Mabel Dodge Luhan

Born in Buffalo, USA, Mabel Ganson, known as Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962), was a writer and a major figure in the cultural avant–gardes on both sides of the Atlantic. Often compared to Alma Mahler (known as the widow of the four arts), George Sand, or Madame de Staël due to her extensive travels, she remains an elusive figure. Her motto, used as an ex libris to mark her books, is an aphorism from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Drawn to freedom, Mabel Ganson’s life was marked by numerous encounters, women and men alike, that punctuated her journeys. First married to the American Karl Evans, the writer met Edwin Dodge, an architect from Boston, in 1904 aboard a ship bound for Le Havre, France. The couple married the following year and settled at Villa Curonia, located in Florence, Italy. In her Intimate Memories, written in 1933, Mabel Dodge confided that she had wanted something grand, partly for John, her son from her first marriage:

“I wanted, now, a house with a husband in it, a father for John, and some kind of peace (…) I wanted space around me – an ampleur of sunny space – and no neighbours. Besides I wanted grandeur.”

Perched on the heights of Arcetri, a district in the Oltrarno nestled in the low hills south of Florence, the villa’s northern façade offers a privileged view over Florence and its landmarks, notably the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, designed in the 15th century by Filippo Brunelleschi, and Giotto’s bell tower, named after its creator, Giotto di Bondone. The villa itself includes a two–storey inner courtyard inspired by Brunelleschi’s architectural style.

Reflecting on her early days in Florence, Mabel Dodge wrote:

“All I realise of it now is that I had turned to beauty. My thoughts were of a life made up of beautiful things, of art, of colour, of noble forms, and of ideas and perceptions about these that had been waiting, asleep, within me.”

Although Mabel Dodge’s favourite room in the villa was the small yellow sitting room, particularly for writing, her guests – many of whom also visited Palmerino – preferred the Grand Salon. Bernard Berenson even declared its “proportions perfect”, while the painter Jacques–Émile Blanche, himself a former guest of Palmerino, took advantage of the brilliant light in the room to paint a Portrait of Mabel Dodge and her son (1911), John, which is now housed in the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York State. Between 1905 and 1912 (the year of her separation from Edwin Dodge), Villa Curonia became a true haven for intellectuals, writers, and artists ; a model literary colony that Mabel Dodge would later expand and refine upon her return to New York, and even more so in Taos, New Mexico, where she settled from 1917 onwards.

A symbol of the “new woman” of the Belle Époque, Mabel Dodge embodied liberty in its fullest sense. Her desire to reach Europe, and Florence in particular, is described in her European Experiences as a sensation, a stretching between two worlds, a longing akin to willpower ; the wish to touch the seabed. Bordering on the absolute described by Aragon in his post–war novel Aurélien, Mabel Dodge attempted suicide twice, following the failure of her second marriage and a brief affair with her driver. Subversive, briefly involved with the journalist and communist John Reed and a close friend of the anarchist activist Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge is also known in Italy for having helped shape a distinct vision of the anglo–florentine garden and for having inspired Bernard Berenson in his conception of Villa I Tatti – all without ever sacrificing one cultural influence to the other. According to agronomist Elena Macellari, Edith Wharton believed that this delicate balance carried the risk of anglicization (or, in this case, americanization), as she expressed in one of her seminars entitled Italian Villas and Their Gardens. This difficult balance is a way, through the motif of the garden, to build a bridge with Mabel Dodge herself who did not merely live in Florence, but sought – not in opposition, but as a kind of continuation – to carry it with her. As she once wrote: “I wasn’t the same person when I left Florence.”

Alan B.