Lorenzo in Taos: The Inspiration Behind Rachel Cusk's International Bestseller Second Place

"An intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation." - The New Yorker" Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos , Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico" - Rachel Cusk"It's the most serious 'confession' that ever came out of America and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced." - D.H LawrenceWritten in direct address to the poet Robinson Jeffers, "Lorenzo in Taos" is dedicated "To Tony and All Indians," but Tony and the Indians are a sideshow. The memoir's raison d'être is the arrival of D.H Lawrence, whom Mabel has mystically "summoned" to Taos to articulate the beauty of the Indian way of life. When Lawrence is keener on depicting Mabel's romance with Tony, she does not object, framing it in symbolic terms. "Of course it was for this I had called him from across the world," she writes, "to give him the truth about the false, new, external America in the east, and the true, primordial, undiscovered America that was preserved, living, in the Indian bloodstream." She intends Lawrence to write a parable about her escape from a fallen civilization to an American Eden.From Luhan's first encounter with the Lawrences, which she reports as a "vibratory disturbance," Luhan and Frieda Lawrence are suspicious of one another. After Luhan wears a dressing gown to her first planning session with Lawrence, and listens sympathetically as he gripes about his wife ("the hateful, destroying female"), Frieda bans their one-on-one meetings, and Lawrence's novel is dropped.Their relationship, though, is just getting started.