The Remarkable Dorothy Brett ( 1883-1977): An Introduction

The inaugural blog posting (August 6, 2010) centered on the discovery of the New Mexico Historical Highway Marker on “The Three Fates” which included Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frieda Lawrence and Dorothy Brett. Since then I’ve written several postings on Mabel and introduced Frieda. Now it’s Brett’s turn. She’s helping me make the introduction, including how she came to be in Taos.

I was born in London, in what now seems to be the golden age of Queen Victoria. Mine was the usual life of a child born of parents involved in politics, royalty, and the necessary conventions.

Born in London to an aristocratic family, Dorothy Brett was raised in the restrictive manner typical of privileged children of the Victorian era. She lived a relatively secluded life, until with the help of an old family friend, Dorothy got permission from her parents to attend the Slade School of Art. She began her studies in the fall of 1910, and completed the program four years later. According to school tradition, students called each other by their surnames. From that time on, only her family referred to her as Dorothy or Doll; she was called Brett or “The Brett” by everyone else.

By her second year, Brett had a studio of her own where she sometime entertained fellow art students, including Dora Carrington. Free of her oppressive home life, Brett adopted the Bohemian life of an artist. She and Carrington bobbed their hair and wore men’s trousers. Soon, through the salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who like Mabel Dodge hosted some of the leading intellectual figures of her time, Brett and Carrington met George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Wolfe and Katherine Mansfield at Lady Morrell’s Garsington estate. Through these gatherings, Brett gained exposure to a stimulating social world and to the arts through some of England’s leading visual and performing artists and writers. (Katherine Mansfield would become one of Brett’s closest friends.)

We were after new ideas and concepts that often frightened others. I’ve always said everyone has to be after something, and if others don’t like it, the devil take them.

Through the Garsington circle Brett met D. H. and Frieda Lawrence in 1915. In the years that followed, Brett became familiar with Lawrence’s proposal to create a utopian community he called Rananim. When the Lawrences returned to England following their first visit with Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1923, D. H. stated that he had found the ideal location for his Rananim – Taos, New Mexico – and actively recruited Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry and others from the Garsington crowd to join him and Frieda there. In the end, only Brett joined the Lawrences on their return trip to Taos in 1924. 

Upon her arrival, Brett instantly fell in love with the land and people of New Mexico. She later wrote about the “sudden dive into an entirely new life among three races,” and the transformation that took place in her life. “I began to find myself, my place and later a purpose.”

An account of Brett’s Taos years will follow, and will address questions like “How did being in Taos affect and change her life direction?” To help answer that, I’ve recently reconnected with Brett’s biographer, Pamela Evans. I asked Pam for her thoughts on what people might not know about Brett. One answer -- what an avid reader she was. Also that Brett mentored young people: “She loved the energy and curiosity of the young, and was always encouraging them to buck the system, question authority, find work they loved and then not be talked out of doing it.”

We’ll hear more on Brett from Pam, who has graciously agreed to write a guest column. I can hardly wait!

Adios for now,

Liz

Mabel Dodge Luhan's 132nd Birthday Celebration

You may have seen the earlier posting about the festivities planned to celebrate Mabel Dodge Luhan's birthday. The evening event, scheduled between 6 and 8 p.m., began with a twenty-minute dialog between “Mabel”, played by Leslie Harrell Dillen* and Lois Palken Rudnick**, Mabel's biographer.

Many of you indicated you would have liked to attend this event but couldn't, so I thought you might enjoy experiencing it vicariously through photos.

On February 26, 2011 preparations for Mabel's birthday feast began early in the day.

Pamela Martinez  and Chef Jane Garrett

By 5:45 p.m. the classroom filled with greetings and conversation

and just after 6:00, acting as emcee, I introduced Mabel (played by Leslie Dillen) and Mabel's biographer (played by Lois Rudnick).

Lois Rudnick (right) and Leslie Harrell Dillen (left

Warning the audience about the adult content that would follow, Lois advised parents to remove children from the room, or at least cover their ears. She then gave a lovely overview of the twists and turns of Mabel's complex life.

Mabel (Leslie) then regaled the adults (and a baby) with a reading from her article "Change of Life". Ahead of her time, Mabel penned this piece on menopause in 1938--pretty daring for the time. She opined that women's lives rather than being over, would now be more full and intense than ever. Freed from the child bearing period, the fire burned more fiercely in women at this stage, and Mabel urged them to kindle the inner flame and shed their light with its "highly vibrating influence" on their men.

After a lively and informative question and answer period,  the evening's participants moved to the main house for

a booksigning of the newly released Mabel Dodge Luhan in Her Own Words

Karen Young inscribing book

and fancy hors d'oeuvres topped off with a serving of chocolate raspberry birthday cake (far right in background) in Mabel's honor.

It was a great evening, done Mabel style,  and we all agreed

                                                       she would have loved it!

Adios for now,

Liz

All photos courtesy of Mabel Dodge Luhan House's photo chronicler Noreen Perrin

* Leslie Harrell Dillen is an award-winning actor and playwright who wrote and performed “The Passions of Mabel Dodge Luhan." Her plays have been produced in Massachusetts, New York, California and Washington. Leslie has also written and performed five solo shows which she presented on stages throughout the U.S and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland and at the New York Fringe Festival. Her new play, "2 Wives in India," which runs through April 3rd, opened yesterday (Friday, March 18th) at the Santa Fe Playhouse.

**  Lois Palken Rudnick chaired the American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for 26 years. She has lectured locally, nationally and internationally on modern American culture. Lois retired in 2009 and now lives in Santa Fe. Besides her biography Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Women, New Worlds, she has written Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture and most recently Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism.

News Flash: Celebrating Mabel Dodge Luhan's birthday on February 26th

Invitation to a special event

at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House Classroom

Saturday, February 26^th from 6 to 8 p.m.

Actress and playwright Leslie Dillen as Mabel

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House invites the public to the first salon celebrating Mabel’s birthday, Saturday, February 26^th 6-8 p.m. at the Classroom. The evening event begins with a twenty-minute dialog between “Mabel”, played by Leslie Dillen (who wrote and performed “The Passions of Mabel Dodge Luhan”) and Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel’s biographer (author of Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture and most recently Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism). The audience will then be invited to participate in discussion around questions raised in the dialog.

Afterwards, everyone is invited to a booksigning of the newly published Mabel Dodge Luhan in Her Own Words and to partake of refreshments.

Proceeds from the book sale go towards preservation of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House (on both the National and State Register of Historic Places).

Call 575-751-9686 for further information.

The Heat is Back On: Coping at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House during the natural gas outage

You may have heard about the recent crisis in the Taos area caused by the natural gas outage. Residents first learned of the situation on Thursday morning, February 3^rd. The first communication I received came when Town of Taos Public Relations Officer, Cathy Connelly, sent out word informing the citizens of Questa, Red River and Taos of the shutoff of natural gas forecast to last for a prolonged period of time. She and local radio hosts went into state-of-emergency media coverage until the situation was resolved. That evening an arctic cold front dropped temperatures to 25 below zero, and it stayed frigid for days.

This past Saturday when I drove to the Mabel Dodge Luhan House to learn how the staff survived the days without heat, Judi Jordan greeted me with “I think it will be days before I warm up.” Being cold and without heat both at work and at home left her drained. Judi told me that other people she talked to were exhausted by the cold.

Jessica and the hot plates that blew the fuses

Like other staff, Jessica Van Houten came prepared to work in the cold, wearing two pairs of long underwear under her snowboarding outfit. She arrived at the Mabel Dodge Friday at 4:30 a.m. to allow time for hot plates to warm up. With stoves and hot water heaters out of commission, electricity provided the remaining heat source. While the hot plates heated, Jessica began started the coffee machines and the microwave. This overloaded the circuit and blew all the fuses. No hot plates, no hot water. Ever resourceful, Jessica served intrepid guests yoghurt, cereal, applesauce, a fruit plate—and managed to provide them with hot coffee.

      
Staffer Diane de Fremery wrote up an event that took place later that day:

In spite of the cold, on Friday, February 4th we had the most superb Mabel moment. Approximately 20 people ventured out to come to a SOMOS reading by George Wallace, the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace writer-in-resident. We put the chairs around the fireplace in living room. There was no heat in the classroom, plus we had [only a handful of guests] due to the crisis situation with no heat or hot water in the big house.

            It was intimate and reminiscent of days gone by when Mabel had her salons. There was also live music provided by Juilliard graduate Abbie Conant between the readings. It was a special evening.

Judy Barber, a writer from Sausalito, CA, told me about her experience. She arrived on Saturday, February 5^th, two days in advance of the start of Natalie Goldberg’s scheduled workshop. The rooms were so chilly that the staff offered to move the couch in front of the fireplace to keep her warm at night. Judy commended the Mabel Dodge’s caretaker, Jamison Nicolazzo and his girlfriend Dionne, who checked on the house every three hours during the night and brought in more firewood for her use. That evening electricity went out, and Judy spent most of the night in the dark. She felt an obligation to keep the fire burning, and awoke every two hours to feed the fire.

On Saturday I spoke with Judi Jordan, on duty over the weekend, and asked her if she would comment on her experience. She had been without heat and hot water both at work and at home. She thought of the bitter winter cold pioneer women must have endured, how they probably never got really warm. Judi wrote in her journal: “When it’s this cold, all you're trying to do is put your head down and endure.” While persevering, Judi thought of a passage from Natalie Goldberg’s Long Quiet Highway, words appropriate to her situation and that of thousands of other Taosenos:

The next morning had been very cold. There was frost on the bell. We hadn’t expected it to get that cold that early in the year. After all, we slept and sat in tents. After the two periods beginning at 5 a.m., I was signed up to be the breakfast server. Servers never wore socks or gloves. I have to bow, barefoot, with my big pot of steaming rice in front of each student, then kneel on the ground and serve them—they were all sitting on the floor on cushions—then lug up the pot and go to the next person. I was cold. Roshi was the last person to be served. I couldn’t wait to get it over with, to run out of the tent and put on my socks and gloves. As I knelt in front of Roshi, about to scoop a ladle of rice into his bowl, he sharply, clearly said to me, “Eat the cold.” I took a deep breath, slowed down, and tried  to open to the weather. This man wasn’t kidding around. Don’t run away, even from the cold—digest it, he was saying. And he meant this for all my life, not just the moment I was there.*

“It’s really hard to eat the cold when the cold lasts this long,” Judi said. She added her thoughts on how this experience would teach us to be more compassionate and caring of others. It also highlighted how dependent our society has become on large corporations, and how this might teach us to become more self-reliant.

Four days later, on Monday February 8th, Taosenos finally fought back. The relighting process conducted by the gas companies had gone much too slowly, people and businesses had suffered enough. The local media got out the word that if people would call qualified plumbers, they could have the relighting work done themselves. A plumber relit the gas at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House just hours before Natalie’s group of 26 showed up for a five-day workshop. When the gas came on, Chef Jane Garrett immediately began cooking. The kitchen heated up and became the warmest, most appealing place in the house.

Wood fire warmth

Under these circumstances, it seemed appropriate to close with Mabel’s description of her kitchen:

           

That’s the nicest room in the house from eight to ten in the morning. All the woodwork is painted blue and the walls are whitewashed. There is a long table in the center with a blue oilcloth on it, and a big blue stove burning cedar wood.

            A long row of windows facing east, lets in plenty of sunshine across the geraniums, and there is a breakfast table under the windows on the west side of the room. There is always a lovely smell of oranges and coffee, bacon and eggs and toast out there at that hour, and the men love to eat breakfast there, close to the Source, with the cheerful hum and bustle of cooking going on, the eggs sizzling on the plate, the butter melting on the crisp toast.**

 I leave you with Mabel’s kitchen portrait as we continue to recover and warm up aqui en Taos (here in Taos).

Adios for now, let Valentine’s Day warm your heart,

Liz

*The quote from Long Quiet Highway appears on page 194, Bantam Books 1994 edition.

**Quote taken from Winter in Taos, Palomas de Taos 1996 edition, page 23.

Profiles: Introducing Karen Young of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House staff

Today I interviewed Karen Young, my first profile on the remarkable women who staff the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. Although her main duties involve educational programming and marketing, like her co-workers, Karen’s life extends beyond the walls of the Mabel Dodge. Here’s her story:

Karen Young feeding breakfast to her alpacas

A background in anthropology and work in archeology led to Karen’s first trip to Taos in 1969. Through a private field school for high school students conducted at Southern Methodist University’s Fort Burgwin,  11 miles outside Taos, she and her archeologist  husband Jon spent four seasons with students from Picuris Pueblo, California and other states conducting a month-long dig at Pot Creek site. During that time, the two became acquainted with the Kit Carson Foundation director Jack Boyer, in charge of three museums--the Kit Carson Home, the Blumenschein Home, and the Hacienda de los Martinez.

Five years later, the couple packed up the family and moved to Taos, a move made possible by Karen’s creativity. With Jack Boyer’s support, she wrote a successful National Endowment for the Humanities grant and created a job for herself and Jon developing an interpretive plan for the Blumenschein Home, the Martinez Hacienda and the Taos Morada. During this time, the Youngs lived in a part of the Blumenschein Home while they built their first home—an adobe designed by Karen.

The NEH grant funded the Young’s first year in Taos, allowing just enough time for Karen and Jon to provide the family with a roof over their heads…the interior was still under construction. Karen remembers the day they moved in -- May 8^th -- because it snowed. After the NEH funding ended, Karen and Jon scrambled to survive. Painting fences, sporadic jobs at the Katchina Lodge and the Abominable Snow Mansion, and other seasonal work kept them afloat until George and Kitty Otero, then owners of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, asked them to help run the Global Realities program. Months later the Forest Service hired Jon as Forest Archeologist, and Karen’s Museum Studies degree landed her a job at the Millicent Rogers Museum. For the next seven years, work there as museum educator and acting director carried her through divorce, and almost through building her own pumice and adobe home.

When the Millicent Rogers Museum hired a new director, Karen suddenly found herself without a job due to cutbacks. Now single, she despaired at being unemployed and at the possibility of having to leave Taos. One day she ran into Pablo Trujillo, whose group Los Alegres had played traditional Hispanic music at the Mabel Dodge, at the post office. When Karen told him her news, he asked to see her hands. Examining them, he announced: “You’ll stay here. You have callouses.” Stay she did, finding work as director of the Northern Pueblos Institute through Northern New Mexico Community College, as co-director of the Taos Historic Museums (formerly the Kit Carson Foundation), and most recently back at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House.

Another kind of work opened up for Karen when her world took on a new dimension in the 1990s. She became interested in alpacas after meeting Phil Switzer from Estes Park, Colorado who brought some of his animals to the annual Taos Wool Festival in 1994. Right then Karen decided she would like to raise alpacas. She consulted with Phil who told her to talk to other breeders and attend alpaca association meetings. As it happened, the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association held its annual meeting in Estes Park the following year. Karen attended the conference, went to lectures, talked to breeders and invested $5 in a raffle ticket for two machos or male alpacas. At the end of the conference, she checked to see who had won the raffle. Someone replied: “It was someone from New Mexico…name started with ‘W’.” Karen’s hopes were dashed, but only until someone else said: “Oh, the last name was Young.”

That’s how Morning Star Alpacas got its start…and that’s another story. Today Karen owns 31 alpacas. She manages to sustain them and her business through the occasional sale of an animal and the wool, and sometimes she shows her animals. Yet the alpacas help sustain Karen—caring for them keeps her active. She finds great joy in watching these calm, gentle animals from her living room window. The alpacas’ cycle of breeding, birthing, and aging echoes the change of seasons in Nature, and in Karen’s life in Taos.

Double rainbow over Karen's home

 In closing, I asked Karen to answer the question "What is it about Taos that invites women to be remarkable?" Her multi-pronged answers follow: "An environment that reaches out and enfolds you; finding new strengths with each challenge met; support from all cultures." I particularly liked her last statement: "The surprise of finding you've sincerely been accepted into the community." And the community benefits from Karen's presence.

Adios for now,

Liz

Mabel Dodge Luhan and Mark Twain – Reflections on Autobiography in the New Year

What a wee part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself....his acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world...The mass of him is hidden -- it and its volcanic fires toss and boil, and never rest, night or day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.... Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written." -- from Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1*

Over the holidays I immersed myself in the autobiographical works of “The Three Fates” -- Mabel, Frieda Lawrence and Dorothy Brett. I skimmed their works– including Mabel’s Winter in Taos, Frieda’s Not I But the Wind and Brett’s Lawrence and Brett -- mining them for answers to questions about the three women, and for topics for the blog. I came away wanting to know more -- their autobiographies left me unsatisfied, the writing didn't reveal nearly enough about them.

Cover of Winter in Taos, reprint, fourth printing 1996

I finally fastened onto Mabel’s four-volume autobiography, Intimate Memories, which she started in 1924. Mabel wrote of her early intent “I started out to try and show the inward picture of a person of my own period; what heredity and environment had made of her. I did not believe, and do not believe, that she was inwardly so different from a lot of others. She was a 20^th century type.” Background (published in 1933) deals with her early life in her hometown of Buffalo, New York; European Experiences (1935) covers time spent in Italy at Villa Curonia; Movers and Shakers (1936) discusses her years as hostess of an avant garde salon in New York; and Edge of Taos Desert (1937) traces her journey to Taos, and meeting and eventually marrying Antonio Luhan from Taos Pueblo.

In each volume Mabel investigates a certain period of her life, each representing a phase that contributed to her search to make herself “real.” Her therapist A. A. Brill, America’s first practicing psychotherapist and the first to translate major works by Freud into English, had suggested she write about her life as therapy. Brill viewed the practice of psychotherapy as a way of giving meaning and structure to life, and so encouraged Mabel to write as a means of self-discovery.

Lois Palken Rudnick and I have discussed the writing of biography, in light of our own work [on Mabel Dodge Luhan and Ernest L. Blumenschein, respectively]. Our conversations have centered on how no matter how many letters, pictures, diaries, interviews, clippings and archival material we delved into, what emerged in the end was a partial portrait of our subjects. I suppose that’s why Mark Twain’s statement on biographies being “but the clothes and buttons of the man” struck me. The full life Mabel lived took place in her head, and could never be written in full.

That said, my goal for this coming year is to post brief sketches on Mabel, her circle, and generations of women who followed,  and to provide enough of a portrait for each of us to recognize ourselves in these women. For as Mabel herself stated, our stories are much the same -- the universal stories of the human race -- and there are life lessons to learn from everyone. Let this be part of our own self-discovery, part of becoming "real."

Happy New Year!

Adios for now,

Liz

* from "Riverboat Rambler" by Garrison Keillor. New York Times Book Review, Sunday, December 19, 2010: 7 -- Review of Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1.

**Mabel Dodge Luhan to Hutchins Hapgood, 5 November ?, Hapgood Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, quoted in Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, edited by Lois Palken Rudnick. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999: vii).

Christmas Eve at Taos Pueblo and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House

Throughout her life in Taos, Mabel attended various Pueblo celebrations. Of all of the holiday events, Christmas Eve at Taos Pueblo is one of the most special. The Pueblo people gather pitch pine, cut it to various lengths, and stack it criss-crossed to build ricks of wood from one foot to twelve feet high. These are lit just after dusk, and the whole area between the North and South houses come alive with bonfires. The fires light the Christmas Eve procession around the Taos Pueblo plaza that follows mass at the San Geronimo church. It's magical, as a description from D.H. Lawrence conveys:

Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos, twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo, then suddenly, again, like dark calling dark, the deep Indian cluster -- singing around the drum, wild and awful, suddenly rousing on the lost dusk as the procession starts. And then the bonfires leaping suddenly in spurts of high flame, columns of sudden flame forming an alley for the procession.*

Over the years my friend Judith Bronner has photographed this event (here, the plaza in front of the North House at dusk, just before the procession), and I share one of her pictures with you.

"Christmas Eve", Taos Pueblo © 2010 Judith Bronner

When guests at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House return after the Pueblo festivities, a cheery fire and steaming bowls of posole await them. This spicy hominy stew, a dish for celebrating life’s blessings, is served throughout New Mexico. It can be made either with red or green chile. The recipe here (below), made with pork and using dried red chiles, is quite traditional. However, chicken, turkey, or vegetable protein may be substituted for the pork. Enjoy.

Adios for now,
Liz

Photo courtesy of Judith Bronner. Thank you, Judith! 

* Quote from "New Mexico" typescript, D.H. Lawrence Papers, AC 131-p, Angélico Chávez History Library, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe.

Posole Recipe:

12 dried long red chile**
3 pounds boned pork roast cut into 1" cubes
1/2 head of garlic peeled and chopped
A large pinch of Mexican oregano
1/2 large onion, chopped
1 large (industrial-size) can hominy 
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1.Break open the chiles and remove the seeds and veins.
2. Put the chiles to cook in a medium sized pot. Cover with fresh water and gently boil until chiles are very soft.
3. Let the mixture cool and using a favorite method, blend the chile and the water to make a paste and strain.
4. Put the cubed pork, oregano, garlic, onion and salt into a large heavy pot and cover with water. Boil meat gently for 30 minutes.
5. When the meat is soft, add the chile and hominy and cook for 15 to 20 minutes until the mixture is boiling nicely. Add oregano, and salt and pepper to taste.

To serve, ladle the posole into heavy bowls and serve with thinly sliced cabbage and radishes, quartered limes, and fresh corn tortillas.

This recipe serves 20-24 people. 

**Using frozen or powdered red or green chile eliminates steps 1-3 -- the preparation and cooking time for the chile mixture.