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Back in 1994 I met one of the most delicious persons I have ever met in my life\u2013it is very, very hard to encapsulate in just one adjective the vivacity, cheerfulness, zest for life that Prof. Lois Rudnick transmits with her presence. Now emeritus, Lois was that academic year a Fulbright visitor from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She spent that time teaching in my Department (also in the English Dept. at the Universitat de Barcelona). Lois gave me personally many wonderful moments to remember for ever, from our seeing together Steven Spielberg\u2019s Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> (Prof. Rudnick is Jewish) to teaching me why contemporary dance is more thrilling than classical ballet (it\u2019s about the freedom to create new moves, as pioneering US dancer Isadora Duncan demonstrated her whole life).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prof. Rudnick\u2019s academic career has been focused mainly on researching the life of literary and artistic hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan. Several of the many biographical books she has devoted to Luhan are available from Amazon.com, if you\u2019re curious. I must say that, before meeting Lois, I had never heard of Luhan (1879-1962), a wealthy socialite from Buffalo (New York) particularly known for having chosen Taos, in New Mexico, as her home and having attracted there a long list of artists of all descriptions from 1917 onward. D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O\u2019Keefe are usually mentioned among her guests, but the list is far, far longer. Incidentally, her beautiful Taos home is now a bed-and-breakfast establishment\u2013though she hated tourists. Luhan, n\u00e9e Ganson, went though four marriages that gave her not only a long list of surnames to choose from but also a troubled private and public life. Her last husband, Tony Lujan (notice the different spelling) was a handsome Pueblo Indian (today native American\u2026) whom she married in 1923, at a historical period when very few interracial unions of this exceptional kind were celebrated at all. They stayed married for almost 40 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lois Rudnick\u2019s\nlatest book on Luhan is The Suppressed\nMemoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making\nof Modern American Culture<\/em> (2012). This is actually an edition of a number\nof autobiographical texts which Luhan did not include in her groundbreaking\nautobiographical tetralogy, Intimate\nMemoirs<\/em> (1933-37), which she started writing at 45. In this 1600-page long,\npoignant text Luhan gave a candid account not only of her network of celebrity\nfriends and acquaintances but also of her own personal life, with a sincerity\nthat is to be praised. This woman was born in an American Victorian home but\nher life ended the year before second-wave feminism erupted with Betty Friedan\u2019s\nThe Feminine Mystique<\/em>. In these 83\nyears she had to learn, at a great personal cost, how to break the tight rules\nshe had been handed down as a girl while she and the rest of the international Modernist\ncoterie(s) re-invented love, sexuality and identity. Not an easy task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018suppressed memoirs\u2019 that Prof. Rudkin could not access before 2000 (there was an injunction placed by author\u2019s son, if I understand correctly, against their publication) deal specifically with the episodes in Luhan\u2019s life connected with sex, and more particularly with how the transmission of VD negatively affected her marriages and her many affairs. Indeed, the volume even contains a nicely-packed condom\u2013a clever reminder that VD is still rampant, despite all we (supposedly) know about gonorrhoea, syphilis and the rest. Also, a reminder that (though also transmitted in other ways than VD) HIV and syphilis connect distant periods of heterosexuality in ways we hardly pay attention to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The paradox\nin Luhan\u2019s life is that of her four husbands, three suffered from syphilis and,\nalthough she did all she could to avoid catching the feared disease (except, it\nseems, using condoms, for she wanted children) ultimately Tony\u2019s infidelity was\nthe reason why Mabel was infected and their idyll radically transformed. I am\nvery much reluctant to reading biographical material and I have a very prudish Victorian\nhorror of intruding into the sex lives of persons who have not entrusted their\nconfidence to me. Fiction is fine but real-life events are not so fine. You may\nimagine how befuddled I felt reading the passage in which Luhan describes that\nshe knew simultaneously that her husband Tony was a) unfaithful and b) infected\nwith syphilis, when she noticed the stain of bloodied semen on the otherwise\npristine white sheet he used to wrap his body in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I get Lois\u2019\npoint: Luhan gives unique evidence of how the Modernist sexual liberation of\nthe 1910s-1930s was accompanied by the dark shadow of VD, so why not explore\nit? We do know that Victorian women (and their babies) were often the innocent\nvictims of their husbands\u2019 secret lives but we have little information about\nhow women of Luhan\u2019s generation coped with the reality of VD, once first-wave\nfeminism introduced a certain measure of female sexual liberation. Fiction\ncould not go very far: D.H. Lawrence\u2019s Lady\nChatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em>, published in 1929 (privately and in Italy) was the\nobject of an obscenity trial in 1960 and could only be published in the UK\nafter that date. And there\u2019s no mention of VD in it despite its frank sexuality!\nSo, yes, I value and understand Luhan\u2019s painful, brave testimonial. Still, I\u2019m\nsomehow sorry that I need to intrude into the privacy of her bedroom to grasp a\ntruth everyone in her time seemed to be hiding. I must thank Lois Rudnick,\nthen, for bringing that truth to us while I wonder whether that is the only way\nto raise awareness. Possibly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having got\nthat off my chest that, I have other issues to raise. You can, by the way,\nlisten to Prof. Rudnick herself discuss her book here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ibTHhgQ74ew<\/a>.\nOne of these issues is that, obviously, only educated, upper-class women like\nLuhan were articulate enough to offer an insightful portrait of private life (and\neven so, she mostly wrote her texts for the psychologists and psychiatrists\ntreating her all her life). The anger and disappointment with which she\nreceives evidence of infection (and hence, of betrayal) must have also been\npart of the life of less privileged women but, then, we will never have their\ntestimonial. They\u2019re just statistics, if at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another\nissue is that, from what I gather, early 20th<\/sup> century women who,\nlike Mabel, appeared to be liberated and even had a notorious reputation as\nmen-eaters, did not really find much satisfaction in sex, which was not even\nthe main point in their search for romance. Reading Luhan\u2019s account of the\naffair she had with Dr. John Parmenter during her first marriage, it seems that\nshe fell in love above all with a certain patriarchal ideal of protective\nmasculinity, paradoxical as this may sound. The pain which she felt when this\nidealized man turned out to be incapable of abandoning a wife he didn\u2019t love seems\nto come directly from the Romantic period rather than the 1910s. This is Jane\nAusten with sex and not the post-second feminist wave accounts of bedroom\nmisencounters we are used to now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact,\nand this is what kept me reading\u2013apart from Prof. Rudnick\u2019s manifest passion\nfor her subject\u2013the suppressed memoirs function as a chronicle of a lost\nstruggle against infidelity. Decades into their marriage, and even though Mabel\nknows that Tony has had liaisons with other women, she feels again a deep\nRomantic pain caused by the budding relationship between her husband and a\nyounger woman, Millicent Rogers. A celebrity in the circles of fashion and art,\nRogers moved from Hollywood to Taos in 1947 intent on imitating the much\nadmired Luhan, to the point of also obsessing with Tony. Luhan never acknowledges\nthat she is in the same position as Dr. Parmenter\u2019s wife back in the first of\nthe suppressed memoirs, either because she is mortified by the comparison or\nbecause she cannot see the parallelism. I don\u2019t mean that infidelity necessarily\nleads eventually to some kind of retribution but, rather, that Luhan must be\none of the first modern women to describe how monogamy and sexual liberation\nclash\u2013a situation we are very far from having solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, the\nmost painful memory Luhan narrates is not her chagrin at realizing that, despite\nher caution, she has syphilis but her realization that she can do nothing to\nstop Tony from loving this Rogers woman, the upstart whom Mabel so hates. Much\nmore so because unlike Dr. Parmenter, who acts as a cowardly child with both wife\nand mistress, Tony assumes with all the serenity he can muster that he loves\nMabel but also Millicent (she eventually left him for his nephew, Benito).\nEncountering that type of deep Romantic pain in a book about venereal disease gives\nLois Rudnick\u2019s exploration of American Modernism a strange twist, for my\nimpression is that in current discussions of sexuality love (which is what\nMabel feels) occupies in the end little room. I may be ranting and raving at my\nworst today but, beyond the clich\u00e9s of romance, is there any serious current attempt\nat considering love? Don\u2019t we talk too much about sexuality, too little about\nfeeling? And how come I notice this void in a book about syphilis?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is\nalso a subtle subtext in The Suppressed\nMemoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan<\/em> which has do to with race and class. As a\nrich, white, female intruder in the Pueblo community Luhan is not particularly\nwell-liked; her affair with Tony, which begins when both are still married, is\nless than welcome and she even more or less acknowledges that her money bought\nthis Pueblo man just as she purchased Taos land. Eventually, Mabel convinces\nthe Pueblo Indians indirectly through Tony (by then her husband) and, if I\nrecall correctly, the intervention of John Collier\u2013later Commissioner for the\nBureau of Indian Affairs in President Roosevelt\u2019s administration\u2013to test the\nadult community members for syphilis. Among those who refuse to be tested is\nthe husband of Tony\u2019s mistress, the woman who passes syphilis onto him. If you\nadd two and two, Rudnick is hinting at a plot of revenge aimed at putting the\nYankee interloper in her place. The impulse to do biographical research\nexposes, thus, patterns in History we might never be aware of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I recall\nconversations with Lois, worried already in 1994-5, before the internet really\nexploded, about what would happen with documentation in the future and how\nbiographers would work. Funnily, if Luhan were alive today, she would most\nlikely be an influencer with a heavily documented life in the social networks. And\/or\nperhaps one of those novelists that write narcissistic auto-fiction, though I\nwonder whether there is a single grain of truth in the sub-genre. As for the\ntruth we get from Luhan\u2019s \u2018suppressed memoirs\u2019 (and \u2018suppressed\u2019 here means\nboth unpublished and self-censored), it is necessarily biased towards a zeitgeist<\/em> obsessed with sex and very\nmuch reluctant to consider love\u2013and the models we follow in our lives. At one\npoint Mabel throws a tantrum at her husband, she writes, not so much because\nshe is uncontrollably angry but because she intends to seduce her man back into\nher arms as the heroines of romance do. Impassive, Tony responds coolly \u2018You\u2019re\ntearing my trousers\u2019 and the whole edifice of romantic seduction comes crashing\ndown. At least, Mabel knows which model is failing her. As for us, how do we love\n(or fail to love)? I wonder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the way,\nyou might be surprised to know that in the USA, \u2018During 2017, there were\n101,567 reported new diagnoses of syphilis (all stages), compared to 39,782\nestimated new diagnoses of HIV infection in 2016 and 555,608 cases of gonorrhoea\nin 2017\u2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\n(https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/std\/syphilis\/stdfact-syphilis-detailed.htm<\/a>).\nJust in case you thought syphilis was a thing of the distant Victorian past and\nnot of post-modern sexuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\npublish a new post every Tuesday (for updates follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments\nare very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from: http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328<\/a>.\nMy web: http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in 1994 I met one of the most delicious persons I have ever met in my life\u2013it is very, very hard to encapsulate in just one adjective the vivacity, cheerfulness, zest for life that Prof. Lois Rudnick transmits with her presence. Now emeritus, Lois was that academic year a Fulbright visitor from the University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[301,306,389,431,454,458,498,502],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-lois-rudnick","tag-mabel-dodge-luhan","tag-pueblo-indians","tag-sexuality","tag-syphilis","tag-taos","tag-us-modernism","tag-vd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}