Books: Continued Story

MOVERS AND SHAKERS—Mabel Dodge Luhan—Harcourt, Brace ($5).

During the last four years a wealthy, 56-year-old grandmother, living in the peaceful seclusion of her New Mexican ranch, has published three books that belong with the most scandalous of contemporary autobiographies. Creator of these solemnly indiscreet records is Mabel Dodge Luhan, patroness of art, friend of D. H. Lawrence and of other literary great, wife of a Taos Indian whose folkways she recounted in Winter in Taos. The scandalous books are the successive volumes of her Intimate Memories. This is a long manuscript, about which lurid literary legends are steadily accumulating. It now reposes in the safe of Publishers Harcourt and Brace and is not to be published in its entirety until Mabel Dodge Luhan has been dead for 25 years. Meanwhile with each publication the author’s selections from her memoriesgrow longer and more intimate, revolve around more eminent personages in more unconventional situations, until they now total 1,278 closely-printed pages of documentation on a dissatisfied, determined, uneasy career, packed with accounts of youthful esthetic and emotional misadventures as recollected in aged tranquillity.

The first volume told of Mabel Dodge’s unhappy childhood in a prosperous Buffalo family and of schoolgirlish infatuations In the U. S. and France. Second, European Experiences (TIME, Sept. 30, 1935) told of her first two marriages, of establishing a meeting-place for adventurous spirits in her villa in Florence, included droll accounts of how she almost had love affairs with an Italian chauffeur, a British officer, as well as with poets, painters and poseurs of varied talent. Written with a queer sort of frozen-faced malice that did not reveal what the author thought of the highbrow foolishness she observed, the memoirs presented their central character as at once high-strung and imperturbable, gushy but shrewd, a celebrity-hunter, falling for all manner of artistic fakers but preserving a strong streak of hard-headed commonsense. Her European experiences, which ended as she returned to the U. S. filled with dread for the “ugly” future, were of the “not quite” variety—she was almost unfaithful to her architect husband, nearly left him, came close to killing herself.

Movers and Shakers, covering about five years of the ugly future, reveals that for Mabel Dodge the pace of pre-War U. S. life made such half-experiences impossible and drastic showdowns inevitable. Establishing a Manhattan salon at No. 23 Fifth Ave., she took the first decisive step of separating from her husband. Guests flocked to her salon, enmeshed her in their tangled affairs. Sculptor Jo Davidson brought Journalist Hutchins Hapgood, who brought Lincoln Steffens, who brought some young college graduates: John Reed, Walter Lippmann, Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson. They were followed by Emma Goldman, “Big Bill” Haywood, Alexander Berkman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Max Eastman, Frances Perkins, Margaret Sanger, Mary Heaton Vorse, many others. The impressionable hostess, vibrating to labor leaders, radical journalists, jailbirds, futurist artists and philosophical anarchists as sensitively as she had responded to Florentine decadents, soon found her new companions too headstrong for her. She sponsored a modern art show and demonstrations of the I. W. W., entertained one of the dynamiters of the Los Angeles Times during his flight, was written up in the newspapers as a sphinx, a cigaret smoker, a society lady turned radical. But all her deftness in avoiding emotional commitmentsdid not save her when she fell in love with John Reed, revisited Europe with him.

Writing blandly but unsparingly of her friends, their affectations and misfortunes, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s account of her grand passion is tolerable because she does not spare herself. Possessive, egocentric, feverishly jealous, she reproached Reed for paying too much attention to Italian architecture. Soon she was reproaching him for paying too much attention to other women, and writing angry letters to feminine friends she suspected of trying to steal him from her. Back in New York Reed dropped her a note: “Goodbye, my darling. I cannot live with you. You smother me. You crush me. You want to kill my spirit.” He headed for Mexico to write up the Revolution. She went along as far as El Paso. He returned, went to Colorado to write up the Ludlow Massacre. She stayed in Manhattan, experimented with Mexican drugs. They were reconciled, went abroad again, with Reed leaving for the front to write up the War, then for Russia to write up the Revolution. Once Reed sent her a cable: “N. T. and I have fallen in love with each other. My heart is broken.” N. T. was the wife of a mutual friend. Growing more exuberant as life got harder, Reed wrote across his passport in the War zone: “I am a German and Austrian spy. I do it for money.”

Mabel Dodge’s recoil from her strenuous experiences in the upper world and underworld of the Left drove her back to the circles of more conventional artists. She embarked on a tormented love affair with Artist Maurice Sterne, eventually married him. Despondent, impatient, she took to psychoanalysis, which she enjoyed as “a kind of tattletaling.” Then she frequented Christian Scientists, mediums, mystics, quacks, Buddhists and other heathen healers, as her third husband drifted away. Reed died in Moscow, Haywood stayed in Leavenworth penitentiary, Lippmann edited The New Republic, and her friends of the dead Bohemian days went their painful ways to success, disgrace or both.