“Now don’t you keep going on to me about introverts and extraverts and insides and outsides,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1924. Instead, he continued, she should wash the dishes until she could keep up a rhythm “with a grace.” At the time, Luhan was reading up on mysticism and Jungian psychoanalysis, and she had written to Lawrence about her discoveries. He was not the right audience. Lawrence regarded Luhan alternately as a source of irritation; as an embodiment of his bête noire, the dominating woman; and as a model for some of the most cruelly portrayed heroines he would ever write. He had vowed to destroy her, and she would come to believe, at times, that he had succeeded.
A former Greenwich Village radical, Luhan considered herself divinely appointed to “save the Indians” in order to restore the spiritual and sexual life of a white American society in decay. This vocation led her to New Mexico, where she ditched husband No. 3 for Tony Lujan, a man from the Taos pueblo. In Taos, she launched an artist colony, wrote volume after volume of a tell-all memoir, and hosted a parade of famous guests, Lawrence included. Their relationship is a central subject of two new books: Frances Wilson’s “Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence,” a biography of the author, and Rachel Cusk’s “Second Place,” a rewriting of Luhan’s memoir “Lorenzo in Taos.”
It is a strange moment for a Mabel Dodge Luhan revival. Long the butt of historians’ jokes, she resists an easy feminist reading, and even the flowering of women’s histories in the seventies and eighties produced no unbridled celebrations. But she doesn’t make for a natural villain, either. Although, by today’s standards, her racial beliefs sit somewhere on the spectrum between troubling and deranged, they led her to support a multiracial array of artists and fight doggedly, and effectively, for indigenous land rights. Even her memoirs, which are peppered with occult vernacular and accounts of unhinged behavior, are essentially harmless—a modernist sex-and-gossip log, at high pitch. All the same, plucking her out of oblivion is a fraught endeavor: to mine the archive for characters to rediscover is to engage in a kind of revisionism, casting elements of the past as contemporary fables. Sometimes, that process is a cautionary tale all its own.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was born Mabel Ganson, in 1879, to a wealthy Buffalo family. In 1900, she eloped with her first husband, who died less than three years later, leaving her a son of questionable paternity. (She had an affair with the family doctor, who, she later alleged, was also sleeping with her mother.) Widowed and extricated from the first of many love triangles, Luhan set off for Europe, where she met and married the architect Edwin Dodge. Together they lived in Florence and socialized with the likes of Gertrude and Leo Stein and André Gide.
Eventually, the couple moved to New York, where Luhan ran a legendary salon out of her Fifth Avenue apartment, hosting socialists, anarchists, suffragists, and radicals of all stripes. One of the first of her famous “evenings” was orchestrated by the writer and patron Carl Van Vechten, who invited a pair of Black performers to dance and sing. Luhan was scandalized—it “made me feel first hot and then cold, for I never had been so near this kind of thing before,” she wrote. On another occasion, she asked A. A. Brill, the first translator of Freud’s major works into English, to give a presentation. Several of the guests, “incensed at his assertions about unconscious behavior,” walked out in protest.
Luhan knew everyone and was part of everything. She helped organize the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced European modernism to the United States, and called it “my own little revolution.” She joined the Heterodoxy Club, a society for “tabooless” women, and wrote for The Masses, Max Eastman’s socialist magazine. She liked to be around revolutionaries like Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and her sometimes-lover John Reed, not for their politics so much as their personalities. When she got tired of them, too, she helped Isadora Duncan’s sister Elizabeth establish a dance school in Croton-on-Hudson. Around that time Luhan became acquainted with her third husband, the Jewish painter and sculptor Maurice Sterne.
Perhaps inevitably, the marriage soured, and Luhan embarked upon a series of attempts at psychoanalysis—“apparently a kind of tattletaling,” she reflected approvingly. On one analyst’s advice, she dispatched Sterne to the Southwest, where she suggested he might find a new subject for his paintings. Sterne considered the separation temporary, and in his letters home he coaxed Luhan to join him. “Do you want an object in life?” he wrote her. “Save the Indians, their art-culture—reveal it to the world!” Shortly after Sterne’s departure, Luhan had visited a medium who foresaw her surrounded by Indians. Luhan was also haunted by a dream in which Sterne’s head floated before her and morphed into a second face, “an Indian face.” The letter, the prophecy, and the dream forming a triad of signs, she resolved to travel to New Mexico.
In Santa Fe, where Sterne was staying, Luhan judged the artistic community too established—but, in the smaller, more remote Taos, she found what she was seeking. “The singular raging lust for individuality and separateness had been impelling me all my years,” she writes. Taos was different: “All of a sudden I was brought up against the Tribe, where a different instinct ruled. . . . and where virtue lay in wholeness instead of in dismemberment.” That instinct, she thought, could teach America to abandon the logic of science and individualism and revert to mysticism and communal life.
As outlandish as Luhan may sound, neither her primitivism nor her spiritualism was particularly unusual in her time. Charlotte Osgood Mason, Van Vechten’s rival for the most influential patron of the Harlem Renaissance, believed that she was using her money to achieve a “mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa.” Fellow Heterodoxy Club member Elsie Clews Parsons likewise became enthralled with the Southwest, and, declaring, “It may seem a queer taste, but Negroes and Indians for me,” began to pursue her own fieldwork. (Parsons was a student and funder of Franz Boas’s anthropology department at Columbia, which trained Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston.) And, in the nineteen-tens and twenties, much of the European and American art world was oriented around what would now be called cultural appropriation. A year after the Armory Show, the gallerist Alfred Stieglitz opened an exhibition titled “Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art.” When Luhan appointed herself the savior of the Indians, she was treading a well-worn path for avant-garde transgression. Where she deviated was in a choice that, with a century’s hindsight, appears less scandalous: marrying a man whose race differed from hers.
When Mabel met Tony Lujan, he was singing on the floor of a pueblo hut. According to Sterne’s later account, the performance was for the benefit of tourists, but Mabel was entranced: Tony’s face was the one from her dream. As she fell in love, she came to believe that “my real home was in the Pueblo.” Soon rid of their respective spouses, Tony and Mabel began work on a new house—not, of course, in the pueblo. Their adobe mansion had, by the time all the extensions were completed, seventeen rooms and three stories, along with central heating, soundproofing, and plumbing. (“Mabeltown” also comprised five guesthouses, a gatehouse, barns, and stables.) Mabel continued to praise the locals for their lack of materialism, and the hypocrisy was not lost on at least one resident of the pueblo, who, in a letter to the Taos Star, suggested that she trade places with him. “You drink muddy water which came down from the mountains,” he wrote, “and my five children will drink nice clean water from your faucets.”
By then, Luhan was no stranger to newspaper coverage. Her Southwestern adventures were duly chronicled, with reports describing her as the “first lady of Taos” and a “hostess and angel to numerous writers.” Aside from Lawrence and Parsons, her guests included Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham, Thornton Wilder, Greta Garbo, and Jean Toomer. Ansel Adams photographed both Tony and the pueblo. John Collier, who would go on to become the Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the F.D.R. Administration, visited Luhan and stayed on to help lead the campaign against the Bursum Bill, which aimed to privatize indigenous land so that it could be bought up by white ranchers and developers.
As for Tony and Mabel’s marriage, it was both famous and famously mocked. The writer Mary Austin told Mabel that Tony was “a joke—a good natured and occasionally ribald joke, but still a joke—to most of the people who come to your house.” When Tony accompanied Van Vechten to a Harlem night club, the event was so extraordinary that it merited inclusion in the New York Daily News’s society column. But in all the sensational press coverage, as well as in Mabel’s romantic telling of the story, Tony himself remains a hazy figure. He abandoned his wife, and lost his place in his tribe, to be with Mabel, and she later admitted that they had little in common. Tony never became conversant in Mabel’s preferred topics, like psychoanalysis and modern art, and he would not tell her the secrets of his tribe, no matter how desperately she pleaded. That he had been able to largely avoid school was part of his appeal. “He was Indian,” she wrote, “whole, uninjured, and unsplit.”
This, of course, is projection. With her descriptions of Tony’s attributes, Mabel tells us less about her partner than about the qualities she feels she lacks. In current academic-adjacent parlance, we might say that she is “othering” Tony, and intend it as a condemnation. But Mabel wore the accusation proudly: “Tony is a kind of symbol of my having gone over into an ‘otherness,’ as Lawrence would say.” Applying the term without any negative connotation, she was careful to credit the person from whom she had picked it up. As Wilson notes in her new biography, its originator was none other than D. H. Lawrence himself.
If Luhan’s politics have not aged well, neither have Lawrence’s. His sex scenes—in which any motion by the female partner is tantamount to a moral failure—will baffle the contemporary reader. But they recall the advice Luhan received from her first analyst, who told her to stop trying to assume “the male role” during intercourse, and, when she mentioned wanting to cut her hair short, accused her of expressing the intent to commit castration. Both Luhan and Lawrence were profoundly influenced by theosophy, a nineteenth-century occult movement, and Lawrence shared Luhan’s faith in the tonic properties of indigenous life. “America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent,” he wrote in The New Republic. “They must pick up the life-thread where the mysterious Red race let it fall.”
By the time he collided with Luhan in New Mexico, Lawrence had already published several novels, including “Sons and Lovers” and “Women in Love,” and been censored multiple times over. Sex was, for him, a religion, and he had earned a reputation for risqué prose. He had also broken up a marriage, persuading an aristocratic German woman named Frieda to abandon her husband and three children. For years, the pair had lived a nomadic existence, staying in such places as Sardinia, Australia, and Sri Lanka. The glamorous women who pursued Lawrence were flummoxed by his loyalty to Frieda: stout, older than he was, decidedly ungifted with words. Much is known about their life together because, as Wilson notes, most people Lawrence spent time with wrote about the experience.
Luhan was no exception. Written in direct address to the poet Robinson Jeffers, “Lorenzo in Taos” is dedicated “To Tony and All Indians,” but Tony and the Indians are a sideshow. The memoir’s raison d’être is the arrival of Lawrence, whom Mabel has mystically “summoned” to Taos to articulate the beauty of the Indian way of life. When Lawrence is keener on depicting Mabel’s romance with Tony, she does not object, framing it in symbolic terms. “Of course it was for this I had called him from across the world,” she writes, “to give him the truth about America: the false, new, external America in the east, and the true, primordial, undiscovered America that was preserved, living, in the Indian bloodstream.” She intends Lawrence to write a parable about her escape from a fallen civilization to an American Eden.
It is Frieda who vetoes the collaboration. From Luhan’s first encounter with the Lawrences, which she reports as a “vibratory disturbance,” Luhan and Frieda are suspicious of one another. Luhan thinks she can see Frieda picturing her and Tony in bed, and Frieda’s correspondence supports the intuition that she was shocked by the mixed-race pairing. After Luhan wears a dressing gown to her first planning session with Lawrence, and listens sympathetically as he gripes about his wife (“the hateful, destroying female”), Frieda bans their one-on-one meetings, and Lawrence’s novel is dropped.
Their relationship, though, is just getting started. Over the course of “Lorenzo in Taos,” Lawrence attends Hopi ceremonies, steals some plausibly-deniable physical contact with Luhan (fingers meeting under soap suds, thighs brushing on horseback), berates Tony, pelts Frieda with stones, and sagely advises Luhan’s son to beat his new wife. He and Frieda are in and out of Taos, eventually returning with the painter Dorothy Brett, whom Luhan characterizes as an awkward hanger-on. Whenever Lawrence is absent, Luhan feels a “psychic emptiness.” She loves him, then gives him up, then can’t leave him alone. He spreads the rumor that she attempted to seduce him, and promises to “destroy” her, then assures her that she’s no longer his enemy, and that, even when she was, he “never really forsook” her. She sends him a letter ending their friendship, because “his core was treacherous.”
Some elements of “Lorenzo” are ripe for feminist finger-wagging, but Luhan depicts Lawrence’s misogyny with a light, self-mocking humor. Appalled at her laziness—she was accustomed to spending the first half of the day in bed—he instructs her to scrub her floors and bake bread, feats she attempts to comic effect. She even agrees to forgo her flowing dresses for the fitted waists and aprons of his childhood. (“My heart sank,” Luhan writes, “but I determined to be equal to this need of his to be entirely surrounded by all sorts and sizes of persons dressed like his mother.”) She is less inclined to indulge Lawrence’s substantive critiques of her character. “I am not going to think of you as a writer,” he tells her early on. “I’m not going to think of you even as a knower.” To him, she will always be “the Eve who is Voiceless like the serpent”—or, in Luhan’s words, “that greatest living abomination, the dominating American woman.”
Out of the breakdown Lawrence occasions comes a revelation: Luhan begins work on her memoirs. In what would later be titled “Intimate Memories,” she reproduces the allegorical plot she sketched out for Lawrence, and “Lorenzo” concludes with her sending him the first volumes and receiving his reply. “It’s the most serious ‘confession’ that ever came out of America,” he writes, “and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced.” His response is everything she’d wished for. She has written for an audience of one, she admits, and he at last thinks of her as a writer, even as a knower. In this final, self-reflexive turn, Luhan caters almost too well to a latter-day feminist readership: rather than waiting for Lawrence to tell her story, she tells it herself.
While Luhan was writing for Lawrence, he was busy writing about her: although he never completed the novel they planned, the central figures in his works from 1922 to 1925, including his novel “The Plumed Serpent” and several shorter pieces, are transparently based on her. In the story “The Woman Who Rode Away,” the eponymous woman travels to the desert in Mexico, where she is abducted and ritually sacrificed by a group of Indian men. Lawrence is not subtle in his anti-feminist messaging. “Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again,” he writes, “and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of women.” Privately, he called it “Mabel’s story to me,” and she did not miss the reference. It was, she said, where Lawrence had “satisfied his sadism.”
Years later, when the writer Kate Millett deemed the story “sadistic pornography,” she was echoing Luhan’s assessment. Millett’s 1970 feminist classic “Sexual Politics” devotes a chapter to attacking Lawrence, and its pièce de résistance is a close reading of “The Woman Who Rode Away.” The story not only “resembles commercial hard core,” Millett writes, but is Lawrence’s “most impassioned statement of the doctrine of male supremacy and the penis as deity.” Until “Sexual Politics,” Lawrence was seen as an anti-censorship icon; Millett’s thoroughgoing decimation was largely responsible for his removal from syllabi.
Wilson’s “Burning Man” is written against the backdrop of Millett’s charge of misogyny. “What Kate Millett did was to flip the tale and the teller around,” she writes. “She made Lawrence himself the human sacrifice, and encouraged his ‘throng’ of readers to strip him naked and give the ‘low, wild cry’ for his destruction.” Likening a critique of one of the most celebrated writers of the early twentieth century to the ritual murder of a nameless character is a stretch, but Wilson finds herself on the defensive. “Being loyal to Lawrence, especially as a woman, has always required some sort of explanation,” she writes.
Perhaps part of Wilson’s rebellion against feminist orthodoxy consists in rescuing a figure who plays a minor role in Lawrence’s other biographies, and in the history of the period writ large. Wilson devotes a sizable portion of the book to Luhan, introducing her as a “much mocked figure” whose “biographers do not take her seriously.” To Wilson’s credit, she does take Luhan seriously, working through her complicated, eccentric story with patience and even appreciation—especially for Luhan’s portrayal of Lawrence. “Lorenzo in Taos is packed with good phrases,” Wilson writes, and “her insights often have the ring of truth.”
But Wilson seems to be under the impression that, in order to rehabilitate Luhan, she must unearth an explanation for her erraticism. To do so, she draws at length on a later, long-unpublished volume of Luhan’s memoirs—a text so explicit that her son had it locked away for decades. In it, Luhan revealed the secret source of her unhappiness with Tony: she believed he had infected her with syphilis. His infidelity, the testing, and subsequent medical treatments occurred during Lawrence and Frieda’s stay in New Mexico, but none of that is mentioned in “Lorenzo in Taos.” Unpacking Luhan’s omissions—and disclosing that three of her four husbands likely had syphilis—Wilson goes a step further: she interprets a passage in which Luhan reacts to the scent of Tony’s semen as evidence that she is repressing memories of incest. “Mabel’s real secret, I suggest,” Wilson writes, “is her abuse by the syphilitic Charles Ganson.”
Luhan never accused her father of molesting her or having syphilis, and there is no evidence for either assertion, aside from a few elliptical references in her memoirs to Charles’s health and the sexlessness of her parents’ relationship. Still, Wilson presents a Luhan whose severe abuse in childhood can partially account for her risky sexual behavior and disturbing racial attitudes. This is a Luhan who compulsively confesses, compulsively narrativizes, compulsively lies. It is a troubled Luhan, whose talents are inextricable from her psychological damage. And it is not at all the Luhan who appears courtesy of Rachel Cusk.
The dedication page at the end of “Second Place” is unusually frank about its source material. “Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico,” Cusk writes. “My version—in which the Lawrence figure is a painter, not a writer—is intended as a tribute to her spirit.” In fact, almost all of the plot points, characters, and scenes in “Second Place” are taken from the considerably more detailed “Lorenzo,” with some dialogue repeated verbatim. As in “Lorenzo,” a narrator addresses her story to “Jeffers,” and, as in “Lorenzo,” her correspondence with the Lawrence character (“L”) is embedded throughout. Like Luhan, Cusk’s narrator invites the artist to stay in her guesthouse, hoping that he will produce representations of the place where she lives with her husband, Tony.
The only major character eliminated from “Second Place” is Frieda, and her absence has the drastic effect of cancelling out the story’s central love triangle. Instead of a long-married man, L is a bachelor accompanied by a woman named Brett, who has been transformed from an anomaly into a cliché: a “ravishing creature” who is the companion of an older male artist. The real Lawrence had no sexual interest in Brett; he was attracted to Frieda, a woman of Luhan’s exact age and body type. In Cusk’s version, L’s desire is geared toward a younger, more conventionally beautiful rival, and the narrator is convinced that L does not consider her “truly a woman” at all. (Where Lawrence suggests writing a novel about Luhan, Cusk’s narrator has to beg L to paint her.) With Frieda missing, it is Brett whom the narrator assumes is “imagining me and Tony together sexually”—a comment that has an entirely different valence, because Cusk’s most aggressive move is to excise Tony’s cultural identity.
Variously labeled as “exotic,” “not a usual-looking person,” and “dark-skinned” with “long white hair,” Cusk’s Tony looks like Tony Lujan, acts like Tony Lujan, and thinks like Tony Lujan—but was not raised in the Taos pueblo. Instead, he was adopted by a white family living on an isolated marsh. “I have seen photographs of Native Americans, and more than anything he looks like one of them,” Cusk’s narrator explains, and throughout “Second Place” there are hints that Tony embodies some kind of essentialized Indianness, though his “origins” are unclear. (When he courts the narrator with daily letters, it is “as if he were beating a drum.”) Cusk transforms the cultural differences that Luhan romanticized into Tony’s personal idiosyncrasies—and even into his genetic inheritance, as though she shares Luhan’s belief that the exotic could be “preserved, living, in the Indian bloodstream.” And there is little possibility of cultural difference, because other than (maybe) Tony, the Indians have been replaced with empty landscape.
No longer a purported mediator between cultures, much less a pioneer, Cusk’s narrator is a Luhan in muted tones. Rather than lounging in bed, she is up early to do chores, pick herbs from the garden, and cook for her husband. She does not build a “Mabeltown,” and it is Tony who owns the land, a reversal of the classed balance of power in their actual relationship. Where Luhan is extravagant and bohemian, Cusk’s narrator is reserved, ill at ease with her own desires: “The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without,” Cusk writes. Luhan sees herself as a magnet for erotic energy, imagining it even in places it may not exist, but Cusk’s narrator reports, “I didn’t get sexual attention very often.” What we find in “Second Place” is not Luhan—fluctuating from pole to pole, intellectual system to intellectual system, lover to lover—but a character who will be familiar to readers of Cusk’s other novels.
Cusk has a long-standing interest in sexism, and more particularly in the misogyny inherent in presumptions about male artistic genius. She recently explored the phenomenon in a Times Magazine feature, which was devoted in part to the painter Celia Paul’s love affair with the much older Lucian Freud. Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy, too, is preoccupied with the role of the female writer in a world of male ego; its final installment ends, symbolically, with a man pissing in the narrator’s general direction. It seems natural that Cusk might use Luhan—a difficult woman and an eager muse—as an avatar for her ideas. And if unsparing gender analysis was somewhat beyond Luhan’s reach, Cusk brings it to the fore. “Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place,” her narrator scoffs, after L describes his unhappiness. “He couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him.”
Yet behind Cusk’s “tribute” to Luhan’s spirit is a fundamental misreading of that spirit. Luhan is intellectually expansive, overdramatic, and parodic, eager to venture wild, passionate claims. She represents the opposite of the spare, pared-down style in contemporary anglophone literature of which the “Outline” trilogy is, in some sense, an apotheosis. What does it do to defang her, and to remove Frieda, doll up Brett, and deracinate Tony? It standardizes a difficult, subversive marriage—a marriage built on money and mutual fantasies, and without much common ground—and converts a tangle of relationships into something much simpler, a dynamic in which gender is isolated as the sole locus of oppression. It is an attempt not so much to update a story as to erode its complexity. And it betrays the strange assumption that audiences cannot abide a character who is not only a victim or an oppressor but both—a person enmeshed, as many of us are, in an intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation.
Luhan’s story didn’t need to be wrested from the hands of a male artist. She had her own ideas about her life, and she expressed them in writing. (No one reads “Intimate Memories” anymore, but no one reads “The Woman Who Rode Away,” either.) And, if Luhan was Lawrence’s muse, he was also hers; each exploited the other for symbolic material. It is telling that both of the authors attempting to resuscitate Luhan felt compelled to emphasize her victimhood. Writing any story is a process of projection and omission, and fragments of an old tale, excavated from the mound of history, will often catch a glint of the zeitgeist. But when a would-be icon fails to deliver, the impulse is to sand down her edges or to excuse them as a result of subjugation. This sanitizes the past, rendering it flatter, more feel-good; it replaces history with Hollywood. Some figures, it turns out, don’t have to be rescued. Not every forgotten woman is in need of a bio-pic.
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