‘Something Stood Up in my Soul’: D. H. Lawrence in Taos

D.H. Lawrence, like many of the artists affiliated with Taos’ modern little art colony, was invited there by Mabel Dodge Luhan to ‘see and feel and wonder’ the ‘essence’ of Taos and ultimately put it ‘between the covers of a book.’ Although Lawrence was leery of the highbrow’s fascination with Taos’ unique peoples and places, he nonetheless formally incorporated elements of the ‘Taos mystique’ into the work he produced while living there. In the novelette St. Mawr, which sympathetically portrays the wanderings of a cosmopolitan American woman who flees the ghastly modern metropolis of London, Lawrence details her discovery of ‘something else’ in the vital and otherworldly wilds of New Mexico. Although his protagonist is certain that she has found a final resting place in the gorgeous country in and around Taos, Lawrence’s inconclusive ending intimates that even at the far peripheries of the modern world-system, she can’t and won’t escape its soul-sucking reaches.

Cultivating the Taos Mystique

Unlike the new development at Carmel and the recently revitalized fishing village of Provincetown, the old frontier trading post of Taos, New Mexico, was experiencing slow, steady growth at the turn of the twentieth century. The rapid, regional expansion of a modern, automobile-based tourism into Taos and a broadly-articulated modernist fascination with experiencing the ways of the primitive ‘other’ attracted a distinctively modernist coterie to the region and shifted the local power structures from the Native Puebloans and established Hispanic residents toward the relative newcomers: Anglo business and land owners. This chapter considers the development of the local tourism and real estate industry alongside a vogue for witnessing, appreciating, and representing Native American ceremonial dance ceremonials. Through analysis of literary representations of these dances by Marsden Hartley, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Mary Austin, this chapter identifies a fascination with Native dance as a distinctively modernist practice: ones that served, for each other and the larger world, as ‘a sign of modernism in us.’ Further, these dances were integral to the creation of the ineffable ‘Taos mystique’ that undergirded the local tourism and real estate industry.

Introduction: Modernism beyond the Metropolis

This introductory chapter offers a meditation on the spaces and places of modernist activity, positing that the metropolis is incidental, rather than essential, to the production of social and aesthetic modernism. In de-centring the metropolis, this chapter proposes that rural, peripheral spaces—those Raymond Williams memorably dismissed as ‘hinterlands’—should not only be recognized as essential to the development of modernist practices, but also may productively be recognized as part of a broad, modernist impulse toward ‘little’ and small-scale production in general. Working from Wallerstein’s conceptualisation of the networked, capitalist, modern world-system, this chapter makes the case for a more careful, site-specific examination of sub- or extra-urban places in which modernist practices emerged and coalesced and argues for seeing the modern little art colony as a representative modernist space. This chapter also offers a brief historical background to the development of the little art colony in the US, pointing to its nineteenth-century European antecedents as well as US-based utopian colonies (most notably that at Brook Farm), where the social practices associated with modernism fused with new and experimental arts-based practices.

Race, Place and Cultural Production in Carmel-by-the-Sea

Carmel-by-the-Sea, a newly developed artist’s village located on the central California coast, claimed for itself the title of the first year-round little art colony in the nation, one that boasted an elaborate infrastructure including an experimental community theatre, communist study groups, dada-inspired balls, ‘straight’ photography, music festivals, and literary work of all stripes. This chapter describes the strange blend of intellectuals, bohemians, socialists, and businessmen that made the Carmel colony exemplary and excavates the history of land development for the high-end tourism and real estate economy on the Monterey Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century. As local newspaper articles, real estate brochures, and guidebooks reveal, this small village used emergent real estate development and cutting-edge marketing techniques to position itself as what Richard Florida might call a ‘creative city.’ These helped to promote the area to a predominantly white middle and upper class with the time and money to spend on tourism and leisure activities. This chapter fleshes out this economic history—one that importantly includes the racially targeted displacements of Chinese fishermen to make way for the artists and tourists—and connects it to a remarkable scene of modernist primitivism in Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon.

Building the Beloved Community in Provincetown

The ‘beloved community’ formed in Provincetown, Massachusetts in tandem with the high period of Greenwich Village’s bohemian ‘little renaissance.’ Once a prosperous whaling port, the village of Provincetown had been undergoing economic decline and a marked ethnic shift in the decades preceding its development as an art colony. By the turn of the century, its Catholic, Portuguese population overtook its ‘native’ Yankee one; at this time, the village amplified its reputation as home to two successful summer art schools and boosted its image within a booming regional tourist economy as a quaint, Cape Cod fishing village. A coterie of moderns from Greenwich Village discovered Provincetown’s relatively underdeveloped beaches and wharves and by the teens had made it their home base, at least during the summer season. This chapter core of this coterie lived out their bohemian identities by drinking copiously, dressing wildly, bathing naked, and forming the performing group that would come to be known as the Provincetown Players. This endeavour brought together individuals with a wide range of talents (as well as those with very little talent but a desire to participate in the fun) for theatrical events that served to consolidate—physically, in the space of the theatre, as well as ideologically, through the content of their plays—a distinctly modern and modernist ‘beloved community’ of friends, lovers, and associates at a distance from the metropolis.

Eugene O’Neill: Superpersonalisation and Racial Spectacularism

Playwright Eugene O’Neill jumpstarted his career and had his first major successes in and from the little art colony in Provincetown; this chapter focuses on O’Neill, the Provincetown Players’ most prominent member, who lived and worked there between 1916 and 1922. The chapter shows how the compressed scale and distinctive mobility of Provincetown’s creative community was crucial to O’Neill’s success. There, O’Neill was exposed to the art colony’s distinctive amalgamation of modern and experimental theatre practices, including those dealing with writing, staging, and promotion. His own work built upon these: he was especially adept at harvesting, adapting, and exporting these practices from the rural outpost to the metropolitan hub of modernist activity in New York. This chapter argues that the formal and topical elements of O’Neill’s notorious play The Emperor Jones (conceived and written in Provincetown), along with its production and promotional strategies, were distinctive to the little art colony. There, O’Neill cultivated and marketed to a ‘special audience,’ drew topical inspiration from long-simmering racial anxieties in the region, and expanded upon the Provincetown Players’ theatrical practice of superpersonalization: a writing and staging strategy that amplifies the bleed between character and actor in order to heighten the audience’s engagement in the play. These strategies kindled his white audience’s ‘racial feelings’: a move that brought the relatively unknown O’Neill into the national and international public consciousness and created a still-resonant sensation about his work.

Robinson Jeffers, the Art Worker and the ‘Carmel Idea’

Poet Robinson Jeffers’ conflicted relationship with Carmel’s tourist economy and his own role, as its widely-recognized poet laureate, within it provides the focus of the second chapter in this section. Concentrating on the early, notorious narrative, Tamar (1924), this chapter extends a discussion of modernist primitivism in Carmel to show how Jeffers reformulates what might otherwise be understood as an exotic and entertaining spectacle of local colour as a scathing political commentary that is aimed both locally and globally. Tamar, a terrifying poem that centres on a dissolute young man who fantasizes about going off to war as a pilot in order to escape problems at home, indicates how the experience of international war profoundly affects the lives of a pastoral farming community on the West Coast. As Jeffers shows, being far from the national capitols of government and culture neither isolates nor insulates the family from modern violence. Further, the poem presents the tragedy of the World War as divine retribution for the long and violent history of Western colonialism and imperialism, material and spiritual traces of which have collected on Carmel’s gorgeous beachfront property.

Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Little Arts Colony: Institutionalising Creative Collectivities

This brief epilogue begins by looking at the current development of the little art colony at Marfa, Texas, then extends a consideration of the little art colony in the U.S. past mid-century. By this time, the growth of the modern tourist industry had largely overwhelmed the places examined in this study and, as the local economies expanded and diversified beyond arts tourism and became physically and financially accessible to the masses, their reputations as vital little art colonies became diluted and faltered. As a model of possibility, however, the little arts community seems to have spawned two significant iterations that continue to be alive and well in the twenty-first century: the widespread, not-for-profit, artist residency program that fosters cross-pollination across the arts and the ubiquitous ‘arts district’ of cities eager to attract and capitalize on the creative class as part of a development and investment plan. the sketches out the salient features of each that draw from the model of the modern little arts colony and considers the effects of institutionalization in each instance.