Books: Vol. IV, Marriage IV

EDGE OF TAOS DESERT—Mabel Dodge Luhan—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Until this week Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan had successfully concealed from most readers the fact that the three volumes of her Intimate Memories (Background, European Experiences, Movers and Shakers), most scandalous of contemporary autobiographies, were written at the urge of a moral purpose as lofty as any that ever moved a penitent at a revival meeting. Now in Edge of Taos Desert Mabel Dodge reveals how, in 1917, at Taos, N. Mex., she was converted by a ''spiritual therapy" which wiped out the effect of 38 years of neurotic floundering, beginning as a poor little rich girl in Buffalo and Europe, continuing steadily as she became a collector of writers, artists, labor leaders and such, who flocked to her famed salons in Florence and New York, involving her in tormented marriages, love affairs, desperate experiments in psychoanalysis, a dozen kinds of mystical philosophies.

Half-believing friends' stories about the occult powers of the Indians, she became so excited by her first glimpse of the Southwest that she got off the train and hired a rattletrap automobile to speed her arrival. "Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty! ... I am Here," she announced to the "mythical" New Mexico landscape. Soon tired of Santa Fe, where the people were "too eager and cordial" ('"Why," she said, "should they be so glad to see me?"), she found in the village of Taos, 75 mi. from Santa Fe, what she was looking for. She rented the wing of a big house owned by a rich, eccentric Englishman, who warned her against Indians and savagely slandered the few other whites in Taos, most of whom hated each other like poison.

Barely waiting to unpack, Mabel set off with a bag of oranges to break down the Indians' aloofness. Hastening her steps was the dread thought that "if people knew about what is here, they'd rush upon it and simply eat it up. ..." With a possessiveness much like that which she had formerly felt toward artists and writers, she declared fiercely: "I'd hate to have these Indians get recognition! Why, it would be the end of them!" Her first stop was at an adobe hut where a blanketed full-blooded Indian named Tony Luhan sat on a hassock beating a drum and singing. Tony was a large-featured, husky, hairless, sedate man with "nice eyelids" and beautifully plucked eyebrows. When he finally looked up, Mabel "saw his was the face that had blotted out [husband] Maurice's in my dream." Tony said he had seen her before too—also in a dream.