Oddballs in the Desert

By ALEXANDER THEROUX
August 1, 2008; Page A11

From Greenwich Village to Taos
By Flannery Burke
(University Press of Kansas, 248 pages, $34.95)

The protagonist of Witter Bynner's misogynistic play of 1926 -- "Cake: An Indulgence" -- is a wealthy, oft-married woman, identified only as "the Lady," who seeks adventure, romance and pleasure in various exotic locales. It was well understood at the time that the Lady was modeled on the domineering but irrepressible Mabel Dodge Luhan, the "salon primitivist," in D.H. Lawrence's words. Between 1917 and 1929, Luhan transformed her adopted Taos home in northern New Mexico into a cultural hinterland for those on the avant-garde of cultural expression, including artists and writers she had come to know in New York City. This salon in the desert is the subject of Flannery Burke's entertaining "From Greenwich Village to Taos."

It was an art colony predominantly, but it included a range of creative guests: the painter Georgia O'Keeffe; the journalist John Reed; writers D.H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein; the feminist Mary Austin; and Carl Van Vechten, one of the guiding lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Mabel Dodge Luhan knew everybody and, in a sense, everybody visited her in Taos.

"You have a certain faculty," the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens once told her, "a centralizing, magnetic, social faculty. You attract, stimulate, and soothe people, and men like to sit with you and talk to themselves!"

This somewhat crackpated romantic from a banking family in Buffalo, N.Y., had a compulsive passion to celebrate art, beauty and nature. Though three of her four marriages failed, she was able to take the money she accumulated -- added to her family wealth -- and move to Florence, Italy, and Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Greenwich Village and eventually Taos, collecting artists and writers along the way. To be at the center of modernity, to explore the "now," meant everything to her. Radical journalists, anarchists, mad activists, sex elves, naturopaths and networkers had gathered around her long before she moved west in 1917.

Curiously, Luhan herself was not an artist or a writer or an activist. She was generous, though -- with her money, her invitations, her advice and quite notably her body. "Free love" advocates abounded in her circles. She vamped whom she wanted and bedded all she could. John Reed, who covered the Russian Revolution in "Ten Days That Shook the World," was one of her lovers. Witter Bynner said that she had a "frontier libido."

Her fourth marriage to the full-blooded Pueblo Indian Antonio ("Tony") Lujan (later changed to "Luhan") did not stop her from throwing herself at the young black writer Jean Toomer, to whom she lustfully wrote: "I hardly could look towards you for fear of starting something psychologically bad for Tony -- yet more & more as time went on I felt with you & in a relationship that was positive and wonderfully refreshing. I am not mistaken, am I? You do feel it too, don't you?"

D.H. Lawrence's wife, Frieda, objected when Dodge invited her novelist-husband to work on the rooftop that formed a patio to Dodge's Taos bedroom. The Lawrences soon moved to a ranch north of Dodge's home. (I recall driving up north of Taos one snowy spring day 10 years ago and finding a small memorial to Lawrence, a sort of roadside grotto just off the road.)

"I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had," Lawrence himself wrote. "The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine up high over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend." Yet Lawrence mocked Luhan and other Anglo women for "romanticizing" their Pueblo neighbors. Lawrence seemed to find the land in the Southwest -- and only the land -- transfiguring.

Ms. Burke commendably records in detail how Luhan was let down by the work that Lawrence did in Taos: among other titles, "St. Mawr," "The Plumed Serpent," "Mornings in Mexico" and "A Little Moonshine With Lemon." They hardly amounted to the triumph she expected when she invited the author of "Women in Love" to her special domain. But Lawrence's own sense of the primitive -- a dark, subintellectual "blood-understanding" between attuned people -- was different from Luhan's simple, natural volkishness. And the control she wanted to exert -- as a sort of queen ruling over her ranch-world -- was at loggerheads with his odd principles of manliness (and womanliness).

Ms. Burke has done her research and neatly documents the tensions in New Mexico among Mexicans, Native Americans and Nuevo-Mexicano "Americans," residents descended from Mexican families or Spanish-Native American unions. Luhan and her Anglo arts community plunked itself down right in the midst of all this.

But Ms. Burke too often meanders among a variety of themes and strikes a humorless note pretty much throughout her book when the oddballs on hand invite something more exuberant or mocking. There is Carl Van Vechten, for instance, invoking the primitivism of Harlem to try to outdo Luhan and her pueblo Southwest; or Mary Austin striving to make of northern New Mexico a "woman's sphere"; or Georgia O'Keeffe painting memorable pictures but also engaging in "romantically charged correspondence" with busy Jean Toomer -- did Mabel Dodge know about that?

When Ms. Burke writes of Mabel Dodge "that her marriage with [Tony] Lujan brought white people into contact with a culture necessary for humanity's survival. Only by incorporating an Indian worldview, she believed, could whites undo the harms of civilization," I thought I spotted a moment of whimsy. Humanity's survival? Indian worldview? Mabel wanted Tony in bed!

Mr. Theroux's latest book is the novel "Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual" (Fantagraphics Books).