Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders

Epilogue: The Legacy of Fire

Epilogue The Legacy of Fire One can look at [Wright] and be awed by the dimensions of . . . the achievement. . . . On the other hand, when you look at who he was as a human being, he was so incredibly at the mercy of his emotions, he’s at the other end of the spectrum. He’s barely a human being. Meryle Secrest At some point, you have to forgive Frank Lloyd Wright for his excesses, his ego, his sensitivities, his horrible relations with his kids, and realize, on balance, that here was an extraordinary contribution to human history. Ken Burns As the critic Paul Fussell so hauntingly records, the summer of 1914 is etched in the West’s “modern memory” as the ironically benign prelude to our loss of cultural innocence, of any grounds for rational optimism. In England, of course, that particularly glorious summer offered up little hint of what would follow: the Somme, Passchendaele, the Ypres Salient, Verdun. Recalling the hordes of men who flocked so eagerly to London recruiting stations in 1914, poet Philip Larkin can only wonder at it all: Never before or since, As changed itself to past 154 Without a word—the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. And in Wisconsin, Taliesin, the apotheosis of the Prairie house, so long in its loving conception, was destroyed in three brutally short hours. So for Frank Lloyd Wright, too, “never such innocence again.” One marker of Wright’s loss, in the wake of his desertion of Catherine and elopement with Mamah, was the brochure he published in connection with his 1914 exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, a bully pulpit from which he could complain publicly (and violently) about the decline of his reputation since his flight to Europe. The brochure includes Wright’s essay “In the Cause of Architecture.” He had written a treatise with the same title back in 1908, just before the “hegira” and his subsequent exile at Taliesin. That one, however, had been marked throughout by a happy optimism about the capacity of democracy and the American suburb to reconcile the competing demands of societal norms on the one hand with the imperatives of the individual on the other. All that optimism is renounced in the 1914 “In the Cause,” an essay that has been characterized as “an unrelievedly morose diatribe” against the new architecture, by which Wright primarily meant the work of his host of imitators, parasitical hacks (in his view) who had stolen his ideas without attribution or due reverence. The problem at the time with “the prairie house bandwagon,” says Twombly, was that “everyone was climbing on board, but few recognized Wright as the driver.” And Wright was infuriated. Back in the 1890s, he himself had entered into the profession “alone, absolutely alone,” he said, and he expected similar individuality from his competitors or, failing that, full credit for his trailblazing efforts in organic architecture. And Wright never relinquished this bitter animosity toward his ostensible colleagues ; he railed at them for the next forty-five years. Wright’s “belief in the existence of a conspiracy to exploit and discredit him,” Twombly speculates, “may have been a manifestation of mild paranoia. Certainly he displayed suspicious symptoms. . . . [U]nless Wright received unquali fied praise and total credit for the prairie movement, he suspected treachery and evil intent.” Epilogue:The Legacy of Fire 155 Gone, too, was his former Whitmanesque confidence in democracy, a faith that had always sustained him, his father, and his Lloyd Jones kin. As a result of his experience with the popular uproar over his taking a mistress and the heavy professional price he had paid for it, democracy for Wright was now no more than “the Gospel of Mediocrity,” a social construct designed to crush the iconoclast by failing to ground itself in “the absolute individualist as the unit of its structure.” In democracy’s place, Wright seemed to call for a kind of wild, anarchic libertarianism, in which such an “individualist” would be freed from the constraints of all lawyers, creditors, politicians, and moralizers—specifically, the kinds of people who sought to restrain him and Mamah. And when Taliesin burned, Wright suffered a loss of a more tangible kind: the five hundred copies of the great Wasmuth monograph that had been reserved for American distribution also burned, delaying full recognition of...