Wright Chat

[SpringGreen]

I hear that Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Massacre, by William Drennan, is coming out in paperback. I have problems with this book, and am hoping that some of the Wright fans here will write a negative review in Amazon.com to deflate its "4" star rating.

There are many problems I have with regarding this book. Drennan makes assertions that have no attribution in the endnotes (such as, on page 11, that "despite some grumblings by the Lloyd Joneses" that Anna married William C. Wright, when there is no endnote to back up the characterization of "grumblings by the Lloyd Joneses").

Drennan refers (in the hardback edition) to Jenkin Lloyd Jones (p. 14-15) as "a kind of Unitarian bishop," which is opposed to the very concepts of the Unitarian religion. He states on page 30 that Wright and his first wife were members of the Unitarian congregation in Oak Park, saying, "They [the Wrights] joined Unity Church, the local Unitarian congregation (Wright had designed the building)," when Wright did not design Unity Temple until years after he and Catherine Tobin were congregational members. Regarding the Lloyd Jones family, Drennan stated on page 9 that “the journey by sail from Britain to New York and then by Wagon and canalboat to the Helena Valley...," implying that the Lloyd Jones family came directly from the East Coast of the United States to the town of Spring Green, when it has been shown (through Secrest's biography) that it was approximately 20 years from their landing in New York City and their settlement in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Drennan wrote on page 31 that FLW met CR Ashbee in 1896, when sources say it was 1900; he stated on page 91 that Mamah Borthwick, upon being attacked at Taliesin in 1914, fell "wearily off her chair and sprawled on the tiled floor,” when this was a flagstone floor. He states on page 110 that Franklin Porter was 6 years old at the time of the 1914 fire. Franklin Porter was born in 1910.

I could go on, but I won't.

I worry that people who do not know about Wright and who stumble across this book will receive a wrong impression about Frank Lloyd Wright, his entire family, and Taliesin. So, if you have read the book and have problems with it, I am asking you to write a negative review in Amazon. Perhaps it will sell less if there are less stars related to the work. The book does not deserve 4 stars.

Thank you.
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"The building as architecture is born out of the heart of man, permanent consort to the ground, comrade to the trees, true reflection of man in the realm of his own spirit." FLLW, "Two Lectures in Architecture: in the Realm of Ideas".

[Mark Hertzberg]

Following is the review I wrote for wrightinracine.com
We have switched web hosts, so I am copying the review as I am unable to link to it.
Mark Hertzberg

The review is (c) Mark Hertzberg and cannot be reproduced without permission.

Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders by William R.
Drennan (Madison: Terrace Books, 2007)

Death in a Prairie House tells a riveting crime story, although the certain motive for the crime still remains a mystery. Prof. Drennan’s account of the brutal attacks weaves together conflicting eyewitness accounts and contemporary newspaper stories. Julian Carlton massacred Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Frank Lloyd Wright’s lover; her two children; and four others at Taliesin on August 15, 1914. Carlton, who was a servant at Taliesin, drank muriatic acid as searchers closed in on his hiding place after the murders. He died in jail several weeks later, before he could be tried, so there has never been a definitive record of what happened, and why. There still is not.

Literally the first half of the book (84 pages) takes the reader through Wright’s parents’ unhappy marriage, and divorce; and then through Wright’s escape from his work and his own marriage, when he and Mrs. Cheney went to Europe in 1909. These chapters of Wright’s life set the stage for the building of Taliesin, for readers who know little about Wright; they are familiar for readers who have pored through any number of other books about the him.

Drennan writes in the Prologue about the “outrage” in Spring Green that Wright’s paramour was living in his “love cottage.” He ends the Prologue asking, “What could Frank Lloyd Wright have been thinking?” We expect that kind of question from a television news anchor, but not from a scholar at the beginning of a book. Readers can form such questions on their own, rather than have them spelled out for them. The book is extensively footnoted (168 pages of narrative are followed by 35 pages of notes), but it is weakened by conjecture and by errors.

Drennan asserts that Wright designed the Charnley House in Chicago. That is subject to speculation, with many scholars of the opinion that Wright was executing Louis Sullivan’s ideas, rather than his own. Drennan incorrectly writes in a photo caption that Richard Bok’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall” sculpture at Taliesin was executed by Alphonse Ianelli at Midway Gardens. On the last page, he writes that Wright’s daughter, Iovanna, had his body disinterred from its grave at Taliesin, cremated, and his ashes mixed in with those of Olgivanna Wright, his third wife, at Taliesin West, in Arizona. That did happen, but it was done as one of the dying Olgivanna’s last wishes, according to her physician, not on Iovanna’s whim, as the author implies. Drennan relies heavily on Brendan Gill’s biography of Wright (Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: De Capo Press: 1998), a book that some Wright scholars say is based on too much speculation.

Although Ed Gein (said to be the inspiration for the character of Norman Bates in Psycho) and Jeffrey Dahmer are better known, Drennan opines that Carlton’s killings were more significant in the annals of Wisconsin crime. When he finally begins his account of the murders, it is with the admonition that “so much remains a mystery; there are no definitive answers to “motive, logistics, time.” He writes, on page 101, regarding a suggested timeline of the murders, “And yet it must be true.” However, he hedges in the next sentence, “Or at least something like it must be true...”

The three dozen pages of footnotes are cumbersome to refer to, and sometimes cumbersome to read. Drennan writes in a footnote on page 189 that since writing the narrative, he has reason to believe that he may not be correct in his description of some of the layout of the house. Why not correct the narrative?

Drennan sometimes introduces facts and ideas without explaining their context. For example, on page 35 we are introduced to William Winslow. The reader does not learn for another page that Wright’s first independent commission, the spectacular Winslow House, was built for him. Drennan does not explain Wright’s ideas about the Prairie style until page 38, several pages after we have been told about his new style of architecture. He gives us the pronunciation of “Mamah” only on page 41, long after we started reading her name. We are told that Wright learned of the murders in a phone call from “Frank Roth in Madison.” We never learn who Frank Roth was, or why he was charged with calling Wright with the news.

There is a paucity of illustrations. The book, most notably, does not include floor plans of the house which would help the reader visualize where the the murders took place, as Carlton laid his hatchet into his victim's skulls. A photograph of the living room at Taliesin refers to the “Wrightian” hearth. Who, but Wright, would have designed it? As we look at the draftsmen at work, we wonder if any of them were among Carlton’s victims.

Drennan’s thesis is that Wright’s work became “markedly (and understandably) more insular, more labyrinthine, even more fortress-like” after the fire and murders at Taliesin. Therefore, he continues, “the slaughter at Taliesin may well have exerted a significant influence on American residential design throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.” It is a dramatic theory, but it is not accurate.

Wright did not abandon the Prairie-style because of the murders. He wrote in his Autobiography that he was frustrated by both his work and marriage, when he closed a chapter in his career in 1909 and left for Europe. Wright had published a short article, “A Fireproof House for $5000” in the Ladies Home Journal in 1907, seven years before Carlton burned Taliesin down. Many of the homes he designed after the murders did not have prominent front doors, as Drennan points out, but neither did many of the ones he designed before the murders.

Drennan describes the Freeman House, a concrete block home designed in Los Angeles in 1924 as “aggressively vertical, thumbing its nose at Emerson’s old hunger for the horizontal line.” The site for the Freeman House allows for nothing but an “aggressively vertical” design. The concrete used in the five Los Angeles homes represented an evolution in Wright’s design work, not a reaction to the crimes. He designed his landmark concrete Unity Temple and the brick Larkin Administration Building a decade before the fire and murders at Taliesin. They are as fortress-like from the outside, and fireproof, as Drennan argues Wright’s post-1914 designs became. Finally, the Usonian homes designed after the 1930s, as well as Fallingwater and Wingspread, are no less organic and inviting than Wright’s Prairie-style work.

Should there still be any doubt about whether or not Wright significantly changed his designs after August 15, 1914, consider that when he rebuilt the smoldering Taliesin, he again used stucco and wood. In fact, the studio at Taliesin II (as Wright’s rebuilt home was referred to), burned down again, in 1926.

Death in a Prairie House succeeds in giving the reader probably every possible sceneario of the massacre to consider. It falls short of its promise in other respects.
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Mark Hertzberg

[SpringGreen]

That is a good review - I remember it when it came out, so thanks for fishing it out of the ether. I have to acquire the patience to see how Death in a Prairie House stands up against research and accuracy over time (hopefully I won't have to wait decades to see that happen).
_________________
"The building as architecture is born out of the heart of man, permanent consort to the ground, comrade to the trees, true reflection of man in the realm of his own spirit." FLLW, "Two Lectures in Architecture: in the Realm of Ideas".