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The Frontier Spirit; D. H. Lawrence in Taos

by Dea Adria Mallin

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. 

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.” 

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.”

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.

Controversy Over Lawrence’s Ashes

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.