Frank Lloyd Wright's second acts...The case against anonymous book reviews
By Kelly Jane Torrance
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared, "There are no second acts in American lives." He clearly hadn't been paying attention to one of his contemporaries, America's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Time and again, just when it appeared the old master's career was over, an almost miraculous rebirth would occur. Perhaps his most famous work, Fallingwater, was produced in the mid-1930s, when Wright was in his mid-60s and considered washed up. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum wasn't finished until just after his death in 1959. In fact, more than a third of the buildings he made were completed in the last nine years of his life.
All of this is detailed in Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's Frank Lloyd Wright. The book is the latest in the Penguin Lives series of short, critical biographies written by accomplished thinkers. Huxtable is the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal and formerly chief architecture critic at the New York Times. She has written an engaging, readable, if at times over the top, look at the man and his work--rightly seeing the two as completely inseparable.
Then again, it would be well nigh impossible to write a biography of Wright that wasn't absorbing. As Huxtable summarizes in her introduction,
You would not dare invent Wright's life; it is too melodramatic. He survived scandal, murder, fires, divorces, bankruptcy, social ostracism, and pursuit by the FBI for offenses ranging from violation of the Mann Act, for transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes (twice, and in the appropriate sequence, each 'victim' became his wife), to accusations under the Sedition Act of allegedly encouraging his apprentices to refuse military service during World War II.
One wonders how Wright found the time to design 770 buildings in his lifetime. He left his first wife and six children for a client's wife. She in turn died brutally, along with her children and some of Wright's workers, when a deranged servant set fire to the house Wright built for her, and attacked those fleeing with an axe. Two more wives would follow, including one who was almost certainly mad. His main home and studio, Taliesin, was damaged by fire multiple times. And he often made more money as a dealer of Japanese prints than as an architect.
But it seems he couldn't have been anything else. From the time he was conceived, his mother had decided he would be an architect, putting up "tasteful" pictures of cathedrals on his nursery walls. Everything he did from his birth in 1869 was subsumed into that goal. From the ages of 11 to 16, he was forced to work summers on a family farm. It was backbreaking for the slight boy. But it gave him a feeling for the land that deeply affected his work, and he would always return to Wisconsin, despite his travels to Chicago, Los Angeles, Toyko, Berlin, and Vienna.
Huxtable is a formidable architecture critic, and her book is filled with long, precise descriptions of Wright's buildings. "They tell us the meaning of the life and what it was lived for," she declares. At times these descriptions turn into digressions that interfere with the flow of his life's narrative. There are many discussions of his later work in the early chapters. But they are also very good, explaining the stark originality of Wright's work in a way the general reader can easily understand. Of his early Prairie houses, she writes, "There was no rush to buy the plans, but the type was clearly established: a low, horizontal structure, rather than a high, straight-sided box, with a relationship to the land that the rigidly vertical dwelling had never acknowledged."
Of course, clients didn't always find those homes completely comfortable living spaces. But architecture is one of the few arts that also serves a function, and Wright buildings were true works of art. In this short, 251-page book (which sadly has no index), Huxtable manages to fit in some discussion of the builder's influences. He claimed to have next to none, of course. But then he also lied about his height and age. ("The life starts with a lie: a changed birth date, from 1867 to 1869, the sort of small, white vanity lie usually embraced by women but common also among men," Huxtable begins her biography--she is very good at beginnings.) And there are always two very different versions of most stories connected with Wright, from how he won commissions to why he abandoned his family and practice after 20 years of work and marriage--the one he told, and the one observers told.
The general reader will find this book an excellent introduction to the life and work of one of this country's most important creations. The only truly unfortunate thing about this volume is its lack of illustration. There are only eight black-and-white photographs of Wright's buildings, and none of the man himself, save for the cover. But one does not need to see much more than that to realize that Frank Lloyd Wright was a distinctly original, and distinctly American, architect, whose work will be a never-ending source of amazement and awe.
*****
James Bowman made a compelling case in the Wall Street Journal last week for the end of anonymous book reviews. Two of the most influential review repositories in the business, Publishers Weekly and the Kirkus Review, feature unsigned copy. "Both have licensing agreements with Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, so that not only booksellers but also many ordinary book buyers will be guided by the opinions of, well, who exactly?" Bowman wonders. "A librarian in Dubuque? A schoolteacher in Detroit? A graduate student at Duquesne?"
Bowman thinks such a policy does a great disservice to readers. "It suggests a magisterial, objective, authoritative source, unsullied by personal biases," he writes. "Yet the opinions actually on offer in these magazines are every bit as quirky, perverse and prone to bias as they are in publications where the writers must take responsibility for what they say." And of course, that bias tends to run liberal.
Bowman does not mention one important fact, however: Anonymous reviews are a throwback in our celebrity-driven culture. They do not allow reviewers to showcase--and show off--their own knowledge, heightening their own reputations rather than the authors they are appraising. With unsigned copy, the emphasis is on the review, not the reviewer. To many readers, this is entirely refreshing.
Sometimes, a name on a review can be helpful. Like most people, I have a few critics whose work I respect, and whose opinions help guide my own reading. But like anything else, a "name brand" sometimes encourages laziness: "So-and-so didn't like this book, so I don't have to read it."
But still, Bowman might have considered publishing his own article anonymously. Isn't it too soon after the Indian Ocean tragedy to be writing sentences like "Faced with this annual tsunami of literature, we all must grasp at any bit of solid support that comes to hand"?
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
