Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan

In the early years of this century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) gathered the foremost artists, philosophers and political radicals--including Gertrude and Leo Stein, John Reed and D. H. Lawrence--to her salons in Florence, Italy, Greenwich Village and Taos, N. Mex. Born into a wealthy but emotionally remote family in Buffalo, N.Y., Luhan's life began in a society she described as ""a slaughter of innocents."" She believed women were ""rarely self-starters,"" saw marriage as a ""passive act"" and wrote most passionately about sex, autoerotic or with women. Desperate, self-indulgent, tempestuous, at times profoundly perceptive and always at the edge of revelation, Luhan called herself ""a mythological figure right in my own lifetime."" She had little interest in her only son (from her first marriage, to Karl Evans, who died in a hunting accident), used ""movers and shakers"" for her advantage and was given to frequent depressions, which she momentarily alleviated with rounds of malicious gossip or extravagance. In 1917, Mabel Dodge went to New Mexico, where she met Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian from Taos whom she had apparently first encountered in a dream some weeks before; he had dreamt about her as well. In Tony and in Taos, Mabel found the balance and completion that had eluded her in previous liaisons, movements and places. The couple lived together until Mabel died, a year before Tony did. At age 45, she began writing her life; this book is a severely abridged edition of the original four volumes spanning 1879-1918. Gossipy, self-serving, at times brilliant, the writing exudes Luhan's feelings of insatiable searching. This is a major film waiting to be made. (Sept.)