(The author shares her memories of life in Greenwich Villa...)
The author shares her memories of life in Greenwich Village just prior to World War I, and the radical intellectual circle of John Reed Walter Lippman, Isadora Duncan, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Bill Haywood
(Winter in Taos starkly contrasts Luhan's memoirs, publish...)
Winter in Taos starkly contrasts Luhan's memoirs, published in four volumes and inspired by Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past. They follow her life through three failed marriages, numerous affairs, and ultimately a feeling of 'being nobody in myself,' despite years of psychoanalysis and a luxurious lifestyle on two continents among the leading literary, art and intellectual personalities of the day. Winter in Taos unfolds in an entirely different pattern, uncluttered with noteworthy names and ornate details. With no chapters dividing the narrative, Luhan describes her simple life in Taos, New Mexico, this 'new world' she called it, from season to season, following a thread that spools out from her consciousness as if she's recording her thoughts in a journal. 'My pleasure is in being very still and sensing things,' she writes, sharing that pleasure with the reader by describing the joys of adobe rooms warmed in winter by aromatic cedar fires; fragrant in spring with flowers; and scented with homegrown fruits and vegetables being preserved and pickled in summer. Having wandered the world, Luhan found her home at last in Taos. Winter in Taos celebrates the spiritual connection she established with the 'deep living earth' as well as the bonds she forged with Tony Luhan, her 'mountain.' This moving tribute to a land and the people who eked a life from it reminds readers that in northern New Mexico, where the seasons can be harshly beautiful, one can bathe in the sunshine until 'untied are the knots in the heart, for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties.'
Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan
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Mabel Dodge Luhans Intimate Memories offers the brilli...)
Mabel Dodge Luhans Intimate Memories offers the brilliantly edited memoirs of one womans rebellion against the whole ghastly social structure under which the United States had been buried since the Victorian era. Luhan fled the Gilded Age prison of the upper classes to lead a life of notoriety among Europe and Americas leading artists, writers, and social visionaries?among them D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed.
Intimate Memories details Luhans assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.
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In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoma...)
In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving.
"I finished it in a state of amazed revelation . . . it is so beautifully compact and consistent. . . . It is going to help many another woman and man to 'take life with the talons' and carry it high."--Ansel Adams
Mabel Dodge Luhan, an American writer, salon hostess, patron saint, and inspiration to an assortment of talented artists, writers, and political radicals in the early decades of the 20th century, was a leading symbol of the "New Woman. "
Background
Mabel Dodge Luhan was born on February 26, 1879, in Buffalo, New York, to Charles and Sara (Cook) Ganson. The Gansons were an affluent family living on inherited wealth. Both of Mabel's grandfathers had made fortunes in banking. Her father Charles was trained as a lawyer, but his weak, nervous disposition, coupled with violent and unpredictable temper tantrums, made him unfit for this or any other profession. When he was not shouting at his wife in jealous "fits, " he spent hours alone in his study doing absolutely nothing at all. He lavished affection on his dogs but had no interest in his only daughter. Mabel knew he did not love her. Her mother Sara was strong and decisive where her father was weak, but Sara was a cold woman, unfeeling and entirely self-centered. Bored with the endless routine of Victorian social life and finding few outlets for her abundant energy, Sara became indifferent to both her husband and child. Mabel could not remember her mother ever giving her a kiss or an affectionate look. In her nursery, Mabel kissed the Mother Goose figures on the walls.
Education
Mabel's need for emotional and intellectual sustenance was not met by her conventional education at Saint Margaret's School for Girls, where the class motto was "They also serve who only stand and wait, " or at Miss Graham's School in New York City, or at the fancy finishing school she attended in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Career
Dodge, together with her second husband, purchased a magnificent Medician estate which they named Villa Curonia, and for the next eight years Mabel spent enormous amounts of money, energy, and creative intelligence transforming her surroundings and herself into works of Renaissance art.
Filling her home with objets d'art and artists, Mabel began her apprenticeship as a salon hostess in Florence. She entertained lavishly, and at her table sat the rich, the famous, the colorful, and the noteworthy of the international set: French novelist André Gide, actress Eleanor Duse, painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Lord and Lady Acton, and an Indian swami, to name only a few.
Mabel, dressed in Renaissance costume, became celebrated for her role as Muse. Unwilling or unable to create in her own right, she wanted at least to serve as the inspiration for genius. Bored with her life in Florence by 1912 and greatly influenced by the Gertrude and Leo Stein's philosophy that the individual could overcome the ill effects of both heredity and environment and create herself anew, Mabel returned to New York.
Separated from her husband, Mabel moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village, the heartland of America's avant-garde. There, at 23 Fifth Avenue, she launched the most successful salon. For the next three years Mabel entertained the "movers and shakers" of pre-war America, men and women who were sweeping in their condemnation of bourgeois values and industrial capitalism. Gathered together at one of Mabel's "Wednesday evenings" one might find artists, philosophers, writers, reformers, and radicals of all stripes: Margaret Sanger, Walter Lippmann, Lincoln Steffens, Emma Goldman, "Big Bill" Haywood, and Hutchins Hapgood. Mabel was determined to make herself the mistress of the spirit of her age by embracing its most idealistic and committed men and women.
In 1916 Mabel and her third husband moved to Taos, New Mexico. There she finally found the "cosmos" she had been searching for all her life. In the 600-year-old Pueblo culture she saw a model of permanence and stability; a total integration of personality achieved through the organic connection of work, play, community, and environment.
For the rest of her life Mabel took a leading role in calling "great souls" to Taos to help her create "a city upon a hill. " The American Southwest was destined, she believed, to serve as a source of social and psychic renewal for the dying, decadent, and disillusioned postwar white civilization. Among the "great souls" she called to Taos to help her spread her gospel of American regeneration were D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, Georgia O'Keeffe, Willa Cather, John Collier, Thomas Wolfe, Andrew Dasburg, Edna Ferber, Leopold Stowkowski, and Mary Austin.
In the 1920's Mabel wrote her four-volume memoirs: Background, European Experiences, Movers and Shakers, and Edge of Taos Desert. She wrote numerous articles on behalf of the integrity of Native American culture, health, and the protection of tribal lands.
She died in Taos of a heart attack on August 13, 1962.
(About D.H. lawrence's life in New Mexico as a boarder wit...)
Views
Quotations:
"To him I was something that made a noise sometimes in the house and had to be told to get out of the way. " (speaking about her father)
Personality
Heralded by her friends and the public as the "New Woman, " Mabel experimented with free love, having several unsatisfactory affairs, the most famous of which was with radical journalist John Reed. Mabel, who was never able to rid herself of the belief that women could only achieve through men, realized the tremendous gap that existed between the radical, emancipated image she projected and the reality that she was intellectually and emotionally dependent on men.
Quotes from others about the person
"The most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art, and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe. "
Connections
Mabel Ganson was educated to be a charming and decorative wife, which she became in 1900 at the age of 21. Her husband, Karl Evans, was a member of her social set whose chief attraction for Mabel was that he was engaged to another woman. Emotionally deprived as a child, she would continue to believe that she had a right to "steal" love whenever the opportunity presented itself. In 1903, shortly after the birth of their son, Karl Evans died in a hunting accident. Mabel, who had as much interest in her child as her parents had had in her, suffered a nervous breakdown. Her family sent her to Europe in 1904 to recover. This was the first of three journeys-the second would be to Greenwich Village and the third to Taos, New Mexico-which marked her search for both a personal identity and a place where she could feel "at home. "
On her way to Paris Mabel met "a nice young man in tweeds" - Edwin Dodge, a wealthy architectural student from Boston. Dodge became her second husband, and together they moved to Florence in 1905. There, depressed and trapped in another loveless marriage, Mabel decided to devote herself to the love of art for its own sake.
Her third husband appeared to be artist and sculptor Maurice Sterne. Soon she fell in love with Tony Luhan, a fullblooded Pueblo Indian. Divorcing Sterne and marrying Luhan, her fourth and final husband, Mabel viewed their alliance as a bridge between Anglo and Native American cultures.