Vol. IV, Marriage IV

EDGE OF TAOS DESERT--Mabel Dodge Luhan--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Until this week Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan had successfully concealed from most readers the fact that the three volumes of her Intimate Memories (Background, European Experiences, Movers and Shakers), most scandalous of contemporary autobiographies, were written at the urge of a moral purpose as lofty as any that ever moved a penitent at a revival meeting. Now in Edge of Taos Desert Mabel Dodge reveals how, in 1917, at Taos, N. Mex., she was converted by a ''spiritual therapy" which wiped out the effect of 38 years of neurotic floundering, beginning as a poor little rich girl in Buffalo and Europe, continuing steadily as she became a collector of writers, artists, labor leaders and such, who flocked to her famed salons in Florence and New York, involving her in tormented marriages, love affairs, desperate experiments in psychoanalysis, a dozen kinds of mystical philosophies.

Half-believing friends' stories about the occult powers of the Indians, she became so excited by her first glimpse of the Southwest that she got off the train and hired a rattletrap automobile to speed her arrival. "Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty! ... I am Here," she announced to the "mythical" New Mexico landscape. Soon tired of Santa Fe, where the people were "too eager and cordial" ('"Why," she said, "should they be so glad to see me?"), she found in the village of Taos, 75 mi. from Santa Fe, what she was looking for. She rented the wing of a big house owned by a rich, eccentric Englishman, who warned her against Indians and savagely slandered the few other whites in Taos, most of whom hated each other like poison.

Barely waiting to unpack, Mabel set off with a bag of oranges to break down the Indians' aloofness. Hastening her steps was the dread thought that "if people knew about what is here, they'd rush upon it and simply eat it up. ..." With a possessiveness much like that which she had formerly felt toward artists and writers, she declared fiercely: "I'd hate to have these Indians get recognition! Why, it would be the end of them!" Her first stop was at an adobe hut where a blanketed full-blooded Indian named Tony Luhan sat on a hassock beating a drum and singing. Tony was a large-featured, husky, hairless, sedate man with "nice eyelids" and beautifully plucked eyebrows. When he finally looked up, Mabel "saw his was the face that had blotted out [husband] Maurice's in my dream." Tony said he had seen her before too--also in a dream.

Invited to dinner by Mabel Dodge, Tony told her he could make himself invisible, and that the fire in her grate was a good friend of his. Thereafter Tony brought other Indians to dance and sing at Mabel Dodge's tea parties, became her expert on Indian affairs. Visiting daily at Tony's house, Mabel taught knitting to his beautiful, fastidious wife, who (unlike other Taos Indian women) "had a slightly malicious, sharp humor, but not real warmth." An imitation of Tony's poker-faced expression proved valuable to Mabel when she returned from these visits to face the unIndianlike frowns of her husband, her son and her guests. Tony taught her a system of love signals so subtle that they could be used even in the presence of Maurice, who now "seemed old and spent and tragic, while Tony was whole and young in the cells of his body. ..." When Maurice finally caught on and slapped her face, she decided definitely to ship him back East alone. Meanwhile she determined to keep the "psychic" status quo of her relationship with Tony, who, although he "never spoke of love," showed unmistakably that he could wait. "Indians," says Mabel Dodge, "burn continuously with a hard, gemlike flame but they know how to bank their fires."

While waiting for Maurice to leave, Mabel made rapid progress in being "broken down and made over" by Tony, could soon sum up her past activities in ''a decadent unhappy world" thus: "I had been something like an octopus with many arms, a psychic belly, and a highly developed pair of eyes." She learned "to live in the moment," learned self-sufficiency (except when Tony was out of her sight). Particularly she learned something that made it easy to write her candid memoirs, namely, the Indian belief that "the power goes out of truth as soon as it is told, spoken or written down."

Finishing touch to "curing me of my epoch" was added when Tony gave Mabel Dodge a dose of the Mexican drug peyote as a cure for dysentery. Awake all night, a clairvoyant vision showed her that "all this learning in the brain, and never in the blood was ended." In this mood even Maurice provoked "a tender, soft, sorry feeling"--though she did not relax her determination to kick him out. To make his going easier (for herself), she and Tony absented themselves at a Corn Dance. On their return Tony said, "I comin' here to this tepee tonight, when darkness here. That be right?" "And it was right," says 58-year-old Mabel Dodge, with the pat finality of a romantic novel and a rejuvenated grandmother who claims that her heart has been missing beats ever since.

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