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The New Yorker
Under Review

The Strange Revival of Mabel Dodge Luhan

The memoirist is at the center of two new, very different books: a
biography of D. H. Lawrence and a novel by Rachel Cusk. Has she been
rescued or reduced?

By Rebecca Panovka

June 2, 2021

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Mabel Dodge Luhan.
Mabel Dodge Luhan seemed to know everyone and was part of everything.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten / Courtesy Library of Congress

"Now don't you keep going on to me about introverts and extraverts
and insides and outsides," D. H. Lawrence wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan
in 1924. Instead, he continued, she should wash the dishes until she
could keep up a rhythm "with a grace." At the time, Luhan was reading
up on mysticism and Jungian psychoanalysis, and she had written to
Lawrence about her discoveries. He was not the right audience.
Lawrence regarded Luhan alternately as a source of irritation; as an
embodiment of his bete noire, the dominating woman; and as a model
for some of the most cruelly portrayed heroines he would ever write.
He had vowed to destroy her, and she would come to believe, at times,
that he had succeeded.

A former Greenwich Village radical, Luhan considered herself divinely
appointed to "save the Indians" in order to restore the spiritual and
sexual life of a white American society in decay. This vocation led
her to New Mexico, where she ditched husband No. 3 for Tony Lujan, a
man from the Taos pueblo. In Taos, she launched an artist colony,
wrote volume after volume of a tell-all memoir, and hosted a parade
of famous guests, Lawrence included. Their relationship is a central
subject of two new books: Frances Wilson's "Burning Man: The Trials
of D. H. Lawrence," a biography of the author, and Rachel Cusk's "
Second Place," a rewriting of Luhan's memoir "Lorenzo in Taos."

Rebecca Panovka is a writer and the co-editor of The Drift.
More:New MexicoD. H. LawrenceLiteratureMemoirsNative Americans
FeminismNovelsRachel Cusk

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