BOOKS

As great as he said he was

Gavin Stamp

MANY MASKS: A LIFE OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT by Brendan Gill Heinemann, f20, pp.544 Architects, on the whole, are a pretty dull lot. They tend to be conventional and respectable, looking more like bank mana- gers than artists. Scandal seldom attaches itself to them, and when it does it is of a boringly predictable sort, as with John Poulson. Otherwise the only occasional vice is an excessive fondness for the bottle, characteristic of the profession. It is this overpowering respectability, often con- veyed through photographs of serious faces, embellished with full beard or luxu- rious moustache, that made the late John Betjeman find the contemplation of Victorian and Edwardian architects and, even better, their wives a source of con- stant amusement.

But what of Frank Lloyd Wright? He is the supreme exception to this generalisa- tion, for his.private life was as racy as his professional achievements were extraordin- ary. No other great architect has ever generated such scandal. First, in 1909, he shocked the respectable suburb of Oak Park, Chicago, where stand so many of his early works, by abandoning his family and running off to Europe with the wife of one of his clients. Then, five years later, Wright's former neighbours were able to feel that the architect's flagrant unortho- doxy met with nemesis. A black servant at his new home in Wisconsin, Taliesin, went berserk and slaughtered seven people in- cluding Wright's offending mistress and her children before setting the house on fire.

The great architect himself lived on for almost half a century, continuing to scan- dalise yet more neighbours by living in sin before marrying two more wives, pub- lishing endless self-justificatory polemics and keeping gossip columnists well sup- plied with copy. Nor is it just the scandal that makes Wright's life extraordinary. Fancying himself as a philosopher in the mode of Whitman and regarding himself as the architectural conscience of America, contemptuous of European influences, Wright was a constant, consummate myth- maker, particularly about himself. Elo- quent, plausible, passionate pseudery poured from him, all to be faithfully recorded by wives and acolytes at what became a sort of commune or monastery: the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin.

This foundation, which still owns Taliesin and the Wright archive, had to be created by friends to protect Wright from himself. Not the least of his vices was extravagance. Always in debt — for which he was once briefly imprisoned — he was notorious for never paying his bills and equally notorious for always demanding more money from his clients. And yet the clients kept coming, despite the fact that the final bill was always several times the original estimate, despite the fact that the roof almost always leaked. In these last failings, Wright has much in common with other famous modern architects, notably Le Corbusier. But it did not matter everybody knew he was an artist and that a Wright house was something special. One client's wife wittly apologised to a guest for the fact that buckets were strewn every- where by remarking that 'This is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.'

In a career which spanned seven de- cades, Wright somehow always got away with it. He had the first and most impor- tant attribute of the successful architect in abundance; that is, charm. A supreme egotist, Wright knew he was a genius and simply expected the world to agree with him. Eventually, the world did. After some years in the wilderness, Wright became immensely famous, in old age an institu- tion. Although both architect and author denied it, Wright was clearly the inspira- tion for Howard Roark, the apostle of pure, ruthless individualism in Ayn Rand's novel of 1943, The Fountainhead. But when the book was made into a film, having the architect-hero played by Gary Cooper was less plausible. For Wright remained an old-fashioned dandy in the tradition of Whistler or Augustus John. He wore his hair unfashionably long, affected cloaks and extravagant hats and wore high heels to compensate for his diminutive stature (a physical characteristic he shared with other 'moderns', like Voysey). When Marilyn Monroe commissioned a house from Wright, her then husband, Arthur Miller, found that the great architect re- minded him of W. C. Fields.

The literature on Frank Lloyd Wright is immense yet, until now, no book has done justice to his colourful life. There has only been Wright's own Autobiography, a masterpiece of egomania, myth-making and selective amnesia. The reason for this is simple: plodding art historians cannot cope with drama and scandal while the many hagiographers have merely repeated the `facts' Wright invented. There was also, until 1985, the problem that seems particu- larly to beset the United States: the surviv- al of the 'art widow'. Now, at last, the truth, almost all the truth, can be told.

Happily, it has been told with wit and relish, as well as with understanding and sympathy, by Brendan Gill. Mr Gill's peculiar strengths are several: he knew Wright in the architect's sunny and vigor- ous old age and he is not an architect or architectural historian. Instead, he is a novelist, poet, theatre critic, reviewer and biographer who has been writing for the New Yorker for over half a century. He has now produced what is surely the most gripping architectural biography ever writ- ten.

It has long been known that Wright was a prodigious liar who was quite unabashed when caught out — 'well, there you are!' he would say. Like many artistic prima- donnas, anxious to exaggerate the degree of their prodigy, he lied about his age, claiming to be born in 1869 (and thus a contemporary of Lutyens) when he was, in fact, two years older. Mr Gill has exposed much more mendacity, particularly about Wright's family background and his rela- tionship with his mother. Yet the myths are so powerful, reinforced by the heroic orthodoxy of the avant-garde, that Mr Gill confessed that he was at first incredulous at some of his discoveries. There is the case of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, one of Wright's finest creations, now, alas, des- troyed. The myth is that Wright's special `floating' foundations enabled this building almost alone to survive the 1923 earth- quake. The truth is that not only did most modern steel-framed structures come through the disaster but also that Wright may have sent himself the telegram that he proudly printed in the autobiography:

`HOTEL STANDS UNDAMAGED AS A MONU- MENT OF YOUR GENIUS . .

Yet this biography does not debunk. As with Franz Schultze's recent admirable study of Mies van der Rohe, to demytholo- gise a ruthlessly single-minded and egocentric artist does not undermine the quality of his work. Mr Gill admires almost all of Wright's buildings and adds to our understanding of them by describing the crises, emotional blackmail, lies and mis- takes surrounding their construction. He is best on the early work, in particular the low, spreading so-called 'Prairie Houses' (another Wright myth: they were really suburban), and he is right to emphasise Wright's debt to Europe, to the Vienna Secession, to Jugendstil and other turn-of- the-century movements, which the jealous architect was careful to deny. More could have been made of this, and certainly much more of other contemporary influences, such as that widespread interest in pre- Christian America, in the exotic monu- ments of the Ancient World, that informed Wright's strange Californian concrete houses of the 1920s.

As for the late work, the product of the period when he knew the architect as a friend and drinking companion enjoying the luxury he considered his due at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Mr Gill suggests few precedents and influences. Perhaps that is right. Although a house like 'Fall- ingwater', with its horizontal planes cantil- evered out over a waterfall, owes some- thing to the 'International Style' Wright affected to despise, other later buildings like the Guggenheim Museum exhibit a quite unprecedented geometry and formal inventiveness. They are also characterised by a decorative quality approaching vulgarity which makes their originality still elude fashionable acceptance. Such designs emanated from the subconscious of an extraordinary artist in total command of three dimensions in his transcendant maturity. As the master would say, 'I just shake it out of my sleeve'.

The title of this book suggests how Wright the exhibitionist and scoundrel can be reconciled with Wright the great architect. Like many great artists, Wright adopted a mask as a defence against the world. What was unusual was its out- rageousness.

Behind a succession of masks incessantly put on and taken off, Wright achieved his unity of person and purpose not in the traditional way, by withdrawal from the world and a disciplined suppression of individual identi- ty, but, on the contrary, by a flagrant exploitation of his identity, carried out upon the most prominent platforms available to him. The world learned to salute Wright upon his accomplishments, but never so eagerly and so often as he saluted himself; disconcertingly, he was discovered to be as great as he said he was.

Mr Gill's illuminating metaphor of a mask made me look up the last pages of Christopher Hussey's Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens: . . . They beheld a face that they had never seen, from which the superficial contours had fallen away to expose the features of the spirit which had been within. 'His face in death, a little fierce and bitter, seemed free at last from all necessity of evasion . .

Is it the 20th century alone that seems to require those few real geniuses in architecture to perform roles, to play games, to evade and deceive, to behave disgracefully in order to realise a vision? That other egomaniac, mythmaker and tyrant, Le Corbusier, comes immediately to mind.

It is appropriate to mention Lutyens in discussing Wright. Both men began their careers as fashionable domestic architects and it would have been illuminating to compare their work, with Wright's inferior building craftsmanship being compensated for by greater formal originality. Also, Lutyens was almost the only contemporary whom Wright felt able to praise, although he thought that the Englishman had failed to come to terms with the modern world as he had. I wish Mr Gill had quoted a splendid appreciation Wright wrote in 1951 of the Lutyens Memorial volumes: . . .a new world reaction like mine could not be trusted to do more than voice admiration of the love, loyalty and art with which this cultured Architect, in love with Architecture, shaped his buildings . . . The symbolism of the period Sir Edwin Lutyens represented is being superseded by practice of the principles of Organic-structure em- ploying to the utmost the materials, machin- ery and men of the Machine Age — the era we now live in — as profoundly worthy, even now, of the love and interpretation of the Architects of the era inevitably ending with Sir Edwin.

— wonderfully typical Wright prose that manages to blow his own trumpet.

Mr Gill has written a profound psycholo- gical study that has freed the greatest American architect from the myths of his own making and has made him come alive — as the greatest American architect.

Despite a few shortcomings, his book belongs on the shelf with the few great classics of architectural biography that we have, such as Summerson's Nash, Saint's Norman Shaw and, of course, Hussey's Lutyens.

`God help him if he gets a taste for alcohol.'