Intimate Memories

Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962), the patron of the arts who put Taos, New Mexico, on the cultural map of the world, began to write her autobiography in 1924, a process that took over a decade and resulted in a four-volume opus published serially tinder the title Intimate Memories. Now almost forty years after her death Mabel has found an editor, and her remarkable autobiography is available in one readable volume for the first time. Abridged and introduced by Lois Rudnick, the author of two previous books on Luhan, Intimate Memories is the story of a woman in rebellion against "the whole ghastly social structure" under which she felt the United States had been buried since the Victorian era. Her struggle for self-expression and community took her from Buffalo to Florence to Manhattan to Taos, a journey during which she married four times, ultimately finding happiness with Antonio Luhan, a Taos Indian. Mabel was famous for assembling the movers and shakers of her time, among them such luminaries as D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed, her Greenwich Village lover in bohemian pre -- World War I New York. Her autobiography is full of great moments: Reed swinging into her bed in her Florentine villa on a silken cord; Mabel, the impatient New Yorker, hiring a car for the last leg of her journey to New Mexico because the train seemed impossibly slow; her first encounter at Taos Pueblo with Tony Luhan, whose face she had seen in her dreams. Mabel was a great popularizer of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and her insights into her own psychology will strike familiar chords with many readers. "That I was crossed in love -- 'unlucky in men' -- was due to my own selection, of course." shemuses, asking herself why she was drawn to "men too immature to satisfy me." From her childhood as a poor little rich girl lacking only for love to her realization on the last page of Intimate Memories that she could be happy with Tony because the Pueblo people were "not neurotic, " Mabel's story is as engrossing as any novel. By making it available at last to the wide audience it deserves, Lois Rudnick has shown that Mabel Dodge Luhan was not just a visionary hostess but a talented and important writer.