Burning Man, page 37
When Jung visited Taos pueblo, he too described the air as ‘filled with a secret known to all the communicants, but to which the whites could gain no access’.129 Only the pueblo, Chief Mountain Lake explained to Jung, whose rituals caused the sun to rise and set, could know the secrets of the universe. As far as Tony was concerned, the emotional demands of Mabel Dodge were a speck of dust compared to ensuring that the sun went round the earth: he had relinquished his part in the ceremonial life of the pueblo, but there was no question about where his loyalty lay. Mabel saw Tony as her conduit to ancient wisdom, but Tony saw himself as a floodwall holding back the twentieth century. His role was to monitor modern America’s fascination with his people: it was Tony who arranged for Ansel Adams to photograph the pueblo, Tony who arranged for Carl Jung to speak to Chief Mountain Lake, Tony who advised John Collier on how to communicate with the Indians. Wrapped in his blanket, he kept his hawk-eyes on the future in order to preserve the sanctity of the past.
‘Indians and an Englishman’, the first of Lawrence’s five essays on New Mexico, was written on 18 September 1922, the day he returned from the Apache festival. It is important to remember when we read this essay that it was produced to order because Mabel considered Lawrence her writer-in-residence. She wanted Lawrence to ‘take my experience, my material, my Taos, and to formulate it into a magnificent creation. That was what I wanted him for.’130 More immediately, however, she wanted Lawrence to protest against the bill which had been introduced into Congress by Senator H. O. Bursum. By allotting native American land to individual Indians who could then sell it to whomever they wished – ranchers, developers, the government – Bursum’s aim was to regain their territories and force the Indians into mainstream American life. Mabel rounded up her writer and artist friends to protest, but her greatest contribution was to involve John Collier, who had come to Taos in 1920 as a radical poet but now became a lobbyist for the Native Americans.
Lawrence wrote nothing about the presence of John Collier in Mabeltown, despite the fact that the Colliers and their two children lived in the house next to him. Mabel described Collier as ‘a small, blond Southerner, intense, preoccupied, and always looking windblown on the quietest day. Because he could not seem to love his own kind of people … he turned to other races and worked for them.’131 Lawrence said something similar about Mabel: she loved the Indian world out of hatred for the white world. Once Collier had discovered Taos, he devoted his life to the fight to protect the land rights and traditions of the Native Americans in the pueblos. From 1922 he worked as a research agent for the Indian Welfare Committee, resisting the repressions instituted by the missionaries and the federal government. This involved a state campaign to uproot Native American children from their families and cultural lives by putting them in boarding schools where overcrowding, illness and corporal punishment prevailed, and the decision, in 1913, to declare all Native Americans wards of the government, which meant that they no longer owned the land on which they lived.
John Collier and Tony Lujan became a team. Because Tony trusted Collier, so too did other Indians. In a letter he later wrote to Collier, Tony described him as ‘a real friend’ and explained how he – Tony – spread the word throughout the pueblos that John Collier ‘really likes Indians. In past time, we had Commissioners against us who tried to stop our ceremony dances and our dances-religious. They nearly destroy us; call our ways bad or immoral or something … But John Collier fight for us … and he save us. Now, he look far ahead and it is like he is putting a wall all around us to protect us.’ Lawrence, observing all this, thought Collier a ‘salvationist’ who, together with Mabel and her ‘poisonous white consciousness’, was destroying what they wanted to preserve.132
The campaign against the Bursum Bill was the first time in American history that the protection of indigenous lands and culture would become a national movement, and Mabel’s connectivity put her at the helm of the protest. The campaign, which became a cause célèbre, was launched by an article by Collier called ‘The Red Atlantis’ in which he argued that the life of the ‘Pueblo Indian’ was a model for all Americans and he outlined his reform ideals: ‘recognition of Indian civil rights, conservation of their lands through cooperative enterprise, preservation of their communal societies, and agricultural and industrial assistance programs sponsored by the federal government’.133 Tony Lujan and John Collier then visited the twenty-two New Mexican pueblos, from Taos to Hopi, explaining what was at stake and organising a defence in the form of an All-Pueblo Council. Lawrence put his name to Mabel’s petition against the bill, but otherwise refused to be her scrivener. ‘I arrive in New Mexico at a moment of crisis,’ he wrote in an article published in the New York Times Magazine called ‘Certain Americans and an Englishmen’. ‘The crisis is a thing called the Bursum Bill, and it affects the Pueblo Indians. I wouldn’t know a thing about it, if I needn’t. But it’s Bursum Bursum Bursum!! the Bill! the Bill! the Bill!’134 Mabel, reading what Lawrence had produced on her behalf, was duly disappointed: ‘it does not seem to me very good’, she said.135 Lawrence, who ‘believed’, so he had said in his letter from Ceylon, in the Native American and wanted them to ‘believe’ in him, had fallen at the first hurdle.
The Native Americans believed instead in John Collier and so did Mabel, who wrote him a letter in late November offering all she had in terms of ‘energy, time, and money’ to further his campaign. Her home, she said, was to be ‘a base of operations really for a new world plan’ which would save ‘the whole culture and agriculture of the pueblos’, while also guiding white America into a whole new way of living. She would even, she told Collier, marry Tony if that made their work ‘more convenient from the worldly standpoint’.136 In a letter to a friend, Mabel expanded on her vision:
We want interest and appreciation of the Indian life and culture to become part of our conscious racial mind. We want as a nation to value the Indian as we value ourselves. We want to consciously love the wholeness and harmony of Indian life, and to consciously protect it.137
He understood nothing, Lawrence stressed in his New Mexican essays, about Native American consciousness and culture, the aim of his insistence that ‘there is no bridge’ between the two worlds, ‘no canal of connection’, being to cause maximum offence to Mabel and those other ‘highbrows’ who fooled themselves ‘into believing that the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to the true ideal gods, than we are’.138
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Readers of the Divine Comedy generally prefer Inferno to Paradise. Dante’s Paradise, wrote Lawrence in Movements in European History, ‘was much less vivid to him than the Inferno’ because what Dante knew best ‘was the tumultuous, violent passion of the past, that which was punished in Hell. The spiritual happiness is not his. He belongs to the old world.’139 There was also the issue – which Dante returns to – of describing that which exceeds representation. The problem with representing Paradise is that nobody understands you, and Dante therefore explains that, having now reached the uncharted terrain of eternity, his poem will have to switch, or ‘leap’, into a different mode:
And thus, in representing Paradise,
the sacred poem has to leap across,
as does a man who finds his path.
(Paradise, Canto 23, 61–3)
Lawrence describes a similar jolt in ‘Indians and an Englishman’, also published in the New York Times Magazine, which begins: ‘Supposing one fell on to the moon, and found them talking English, it would be something the same as falling out of the open world plump down here in the middle of America.’140 There are no perspectives on the moon, and what is most striking in Lawrence’s early accounts of the landscape in New Mexico is the absence of deep, technicolour, consciousness-expanding views.
‘Indians and an Englishman’ continues with an appeal to the ‘dear reader’ to have towards Lawrence an attitude of ‘amused pity’, recalling the appeal to the reader of Paradise, Canto 2, where we are pictured in a small bark tailing behind Dante’s splendid ship. Now, Dante tells us, we must ‘turn back’ to our ‘shores again’ because at this point the waters become deeper and harder to navigate.
do not
attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,
by losing sight of me, be left astray.
(Paradise, Canto 2, 4–6)
An author’s admonishment to his reader to stop reading is rare indeed, and Dante’s purpose is to prevent us from being led astray. Now that the physical side of his climb has ended, we enter the metaphysical with Beatrice explaining the workings of the universe: why, for example, there are spots on the moon. We are also introduced to the cosmological complexity of Paradise, with its higher and lower heavens, and faster and slower heavens. Those heavens that are nearer to God and the empyrean, we are told, move with more speed than those which are closest to Purgatory.
In the four volumes of Mabel Dodge’s Intimate Memories, the waters become equally hard to navigate as she too tries to explain the workings of the heavens (‘What holds the stars firm in their constellations, able to withstand the awful magnetism that must attract them to one another?’)141 and to warn her readers off asking too many questions about her relationship with Tony Lujan. ‘This narrative about Tony and me becomes more and more difficult to tell,’ she warns, ‘for I feel increasingly obliged to leave most of it unwritten, not only the secret aspects of his religious life and experience, but the secret intimacies of our own personal life together.’142
* * *
It was dusk when they arrived at the reservation and Tony parked the Ford at the top of a crest. Lawrence looked down from the ‘high shallows’ while the other two men sat beneath a pine tree to braid their hair and dress in their best blankets and turquoise jewellery. They were above a hollow basin with a lake in the distance, and what Lawrence saw on the crest below was as though projected in black and white: ‘the points of Indian tents, the tepees, and smoke, and silhouettes of tethered horses and blanketed figures moving’.143 In his later essay ‘New Mexico’, he described the reservation as composed of ‘old Spanish, Red Indian, desert mesas, pueblos, cow-boys, penitents, all that film stuff’.144 This was Cinema Paradiso.
The Native Americans of New Mexico were among cinema’s earliest subjects. In 1912 D. W. Griffiths had shot a film in the Isleta pueblo, twenty miles south of Taos, called A Pueblo Legend, which starred Mary Pickford as ‘the Indian girl’. A Pueblo Legend opens on a feast-day in the time before Columbus, with the sun priest telling the legend of the turquoise stone that fell from the sky. Mary Pickford recalled how the actors’ costumes, loaned by the Museum of Indian Antiques in Albuquerque, were worn incorrectly, and so the chief ordered the crew out of the village. Three years later, when D. W. Griffiths made another New Mexican film called The Penitentes, he brought in Charles Lummis, author of The Land of Poco Tiempo, as a cultural and historical adviser.
Back at the Apache reservation, Lawrence heard rather than saw the dance. As the sun went down, he wrote in ‘Indians and an Englishman’, the drums started ‘their strong-weak, strong-weak pulse that beat on the plasm of one’s tissue’. Two elderly men then began moving, ‘pat-pat, pat-pat’, their feet flat on the earth ‘like birds that move from the feet only’, and while they danced they sang ‘with wide mouths’, sightless, without words or vision and in perfect hypnotic unison: ‘Hie! Hie! Hie! Hy-a! Hy-a! Hie! Hie! Hie! Ay-away-away –!’ A second set of drums then began thud-thudding, as though in response, and ‘from the gathering darkness’ other men drifted slowly in,
each carrying an aspen-twig, each joining to cluster close in two rows upon the drum, holding each his aspen twig inwards, their faces all together, mouths all open in the song-shout, and all of them all the time going on the two feet, pat-pat, pat-pat, pat-pat, to the thud-thud of the drum.
As he listened, Lawrence was overcome by ‘an acute sadness, and a nostalgia, unbearably yearning for something, and a sickness of soul came over me’. His contact with ‘Red Men’ was not, he confessed, ‘what I thought it would be. It was something of a shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-richnesses.’ This visceral response to the lost past, by now so familiar to Lawrence’s readers, always comes as a shock to Lawrence himself; each time his soul breaks down feels like the first time his soul has broken down, and on each occasion, with the predictability of a cuckoo clock, he knows that he cannot go back. ‘There is no going back,’ he now once again concludes. ‘Always onward, still further.’ Except that having reached his destination – Taos, Lawrence wrote, ‘feels final’ – there is no further that he can go.145
They ate supper at their camp, and when Tony Lujan went off to visit the tepees of his friends, Lawrence wrapped himself ‘up to the nose’ and wandered invisible among the Apaches in their blankets and the cowboys in their big hats and leather chaps. The ‘dark air’ was ‘thick with enemies: that was my feeling’. He describes the world as a stage and himself as Hamlet: Lawrence cast ‘a lone lorn’ figure that night, while the Taos Indians in their white cotton sheets were ‘like Hamlet’s father’s ghost’. It is striking how powerful Lawrence’s father-fantasy is in this essay about dancing, underground men: ‘these old men telling the tribal tale were my fathers’; he too had ‘a dark-faced, bronze-voiced father far back in the resinous ages’ and his mother ‘lay in her hour with this dusky-lipped tribe father’ who, ‘like many an old father with a changeling son … would like to deny me’. Lawrence passed a group of young men playing softly on a drum and a group of old men sitting in the firelight, listening to an even older man reciting like a ‘somnambulist’, in a ‘distant, plangent, recitative voice’, the history of his tribe. This ‘piece of living red earth’ talked for hours and hours; some of the men who ‘listened without listening’ were chewing gum and others smoked cigarettes; they drifted out and filtered in and Lawrence stood wrapped in his blanket ‘in the cold night, at some little distance from the entrance, looking on’. The old man’s voice from its ‘far-off time’ was ‘not for my ears. Its language was unknown to me. And I did not wish to know.’ As the night thickened, the cowboys rode home and there was ‘a new savagery in the air’. So Lawrence went slowly away, back over the rim and across the darkness to his own lonely camp.146
The Indians, said Lawrence, were ‘flat shapes, exactly like men, but without any substance of reality … No deeper consciousness at all.’147 It was a strange criticism from a man who claimed to distrust mental consciousness, but the whole business of having an inside or an outside and of being an insider or an outsider becomes paramount in Taos, where Lawrence was an outsider with an inside while Tony was an insider with, Lawrence thought, only an outside. Lawrence’s letters home describe a world which is all show: ‘Internally, there is nothing,’ he wrote.148
* * *
No sooner had Lawrence and Tony Lujan returned from the Apache festival than the group dynamic changed. Mabel put it like this: Lawrence ‘was annoyed that Frieda and I had become friends, and not only jealous of me, but jealous of her as well. The flow immediately ceased between Frieda and me and started between Lawrence and me. He somehow switched it.’ Lawrence was jealous of Mabel and Frieda, Mabel was jealous of Frieda and Lawrence, and Frieda was jealous of Mabel and Lawrence. So the night after writing the first draft of ‘Indians and an Englishman’, Lawrence suggested that he and Mabel should work on a book together. Having been in America for a little over two weeks, ‘he said he wanted to write an American novel,’ Mabel recalled, and that ‘he wanted to write it around me’. She was delighted: ‘It was for this I had called him from across the world.’149
On the morning of 19 September, Lawrence went across to the Big House to begin work. He found Mabel sunbathing on the flat roof outside her bedroom, naked beneath a dressing gown that was like a burnous. She says that she didn’t think to dress for him, but this is disingenuous. Passing by Mabel’s unmade bed, Lawrence ‘averted his eyes, as though it were a revolting sight’. Mabel’s room was, she said, clean and light but Lawrence, just by ‘passing through it, turned it into a brothel. Yes he did. That’s how powerful he was.’ Mabel, who felt so connected to Lawrence, had misread him: Lawrence hated slovenliness, sartorial and domestic.
Squatting on the roof, while the pigeons in their coops below paced ‘amorously up and down’, Lawrence fell into a ‘gloomy silence’. ‘I don’t know how Frieda’s going to feel about this,’ he said, and he threw an angry look in the direction of their house below. ‘Well, surely she will understand,’ Mabel reassured him, at which point Lawrence launched into a tirade against Frieda who, being German, understood nothing about the ‘Latin spirit’ shared by himself and Mabel. Were they discussing co-writing a novel or having an affair? Mabel elides the difference, and Lawrence did too. Mabel then, having waited almost a year to do so, told Lawrence the story of her journey ‘from civilisation to the bright, strange world of Taos’: how she had exchanged her New York salon – ‘the sick old world of art and artists’ – for the ‘pristine valley and upland lakes’. And ‘in that hour’, she wrote in Lorenzo in Taos, she and Lawrence ‘became more intimate, psychically, than I have ever been with anyone else before’.150 Which makes it sound less like an affair than a psychoanalytic session.
