Snow salting the sagebrush. Sun commanding the huge expanse of sky. The New Mexican landscape can present a paradox. For the well-travelled D.H. Lawrence, it was also a paradise: "I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I ever had. It certainly changed me forever . . . The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend."
Lawrence arrived in Taos with his wife Frieda in September 1922, responding to the "command" of Mabel Dodge Luhan that he should come ("Come, Lawrence! Come to Taos! . . . This is not prayer but command") and write a novel about New Mexico. Mabel, described as "a rich and frequently married woman from Buffalo who collected people and created situations", later gave to Frieda Lawrence (D.H. had a principled objection to property ownership) Kiowa Ranch with 160 acres; though expecting nothing in return, she was handsomely compensated with the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.
The pellucid light of New Mexico transforms and clarifies everything it touches. One can imagine the excitement with which the painter, as well as the writer, in D.H. Lawrence responded to the sight of the imperturbable blue backdrop to the snowgouged Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains. And the blood-coughing consumptive in him must have looked to the immaculate air and lofty altitude (Kiowa is 8,600 feet above sea level) with high hopes of a permanent cure.
Apart from his stories (St Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away were written there) and poems (he completed his major collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in 1923), D.H. Lawrence's New Mexican legacy includes a cluster of his paintings - banned from exhibition in England - which ended up in the manager's claustrophobic office at the La Fonda hotel in Taos. When I visited the hotel, I was told that the paintings had been temporarily removed to Albuquerque for restoration. The Lawrence "memorial chapel" on the Kiowa Ranch, to which his ashes were supposedly returned from France (where he died, aged 44, in 1930) and mixed with the concrete used in the altar, is a place of pilgrimage for Lawrence enthusiasts. The ashes are a hotly disputed issue: some commentators suggest that the Kiowa concrete was reinforced only by fireplace ash, the fiery writer's ashes having already been scattered on French soil.
Visitors to Mabel Dodge Luhan's adobe mansion in Taos are now invited - rather than commanded - to stay: it operates as a commodious and congenial Bed and Breakfast. For $110 a night you can sleep in the room formerly occupied by Tony Luhan, Mabel's Pueblo Indian husband, and enjoy "shared use of the D.H. Lawrence bathroom" where the once shocking writer, himself "shocked by the lack of privacy", painted the clear-glass window panels with cheerfully colourful images. Diligent housekeeper that he was (sweeping floors, making beds, baking bread and lemon tarts, washing and ironing clothes), D.H. Lawrence would have made an exemplary B & B host. Given time and health, he might also have served Mabel with the five-star New Mexican novel for which she yearned.