Burning Man, page 36
In the poem ‘When I Went to the Film’, Lawrence described film culture as a form of pornography. Cinema, he believed, detaches us from our own souls by replacing vitality with abstraction: film actors – false gods – are shadows who ‘live in the rapid and kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract’.106
When I went to the film and saw all the black and white feelings that nobody felt,
And heard the audience sighing and sobbing with all the emotions that none of them felt,
And saw them cuddling with rising passions they none of them for a moment felt,
And caught them moaning from close-up kisses, black and white kisses that could not be felt
It was like being in heaven …
Yet when, in January 1923, Lawrence’s American publisher Thomas Seltzer tried to sell Warner Brothers the film rights for Women in Love, Lawrence and Frieda were excited by the possibility – ‘it would mean dollars!’ – and disappointed when it didn’t happen.107
Mabel saw the arrival of Lawrence at Lamy Junction as confirmation of her power, but what Lawrence saw on the station platform was a piece of theatre. First, regal as a pharaoh, was the expressionless Native American Tony Lujan, with his two long braids, and then there was Mabel herself, dressed like a fortune teller with her own hair cut into a Betty Boop bob. At forty-three, Mabel was the same age as Frieda, and she had the same full figure. There, however, the likeness ends. Frieda was physical and Mabel spiritual; the two women recalled Ursula Brangwen and Hermione Roddice: ‘And was not Ursula’s way of emotional intimacy’, Lawrence wrote in Women in Love, ‘emotional and physical, was it not just as dangerous as Hermione’s abstract spiritual “intimacy?” … Hermione saw herself as the perfect Idea, to which all men must come: And Ursula was the perfect Womb.’108
Mabel was disappointed by her first impression of Lawrence, whose nose she thought vulgar. They came towards her down the platform with their trunks and boxes and painted Sicilian cart panel, Frieda fleshy and expansive, with a ‘forced, false bonhomie’ and her ‘lower jaw pulled a little sideways’; she had a mouth, Mabel said, like ‘a gunman’. Running along with ‘short quick steps’ by her side, ‘agitated, fussy’ and ‘distraught’, was the master himself.109 The couple appeared to Mabel exactly as Magnus and Douglas had appeared to Lawrence three years earlier, on that wet November evening by the Ponte Vecchio, which shows how marked was the change in his health since his illness the previous winter. Until recently, Lawrence had moved like a forerunner, and it was Frieda who scuttled behind.
Tony Lujan by Ansel Adams
Mabel Dodge Luhan
It was a seventy-mile drive to Taos so they ate supper in the station café, sitting in a row of four high seats at the polished wooden counter. Lawrence in his dark suit and tie and Tony in his Native American blanket sat at the far ends, shielded from one another by their women. The meal was ‘an agony’, wrote Mabel, who felt the air around them ‘splitting and crackling … from the singular crash of our meeting’. There was ‘a vibratory disturbance around our neighborhood like an upheaval in nature. I did not imagine this,’ she stressed. ‘It was so.’ While Tony ate with his usual calm aloofness and Frieda talked incessantly with interjections of laughter, Mabel, whose rule it was to say as little as she could, read the runes. She sensed that Frieda was ‘visualising’ Tony in bed and that Lawrence, being ‘keyed’ into Frieda, therefore ‘felt things through her’. As such, he did not like Frieda thinking about Tony in bed, but Frieda, Mabel understood, ‘had to see life from the sex-centre’; she was ‘the mother of orgasm’. Lawrence, she believed, was tied to Frieda as a lamb to a stake: ‘he frisked and pulled in an agony, not Promethean so much as Panic’. Mabel denigrates her skills as a writer but Lorenzo in Taos is packed with good phrases, and Panic is precisely the right word for Lawrence at this point. While her memory cannot always be trusted, her insights often have the ring of truth. She describes Frieda, for example, as ‘complete, but limited’ and Lawrence as ‘incomplete and limited’. It is beautifully precise, and one of the wisest summations we have of the Lawrence union.110
Supper finished, the party went out to the motorcar where Lawrence joined Tony in the front seat. This was the first time that Lawrence had met a Native American, and he had not expected him to be at the wheel of a Ford Model T. Indians, he believed, should pass through the land like fish through water or birds through air, without making a sound or leaving a trace. Frieda, confronted with Tony’s broad back, exclaimed to Mabel that this wonderful expanse of body must be a ‘rock to lean on’, and Lawrence, hearing a criticism of himself, apparently twitched. At this point the car broke down and they sat in silence under the vast southern sky while Tony fiddled with the engine. Frieda suggested that Lawrence, who knew nothing about mechanics, lend Tony a hand and Lawrence snapped back that he hated cars. ‘“Oh, you and your hates,” she returned, contemptuously.’111
It was now too late to drive through the canyon to Taos and so they stopped in Santa Fe, where Mabel arranged for the Lawrences to stay the night with her friend Witter Bynner, who lived in an adobe house with his former student (and current lover) Willard ‘Spud’ Johnson. Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson were part of the ‘literairy crew’ that Lawrence had specifically not wanted to meet. Bynner was a poet whose most recent collection was A Canticle of Pan and Other Poems, while Spud had founded a journal called Laughing Horse, whose editors described themselves as a ‘wrecking gang, hurlers of brickbats, shooters of barbs, tossers of custard pie’.112 Lawrence would become their prized contributor, but the wreckage began on the driveway of Bynner’s house when Tony unwittingly reversed the Ford over the Sicilian panel. The first words that Bynner thus heard from Lawrence were said in a ‘fierce falsetto’: ‘It’s your fault, Frieda! You’ve made me carry that vile thing round the world, but I’m done with it. Take it, Mr Bynner, keep it, it’s yours! Put it out of my sight! Tony, you’re a fool!’113 Bynner kept the panel, buckled and split, for the rest of his life.
In Journey with Genius, his memoir of D. H. Lawrence, Bynner noted that the Lawrences were both on the run but at different stages of their escape. Lawrence would continue to ‘flee each harbor’, but Frieda, who had made the ‘important break’ (from Weekley, in May 1912), ‘did not need all the subsequent little escapes from escape’ that her life with Lawrence had become.114 Frieda needed to build her nest.
When he had recovered his temper, Lawrence entertained his hosts and their guests – who included Mabel’s friend Alice Henderson, co-editor with Harriet Monroe of Poetry – to an impersonation of Norman Douglas, whom Bynner knew. The next morning, Bynner rose early to find the Lawrences already up. Having made the bed and washed the dishes, they were now cooking breakfast. ‘The night had been the Lawrences’ first in an American house,’ Bynner reflected. It would prove ‘a mixed omen’.115
The relationship between Lawrence and Mabel was a battle of wills, or rather a battle in which Lawrence resisted what they both described as Mabel’s ‘magnetism’. The battle took the form of a bullfight, where Lawrence shook his red cape and Mabel, horns lowered and eyes narrowed, came charging forward. Their dynamic might equally be seen as a snake dance, with Mabel manipulating the serpentine Lawrence, whom she held, for the moment, in captivity.
Mabel’s adobe mansion was her great accomplishment: part Spanish revival, part English country house, part Florentine palazzo, this was her magnet and soul-centre, built with the intention of changing human consciousness. Her house would be a ‘headquarters for the future’, she believed.116 Here twentieth-century radicalism would find the soil in which to flourish: Mabel, who envied Tony’s tribal life, created a tribe of her own along the same lines as her salon in Greenwich Village. She drew into her orbit Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe and Martha Graham (who choreographed El Penitente during her time here), John Collier, the future Commissioner of Indian Affairs, came first in 1920 and then made Taos the base for his life’s work, Ansel Adams photographed both Tony Lujan and the pueblo, Greta Garbo visited with the costume designer Gilbert Adrian, the conductor Leopold Stokowski came for the Indian songs, which contained, he said, sounds that are ‘not supposed to exist’ in European music,117 and when Carl Jung made the pilgrimage to Taos described in Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he was granted a rare interview with an elder in the pueblo called Mountain Lake who explained that white men ‘think with their heads’ while Indians think with the heart. Mountain Lake, wrote Jung, had ‘unveiled a truth to which we are blind’.118
The Big House at Los Gallos by Ansel Adams
The Big House, as it was known, eventually had seventeen rooms, in addition to which Mabeltown consisted of five guest houses (two of them photographed for House Beautiful in 1922), a large gatehouse for the staff, barns, corrals and stables for the horses and a busy Mexican village on stilts for the pigeons. Mabel bought the twelve acres in 1918 and Tony designed the main building, drawing each room in the earth with a piece of whittled stick, while the men from the pueblo did the work. ‘The house grew slowly,’ Mabel wrote, ‘and it stretches on and on.’ It grew room by room, step by step, alcove by alcove, porch by porch, wing by wing. She installed central heating, soundproofing and plumbing; she designed private quarters for herself and public areas for her guests; Tony cut down trees for the support columns which were carved into rope-like twists, and Mabel invented a concoction of wood-ashes and kerosene oil to rub into the corbels that held the roof beams. A second storey appeared, and then a third, in the form of a glass lookout positioned like a bell tower which gave Mabel eyes to the pueblo three miles away. She decorated the doors with ornamental fittings from Florence; the ceiling saplings for the dining room were painted – after those in Mexico’s Laguna chapel – in shades of rust and frost and charcoal; and the glossy brown floor tiles were cast in a clay oven beneath the cottonwood trees. The house was janus-faced: while it looked as primitive as the pueblo, it had every modern convenience including electricity, running water and soundproofed rooms. The front of the building was protected by bushes and trees, but the back was strung with telephone wires, radio wires and electric and power wires, all ‘swinging carelessly’.119 It took four years to build – this being the land of Poco Tiempo – and the front door commemorates the date of completion: 1922. But Lawrence took one look at Mabel’s creation and giggled. It was, he said, like ‘one of those nasty little temples in India’.120
The next day Tony drove the party down to the pueblo at the foot of the Sacred Mountain. Taos, the Indians believe, is ‘the King’ pueblo, crowned by the Aztec King Montezuma himself who came here before Coronado’s conquest of New Mexico in 1540. Frieda exclaimed with delight at the two piles of box-tenements, cosmologically arranged on either side of the river and rising like primitive skyscrapers, and at the four kivas, layered beneath the ground into underworlds, and at the dusty plaza, with its full-skirted women in white deerskin boots and men invisible in their sheets and dogs sniffing around. But Lawrence, said Mabel, was ‘silent and seemingly unaware’.121 He was, however, intensely aware: why, he wondered in his writings on Taos, when the marble statues of classical antiquity stand limbless in the desert like Ozymandias, didn’t these thousand-year-old clay-heaps crumble back to the earth from whence they came? He was equally struck by the adobe Catholic church, as neat and crisp as a gingerbread house. The Indians, who adopted the Madonna from the Spanish invaders, rejected the other Catholic paraphernalia like confession and Extreme Unction. They worshipped the Virgin as a goddess: every Christmas Eve, Lawrence learned, her image was removed from the altar and paraded in a starlit procession by the village elders, who warded away bad spirits by firing guns and banging drums.
The Taos pueblo
Mabel compared Taos to a landscape by Leonardo, and Lawrence, for whom Leonardo’s landscapes were the architecture of his own imagination, doubtless agreed. The terrain was both strange and familiar; he had been here before, and not only when he looked at the Madonna of the Rocks. Taos pueblo, Lawrence wrote to Brewster, was ‘like looking from the top of a hill way back down to a village one has left and forgotten: a bit écoeurant’.122 In his essay on ‘Taos’, written that October, Lawrence compared the pueblo to ‘one of the monasteries of Europe’, a place in which the ‘spirit dwells’.123 Taos pueblo reminded him of Monte Cassino but it also, with its flat roofs and ladder entrances, recalled the house in Rabat where Magnus had ended his life.
‘The Red Wolf’, written in October 1922, describes the poet standing in the pueblo at dusk, ‘on the shadow’s dark red rim’, having ‘followed the sun from the dawn through the east / trotting east and east and east till the sun himself went home’. In a Wordsworthian encounter, the poet meets ‘a dark old demon’ in a white sheet who says ‘thin red wolf, go home’. But, the poet replies, the red wolf ‘has no home, old father, / That’s why I come’.
The red dawn wolf sitting ‘dark at the door’, lifting up his voice and howling ‘to the walls of the pueblo / Announcing he’s here’, is an appropriate image for Lawrence’s arrival on the scene as an American writer.
* * *
Things were not going according to plan, and so Mabel rearranged the players. On Lawrence’s third day in Taos, she ordered Tony to take him, together with her old friend Bessie Freeman – who was visiting from Buffalo, New York – to the Apache harvest festival celebrations in the Jicarilla reservation 100 miles north-west. This required the hypersensitive Englishman, the middle-aged American woman and two Native Americans (Tony was with a companion) to sleep for four nights in tepees. ‘Tony didn’t want to take Lawrence,’ Mabel recalled, ‘but I made him!’ And Lawrence didn’t want to go with Tony, but Mabel made him too. Her ‘need to bring Lawrence and the Indians together,’ Mabel explained, ‘was like an impulse of the evolutionary will … using me for its own purposes’.124 But the impulse was equally to bring herself together with Frieda because the best way of controlling the Lawrences, Mabel had decided, was divide and rule.
With Lawrence and Tony away, Mabel and Frieda became, for a moment, friends. ‘She was good company when Lawrence was not there,’ said Mabel, ‘as is the case with nearly all wives.’ Frieda, Mabel found, was ‘hedged in by her happy flesh’. Simple and boisterous, ‘any reference to the spirit … was antagonistic to her’; the only unhappiness that Frieda would allow were those ‘caused by some mishap of the bed’, and one such mishap, Frieda told Mabel, had been Lawrence’s affair with a young Cornish farmer during the war. Frieda had similarly warned off H.D. by telling her that Lawrence was homosexual. Her husband, Frieda suggested to Mabel, was attracted to non-intellectual men of the land, rather like the ones with whom he was currently camping. Mabel, who did not rise to the bait, had her own agenda. ‘Frieda,’ she announced, ‘it seems to me that Lawrence lives through you. That you have to feel a thing before he can feel it. That you are, somehow, the source of his feeling about things.’ Everyone in Mabel’s world was a medium for someone else. ‘You don’t know how right you are,’ Frieda cried. ‘He has to get it all from me. Unless I am there, he feels nothing. Nothing. And he gets his books from me. Nobody knows that. Why, I have done pages of his books for him. In Sons and Lovers I actually wrote pages into it.’ Mabel had unearthed, in a matter of moments, Frieda’s ‘great grievance’. ‘Everyone thinks Lawrence is so wonderful. Well, I am something in myself, too.’125
The Apache party, meanwhile, went banging and lurching across the Rio Grande and over the San Juan mountains, between the dusty divides and through a desert as mottled and cracked, Lawrence thought, as the bottom of the sea once the water has been drained. An emptied basin is effectively what the New Mexico desert is: on three occasions in its volcanic past the land has been flooded by ocean.
The drive to the Jicarilla reservation, where Tony was participating in the festival, took two days, but Lawrence says nothing in any of his writing about his impressions of Mabel’s lover, who remains the most enigmatic figure in Mabeltown. In Willa Cather’s 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, the bishop of Santa Fe crosses New Mexico with a guide called Eusabio, who may have been modelled on Tony Lujan. Travelling with Eusabio, says Cather, ‘was like travelling with the landscape made human’,126 but this is not how Lawrence saw Tony, whom he had called a ‘fool’ on their first meeting. Tony, he will have seen, was part warlock, part Buddha, part tour-guide and part playboy, and Lawrence’s silence conceals a complex response. On the one hand, Tony represented the Lawrentian ideal of manhood: he was the real thing, the noble savage under whose tutelage the middle-class woman gives up her controlling will and overcooked mind. But rather than dragging Mabel by the hair to live in his pueblo, as Lawrence would have preferred him to do, Tony had left the pueblo in order to be pampered as a fetish by Mabel. It was Tony, and not Mabel, who appeared to be the captive: he had given up his wife and importance in the tribe to be bossed about by a New York socialite who wanted to save the very people he had abandoned. Tony Lujan was thus in a similar position to Frieda, who had traded her home and her children to serve the cause of Lawrence.
On the other hand, Tony was nobody’s poodle. That Mabel needed Lawrence to interpret the riddles of the pueblo is because Tony himself refused to do so. The ‘secretive Indian silence’, as she called it, was ‘torment’ to a woman as inquisitive as Mabel. Her simplest questions, such as why Manuel changed his hair today from braids to a knot, would be met by Tony with the same response: ‘Secret.’127 Some nights she would wake to find Tony pulling on his clothes. ‘What are you doing?’ Mabel would ask. ‘Dressin. Goin,’ Tony would answer. ‘Going where?’ Mabel would wail. ‘To the mountain,’ Tony would reply. ‘Oh Tony, why?’ ‘Secret.’ In the early days of their relationship, before he lost his place in the pueblo, Tony disappeared into the kiva for six weeks in order to be trained as the headman of his clan. This period was ‘like a death’ for Mabel, whose need to unlock secrets was, she realised, her undoing. ‘I wanted to know the secret of the Sacred Mountain,’ she confessed, and ‘the secret of the Indian’s sufficiency’, but while Tony taught her to hear the difference in the sound of the stream after midnight, he never explained ‘why he could walk straight up a hillside with no more effort than when he went down it’.128
