Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan

by Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lois Palken Rudnick (Editor)

Mabel Dodge Luhan--salon hostess, writer, and muse--published four volumes and 1,600 pages of 'intimate memories' during the 1930s. In vivid and compelling prose, she explored the momentous changes in sexuality, politics, art, and culture that moved Americans from the Victorian into the modern age. Noted for assembling and inspiring some of the leading creative men and women of her day--Gertrude Stein, John Reed, and D. H. Lawrence among them--she was a 'mover and shaker' of national and international renown during her lifetime (1879-1962). Lois Palken Rudnick, Luhan's biographer, has abridged the original volumes into one book that highlights Luhan's struggles for self-expression and from Gilded Age Buffalo, New York; to Florence, Italy; to radical Greenwich Village in New York; and, finally, to Taos, New Mexico, where she met and eventually married her fourth husband, Antonio Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. This new edition of Luhan's edited memoirs (first published in 1999) contains a new foreword as well as the original introduction.

Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography, Biography

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan was an American patron of the arts, who was particularly associated with the Taos art colony.

Reviews

[Kate Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow--Mabel knew just about everybody who was anybody in the arts and politics of the early 20th century:Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, and Margaret Sanger are a few. Mabel also had enough money to do exactly what she pleased, which was the good news and the bad news. As a child, her family's wealth meant she was lonely, raised by servants while her parents kept her at arm's length. As a young woman, she was told by her lover John Reed (remember the movie Reds?) that the reason she was continually depressed was that she had no work. "You need to be busy, Mabel!"
Rather than seeking the spotlight, she preferred to be the observer, and provide support for other creative people. Among those who encouraged her to write her memoirs was D.H. Lawrence, and write she did: four volumes, published when she was in her 40s. The present volume is an edited version of the four volumes, bringing the length down to a manageable 245 pp. When she came to Taos in 1917, after having lived in New York and Italy, she felt she was finally home. It was quite a ride, Mabel's life, and worth your time.

[Marilyn Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I wasn’t as blown away by this abridged version of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s multi-volumed memoir as I was Lorenzo in Taos, I still found it to be a fine read, especially the final section. Luhan has a beautiful openness to her personality and shows this in her writing, which resonates in the reader.

[Mahika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir of individuation, of "a personality struggling to become individual," with all of Mabel's various houses "like the shells of the soul in its progressive metamorphoses..." All along she is seeking common life: not a life of shared appearances, but that "obscure exchange of hidden life." Like Woolf, she wonders: who is a person without her relations? She writes, "I always felt our true existence was in the minds and hearts of other people. If one could become real to others, then one was real to oneself..."

Mabel's personal stationery had "a violet monogram inside a silver circle around which Whitman's words pursued each other: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself'..." Indeed, she was like a chameleon; in Florence she role plays Italian royalty; in Greenwich she runs with anarchists. Quiet, mysterious, and inward - "The quieter I was, the more wide awake I felt toward life..." - her life reflects a fierce responsibility to self, even a hyper-individualism - "I belonged to myself only..." - a stance apparently shaped by a cold, companionless childhood. There is a through line in her individual character as what the editor, Lois Palken, calls an "artist of life," a character which reminded me of Anaïs Nin: collector and sharp witness of other people, a woman waiting to be used by life in some meaningful way, while intolerant of "ordinary" work or life (a stance undergirded, of course, by her wealth). Enchanted with form, Mabel had "a love for beautiful things, for noble ideas, and for interesting people..."

Mabel was raised in Buffalo during peak Gilded Age in a neighborhood of the city's elite. Her parents lived on inherited wealth, members of the "leisure class." This memoir was poorly received by leftist critics of the 1930s when first published. It's no wonder; during the Gilded Age (when Mabel was coming of age in Buffalo and living an 'idle rich' expatriate life in Europe), 2% of Americans controlled 60% of wealth while up to a half of the country lived in poverty.... Perhaps wanting to separate herself from the bubble of privilege in which she was reared, she was later drawn to affiliate herself with the anarchists, communists, and bohemian circles of pre-war Greenwich Village.

Leaving Buffalo for her "European Experiences," she feels "awake at last after the long dark sleep of my youth with my parents." There she discovers a rich, vivid "old world" in contrast to the shallowness and lack of culture she perceived of Buffalo and America at large. Villa Curonia, her Florentine villa, represents the height of her most aesthetically-oriented life, during which she is "seriously involved with things... emotionally..." with "so much thought and feeling given to them... their discovery, their attainment, their disposition in one's house.... almost like a love affair, the drama over an antique..." The villa is described in beautiful detail, reflecting an opulent, sophisticated taste: every "crouching fold of damask... steady glowing gold... shadowy forms of ancient polished wood... layer upon layer of textures that passed from rose petal all the way to hand wrought iron..."

She experiences the villa as "a career in itself" - where, at a long dinner table over "flagons of wine" with "blossoms sprinkled here and there," she and her husband host salons of guests like Gertrude and Leo Stein, and André Gide... It is also a place in which she is helplessly "caught and entangled... inseparable from," a part of herself "allying itself with form...."

So she returns to America. In Greenwich Village, Mabel determines and enacts her contribution to "collect" who she determines to be interesting individuals at her apartment at 23 5th Ave at what are effectively salons of cultural imagination. She says it herself: "It was not dogs or glass I collected now; it was people, Important People..." A patroness of individuality and originality, she is interested in people singularly, not their parties or organizations. She sums up this period of early modernity as an age of new ways of "communication," new ways of seeing things, saying things. The salonnière life in New York she finds greatly contrasted to the old world glamour of Italy. Yet even in this more grounded life, even somewhat responsive to the state of the world, she craves still "a life in common with others..." Is it that in being always hostess and patroness, she is removed from feeling a true member of the group?

All along, Mabel is waiting: "for life to make use of me... of my whole attentive being..." She is herself aware of the "inheritance problem" - "There is a peculiar sense of insecurity that finally comes to people who have money they have inherited. I have never done any work of any kind, for nothing obliged me to and so there never seemed to be an incentive." The idle rich are "idle and unhappy and terribly bored with everything..." Idle, to the point of an "emptiness of living."

And yet, she determines not to succumb to that emptiness: to listen to what life was asking of her, what work it sought to use her for. "I was serving by living: by hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting. By growing and sleeping, by failing and by dying. And all the years through I have said to myself I was serving by waiting. Waiting to work." She is willing to be led, and finds that "the decisive actions throughout life have been impelled by a deeper self than the one who thought or wished for definite things..." Her manifesto is: "One must just let life express itself in whatever form it will... Let It happen. Let It decide."

Then Taos reveals itself to her as the flowering of every effort which preceded it: the end to the long pilgrimage. The opulence of her "Florentine dream life" seems, after all, meaningless in Taos, where the forever seeking of things has been replaced with the goodness of simplicity and roots. That dream pursued of utopia, the dream of a home in the world, of a place where "individual creativity is rooted in community..." has led her into Taos, where she is at last rooted, no longer "a dilettante.... a visitor to this planet." A place, at last, she belongs.