text. It seems that she is writing about her Greenwich Village artist bohemian socialist salon days when she had a relationship with famous journalist John Reed.
He shares his notions about writing with power and conviction:
“Heaven knows what it is to be honest in writing. One has to write from some point of view, to leave all other aspects, from all the remaining points of view, to be conjectured. One can’t write without feeling--and feeling is bias. The only thing to put down on paper is one’s own honest-to goodness feeling.”
In this end letter section it is clear that the searching wealthy Luhan has continued to search. From reading his letters it is clear that she is really into Gurdjeff and keep trying to get Lawrence to go sit with him or whatever one did with Gurdjeff. DH is resistant all the way. He doesn’t want Gurdjeff, and is tired of a certain type of searching, but she keeps on telling him to go. He never does, of course.
By 1928 he has written Lady Chatterley’s Lover and tells her he plans to publish it himself of an uncensored version and needs the money. He prints 1000 copies to sell for $10 each. This of course worked out well, and he died two years later.
A mere two years after his death she publishes this book. She claims in the beginning that she sent it to Frieda who was OK with it and said that DH was better at the end. I assume she meant different from the not that pleasant depiction of Luhan’s, but this is all rather vague.
Reading this with little other information is like hanging out with someone who complains about someone else unknown to the listener. It is impossible to discern the truth of the matter in other people’s complicated relationships.
This book quite interesting at the beginning, but it slowed since it wasn’t all that deep and felt a little too gossipy-celebrity in an old school literature culture sort of way.
