¡Colores!; 702; Mabel Dodge Luhan: Rites of Passage

You major funding for the Calories series was provided by the McHughan Foundation. Well a lot of people claim that Mabel was a controlling bitch and I feel that that was sexism at its best. I think that Mabel was one of the most important

women of the century. She was my aunt. She was married to my uncle, my father's brother. I think she herself was a very complicated complex mixture and could be different things to different people. People were what she dealt in and she liked the talented, the innovative, the exciting and she liked to stir up, not trouble for trouble safe, but because it was exciting. Other people in my family have told me that she was a real strong-willed and actually a pretty difficult person. She didn't like what she saw happening around her or how she was treated her, the roles she was allowed to play and she decided to live her life on her own terms. She came here to help de-nding people when they needed her she was there. One of the main reasons why she hasn't gotten the recognition that she probably deserved is because she was a woman and it's

because she was a white woman. What I know of her is what I've read and it's really beautiful writing. I think people should read her books because she told the truth. She loved telling the truth. That was that one of her dangers is both heartless and non-concerned. Her role was often just dismissed as being, oh well, she was a wealthy white woman, and people were not looking at what were some of the deeper motivations, it's a very neglected story. Mabel Gansen was born on February 26, 1879, to a wealthy family in Buffalo, New York. Throughout her early childhood and late adolescence, Mabel would encounter the experiences that

would lay the foundation for her life's journey. She would meet one of the most important people in her life, Violet Chalito, who would introduce her to the works of great literature and art. Mabel would become enamored with such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, and William Shakespeare. Mabel Dodge Luhan was born a child of privilege into the gilded age at a moment in American history when the United States had reached its peak as an urban industrial power, an extraordinary technological boom. And Mabel's ancestors were very much part of that process. And so it was that the world into which Mabel was born was one in which Americans felt themselves to be coming the most powerful people on earth. But made her life in that home to her a tragedy and a haunting tragedy that stayed with

her for all of her life was the fact that her father and mother, though they had all the money in the world and social prestige any human being could want, had no love for one another, and nothing to do, ultimately being empty in terms of any kind of spiritual or ethical conviction. Do you also remember as never being touched by them, loved by them, or held by them? Mabel's parents seemed to have been incapable of affection for anyone, each other or for their child. And so as a young girl growing up she spent a lot of time alone in her room in what she felt was a devastating silence, a silence that was both a silence because no one was there to talk to, and an internal silence, a sense of non-being that she didn't even exist as a human being. There was nothing and no one. To be only one has a feeling of doom in it.

Life, my life, was set in a rigid, unlovely, inescapable pattern. Better a real pain, better a danger to life itself than this negation of living that comes from not having anything to do. My parents seemed like dim dull figures far behind, I couldn't make them part of my journey. I had to set off alone. So Mabel very early seemed to sense that she was living in a class that had learned to substitute powerful love. She learned that if she were to have any sense of reality for herself, she could only have it. When she was controlling others, making them do what she wanted, forcing them to acknowledge her reality. I have always been myself and at the same time always able to be the other person, feel with him, think he's thoughts, I identified myself with him and it always made people want to kiss me and to manifest an actual heneerness of union.

If I could become real to others, I became real to myself. It seemed to testify to my power, which I was forever feeding. At the same time she was being raised to believe that as a woman, there was nothing she could be in her life or do with her life except to have one goal in life and that was to marry. And neither of the first two men that she married provided her with any of the emotional or intellectual fulfillment that she was seeking. The burden of love undelivered is the ultimate load. With love unsatisfied, some people turn to food, others to drink, others will add pearls to pearls, turning frantically here and there to satisfy the basic craving, but it is difficult to find a substitute. In the midst of feeling that her only choices in life were marriage and family. She managed to find another world, the world of art, that allowed her to express herself

emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in a way that she was incapable of, either within the institution of marriage or within the world in which she had grown up. Literature is art. My thoughts were of a life made up of beautiful things, of art, of color, of noble forms and of ideas and perceptions about them that had been waiting, asleep within me, and that now allured me by their untried, uncreated images. There was no way in the world that she grew up in for a woman to imagine that she could become an artist herself, and so what Mabel chose as her life of vocation was to become an artist of life and to achieve great art by bringing those into her circle who themselves were great artists, mostly men. The only way I was able to live was vicariously, imagining myself into other forms other than my own.

A man was what gave me identity, and the artist is the greatest of us all in these divine aesthetics of self-creation. In 1904, Mabel moved to Florence, Italy in her mid-20s and would remain there for the following eight years of her life. In this period, she would discover and nurture her talent for gathering influential people, some of the many who visited her home at the Via Coronia included Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Eleanor Duce, and Arthur Rubenstein. Many American artists and writers had become emigrates to the old world because they felt that American civilization was so materialistic, so burdened by technology and things that a true artist couldn't breathe in that atmosphere. And so she is part of an expatriate movement that goes to Europe, thinking that it's giving up its American past and its American roots, and she's going to set herself down in the middle of Florence and recreate the Renaissance. I'm not made of hearts, we're that easy.

And so for a while, she lives the life of a Renaissance princess and brings to her dinner parties the leading royalty actors and actresses and artists of Europe to partake of her food and to provide the proper ambiance for her newly assumed identity as a Renaissance lady. This doesn't work for very long because what she finds is that she's appropriating a role that has absolutely nothing to do with her as an American. She learns this lesson from Gertrude and Leo Stein. What the Stein's love about Mabel is her mobility, the archetypal American at the dawn of a century in which people were always reinventing themselves and she encouraged in Mabel the sense of playfulness and self-invention that Mabel had always loved but never felt secure about. Gertrude had direct first-hand reactions of her own about life. I remember she was the first one of all those sophisticated cultural people I had grown accustomed to who made me realize how nothing is anything more than it is to oneself.

In 1912, Mabel returned to the United States in her mid-30s. She would find herself in the birthplace of the modern age, Greenwich Village, New York. Although still married, she would primarily dedicate herself and her money to the revolutionary movements of the time, some of which included anarchy, expressionism, women's equality, and the introduction of psychology. Her intimate relationship with Jack Reed as well as her place among such movers and shakers as Alfred Stieglitz, Lincoln Stephens, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger would make her a leading symbol of the modern woman. What's different in 1912, from 19 how do we when she leaves, is that for the first time you have a generation of Americans who recognize that the cost of America is coming to age as a major industrial world empire, has been too great in terms of what it has taken out of

the lives of the working class men and women in the immigrants who have helped to create that wealth. Mabel comes back and identifies herself with those who want to make the kinds of changes that will rectify these inequities because her own life, she felt, had been destroyed by that system. The new spirit was abroad and swept us all together and I belonged. It became overnight my own little revolution. I would upset America. I would with fatal, irrevocable disaster to the old order of things. I was going to dynamite New York and nothing would stop me. She becomes a mistress of her age and she partakes in every one of these movements to make herself available to anyone who has a cause that promises to transform the United States from a class bound materialist empire into a world where there is greater social justice and particularly a world in which there is greater social and economic and sexual equality

between men and women. Now we have the children and the factory. Anything that will extend the unawaken consciousness here or elsewhere will have my support. What is needed is more, more and always more consciousness, both in life and in art. She did many things of note, perhaps the most important was the salon that she established to which she brought various radical activists and visionaries who were trying to transform American culture in terms of how we perceive the world as well as in terms of what we do about changing it and making it a more just and humane place. I thought I would try to get people together a little to see if it wouldn't increase understanding. So they came to my home, heads of things, heads of movements, heads of all kinds of groups of people, poets, lawyers, murderers, I.W.W.'s, suffragists, birth controlists, artists, club women, women's places in the home women, newspaper men, clergy men, and just plain men.

In the midst of this whirlwind of political and social activity, during which Mabel for the first time in her life found her own voice and a venue for her imagination and energy she meets Jack Reed, one of the young Bohemian revolutionaries of Greenwich Village, and he is out to become a mover and shaker who is going to change the world. I knew he couldn't have done it without me, I felt that I was behind him, pouring all the power of the universe through myself to him. As soon as they became lovers, she subordinated herself, her activities, and her concerns to her need to feel that she was the center of his life, and no woman was ever going to be the center of Jack Reed's life. This is so fundamental.

Is it what feminism is all about? I know all women go through this, but must they go on going through it? Are we supposed to make men do things or are men to change? And ultimately she breaks it off because she realizes that herself is going nowhere. For the mature woman, there is only herself, free and alone in the brotherhood of man bearing her own security within her soul. The end of her fear with John Reed coincided with the end of that generation's idealism, because they break apart when World War I breaks out. During World War I, the only thing that seemed to matter anymore was whether or not one was 100% American. And that meant never criticizing or speaking out about the government in any way whatsoever. And the hopes and dreams of her generation that social reform and economic reform would

change the lives of America's most oppressed people, become the last thing on the American agenda. The disillusion that infecting her radical friends is beyond telling in its profundity. I had said goodbye forever to read in my heart, to the labor movement, to revolution, and to anarchy. My young lover was gone, and it seemed gone with him where the younger hopes of change. In 1917, Mabel discovered the Southwest, where she would meet her fourth and final husband, Tony Luhon, and remain with him for the rest of her life in Towson, New Mexico. Inspired by the lifestyle of the Native New Mexican people, she became a strong political and social supporter of their culture. With her newfound passion, she would promote her Southwestern home as a utopian garden of Eden and transform it into a hearth for the creative minds of her time.

She introduced such individuals to New Mexico as Georgia O'Keefe, Mary Austin, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willacatha, and Carl Jung. So she goes to the Southwest, and that's when Mabel, for the final time in her life, sees a world that will finally make her feel at home. My life broke into, right then, and I entered the second half. This time she's part of a post-war generation of radicals and artists and writers who are searching for worlds other than the urban industrial empire, the working urban working class world of the cities, because that seems to have been the center of power that helped to foment, create, and support the war that seems to have destroyed Western civilization. I came to Tows where I was offered and accepted a spiritual therapy that was cleansing, one

that provided a difficult and painful method of curing me of my epoch, and that finally rewarded me with a sense of reality. And she meets Tony Luhan, a Tows Indian. Tony introduces her to a new world that had solved, she thought, all of the problems of Western civilization that she had struggled with from the time that she was a child. That lived in peace and harmony with the land that was not particularly interested in material wealth, where there were no observable class differences, where both women and men were central to religious worship, both central to the economy and the work that helped to support the community and the family life. And most important to her as somebody who is interested in transforming culture, art, and ritual, and symbol are the very center of their lives. As I stood there facing Tony when he spoke to me, perhaps it was only an instant in time,

that I was by grace born in that flash as I should have been years, years ago, inducted into the new world. The earth and Tony were identical in my imagination. I longed so to simply be as they were. I wanted to be part of this place without seeming to try, but we keep on trying, don't we? We who do not belong but so want to belong. We decide that she can become, through her love with Tony, a bridge between cultures, who by writing about the Indian world and by bringing the world and country's greatest artists and visionaries out there to see it and to feel it, transform the consciousness of Anglo-civilization. The bridge between cultures, I'm a spring artist, thinkers, the great souls to tell. A bread a gospel that would redefine the culture of Anglo-America, make my new home the

place they would come to, to make my experience, my material, my house, and to formulate it all into a magnificent creation. Mabel managed to bring out the house, either by inviting or having others invite them. Some of the most interesting creative people in offer times. The aspect of Mabel's vision, which was to bring to New Mexico, people who could truly cherish, understand, and create out of their own artistic selves, you know, vehicles for expressing the beauty of the landscape and its indigenous peoples was wonderful. She couldn't have been happier about that, but in terms of her larger scheme of making towels a kind of utopian communal model for a new world order, no way did that work.

In fact, some of the unintended consequences was to bring in hordes of tourists and real estate developers and others who had the absolute opposite visions of what Mabel Dodge Luhan dreamed, and who turned Northern New Mexico into a playground for the rich and leisureed class that she had thought she had abandoned. I just couldn't stop wondering about the Indian nature and the secret at its core. I wanted to be like them and felt in an obscure way that if I looked and acted the way they did, I would be. I will be like them. You see, with Tony and the Indians, there is not I will. They come on into the plaza, business, business, a lot of activity ending in nothing. So she sets about to publish her memoirs as her final penultimate statement in her own

voice for all time saying what it was that she had hoped to be, what it was that she was critical of in the world and that she was brought up. I help her fellow Americans learn the lesson of how not to be what she was. That is a striving, grasping, manipulative, power-hungry person who tried to use others to express her own life force. I started out to try and show the inward picture of a person of my own period. What her reddity and environment had made of her. I tried to take off the mask and show the actuality, the lack of suitable outlets, ambition, activities, stimulation, the whole ghastly social structure under which we were buried. The tragedy of how her memoirs were received is that they saw her as setting herself forth as a symbol for approval for having led this kind of life.

Of everything that they believed had helped to take America on the road to economic depression. It was impossible not to notice that while Mabel was speaking about the life of simplicity and non-materialism that she had taken on in New Mexico, she was living a life of privilege amidst a world of extraordinary poverty and human suffering. What did Mabel dodge Luan have left to tell anyone? She recognizes perhaps that the final blow to her vision of what New Mexico could become has literally been smashed to smithereens by it being the place where the atomic age begins and where the greatest potential destructive power known to humankind is unleashed for the first time.

I think she would like to have been acknowledged as a woman of importance in her own time, who had really contributed to creating a new American culture and a new American vision of how individuals should relate to one another to the land and to the various peoples that they lived with on the land. Instead, she ended up in the last 22 years of her life more or less in a state of retirement. She lives a much more privatized and quiet life in the 1940s and 50s. There are times of terrible stress and strain when she and Tony drink become alcoholic. She's very sick for a while. She undergoes a series of operations. She would wander some nights in her last months of life through her house and house a frightened child back in her home in Buffalo looking for her mother. But her granddaughter Bonnie, who knew her best from 1942 till 1962 when she dies,

remembers her as being a vivacious and vital and willful woman who still managed to get together and bring people together to have parties to give money to artists and local community members in need to help out the pueblo and to maintain a sense of her own dignity and decency the best that she could. Maybe the most important lesson, maybe learned in life, was that she didn't have to change the world. It ought to be seen as being central to the culture that in order to achieve happiness in this life, it doesn't come through material accumulation, through power over others, through manipulating others to get them to do what you want to do, but by finding a sense of integrity in yourself and a sense that you've done something for other people that is valuable. In 1955, shortly before her death, Mabel mailed 1500 pounds of her personal scrapbooks, newspaper articles, photographs, writings, and letters to Yale University in a final attempt to

be recognized. Nearly 20 years later, Professor Lois Paulken-Rudnick discovered them, and in 1984 published her biography, Mabel Dodge-Luhan, New Woman, New Worlds. August 18, 1962, Mabel died. A year later, Tony died. At the time of her death, having given most of her money away, Mabel was left with little of her original wealth. Her final and most valuable possession was her home. Today, it still stands, and is used as an educational center for progressive and creative thought. She was a bit like Elmer Roosevelt. She had to go out there and meet all these people, and get as much out of them as she could, and by that, she gave them a great deal because she introduced them to other people and saw that they interrelated and produced a great deal of intellectual development. She only wanted to be here, and she was looking for love at the same time,

and when she found my uncle, that's what she found. I think what happened to Mabel when she moved to Taos was that she finally found herself. She enjoyed life more than anybody I know. People's interest in knowing Mabel is, because of her attraction and vitality, it's a vehicle to better understand themselves.