From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's Paperback – 22 January 2016

Great reference book of arts of the period in both Greenwich village & new mexico

New Mexican native Flannery Burke’s FROM GREENWICH VILLAGE TO TAOS is quite a curious little book. The key to it is in the subtitle: PRIMITIVISM AND PLACE AT MABEL DODGE LUHAN’S. “Primitivism” was a post-World War I reaction to “Modernism,” which had only led to war and destruction in the eyes of some people. Only by returning to a pre-industrial mentality could people regain the humanity they had lost. But what does “place” mean? Is it a literal location, or is it an abstract concept symbolizing a feeling or a relationship? What is one’s place in society? In the family? In the universe? And finally, who is Mabel Dodge Luhan? I only knew of her as a result of seeing a film made in the early 80s, PRIEST OF LOVE, about D.H. Lawrence. Ava Gardner (a favorite of mine) played Mabel Dodge Luhan. If an unknown actress had played the part, I probably would never have remembered the name.I am now planning a trip to New Mexico and wanted to do a little reading about Taos beforehand. You cannot read anything about Taos without seeing the name “Mabel Dodge Luhan.” Mabel Dodge was a wealthy socialite with artistic pretentions. She had a salon in Greenwich Village and had a love affair with American Communist John Reed (the subject of the movie REDS). She knew Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo rather well. (They had a lengthy correspondence.) She had previously had a salon in Florence and had grown up in Europe. She decided to leave New York and start a utopian artists’ colony in northern New Mexico. She first went to Santa Fe, but decided that she had too much competition and moved north to Taos, where she fell in love with the landscape and the Native Americans who lived in the area. She ended up marrying an Indian, Tony Lujan. She sought to lure the world’s great artistic and literary lights, like D.H. Lawrence (to whom she gave a house), Aldous Huxley, Leopold Stokowski, and Georgia O’Keefe (who ended up becoming an icon).But this book is not a biography of MDL; it is about her relationship to Taos. She had a particular vision of what she wanted Taos to be and that she wanted to broadcast to the world. For better or for worse, she largely succeeded.On the whole, I found this book very absorbing, even in the long sections dealing with politics. However, I was surprised by the omission of lesbianism. In the Wikipedia entry, that seems to be one of the things MDL is famous for. Tennessee Williams in his memoirs called Taos “the lesbian capital of the world.” A great part of the book Burke devotes to the idea of Taos being “a woman’s place,” but nowhere in the book is the word “lesbian.” She does mention a woman named Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who eschewed the company of men and built a house with a female friend. (She and three female buddies stopped traffic by doing manual labor in riding breeches back in those days!) But Burke never says they are lesbians. She has no trouble identifying Witter Brynner and Spud Johnson as gay lovers (as well as several men in New York), but she is generally evasive about lesbianism. If that is indeed how someone like Tennessee Williams sees the place, it is important to talk about if you’re going to talk about Taos. Maybe the author felt that it would necessitate bringing in other elements that distract from the point of the book, but I wish she had not left it out.I liked the book and feel that reading it will make my upcoming trip to Taos more meaningful.