D.H. Lawrence at the Ranch
Near Red River, New Mexico
D.H. Lawrence arrived in Taos in September nineteen twenty-two, invited by Mabel Dodge, who had sent him a succession of letters about New Mexico that were essentially literary seductions. He came seeking what he called a new world, a place where the industrial modernity of England and the social conventions that had made him controversial had not yet arrived.
He stayed for three years, with intervals back to Europe, living in a small ranch in the Sangre de Cristo foothills north of Taos at an altitude of about eighty-six hundred feet. The ranch had been given to Mabel Dodge by the pueblo member Tony Luhan; Mabel later gave it to Frieda, Lawrence's wife, in exchange for the manuscript of his novel Sons and Lovers, after Lawrence himself had declined the gift. Frieda lived there until her death in nineteen fifty-six, when she willed it onward. It passed eventually to the University of New Mexico, which now administers it as a small writers' retreat and historical site.
What Lawrence wrote at the ranch includes some of his most vivid prose about Pueblo ceremonial life, collected in the volume Mornings in Mexico, published in nineteen twenty-seven. The prose alternates between genuine wonder and something that contemporary readers identify as primitivism: the projection onto Indigenous peoples of qualities, simplicity, spiritual authenticity, closeness to nature, that European intellectuals imagined they had lost.
He was drawn to Pueblo ceremony. He was also, at various points in his essays, condescending about it in ways that say more about his frame of reference than about the ceremony itself.
Lawrence died in France in March nineteen thirty, at age forty-four. His ashes were brought back to New Mexico by Frieda, who installed them in a small shrine on the ranch property. The shrine is still there. The mountain meadow around it has not changed much in a hundred years.
Whether he found his new world is a question his essays circle without answering. He found a place he could not stop writing about. That may be the same thing.
