[This review originally appeared in Parabola, 1993, 18, (2), 92, 94.]
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Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: Knopf, 1992. |
"Character is fate," wrote Frank Lloyd Wright, "and mine got me into heavy going." Heavy going, indeed. In his remarkable life, this American architect faced bankruptcy, arrest, divorce, fire, earthquake, murder, social ostracism, professional indifference‑-in short, a barrage of misfortunes that would have overwhelmed a person less motivated, persistent, and able. Making sense of Wright's labyrinthine life is a formidable challenge, and Meryle Secrest's new biography succeeds admirably.
In twenty chapters, Secrest organizes Wright's career around four major periods marked by pivotal shifts in his professional and private life. This four-part division follows earlier biographical presentations and, in that sense, offers no groundbreaking insight. Rather, Secrest's accomplishment is a vivid, engaging presentation accomplished in part because she is the first professional biographer to have access to the complete Frank Lloyd Wright Archives of some 100,000 letters and other documents. These materials become a key means for her unraveling Wright's complex personality, which she interprets as a powerful tension between dramatically different positive and negative parts.
On the one hand, she explores Wright's personal impediments‑-his self-centeredness, arrogance, guile, ingratiation, and secret sense of being socially and professionally handicapped. Secrest interprets these flaws as grounded in a difficult parental relationship‑-a distant father who eventually left his family and, especially, an impulsive, headstrong mother determined that her son would reach the greatness out of which she felt she had been shortchanged.
Secrest demonstrates that, in several of her letters to her son, Wright's mother pointed to "Lincoln and Christ himself" as men that the young Wright must emulate. She also emphasized that, if she had been born with the same advantages as he, she could have accomplished great things. Secrest concludes that Wright felt he was not loved for who he himself was but only for the figure his mother wanted him to be. The result was "an unconscious courting of catastrophe and ruin, one calculated to stop him in his tracks as spectacularly as possible, but one that would always look like an accident."
Secrest also seeks to unravel the positive qualities of character that provided Wright the means to overcome the strong negative side of his personality. First, there was his acute visual memory‑-"it is doubtful whether he ever forgot anything he saw." These powers of seeing went beyond the surface of things to give Wright an innate sense of form, especially form in nature, which to him, as to his idols Ruskin, Emerson, and Whitman, evoked an emotional and sacred meaning.
Secrest argues that one of Wright's most profound architectural expressions of his love for nature was his Wisconsin home "Taliesin," which he named after the legendary Celtic poet-savior who was destined to die and reborn. She suggests that Taliesin was a "vision of acadia, of man's living in harmony with nature." Literally and spiritually, Taliesin became the center of Wright's adult life, and some of Secrest's most powerful writing deals with his building and rebuilding this home, which would later include an architectural school directed by Wright and his third wife, Oglivanna Hinzenberg, to whose life Secrest gives lengthy discussion, including the influences on Taliesin of Oglivanna's studies in the 1920s with the Greek-Armenian philosopher and spiritual teacher Gurdjieff.
In describing Wright's architectural accomplishments and philosophy, Secrest is best when she focuses on particular stories associated with a building's design and construction, especially as Wright cajoled and outwitted clients. In his life, Wright completed over 800 designs, and Secrest cleverly emphasizes buildings that have their share of amusing or intriguing stories‑-the Robie House, the Larkin Building, the Hollyhock House, the Imperial Hotel, the Guggenheim Museum, and, of course, Wright's masterpiece of a house, "Fallingwater," about which Secrest provides one of her most inspired descriptions:
The fact that [Wright] dared to place a house actually over a waterfall, the fact that he wrestled with the elemental forces of nature (forging fire and earth with water as he had with Hollyhock House), the fact that he spoke in terms of "consecrated" spaces: these state more forcefully than words Wright's almost demonic determination to weld man (the newcomer in an alien land) with his environment, make him inextricably part of it. They also show what one can only call Wright's essentially religious impulses of respect, wonder and celebration of the natural world.
A major weakness of Secrest's book is an abrupt conclusion that ends with the final few days of Wright's life and his death in April, 1959. Her account of Wright's complicated career is excellent, but she provides little evaluation of what his accomplishments might mean for the future. Overall, she seems to conclude that Wright was a premodern man attempting to divert, through his architecture, the drift of American society toward mediocrity, conformity, and materialism. He always upheld, she says, "the good, the true, and the beautiful."
Yet Secrest also seems to conclude that, in our postmodern age of relativist meanings, Wright's architectural vision is hopelessly romantic, emotional, and of the past. A more spirited defense of Wright's accomplishments would argue that his work, as he himself claimed when attacking the designs of Le Corbusier and other modernist architects, is of the future and points to a built environment that works both humanly and ecologically through a powerful evocation of people and place.
In his architecture, Wright regularly created the sense of well-being and repose that truly beautiful environments, whether old or new, always possess. In this sense, Wright's accomplishments offer a powerful beacon for making places in the future, and one wishes that Secrest had flushed out this hopeful possibility. Almost certainly, Wright's work is much more for the new millennium than of the present or past. A more forward-looking biography would better set the stage.