David Herbert Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever… The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul…

Even today, when you arrive in Taos, after the rugged Rio Grande gorge and the lunar landscape of the valley, the central plaza is still small, still dusty, and although celebrities like Julia Roberts have chosen to make their homes at the foot of the Taos Mountain, the place has much of what the British writer D. H. Lawrence and his German-born wife Frieda must have seen and felt when they arrived in September of 1922.

Invited to New Mexico by Mabel Dodge Sterne, David Herbert Lawrence was 37 years old and already famous, his name synonymous with sensual force, if not sex and passion. Fan mail arrived regularly from the United States as well as England for this working-class darling of the English literary elite, this contradictory man who called for a release from puritanical bonds and the mechanization of industrialized men and women into a more magical “blood knowledge” about how to live. As an author, he would go on to produce more novels, short stories, poems, and essays, culminating in the publication, shortly before his death at 44 from tuberculosis, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in both England and the United States as pornography. It is up to the distant future to speak definitively of his greatness or lack of it, but surely he is considered one of the pivotal literary voices of the 20^th century.

Portrait of a Genius, But…

Richard Aldington’s biography of Lawrence uses this title to catch the Lawrentian contradictions. Lawrence himself was alternately described as unassuming, lively, friendly and down-to-earth, or, as Frieda’s father, Baron von Richthofen saw him, a common, low-bred lout. Others called him self-centered, arrogant, dark, brooding, difficult, violent, hateful, almost a Fascist, even insane. He could write compelling prose -- with a warmth that stimulated the instinct for life and blood passions and relatedness, with psychological subtlety, and with structural grandeur. He could also write outlandish, florid prose – and not necessarily detect the difference.

Touting the redemptive powers of sex, Lawrence can be read equally as champion of male domination of the female who brings out misogynistic resentments and murderous impulses, or as teetering on the edge of male homosexual bonding, or as champion of the female rightfully dominating the male, which Constance Chatterley ultimately does.

Lawrence was caught in the tangle of his striving mother’s mismatched marriage to his father, a coal miner with a beautiful voice. She threw all her energy into the sickly Bert, her fourth child, and left him with the dark current that can run between a mother and a son she chooses over her husband. Lawrence was caught again in the tangle of his own marriage to Frieda Von Richthofen, an effervescent, adventurous, and sensual German aristocrat and advocate of free love, who, as a married woman with three children, chose to have a quick, erotic encounter in her own house where Lawrence, a schoolteacher, was one of her professor husband’s luncheon guests. Frieda could not have guessed how this would change everything for her and for Lawrence.

For having deceived her husband, he divorced her, and Lawrence married her. “You are the call and I am the answer,” he wrote. The couple was not welcome in the place of Frieda’s infidelity, Frieda was forbidden to see her children, and Lawrence, like a solipsistic child, was infuriated at any mention of them, lest they take “his” place. In a sense, Lawrence was liberated from his familiar landscape and his national identity as the couple traveled restlessly, saying they required “authentic” and “genuine” places, yet mostly finding their way to expatriate artists’ colonies. They lived a frenetic life, exchanging places, friends, and languages every few months. Eventually, the couple discovered the New World and New Mexico.

Coming to Taos

After the railroads arrived and the Indians had been “contained,” the Southwest became a gathering point for America’s consumptives. Even John B. Stetson, a tubercular Philadelphian who designed the Western riding hat that bears his name, took the “ranch cure.” Soon, however, Southwestern states banned the sick, with the exception of New Mexico, which had only achieved statehood in 1912 and wanted new population.

D. H. Lawrence, who from childhood had been sickly and frail, knew that in 1901, his mother had been told he was tubercular. He had persistent bronchial woes, blood-spitting episodes, collapses, and pneumonias, but he denied all of it. The hot springs, high altitude, and dry climate that Taos offered had tremendous appeal to health seekers, and one could say that New Mexico was the greatest hope of drawing a clear breath that Lawrence ever had.

When the letter that would change his life came to Lawrence in 1921 in Sicily, it came from Mabel Dodge Sterne, a New York heiress and patron of the arts. She had lived abroad, had a succession of husbands and lovers, held salons in New York with guests like Emma Goldman, Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Sanger, and she was an admirer of Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. She invited him to come and exercise his genius by describing the magic of Taos; as a lure, she enclosed leaves of a pungent Indian herb, a medicinal root, the offer of a house and subsistence, and a request to join her crusade to bring together “the two ends of humanity – our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era.”

He replied immediately, asking about the Indians (“Are they sad and drying out?”) and stating his one fear: “Is there a colony of rather dreadful sub-arty people? Even if there is, it couldn’t be worse than Florence.” There was an artists’ colony, the Taos Society of Artists, established by Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein who had taken a painting trip to the West, had to repair their broken wagon wheel in Taos, and found themselves inexorably drawn into the natural beauty and layered civilization from Indian to pre-Columbian to Spanish.

Lawrence decided to come to Taos, but was detained by ill health in Sicily for months, dreaming of the Indians and “the old sun magic.” Still, the thought of having to go through New York, which he detested, made him impulsively accept an invitation to Ceylon and postpone Taos. Once there, he derided Ceylon as “too boneless and negative,” traipsed to Australia but found it “too new, you see: too vast. It needs hundreds of years before it can live,” and finally, in September of 1922, the Lawrences wound their way to New Mexico.

When he and Frieda arrived by train in Lamy, 20 miles from Santa Fe, Mabel herself awaited them on the station platform with her Cadillac, her tall, handsome, self-contained Indian consort, Tony Luhan, from Taos Pueblo, her annual income of $14,000, and her wish to build a bridge between Indian and American cultures. She had invited Lawrence to the place of her “at-one-ment,” as she called it, with the universe; Mabel had invited other writers, thinkers, and painters, including Carl Jung, Willa Cather, Ansel Adams, Thornton Wilder, and Thomas Wolfe -- who stayed one day and turned right around -- while the Lawrences made three long visits between 1922 and 1925.

The Lawrences spent their first night in Santa Fe in the literary company of poet and playwright Harold Witter Bynner who had once proposed marriage to the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, but was refused and thus free to indulge his homosexuality in Santa Fe. Also at dinner was Alice Corbin Henderson, a poet who had moved to Santa Fe because of tuberculosis.  

Then the party proceeded to Taos. In 1922, Taos had a population of two thousand, a dusty plaza, hitching posts, and covered wagons. Mabel’s estate -- with its corrals, five guest houses (including the Pink House, built especially for the Lawrences, servants’ quarters, and huge cottonwood, beech, and elm trees -- was at one end, and at the other end was Taos Pueblo, with six hundred Indians living in a centuries-old adobe “beehive” that today might be the equivalent of a townhouse community. 

continued
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next>>