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D. H. Lawrence Ranch photo by Randall Albright

During this 1924 period of five months at the ranch with Frieda and Brett, Lawrence said, “I don’t write – don’t want to -- don’t care.” But he did care, and he was, as usual, prolific. He completed his short novel, St. Mawr, which celebrates the hard masculinity of the Taos landscape.

He and Frieda also enjoyed massages in Taos, and interestingly, the new El Monte Sagrado “living resort” and spa is -- in the Lawrence tradition and the tradition of Mabel’s third-story solarium and views of the Sacred Mountain -- addressing the disconnect between soul and spirit that exists wherever nature has been replaced by canyons of concrete. At El Monte Sagrado, which owner Tom Worrell calls a living resort because “it’s alive!” they use the exotic fruits and herbs grown in the biolarium for the menu, along with fresh ingredients from local farmers. They incorporate solutions for “green” building and construction, and all the water is purified and recycled on the property, which is built around a huge green space punctuated by cottonwood trees that touch the sky. No toxic chlorine enters the pool which uses a healthy alternative. The spa is small, intimate, and integrated, with outside-inside waterfall cascades and elevated glass ceilings that can open to the elements. In-room or garden terrace massage is also encouraged. Worrell is a big business-man who owned a large media network but now says he wants to help others to live in harmony with nature and be self-sustaining. While it is a destination for the rich, really, Worrell wants to bring awareness of healing in mind and spirit, and planet.

Mexico Again, and Taos One More Time

Returning to Mexico in 1924, Lawrence became very ill. He had been visibly ill since 1911 with continual bouts of colds, flu, and pneumonia, and when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, he remained in denial, with Frieda’s complicity. This time, the doctor insisted on an X-ray, found third stage tuberculosis, gave Lawrence two years to live, and ordered either remaining in Mexico or returning to the ranch in Taos. Lawrence chose Taos, but Texas border officials noted his gauntness and ghostly mien and tubercular cough, and reluctantly granted entry -- but with only a 6-month pass. 

From April to September of 1925, Lawrence was back at Kiowa ranch, happy to be there and receiving sacks of mail from critics and fans. Though he said he “never felt less literary,” he finished his biblical play David, revised The Plumed Serpent, and wrote some of his best essays. And he built a cow shed, so strong was his urge to participate in life. He designed his own health regimen based on his and Frieda’s belief that the body knows what it needs. He avoided Mabel and Tony completely, while Frieda and Brett, who was typing Lawrence’s manuscripts, had screaming bouts over Brett’s access to Lawrence. Lawrence left Kiowa Ranch for the last time on September 10, 1925, writing to a friend, “It grieves me to leave my horses, my cow Susan, and the cat and the white cock – and the place.”

"The Lawrence Tree" by Georgia O'Keeffe

Art Bachrach, who doesn’t necessarily like Lawrence but is nevertheless mesmerized by his travel books and certain poems, reminds that Lawrence was critical of Taos when he was there, saying things like “Taos is artistic small beer,” but talked in glowing terms after he left. Bachrach likes to quote Lawrence’s 1926 nostalgia for the Taos ranch when he wrote, “What about the ranch -- the little ranch in New Mexico? Time is different there.” Lawrence also said that if he ever had homesickness for a place, it was for the ranch’s great, sheltering pine tree at whose base he would sit and write.

Lawrence dreamed of returning to Taos and could not accept the fact that he would not return there. But he was far too ill and died from tuberculosis in the French coastal town of Vence in 1930.

After D.H. Lawrence

In 1933, Frieda returned to Kiowa Ranch with her Italian lover, Angelo Ravagli, not only free of the psychological turbulence of her relationship with Lawrence but, after a court battle with Lawrence’s brother and sister, rich with Lawrence’s entire estate. Frieda and Ravagli built a modern log cabin on the property, put in electricity and running water, woke up with the sun, baked bread, fed the horses, and grew vegetables.

And Frieda became the object of pilgrimage for the faithful and the famous. Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived north of Santa Fe at Abiquiu, visited and like Lawrence, favored the pine tree. O’Keeffe would lie on the weathered carpenter’s bench and stare up, up, up into the branches of the mammoth pine tree and the night sky to produce her now famous painting, “The Lawrence Tree.”

Curiously, even this painting of Lawrence’s inspirational tree is touched by Lawrentian contradiction. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, notes that it has been shown in magazines, books, and at the Whitney with the tree trunk emerging from the lower right, the lower left, and the upper left. She believes the orientation should be from the upper left, but notes that O’Keeffe believed that the organic forms of her work could have orientation from any direction. 

O’Keeffe described her first meeting with Frieda for her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who never set foot in New Mexico: I can remember her very clearly the first time I saw her, standing in a doorway there, with her hair all frizzy, wearing a cheap red calico dress that looked as if she’d wiped the frying pan. She was not thin and not young, but there was something wonderful about her…She was very beautiful … I liked her.

Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Tennessee Williams were among those who came to find Frieda on the mountain -- if they could make it up the long, difficult road. In 1938, when Williams visited Frieda, he told her that he admired Lawrence for a life like his own: “nomadic, restless, uncertain.” Later, while visiting her again, he had to enter the Taos hospital for abdominal surgery and when he recovered, Frieda picked him up to take him to the ranch, “driving like a firetruck,” according to Williams, who collapsed from the altitude and had to be taken right back to the hospital.

Frieda had twenty-five years in Taos to build the Lawrence legend, and she worked assiduously at it, preserving a major role for herself as muse. There was also time for reconciliation with her competitors, and Frieda wrote, “In our old age, Mabel, Brett, and I are friends.” Interestingly, one of the people I interviewed in Taos raised her eyebrows at Frieda’s observation and commented that the three of them were always in town sniping at each other.

Today, the Kiowa Ranch is known as the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, and it belongs to the University of New Mexico, gifted by Frieda in 1955, and according to her will, to be used for cultural, charitable, educational, and recreational purposes, with the Lawrence memorial open to the public.

A visitor to the ranch, about 20 miles up the mountain with a vast valley below, feels the profound quietude and may choose between a sense of man’s smallness before nature or man’s command of the world from such heights (O’Keeffe noted that in the high hills of New Mexico, “it seemed I could see all over this world.”). Either way, the visitor will feel appalled if not demoralized by the conditions at the ranch today.

You can peer through the window of Dorothy Brett’s minuscule cabin and see the bed and simple little table, but the roof has great gaps in it, and mouse leavings are everywhere. Where the Taos Pueblo Indian, Trinidad Archuleta -- who had helped Lawrence build his horno -- had once painted a buffalo on an adobe wall, much of the paint has worn away. Art Bachrach carefully lined up Pueblo Indians (including one of Trinidad’s nephews) to restore the buffalo, but the caretaker halted their efforts and alternatively announced that he was going to put plastic over the remaining image. As UNM must know, plastic would only trap moisture on an adobe wall, and spell certain doom for the beautiful buffalo image.

Of all the buildings, the memorial with Lawrence’s ashes, built by Ravagli, looks well-kept from the outside, whitewashed and with the steep access cleaned and accessible. But open the creaking door, and your eyes survey the inner wreckage. With a broom leaning into the wall, I personally swept away two inches of mouse droppings from the floor and spare furnishings. The guestbook is filled with negative comments for the University of New Mexico about the lack of maintenance and lack of use for scholarly conferences and for writers – in other words, for what Frieda Lawrence had hoped. Bachrach says the ranch buildings were condemned two years ago, and they are clearly falling apart. Only the Lawrence tree that O’Keeffe painted retains its grandeur.

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