Burning Man, page 38
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Mabel, who started out as Mabel Ganson, and then became Mabel Evans before becoming Mabel Dodge, and after that Mabel Dodge Sterne, was born in Buffalo, on the eastern shores of Lake Erie, at what she called ‘zero hour’. The Native Americans had been driven away and the white Americans who now possessed the land ‘were sinking down into a diseased and melancholy inanition’.151 The only child of wealthy parents who hated one another, Mabel’s childhood was gilded, and silent. Because she wrote so garrulously about herself, it is easy to overlook the significance of silence to Mabel. Her father, Charles Ganson, was treated by her mother, Sara, with a silent contempt which provoked him to despair. He would, Mabel recalled, ‘shout and fling his arms about and his face would seem to break up into fragments from the running passion in him’, but still Sara Ganson refused to respond.
Mabel, who imitated her mother in all things, practised this same pose, and she found in Tony Lujan someone equally taciturn: both Tony Lujan and Sara Ganson had what Mabel called ‘a secret life’.152 To her friends, Mabel spoke only in monosyllables (her voice was described as mellow, with confidential overtones), and to her servants she said nothing at all, responding to their queries with brief nods or shakes of her head. Her battle from birth was to get what she wanted: Mabel was always clear about this, objectivity being one of her finest features. She made no attempt to pretend that she was anything other than a manipulator, an exhibitionist and a bully, or to disguise the fact that jealousy was her guiding star and love an obstacle rather than a goal.
What Mabel had was energy – she saw herself as ‘a Leyden jar charged to the brim’ – and she employed this to create the maximum emotional flurry.153 As a child she sexually experimented with her girlfriends, and her mother removed her from school when she became involved with a girl called Beatrice. Her first marriage, aged twenty-one, to Karl Evans, took place suddenly, and in secret. It served a dual purpose: to challenge the authority of Charles Ganson, and to prevent Karl Evans from marrying the woman to whom he was currently engaged. ‘I want you,’ Mabel told him, explaining in her memoir that she wanted him not out of love but in order to prove her power. Three months after the wedding, Mabel was having an affair with her doctor, a middle-aged, married man called John Parmenter whom she first encountered after a suicide attempt. When Mabel became pregnant, she told both Karl Evans and John Parmenter that the child was theirs but, she later wrote, ‘I hardly knew whose baby I was going to have.’154
She called the boy after John, but thought Karl was the father. There would be no electricity flowing between this mother and child: when she was handed the newly born baby, Mabel refused to look at him, deciding that she didn’t ‘like it’, by which she meant both the infant and motherhood. This never changed. When John Evans had children of his own and Mabel offered him parenting advice, he replied by telling his mother, ‘YOU, lecturing ME on children and child-love! YOU, the perfect Mother … MY GOD … There is more love in the little finger of my hand for each of my children than you ever had for me.’155
Two months after John’s birth, Mabel was passing by her parents’ house when she saw Dr Parmenter’s car driving away. Her father was dying and so a visit by the doctor would not be unusual. But Mabel, being naturally suspicious, went inside and found her mother lying in a state of dishabille on the couch at the end of her bed. The air in the room throbbed and Sara Ganson lay there ‘flushed and warmed, her hair, burning brightly in the light, a little loosened’, while her eyes, usually cold, were ‘heated and accentuated by her quickened, strong blood’. Seeing her in a state of post-coital bliss, Mabel realised that her mother was no longer a stranger but another version of Mabel herself, filled with ‘the life that was my life, with the fires that I considered I alone held the key to loosen’. ‘How is my father?’ she asked. Dr Parmenter, Sara Ganson languidly replied, was keeping him quiet with a dose of morphine. Mabel then returned home, haunted by the picture of Parmenter ‘driving his awkward body against my mother’s cold sensuality’.156
Charles Ganson died in the autumn of 1902, and six months later Karl Evans also died, having been accidentally shot in the back while shooting ducks. Mother and daughter were now widows competing over Dr Parmenter. ‘It was,’ Mabel said, ‘as though I had never known Karl’, and to separate her rival from Parmenter, Sara Ganson arranged for Mabel and her tiny son to visit Europe.157
It was on the ship to France that Mabel met Edwin Dodge. He was a recently qualified architect and Mabel had an interest in interior decoration: they married straight away. She claims she was not in love with him, but the purpose of Mabel’s official story was to show that her life had no meaning until she met Tony Lujan. Between 1904 and 1912, the Dodges lived in Florence: ‘I will make you mine,’ Mabel said when she first saw the lily town. They bought the fourteenth-century Villa Curonia at Arcetri, and while Edwin focused on the renovations, Mabel filled the rooms with the expat community, including Gordon Craig and Norman Douglas: she made a point of including theatre people and homosexuals in her circle. She also befriended Gertrude Stein, who furthered the advancement of Mabel Dodge by writing an impenetrable ‘Portrait’ of her which Mabel had printed and distributed around her circle. Alice B. Toklas, who kept her distance, recalled Mabel once encouraging John, then aged five, to jump from the balcony. ‘Fly, my dear, fly,’ she coaxed. ‘There’s nothing like a spartan mother,’ muttered Edwin Dodge.158
In 1912 – the year that Lawrence met Frieda – the Dodges returned to New York, where they set up home in Greenwich Village, in an apartment Mabel decorated entirely in white. This was the bohemian quarter, the city’s Left Bank. From now on things moved fast: Mabel discovered herself as a ‘mover and shaker’ and saw a psychoanalyst who advised her to separate from her husband. She divorced Dodge in 1913, in which year she also donated $500 to the International Show of Modern Art, held at the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory and known for posterity as the Armory Show. The show became what Mabel saw as her own ‘little Revolution’. Here the Steins displayed, for the first time, their magnificent collection of modern art, and Mabel was asked to write a profile of Gertrude Stein for Arts and Decoration magazine.
When the Armory show was over, Mabel redirected the centre of Manhattan’s energy to her house in the Village whose notorious Wednesday Evenings became the Jazz Age equivalent of Studio 54. Her white rooms were filled with the men and women who were shaping the future: trade unionists like one-eyed Bill Haywood, anarchists like Emma Goldman, black musicians from Harlem, suffragettes, psychoanalysts, artists and poets. Mabel supported workers’ rights, women’s rights, the rights of African Americans and the unemployed, and as such the press presented her – correctly – as an heiress who entertained the radicals while the workers starved. But her salon was a great success. Mabel described how, wearing a white shift dress and a vivid scarf, she would greet her guests with a limp hand and a brief, abstract smile, inwardly bubbling with pleasure.
She behaved in her love affairs like a woman deranged; being loved by Mabel was compared to a jail sentence. Her romances, she stressed, were spiritual rather than sexual, except for the one with the journalist and war correspondent John Reed. Between 1913 and 1915, John Reed was Mabel’s great passion. They both believed in the immortal quality of their love: Reed was a god and Mabel the muse from whom, as she put it, he ‘drew electricity’. In 1913, when Reed was writing Insurgent Mexico, the book about the revolution that would make him famous, Mabel pursued him into Texas and one of her Evenings went ahead without her. This occasioned the cubist artist Andrew Dasburg (also in love with her) to paint a picture commemorating ‘The Absence of Mabel Dodge’ which, together with Gertrude Stein’s ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’, consolidated Mabel’s status as the doyenne of modernism.
Mabel also now befriended Isadora Duncan who, having parted ways with Maurice Magnus, was setting up a dance school in New York. Isadora’s sister, Elizabeth, became Mabel’s great ally, and it was Elizabeth Duncan’s dance school, in a farmhouse in Croton-on-Hudson, that Mabel helped to establish. Buying for herself the house next door, Mabel became the Croton Queen and she enrolled her son, John, now aged fifteen, in the Elizabeth Duncan school. It was here, at a dance recital, that Mabel – no longer in love with John Reed – met husband number three, the Jewish-Russian post-impressionist painter Maurice Sterne.
In his own reminiscences Sterne wondered how their marriage ever came about, given that Mabel was not his type and that he was not in her ‘astral sphere’. She disliked his art, but Mabel also believed that if she had a physical relationship with a talented man, she would absorb his powers. What he was drawn to in Mabel, Sterne later realised, was her control. ‘For the first time in my life I could relax, rest my will, and do what someone else decided was best.’ When Mabel went into analysis with A. A. Brill, Freud’s disciple and first English translator, he recommended a marital separation. And so in 1917 Sterne joined the artists’ colony in Santa Fe from where, in November, he sent his wife a letter: ‘Do you want an object in life? Save the Indians, their art-culture – reveal it to the world!’159 That same month the face of a Native American man appeared to Mabel in a dream.
Mabel Dodge, whose life reads like a Freudian case-study, was a psychoanalytic lab-rat. Analysed first as a teenager, she maintained a close relationship with A. A. Brill until his death in 1944. Brill, who in 1909 had accompanied Freud to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts where he gave his famous Clark Lectures, was afterwards asked by Freud to set up and run a branch of the International Psychoanalytic Association in New York. Jung was Freud’s man in Switzerland, and Brill was Freud’s man in America: ‘You are indeed the only one who can always be relied on,’ Freud told him in 1932, ‘who never lets a person down.’160 Brill could equally rely on Mabel, who between August 1917 and February 1918, wrote a bi-weekly column for the New York Journal in which she too disseminated psychoanalytic ideas: ‘Mabel Dodge Writes about the Unconscious’ was the title of one of her articles. It was when Mabel invited Brill to talk at one of her Evenings that the idea of unconscious behaviour was introduced to New Yorkers for the first time. Several of her horrified guests walked out.
In December 1917, Mabel Dodge entered into ‘the second half’ of her life when she headed south-west from New York to ‘save the Indians’. ‘My heart was pounding with impatience, for in spirit I had already arrived and only my body was left behind on that smelly train.’161 After three days of crawling across the desert, she jumped out of the Pullman several stops before Santa Fe and summoned a boy to drive her to the station. But the car had no headlights so she ended up at Wagon Mound, waiting for the train that followed the train she had abandoned.
She and Sterne, for the moment reunited, moved north to Taos, whose landscape Mabel had fallen in love with. Here, in January 1918, she first saw Tony Lujan who was ‘squatting’ – just as Lawrence was doing now – on the floor of his house in the Taos pueblo, beating softly on a drum and singing a wordless song. When he looked up, Mabel realised that his was the face she had seen in her dream. Tony had similarly dreamed about Mabel: ‘I seen you before, already,’ he said, and Mabel gave him an orange. By the summer both Tony’s wife, Candelaria, and Maurice Sterne had been despatched by Mabel, and her journey of ‘awakening at the different great centres’ was over. Buffalo, she explained to Lawrence, had been ‘the lower sex center’, Florence the ‘emotional, nervous, aesthetic center at the solar plexus’, and New York ‘the exciting frontal brain center where ideas stimulate and whirl about’.162
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Back on the sun-roof in Mabeltown, Mabel finished telling Lawrence her story. By the time their hour was up, they had achieved what she called ‘a complete, stark approximation of a spiritual union’. Lawrence then went downstairs while Mabel dressed, and they strolled over to his house. ‘We were happy together,’ she recalled. ‘We reinforced each other.’ But there ahead of them was Frieda in a pink cotton frock, hanging out the washing. Her rage was apparent from a distance of a hundred yards and Lawrence started to ‘chuckle’.163
That night, when the Lawrences came over for supper, Mabel noted a tired serenity about them which suggested they were worn out by fighting. In ‘Not I, But the Wind…’, Frieda covers in one brief sentence her fight with Lawrence over the Mabel-novel: ‘I did not want this.’ So Lawrence, taking Mabel aside, now explained that ‘Frieda thinks we ought to continue the work at our house.’ ‘With her there?’ replied Mabel, astounded. ‘Well, not in the room,’ Lawrence mumbled, at least not ‘all the time. She has her work to do.’ Mabel then understood that she would never, as long as the Lawrences were together, have ‘the chance to unload my accumulation of power’.164
Frieda had reason to feel threatened: Mabel wanted, she admitted, to ‘seduce’ Lawrence’s ‘spirit so that I could make him carry out certain things’. She did not find Lawrence physically attractive but she nonetheless ‘persuaded’ herself that she ‘wanted him’ because she could then imbibe some of his genius.165 Lawrence, meanwhile, knew full well that writing a novelised biography of Mabel and Tony would be an erotic challenge, just as it had been when he wrote The Trespasser, his novelised biography about Helen Corke and her suicidal lover. So the following morning Mabel grudgingly turned up at the Lawrence house and shivered in a room with wide-open windows while Frieda ‘stamped around, sweeping noisily, and singing in loud defiance’. Under these conditions, nothing ‘vital’ could ‘pass’ between writer and subject, and so they shut up shop for the day. Thus began the struggle between Frieda and Mabel, the body and the spirit, for control of Lorenzo’s soul. ‘Frieda’s opposition to me,’ wrote Mabel, ‘released all my desire for domination.’ She put it to Lawrence slightly differently: ‘Frieda,’ Mabel announced, ‘has mothered your books long enough. You need a new mother.’166
Sitting beneath a cottonwood tree, Lawrence began writing immediately. He called his combustible heroine Sybil Mond, Mond meaning world and Sybil combining the name of the Greek oracle with that of Cybele, the plump mother-goddess. With her fierce brows and headlight eyes, Sybil was Isis, a sun disk between her two cow-horns. But Mabel was also, as the mother of a fatherless son, the Virgin of the Pueblo. Thus Sybil Mond was a blend of Madame Blavatsky and Madonna of the Rocks. The Pullman which brought her from New York, meanwhile, was a Balaam’s ass who refused to do her bidding: Sybil willed it to go forward, but instead it rested on the track.
‘I have done your “train” episode,’ Lawrence told Mabel in an undated note, ‘and brought you to Lamy at 3 in the morning.’ Because Frieda had banned Lawrence from being alone with Mabel and Mabel refused to talk to Lawrence with Frieda in the room, he asked her to now flesh out for him, in writing, the following details:
1. The meeting with Maurice
2. John, M and You in Santa Fe
3. How you felt as you drove to Taos
4. What you wanted here before you came
5. First days at Taos
6. First sight of Pueblo
7. First words with Tony
8. Steps in developing intimacy with Tony
9. Expulsion of M
10. Fight with Tony’s wife
11. Moving into your house.167
Mabel would cover most of these points in her memoirs but questions 7, 8 and 10 – the story that became ‘more and more difficult’ for Mabel to tell – still need answering.
Did Mabel really meet Tony Lujan in the mystical conditions she described? Maurice Sterne rubbished her official account: the drum performance in his house, he said, was ‘put on to impress tourists’. Tony was a ‘show-Indian’ who knew exactly how to play spiritually hungry women like Mabel because he had once toured Coney Island with a Wild West troupe. He had, in addition, been ‘spying around’ the Sterne house for a good while before Mabel appeared that day at the pueblo; Maurice recognised him as one of a group of Indians who turned up in their kitchen at mealtimes. He was handsome and arrogant and stood out from the others ‘like a proud cock amongst a flock of meek chickens’. Mabel was ‘hypnotised’ by the Indians, said Sterne, particularly by their silence. What you have to understand about Mabel, he stressed, is that she was a ‘dead battery’ who needed constant recharging and Tony Lujan, Sterne conceded, was probably the right man for the job.168
We know that Tony’s wife was paid by Mabel $35 a month in exchange for not naming her as co-respondent in the divorce (Mabel similarly paid Maurice Sterne $100 a month), and we know that the pueblo strongly disapproved of the union between Mabel and Tony. But who had the power in the relationship: Mabel, who was rich, or Tony, who represented everything that Mabel most valued? Lawrence wanted Mabel to dig deep. ‘You’ve got to remember’, he added at the bottom of his note, sounding like A. A. Brill, ‘also the things you don’t want to remember.’ But without Lawrence there to ‘make the dynamos inside begin to hum and discharge sparks’, Mabel’s battery had once again gone flat and she could not, she said, even begin to put pen to paper.169
She must, however, have written something for him because in a letter to Mountsier on 6 October Lawrence said: ‘Am doing a M. Sterne novel of here, with her Indian: she makes me notes. Wonder how we shall get on with it. I don’t let her see my stuff.’ Frieda added to the letter a postscript: ‘I love the land and like Mabel D … Lawr has actually begun a novel about here and Mabel D – It’s very clever the beginning, it will be rather sardonic!’170 So to begin with, Frieda had liked the Mabel book and mothered it herself. ‘There is a kind of vitality and eternal youth in it,’ she said (according to Mabel) of these opening pages, ‘like nothing he had done before’.171 It was only later, recalled Mabel, that Frieda’s resistance took hold, when the relationship between Lawrence and his Beatrice had broken down.
