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Mabel’s life was writ large. She was the same age as Frieda, 43. Both were sexual outlaws with early psychiatric mentors who believed that sexual repression was harmful, especially for women, and both expressed themselves by living with and through important men. But not humbly. Their roles were to be regenerative, even mythic.

At first, they all got along, with Frieda and Mabel exchanging deep confidences and Lawrence and Mabel engaging in intense talk. Lawrence and Frieda participated in Mabel’s “Indian evenings,” where, after dinner, Tony and a line of Indians in war paint and feathers would dance to a drum, and guests would join in. Mabel and Lawrence agreed that the life force was being destroyed by Western civilization and that spontaneity and living within “the quick of life” could be learned from the Indians. Within weeks of his arrival, Lawrence published an article on a pressing Indian issue in The New York Times.

But strange edges began to appear in the relationship between Mabel and the Lawrences, prodded by an emerging jealousy between Mabel and Frieda. When Lawrence, the prophet of sexual expression, chastised Mabel for sunbathing nude on her deck, and expressed shock at the curtainless 3-sided glass bathroom windows, Art Bachrach, long-time owner of the Moby Dickens bookstore in Taos, with his own book on Lawrence in Taos scheduled for publication in 2005, thought that Frieda’s jealousy was behind his behavior. Other biographers agree.

In Taos this summer, I also spoke with Roberta Meyers, whose father-in-law shares his gravesite with Frieda, and who knew Brett. She viewed the painting of the curtainless bathroom windows as a facet of Lawrence’s and Brett’s inescapable puritanical English upbringing. Meyers recalled that Brett had helped Lawrence with the designs when Mabel allowed him to paint over the bathroom glass with bright geometrics and phoenixes. The phoenix, a mythical bird reborn from its ashes to rise, fresh and beautiful, for another long life, was Lawrence’s personal symbol.

As for Mabel, Roberta Meyers remembers her as “very small, a quiet woman with wonderful ideas, a woman who wanted to bring men of genius together to create more, and to make the world a better place.” She acknowledges Mabel’s intensity and her black moods, adding that she was probably bi-polar and reminds that Mabel had a manic-depressive mother and a father who committed suicide. Not so generous is Bachrach, who views Mabel as primarily self-serving.

It can be said, in any case, that Mabel wanted Lawrence’s full attention so that he could write a book about her, set in New Mexico, and while she may only have wanted to seduce Lawrence’s spirit, Frieda soon insisted on separation and the use of a house 17 miles north of Taos.

Mabel’s resistance was duly noted, and Lawrence, who wrote to his mother-in-law about how Mabel needed to “curb her will-to-power,” soon put Mabel into his “devouring women” category. As a sickly child, Lawrence had remained at home during his Oedipal years instead of school, and was intertwined with his mother for so long that he had an uncanny and appealing understanding of women’s feelings and thoughts, and his greatest sadness, he always said, was the loss of his mother. But that same overpowering and possessive mother had despised his coal miner father, giving young Lawrence no healthy role to grow into as a male, and giving him a lifelong undercurrent of fear of the power of women. Frieda walked the tightrope between his need of her as a woman and the literal blows of his residual anger at women.

That winter was difficult for Lawrence, whose fierce public outbreaks and abusive fights with Frieda made others wonder about his mental stability. At the same time, Lawrence was deeply affected by the sense of place in Taos and wrote, “Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos, twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.”

The Lawrences moved out of the compound along with two easy-going Danish artists, and into two cabins. Lawrence, at work on revising his Studies in Classic American Literature, was making the essays more misogynistic and more critical of America as soulless, bloodless, new, mechanized, commercial. Still, he needed American money. That year, he made over $5,000, and Women in Love had already sold more than 10,000 copies here.

Interlude in Mexico

By early 1923, Lawrence was restless, saying that “there is no life of the blood here. Only nerves, nerve-vibration, nerve-irritation,” and he decided to move on to Mexico. Once there, but still having vitriolic outbursts and feeling that nowhere was home, Lawrence decided he’d “had enough of the New World” and would return to England – until he saw the Aztec ruins and got an idea for a book. Having made the decision to stay in Mexico where he wrote much of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence felt free to call England no more than “a bog” and wrote to a friend to “spit on Taos for me.”

While the Lawrences were in Mexico, Mabel married Tony in Taos, and the American press hungrily took up the story. The Pittsburgh Post headline read “Why Bohemia’s Queen Married an Indian Chief.” The marriage was apparently a good one, lasting through Tony’s occasional return to his first wife in the pueblo and through casual affairs, including one with Georgia O’Keeffe, until Mabel’s death in 1962. While some biographers note that Mabel paid Candelaria Luhan a cash amount each month to let Tony go, Roberta Meyers says that Mabel was always giving the Taos population -- Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo – money and help, including building Taos’ first hospital and paying people’s grocery and medical bills during the Depression.

Lawrence and the Kiowa Ranch

After Frieda went back to England to see her children and Lawrence joined her from Mexico, he was miserable, and Taos again became the promised land. He wrote to Mabel to ask if they could come back, and in March of 1924, Lawrence and Frieda arrived in what Lawrence had christened “Mabeltown” to what one biographer calls “a triumph of hope over experience.” Surprisingly, at Taos, everyone seemed glad to see them. Also in the compound were an actress from the Provincetown Players, an anthropologist connected to the excavator of the pyramids at Teotihuacán who would be useful for Lawrence’s new book, and Dorothy Brett, an upper class British painter whom Lawrence had known from early on and who took up his invitation to New Mexico.

Mabel had wintered in New York and California with Tony, and assigned the Lawrences to the “Two-story House” in her compound. The Mabel Dodge Luhan house would eventually grow organically into 22 rooms using viga construction, aspen latillas topped with sage and mud, arched Pueblo doorways, hand-carved doors, Pueblo fireplaces, and dark, hardwood floors, with a flagstone placita. Though the compound went through some rough days in the 70’s when it was owned by Dennis Hopper, with visitors from Bob Dylan to the last hippie, today, the compound is a beautiful and unique Bed and Breakfast and conference center, where every visitor is curious to see the extensive, upper-story bathroom windows, the intricately carved doors, the kiva fireplaces that Tony built, Mabel’s dovecotes, and the rooftop chicken sculptures. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and enjoys a reputation for fine food as well as lodging.

On their second visit to Taos, the Lawrences did not remain long in Mabel’s compound. On a whim, Mabel had taken her 160-acre ranch on Lobo Mountain, 8,600 feet above sea level, away from her son and given it to the Lawrences in exchange for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Roberta Meyers’ version says that Lawrence, a man who had to experience everything, had gone for the day with Tony to see a Hopi Indian snake dance, while Mabel and Frieda took a long ride on horseback up the mountainside. When Frieda lamented to Mabel that Lawrence would be well if only he could breathe this pure air, but that with Lawrence, she could never, ever, own a house of her own, Frieda impulsively and extravagantly gave her the ranch. That evening, an ebullient Frieda announced the gift to Lawrence, whose internal anti-capitalism god forbade him to accept property and made him livid as he raged against Frieda’s materialism. Frieda obtained the Sons and Lovers manuscript (no doubt with Lawrence’s help) as a medium of exchange and thanks, but Mabel’s gift, says Meyers, was from the heart, and she immediately gave the book away to her New York psychoanalyst and Freud disciple, A. A. Brill. A different version says that Mabel wanted to be the all-giving mother, overflowing with generosity, and therefore gave the manuscript to Brill. The deed, in any case, went to Frieda alone, and they changed the name to Kiowa Ranch.

Lawrence, who had always loved alpine mountains, threw himself into the place. On the first trip to Taos, he’d bought Western gear. His Justin cowboy boots cost $20 (more than monthly rent in the town), and he bragged of his “cowboy hat, good one, $5: sheepskin coat $12.50, corduroy breeches, very nice, $5.” Now at the ranch, Lawrence built an adobe oven and baked all the bread himself. Tony Luhan had taught him to ride, and he often rode twenty miles a day. He cleaned the well. He and three Taos Pueblo Indians and a local carpenter rebuilt a chimney and re-roofed and restored the ranch buildings. And he bought a cow. Lawrence wrote to British acquaintance, G. R. G. Conway, that “I spent all the golden evening riding through the timber hunting the lost cow, and when at last I got her into corral, I felt more like killing her than milking her.” 

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