Buffalo Genius

INTIMATE MEMORIES: BACKGROUND--Mabel Dodge Luhan--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan is one of those U. S. women who is conscious of having exerted a considerable influence, not counting her husbands. During her second marriage (to Edwin Dodge, Boston architect) her salon in Florence was famed throughout Europe. "Everybody" in the art world visited her, from Gertrude Stein to Eleonora Duse. In Manhattan she was a hospitable hostess to Lincoln Steffens, the late John Reed, Walter Lippmann, Emma Goldman, Carl Van Vechten, Robert Edmond Jones. She was largely responsible for the art exhibition which featured the famed cubist A Nude Descending the Staircase. Her fourth and current husband, full-blooded Taos Indian Tony Luhan, she met when he was acting as model for her third, Painter Maurice Sterne. Born into Buffalo society, she has always had the money, friends and inclination to shift her sphere of influence where she would. As readers of her first book, Lorenzo in Taos, may remember, her influence has not always been appreciated; but that time, Authoress Luhan implies, Greek (D. H. Lawrence) met Greek (herself). Long at work on her Intimate Memories, she has now published the first volume, which tells all about her first 18 years.

Unlike Proust's, Authoress Luhan's diving memory fails to bring up pearls; but it is not for lack of trying, and she is sure they are there. Her natural sympathy with people, she says, "has caused me many inward conflicts, and it has always drawn people to me in the same degree that I flowed out to them and identified myself with them, and it has always made people want to kiss me, to manifest an actual nearness and union, finding it comforting and consolatory. It is the only genius I have ever had but it has been enough, and these pages are given to recording its progress." Her own account, however, makes herself out an unextraordinary only child. Her parents got along badly. Her father used to slam the front door so much, in fact, that her mother finally attached a harplike arrangement to it which transmuted a bang into gently dying tinkles. Things Authoress Luhan remembers : that a servant-girl first (unconsciously) aroused her sexually; that the boys & girls of her set kept notebooks, with preferred ratings of the opposite sex; that Nina Wilcox (Putnam Ogle) was her playmate, though Mrs. Ogle disapproved of her; that they used to steal number-plates from front doors; that in the summers she stayed with her grandparents at Lenox or Newport. At Newport she thinks she used to swim at a place called Bailey's Beach--"I haven't been there since I was eight or ten years old but I think that was the name of that little beach where we went with our nurses to bathe." In due season she was presented to Buffalo society.

From some references to her Memories in Lorenzo in Taos, readers might have supposed that Authoress Luhan's autobiographical purpose was to rip off the veils and drawers of Victorian hypocrisy. But very little is removed in this first act.

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