Architecture’s Most Irredeemable Cad
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Version 0 of 1. PLAGUED BY FIRE The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd WrightBy Paul Hendrickson It’s a bit strange, if you think about it, that on lists of Top 10 architects — American architects; modern architects; architects anytime, anywhere — Frank Lloyd Wright’s name nearly always ranks at or near No. 1. Aside from the late, somewhat anomalous Guggenheim Museum in New York City, few people have visited Wright’s landmark works. Two of them, the Larkin Building in Buffalo and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, met the wrecking ball long ago. Most of his single-family houses, which constitute the overwhelming bulk of his executed oeuvre, remain in private hands. His three other publicly accessible iconic projects — Fallingwater (Mill Run, Pa.), Taliesin East (Spring Green, Wis.) and Taliesin West (Scottsdale, Ariz.) — receive only 285,000 visitors a year combined. Popular veneration of Wright rests less on his architecture than on a single picture of Fallingwater (shot on a downstream path where only the photographically intrepid venture), combined with keen curiosity about the man. In his 91 years, Wright, who suffered a raft of personal tragedies, concocted an intoxicating elixir of a persona, mixing rank self-aggrandizement with no-way-but-forward tenacity. He wore flamboyant, dandyish outfits and conducted ostentatiously public adulterous affairs. A gifted, relentless self-promoter, he devoted his picaresque life to convincing people that he, as visionary truth-teller, would repeatedly rise from life’s devastations to triumph over the opprobrium of a blinkered society. Now, adding to the many biographies, memoirs and rubbing-shoulders-with-genius accounts about Wright, comes Paul Hendrickson’s “Plagued by Fire.” Hendrickson, the author of an acclaimed biographical portrait of Hemingway, also subscribes to the received cant that Wright heroically embodied a Whitmanesque or Emersonian ideal, all big skies, prairie homes and American braggadocio. About Wright’s architecture, Hendrickson offers little insight, none of it original. His mission, rather, is to re-evaluate Wright as a person. Hendrickson, who unabashedly inserts himself with poetically construed dear reader whispers into his narrative, confesses that his is a hunt for Wright’s “humanity.” This, he contends, “was large — no, greater than large, in fact, immense.” Let’s get one thing straight. Wright was a cad. Even fervent champions of his architecture acknowledge that. Prudently, Hendrickson concedes the point, portraying the “arrogant and narcissistic” Wright as a status-consumed poseur and a “neglectful father” who abandoned his wife and six children for what he called a “spiritual hegira” to Europe with Mamah Borthwick, the spouse of a client. Hendrickson concedes too that Wright was a manipulative, serial liar; a cheat who soaked unsuspecting employers (Louis Sullivan) and clients (D. D. Martin, Herbert Johnson) of many thousands of dollars. Wright shored up his at-times tottering architectural practice by using his Taliesin Fellowship, the “school” he ran as a vehicle to get young, star-struck students to pay him an exorbitant tuition to do the work ordinarily performed by paid employees. Hendrickson wishes to establish Wright’s “fundamental decency as a person.” He tilts at this windmill with formidable energy and considerable literary imagination, with an earnestness at once lavish and puzzling. His case, elliptically advanced, rests on several claims. First: Wright deserves our compassion because upon him tragedy fell. Best known is the infamous torching, by a servant who was probably psychotic, of Taliesin in 1914, and the brutal murder of Borthwick, her two children and four employees. Also, Wright was by turns resented by co-workers, publicly ostracized as a home wrecker, rudely and prematurely written off as irrelevant by his professional colleagues, and often in the red, even while continuing to purchase Japanese art and, all told, about 85 automobiles. Second: Because Wright experienced emotions, some of them painful, he must be a fundamentally decent person. If you scythe away the thickets of Hendrickson’s alluringly presented prevarications, his assertion comes down to this: In his “Autobiography,” Wright confessed “shame” and “remorse” at some of his more egregious conduct. Hendrickson acknowledges that Wright’s “Autobiography” is notoriously riddled with deliberate falsehoods. Yet by these confessional moments, he is taken in, prompted to wonder if the “ideas we associate with Frank Lloyd Wright” are not “wrong, have long been wrong, or at least not wholly correct?” Third: Wright felt tenderly toward some people. Witness the delicacy with which Wright presented, in his “Autobiography,” his early friendship in Chicago with Cecil Corwin, an older architect whom Hendrickson credibly infers could have been a closeted homosexual, conceding, though, that he has no substantive evidence to offer, “only my instincts.” Hendrickson then builds on this inference, proceeding to maintain that Wright went out of his way to protect Corwin’s privacy. On that foundation, he confabulates a homoerotic (if unconsummated) relationship between the two men. So: Wright suffered tragedies, felt affection and felt pain, and treated a few people decently. Ergo, he was a man of deep humanity. That’s Hendrickson’s position. Not enough to revolutionize, not enough even to alter, our understanding of the man. In florid prose, Hendrickson recounts countless episodes tangential to Wright’s life or work, meandering onto all manner of occasionally interesting terrain. Breathless descriptions of the succession of owners of this or that Wright house; a stentorian account of Wright’s malfeasant cousin Richard Lloyd Jones and his role as a newspaper editor in fomenting the Tulsa race riots; and the Taliesin murders, to which Hendrickson salaciously, repeatedly returns. Hendrickson devotes many pages to his own peripatetic quest to establish that Julian Carlton, the African-American perpetrator, descended from slaves, though he admits: “It can’t be proven … I only strongly believe so.” Often it seems that “Plagued by Fire”’s subject is as much Hendrickson’s hunches and reverential fantasies as it is Wright’s life. Hendrickson suggests that Carlton, in his murderous Taliesin rampage, could have been motivated by racial resentment. His evidence? After the Civil War, Carlton’s father, Galon, appears on a “Registration Oath” list of prospective voters in Alabama, but not on lists of actual voters. That’s it. From this sole, unprovable observation that Galon’s vote might have been suppressed, Hendrickson weaves a fictive gothic tale about the father bequeathing motive to murder to the son: “This is the question that is hard to get out of the mind, once it has formed itself: Could the manipulated denial of Galon’s right to vote, after he had been allowed to take the oath, have caused a deep suppressed anger — that might have passed down?” Coyly, Hendrickson demurs that this is all “just speculations.” “Plagued by Fire” would be simply forgettable if Hendrickson weren’t perpetuating a romantic mythology of artistic genius that is at once tiresome, simplistic, long past its expiration date and wrong. Wright was an imaginative innovator and occasionally an excellent architect, but that doesn’t transform a scoundrel into a tortured genius, let alone a sympathetic character. About how well his Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., accommodated the parishioners, Wright reportedly told a colleague, “I don’t give a damn what the use of it is; I wanted to build a building like that.” No wonder clients stopped inhabiting some of his most celebrated projects in fairly short order. Much of Wright’s architecture is overly controlled and controlling: It’s telling that when he visited clients living in homes he designed, he would rearrange books and photos, to put away unsightly trinkets. In some of his houses, you can’t even look out the window without some ornament insisting that you attend to it instead. As in life, so in his architecture; Wright produced some beautiful objects, but he lacked genuine feeling for his fellow earthlings. Hendrickson is hardly alone in wishing that creators of moving, redemptive art were graced with souls that touch the deepest wells of humanity. Whatever our wishes, though, history repeatedly shows it just isn’t so. Some superb artists are troubled geniuses, others live ordinary lives. In the end, what matters is not the life but the work: its vision, its execution, its lessons, its relevance to the way we do and might live. But none of that is Paul Hendrickson’s concern. |