Teaser

EUROPEAN EXPERIENCES -- Mabel Dodge Luhan--Harcourt, Brace ($3.75). Two years ago Mabel Dodge Luhan published the first volume of extracts from her Intimate Memories, dealing candidly with a girlhood in the upper circle of Buffalo and with first awakening adventures abroad. That book, like European Experiences, was drawn from a vast manuscript that has acquired a legendary importance: the complete story of Mabel Dodge Luhan's life and of the people she has known, not to be published in its entirety until all those who appear in it are dead. European Experiences is a selection of what can be printed now "without hurting anyone's feelings, while still presenting a true and coherent story." Since it is remarkably frank even in this day of candid autobiography, and since Mabel Dodge Luhan seems to have known intimately most of the eminent figures of her time, from Arthur Brisbane to D. H. Lawrence, European Experiences suggests that the unpublished volumes must contain some hair-raising disclosures.

An honest, emotional, impulsive, self-centered girl, "not much to look at," Mabel Ganson enjoyed life in Buffalo, drove her unloved and unloving father to bed when she bobbed her hair long before bobbing was the style. She had a wild but innocent relationship with Seward Cary, husband of one of her friends who taught her to ride, took her on a coaching party through the Berkshires. One night, at a country inn while other members of the party were asleep, Cary "chased me all over the outside of the building; over roofs and down fire escapes, along mad, narrow ledges and into rooms (occupied or not, we didn't know)." Despite such pranks, Mabel drew a line in her relation ship with men that seems to have been established less out of deference to moral ity than by her own fitful moods and fears.

Karl Evans, son of the president of Anchor Line Steamboat Co., a blue-eyed, outdoor youth, courted her although he was engaged to another girl. Mabel accepted his courtship with greater interest after her father forbade her to see Karl again. By a queer sort of trick. Karl married her. They lived happily, keeping the marriage a secret until Mabel became pregnant. Then a second, public ceremony was arranged. Soon after his son was born Karl was accidentally killed while hunting, Mabel's father died and she started for Paris to forget.

Only in her account of life abroad does European Experiences take on its odd, composed, hilarious air of being a gravely philosophical account of extremely funny incidents. Pursued relentlessly by admirers of both sexes, Mabel seems to have known one European experience completely--that of narrow escape.

On the boat she met Edwin Dodge, wealthy, blue-eyed, curly-haired Boston architect, married him after a brief romance and with him established a magnificent home in Florence. There went artists, writers, cosmopolitans, prophets, telling their stories, enacting dramas, and making bold or furtive love to their hostess. The Dodges knew Pen Browning, jolly, rotund sculptor who was always uncomfortable because people expected him to live up to his role as the offspring of the romance of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. They knew Lady Paget, friend of Queen Victoria, theosophist who made her own shoes and who predicted the World War and the Russian Revolution. They entertained Duse, who appeared with a genius in tow, a grim, self-assured, masculine-appearing girl who immediately began chasing her hostess all over the house and garden. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas appeared, as well as Gordon Craig and a host of others less eminent but no less vital, most of them distinguished by a love of art and sultry, frustrated passion.

Precisely where Edwin Dodge fitted into this strange life is by no means clear, since at critical moments in the narrative he seems always to have been in the U. S. Hospitable, inquisitive, wide-eyed, awed by the glamour of European reputations and European love affairs, Mabel Dodge was often irritated by her husband's "inferior sophistication," his Boston facetiousness, his lack of respect for famed visitors, as well as by his occasional puritanical insistence that certain forms of nonsense stop.

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