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An intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation. - The New Yorker 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 - Rachel Cusk It's the most serious 'confession' that ever came out of America and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced. - D.H Lawrence 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'etre is the arrival of D.H 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. From Luhan's first encounter with the Lawrences, which she reports as a vibratory disturbance, Luhan and Frieda Lawrence are suspicious of one another. 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 - whenever Lawrence is absent, Luhan feels a psychic emptiness. She loves him, gives him up, then can't leave him alone. He spreads the rumour 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. To him, she will always be, in Luhan's words, that greatest living abomination, the dominating American woman.

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9781922491312

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An intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation. - The New Yorker 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 - Rachel Cusk It's the most serious 'confession' that ever came out of America and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced. - D.H Lawrence Lorenzo in Taos is packed with good phrases, [Luhan's] insights often have the ring of truth. - Frances Wilson [Luhan is] 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. 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. - Rebecca Panovka, The New Yorker

Author Information

Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) was a wealthy American patron of the arts, who was particularly associated with the Taos art colony. In mid--1912, Dodge held a weekly salon in her Greenwich Village apartment - notable guests included Carl Van Vechten, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Big Bill Haywood, Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, and John Reed. Van Vechten took Dodge as the model for the character Edith Dale in his novel Peter Whiffle. Anthropologist Raymond Harrington introduced Dodge and her friends to peyote in an impromptu ceremony there.In 1917, Dodge, with then husband Maurice Sterne, moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she began a literary colony. On the advice of Tony Lujan, a man from the Taos Pueblo whom she would marry in 1923, she purchased a 12--acre property. Lujan set up a teepee in front of her house, drumming each night in an attempt to lure her to him. Although Sterne bought a shotgun with the intention of chasing Lujan off the property, unable to use it, he instead took to insulting Dodge. In response, she sent him away until their divorce four years later.D. H. Lawrence, the English author, accepted an invitation from her to stay in Taos, arriving with his wife, Frieda, in early September, 1922. He had a fraught relationship with his hostess, however, later writing about it in his fiction. Dodge later published a memoir about the visit entitled, Lorenzo in Taos (1932). In New Mexico, Dodge and Lujan hosted a number of influential artists and poets, including Marsden Hartley, Arnold Ronnebeck, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una, Florence McClung, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Hunter Austin, Mary Foote, Frank Waters, Jaime de Angulo, Aldous Huxley, Ernie O'Malley and others.Dodge died at her home in Taos in 1962. Dennis Hopper bought the Mabel Dodge Luhan House after having noticed it while filming Easy Rider - it has been designated a National Historic Landmark, operating as an historic inn and conference center.

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