Lincoln Steffens by Justin Kaplan

Author:Justin Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Winds of Change

I

“T HE DAYS ARE WONDERFUL AND the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant,” Gertrude Stein wrote in “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia.” The grateful subject of the portrait had it printed and bound as a pamphlet, which then served as one of her passports to avant-garde when, in 1912, at the age of thirty-three, twice married, widowed the first time and bored the second, she decided it was time to leave Florence and seek purpose in New York. Despite the days and the nights and the life, Mrs. Dodge had discovered an old enemy, neurasthenia—in its various aspects of angst, accidie, melancholia, ennui, black dog—standing at the door of her pleasure dome in the sweet hills above the Arno. She moved into 23 Fifth Avenue, a stodgy building on the corner of Ninth Street inhabited, on its ground floor, by General Daniel Sickles, who encapsulated an appalling amount of ancient history, having murdered his wife’s admirer in 1859 and survived both a trial and the battle of Gettysburg. He was very old. In her own apartment on the floor above, Mrs. Dodge set about eradicating comparable vestiges of the century of General Grant and the Widow of Windsor. She had the woodwork painted white, the walls covered with white paper, the tall windows hung with white linen. A white porcelain chandelier hung from the living room ceiling, a white bearskin rug lay in front of the white marble chimney piece. In place of brownstone tonalities she introduced the lucent and favoring light of the Modern.

Fearing the return of boredom once the renovations were completed, Mrs. Dodge concluded on the advice of her psychiatrist that if she were truly to “live mentally,” she would have to send her husband away; and soon, in the boil that she generated, Mr. Dodge, a wealthy New Englander who dabbled in architecture, was hardly missed. As a matter of fact, in order to “mitigate his negative effect upon me,” she said, Dodge had encouraged her in her ambition “to know everybody. . . . I wanted, in particular, to know the Heads of things. Heads of Movements, Heads of Newspapers, Heads of all kinds of groups of people. I became a Species of Head Hunter, in fact. It was not dogs or glass I collected now, it was people. Important People.”

The “fresh and sparkling” whiteness of the apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue provided the background for Mabel Dodge’s celebrated “Evenings,” a domestic equivalent, on a busier scale, of Gertrude Stein’s Paris Saturdays at 27 rue de Fleurus. “All sorts of guests came to Mabel Dodge’s salons,” Lincoln Steffens recalled in 1931, “poor and rich, labor skates, scabs, strikers and unemployed, painters, musicians, reporters, editors, swells; it was the only successful salon I have ever seen in America. By which I mean that there was conversation and that the conversation developed usually out of some one theme and stayed on the floor.”

Her apartment also set off Mabel Dodge’s

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