Books BIO RHYTHMS

Stories about real people intrigue most of us. For one thing, they almost always have pictures, and, leafing through those, we have a sense of a completed life. For another, they gossip, a satisfying diversion in itself. Finally, they remind us of the great variety and the rich extravagance of human beings. If you feel this way, here are some books you might like.

Dallas has literary and social ties with Taos, and many Dallasites may already have sampled Emily Hahn’s fascinating biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the grande dame of Taos, Mabel (Houghton Mifflin, $10). Mabel, perhaps the strangest, the most romantic, and, as Hahn tells it, certainly the funniest denizen of the netherland of the arts in America, was a founder and guiding spirit of the literary and artistic colony in Taos, which included for a time in the Twenties D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Emily Hahn writes for The New Yorker and is the author of more than thirty-five books, including Lorenzo: D.H. Lawrence and the Women Who Loved Him.

Mabel was one of those women, not that David Herbert was having any. With great relish, Hahn chronicles Mabel’s attempt to seduce Lawrence. Shortly after his and Frieda’s arrival in Taos, Lawrence planned to begin work on a book with Mabel about her life. The delighted Mabel got herself up for the first interview, on the balcony outside her bedroom, in negligee, with bare feet and legs. Lawrence, according to Hahn, said nervously, “I don’t know how Frieda’s going to feel about this.”

“Well,” Mabel responded airily, “surely she will understand.” But Lawrence was convinced she wouldn’t, and that was that. Not, however, before Mabel began wearing aprons because Lorenzo’s mother wore them, and baking her own bread and scrubbing the kitchen floor. It didn’t work.

Such domesticity came hard to Mabel, who was born into bourgeois comfort in Buffalo and who married into Dodge wealth along the way. Her husbands other than Edwin Dodge were Karl Evans, her first love, who had the wit to die when Mabel was 22 or so; the painter Maurice Sterne; and finally Tony Luhan, an American Indian from Taos-Pueblo. Mabel’s fourth marriage shocked and titillated Taos, Buffalo, New York and points between, but it lasted over 30 years, till Mabel’s death in 1962.

Of her lovers, the most famous was John Reed, the leftist journalist, a partner melodramatic and zestful enough to suit Mabel. For example:

Once he came home all steamed up over a chance encounter with a beautiful prostitute. They had had a long talk, he said, and through this woman he was able for the first time to appreciate all the mystery of the world. Not because it was such a corny statement but out of sharp jealousy Mabel had a fit, fell on the floor, and tried to faint.

Hahn, whose attitude toward her subject is one of bemused affection, draws on Mabel’s own published works and other unpublished material to create in Mabel a precursor of our own Beautiful People. Mabel was at home in a Florentine villa, in a Fifth Avenue apartment, and in an adobe house in New Mexico, though less so in the last. She knew everybody, from the Lawrences to Isadora Duncan and Leo and Gertrude Stein, without being deeply affected by any of them. From first to last, Mabel was herself, rash, stubborn, absurd, generous, brave and democratic.

Perhaps her most appealing quality was an occasional hardheaded intelligence. Of Lawrence’s dubious horsemanship, for example, she said: “It has been my experience that to the best horseman a horse is a horse . . . with no unusual, human traits. It takes a lively imagination to see in a horse what Lawrence saw in St. Mawr, for instance, and imagination interferes with horsemanship.” Books have been written about Lawrence that said less.

I don’t like books about little men who live in holes, so I’ ve never been a Tolkien fan. I hope it won’t seem blasphemous to those who are if I say that Tolkien was himself a little man who lived in a hole, a somewhat commodious hole called Oxford University. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin, $10) is the “authorized biography,” as if it could possibly matter. This is the thoughtful, well-written, and thoroughly documented story of a quiet good man who did medieval research, who was married for 50 years to the same woman, who taught in a university and whose greatest adventure was his friendship with C.S. Lewis. He had one peculiar vice: he wrote books at night. So if you’re interested in Tolkien, read The Lord of the Rings. I’m not.

Monty, by Robert LaGuardia, a biography of actor Montgomery Clift (Arbor House, $12.95), is an account of Cliffs descent from physical beauty and stardom into alcoholism, drugs, promiscuity and madness. LaGuardia blames this disintegration on a variety of factors, such as an Oedipal family situation, Clift’s debut at 13 as the prodigy of a dominating stage mother and the disastrous auto crash he suffered in 1956, which spoiled his perfect face. But the approach here is so clinical that this beautiful, well-educated, charming, talented and wealthy young man has vitality for the reader largely in the role of patient, passive victim of his own malady, which is diagnosed as – are you ready? – hebephrenic schizophrenia. LaGuardia describes Monty as “a labor of love,” and clearly believes he has given us a tragedy. Unfortunately, what we have is only a case history.

The late H. Allen Smith’s The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler (Morrow, $10) pays affectionate homage to a friend and presents a fabled example of the old-time newspaperman. Accounts are here of Fowler’s amorous adventure with Queen Marie of Rumania during her U.S. tour in 1926, his coverage of the Ruth Snyder execution in 1928, his friendships with Ben Hecht and John Barrymore and W.C. Fields. A bawdy, slap-dash, rough-and-tumble book, Gene Fowler is largely a series of anecdotes starring Fowler. Its humor is often crude, its characterizations one-dimensional, its literary merit zilch. All the women are forgiving and good, all the men hard-drinking, tough, and funny. In Smith’s most serious attempt to analyze Fowler, he calls him “a guy who tried despbrately all his life to be a good man.” Yet somehow, in spite of its literary defects, the book succeeds. It conveys unmistakably Fowler’s enormous energy for life and Smith’s very real love for him.

American Hunger (Harper & Row, $8.95) is the second part of Richard Wright’s great autobiography. Originally intended for publication with the first section, Black Boy, in 1945, American Hunger was held back by the author, but is now printed from the original page proofs corrected by Wright, who died in I960. Black Boy covers Wright’s early life in the South and ends with his departure for a new life above the Mason-Dixon line. American Hunger is less angry and more touching in some ways than the first volume, as Wright encounters for the first time whites who are, to the “boy,” puzzlingly free of racial discrimination. By far the most engrossing section of the book deals with Wright’s struggle to be at once a Communist and an artist of integrity. The story of his break with the Party is, in its honesty and ambivalence, a remarkable one. American Hunger, at a slight 135 pages, outweighs tomes from other disillusioned Party members. Wright’s conclusion:

Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside … to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all. to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

The vision Wright refused to sacrifice to Party solidarity was eminently worth saving. As this book is worth reading.