D. H. Lawrence in Taos

Lawrence was buried in the small Vence cemetery in France in 1930, but in 1935, after Frieda had Ravagli build the little chapel with a rustic rose window on the slope above the cabins, she decided to bring Lawrence back to Taos. Then she heard the cost of shipping a body across the Atlantic and decided on cremation. She had his body exhumed in Vence and then incinerated at Marseille. Ravagli, who was visiting Italy, was dispatched to Vence to deal with the bureaucracies and sail home with Lawrence’s remains. A wooden box holding a zinc container, to be sealed once Lawrence’s ashes were inside, was delivered to Ravagli, and he set sail from Marseilles to New York. At U.S. Customs, he had trouble bringing in the funerary urn, and only after O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, interceded, could he take the train to New Mexico and deliver the ashes for the Lawrence memorial.

In Taos, Frieda learned that Mabel and Lady Brett wanted to scatter the ashes of “a man so Pan-like as Lawrence” across the ranch rather than risk having Frieda and Ravagli make a tourist attraction of the urn’s resting place. Frieda took control by dumping the ashes into a wheelbarrow with the wet cement that Ravagli was mixing for the memorial’s concrete slab altar. And so the ashes made it to the memorial.

Or did they? Here lies backstory -- maybe. Bachrach says that to her dying day, Brett swore that she and Mabel had scattered the ashes across the ranch. Taos legend says the ashes were carelessly abandoned twice after their arrival in New Mexico. Frieda and her friends met Ravagli at the train station in Lamy, but forgot to collect the urn and had to drive back and retrieve it. Stopping for dinner in Santa Fe, some say the urn was accidentally overturned and refilled with ashes from the fireplace – though the urn was supposedly sealed. Then, when the party arrived in Taos and celebrated at the studio of painter Nicolai Fechin, Ravagli said they left the ashes behind again and had to retrieve them a day later.

As for the ashes, Stieglitz wrote to Brett that after helping Ravagli through New York customs, he found the urn outside the door of his art gallery. “Someday, I’ll tell you the story.” Ravagli told the story, after Frieda’s death, that Lawrence’s ashes had never left France. Fearing that customs duties would be large, he said he scattered the ashes in Vence and crossed the Atlantic with an empty urn, to be refilled in New York.

So perhaps the shrine in Taos contains more story than proper ashes. Rena Rosequist, who has owned the Rosequist gallery in Taos since 1960, comments that there are many, many local Lawrence stories, and many, many of them are apocryphal. And since ambiguity prevails, with Penguin Books still believing in 1950 that Lawrence rested in “the little cemetery in Vence, his grave marked by a phoenix carved upon a simple stone,” there is a sense that Lawrence is nowhere…and everywhere.

Lawrence’s “Forbidden Art”

Taos also possesses what is called Lawrence’s “Forbidden Art.” In 1926, Lawrence had plunged into painting, typically immodest with rumps and phalluses, and called by Lawrence himself, along with his third version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “scandalous,” “improper,” and “naughty.” The Taos collection consists of nine of his thirteen paintings from an exhibition confiscated by the London police from the Dorothy Warren Gallery. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in 1928 but had been suppressed in England for challenging the morality of Victorian England with a call for sexual freedom, and in the fallout, the paintings were deemed obscene. When they were banned in London on August 8, 1929, Lawrence was living in Italy but agreed to take them out of England. The ruling that forbid their return to English soil is still on the books today.

One could hardly say, “More’s the pity” in this case. They are dreadful paintings, though they carry a certain fascination. I first saw them in 1989 in Taos. And how did the paintings make the journey from a London art gallery to the La Fonda Hotel in Taos? They had been shipped from London to Italy and then to Vence in the south of France, where Lawrence died, and then to Frieda in Taos. When Frieda died in 1956, they were part of her estate which passed on to Ravagli, whom she had married in 1950. But before Ravagli returned to Italy and his first wife and children, he sold the paintings, for a sum never disclosed, to the owner of the La Fonda Hotel.

This was Saki Karavas, an art collector and avid Lawrence fan, who owned several first editions of Lawrence’s work. Though there is no record of his ever having met Lawrence, he was friendly with “the Lawrence women” – Frieda, Mabel, and Brett. Saki hung the paintings in his cigar smoke-filled office at the hotel where they remained until his death in 1996.

Now, about that office. In 1989, when I walked into the La Fonda, the place was dingy though Saki was debonair. The assistant at the desk asked for $3 admission. I handed him the dollar bills, I was asked to sign a visitor’s guest book for Lawrence’s art, and then the assistant ceremoniously unlocked the door to a small, windowless, low-ceilinged room next to the reception area, and left me alone, surrounded by four walls of Lawrence’s paintings.

It was hard to breathe in the room, and hard to tell if it was the heat or the overwhelming presence of Lawrence, his mind and hand working out his demons and delights and proclaiming total domination of audience. The paintings are mostly erotic, some in a primal and forbidden way. “A Holy Family” depicts a man about to kiss a partially nude woman while a child looks on. In “Fight with an Amazon,” a naked man hungrily embraces, or assaults, a voluptuous naked woman whose hands and arms resist, but whose eyes, downcast in submission, tell the story of Lawrence and Frieda’s struggles. Despite anatomical disproportion, amateur brushstroke and composition, and lack of an esthetic, these paintings are compelling in their rawness and feeling compulsion for union.

In 1996, Saki died and left the paintings and the hotel to his friend George Sahd, who gave a delightful freshness to the hotel and cleaned and put Lawrence’s paintings on handsome display – still for $3 admission. They are a regular Taos attraction, valued in 1983 at $1.5 million, but unless you are a Lawrence worshipper, go instead to the superb Harwood Museum.

D.H. Lawrence had once said to Frieda, indirectly through a character in The Plumed Serpent, “Say you’ll never feel disappointed.” It’s an impossible request. It grants Lawrence perpetual approval and forgiveness, permitting a state of unconditional love not unlike the one a little boy might want from his mother and not quite get. Lawrence’s literary work, despite its misogyny and crude generalizations about life, still has a sensual force that opens up vistas -- like the overpowering Taos landscape, sometimes willful and wild, sometimes tender and intimate, always evoking the deep, the resonant, the unanswerable.

When a British reviewer for The Observer wrote of Lawrence’s work in 1928, “The fact remains that Mr. Lawrence – a passionate, brooding, glowering, worshipping man -- is undoubtedly a man of genius and big and fiery enough to eat a dozen of his merely clever contemporaries,” he first listed Lawrence’s many literary flaws – and then he forgave them. As we still do.

If you make the Lawrence pilgrimage, remember that Taos today has incredible museums, restaurants, and lodgings, but they don’t show up so readily as in Santa Fe. The Stakeout, on Outlaw Hill outside town, has extraordinary food and the definitive setting for watching every madly dramatic sunset over the Rio Grande Gorge, the Picuris mountains, the valley, and the Pueblo land. If you’re lucky, the moon will magically rise as if it were part of a stage set. There’s the excellent Momentitos de la Vida a few miles the other way in Arroyo Seco. In town, there’s Joseph’s Table, now in the historic La Fonda Hotel where chef-owner Joseph Wrede keeps winning big-time awards for his cuisine. There’s the always good Lambert’s just below the plaza, and there’s the historic Doc Martin’s Restaurant in the Taos Inn, named for the real Dr. Martin of the 1890’s who often took chickens or a sack of potatoes for his services. It is called the “living room” of Taos because everyone gathers here for food and live music and art, and you can see the tiny alcove where Doc Martin treated his patients. For lesser sums, there’s Appletree’s, and for greater and greatest sums there are the restaurants of newcomer El Monte Sagrado, 5 minutes away. Lodgings vary from the intimate and distinctively Taos B and Bs, to the Taos Inn, to the Mabel Dodge Luhan compound, to the Oprah-discovered El Monte Sagrado, to my own favorite, the handsome Fechin Inn. Each of the historic museums in town and beyond is well worth the visit, and art galleries and studios abound.

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