THE HOUSE IS LIKE A POEM. In viewing its stones, handcarved woodwork, and filigreed metal, one contemplates a diction of architectural form and design—similies, metaphors, and meter made material in a formulation intended to recall the styles of the past, evoke the handiwork of unschooled artists and artisans, and frame the life of a man, his family, and friends in a physically comprehensible world. Like a poem, the house has individual elements, separable—as might be phrases or figures of speech—into vignettes of striking color and versatility. Yet, like a poem, it is the fullness of the work itself, the entirety of the piece, which attracts, moves, and enchants. Like a poem, the house is the result of one man’s efforts to draw order from nature, cast form from diffusion, create unified meaning from random disorder, and, at the same time, produce and fulfill a highly personal aesthetic.
In writing what he intended to serve as his epitaph, to be placed on a tablet over the niche serving as his final resting place at El Alisal, Charles F. Lummis listed what he felt to be the four major accomplishments of his life:
He built this house.
He saved four old Missions.
He studied and recorded Spanish America.
In the past, historical treatment and analyses of the lifetime work of Charles F. Lummis have addressed the variety of his accomplishments—his work as a writer and editor, literary provocateur historian, preservationist, librarian, photographer, and Indian rights advocate, and his obsession with the founding and establishment of the Southwest Society and Southwest Museum. While the volume of descriptive and analytical material about Lummis is great, and currently burgeoning, one important work of Lummis’ life—El Ailsal, his hand-built home—has been treated in detail not at all.
El Alisal has been accorded attention, certainly, in the three key works which serve as the standard references on Lummis—Keith Lummis’ and Turbese Lummis Fiske’s Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West, Edwin Bingham’s Charles F. Lummis: Editor of the Southwest, and Dudley Gordon’s Crusader In Corduroy. That attention, however, has dealt with El Alisal chiefly as it provided the central focus of Lummis’ brimming social, cultural, and family lives. There has been no sustained, historical, biographical, descriptive and/or analytical treatment of El Alisal itself—despite the fact that in Lummis’ own estimation, El Ailsal stood second in the important works of his lifetime.
1898—Charles F. Lummis Building El Alisal Before the Turn of the Century represents a first installment of my personal attempt to remedy this. Although it was originally intended to serve as an important chapter in a much larger work focused on the entirety and complexity of El Alisal as a distinctive work of art, the completion of that work, at the present time, is uncertain. Nevertheless, this book offers a great deal of insight into the personality of Charles F. Lummis, his journeyman’s devotion of the task of designing and building his personal home-monument, the trials and tribulations of a man creating a work of art from native stone and wood, and, additionally, his compulsive reporting of the work in his daily diaries.
