Transcript
Introduction
Frank Lloyd Wright was born two years after the end of the Civil War and died two years after the launch of Sputnik, 91 years and 10 months on this earth. In the approximate middle of that near-century span, when he was 47, the greatest architect America had yet produced suffered a personal catastrophe that would have destroyed a man of lesser will and lesser ego, although perhaps that is just saying the same thing twice.
A crazed servant named Julian Carlton set fire to Wright's home and went about murdering seven people, one of whom was the woman Wright deeply loved and had been living with for the past several years, even his own wife kept praying, he would somehow come to his moral senses and return to his family. Five years before, in the fall of 1909, having already revolutionized American architecture and produced what other artists might have considered a lifetime's worth of work, Wright had abandoned his practice and gone off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick.
It was not just a local scandal, but a regional outrage and in some ways, a national one. She had forsaken her spouse and two little children, and he had forsaken his spouse and six children. And now after some relative quiet in their lives, 45-year-old Mamah Borthwick was dead. No, not just dead, but slaughtered in the most gruesome way. As much as this moment had been chronicled, poured over, dreamed into by what is now three generations of Wright biographers and historians, by play rights, by newspaper feature writers, by documentary film makers, by a handful of novelists, by conspiracy theorists.
Even as it's been dreamed into and performed on stage by an opera company, there is still so much about it that has to be imagined, conjured which is to say we know so much and simultaneously so little, which in a way is its own definition of Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Riddles wrapped up inside of riddles, triangles drawn inside of circles drawn inside of squares. One of Wright's lifelong dictums was that his buildings were like plants and trees that grow from inside out and come up from the earth craving the light.
He just needed to conceive the thing, draw the thing and make the thing. The thing has simply shaken itself out of my sleeve, the old shaman like to say, ever his own best publicist. In a 72-year career as architect and egotist, Frank Lloyd Wright shook more than 1,100 things from his sleeve, a staggering number by any artistic measurement. They were churches, schools, offices, banks, museums, hotels, medical clinics, an automobile showroom, a synagogue, a mile high skyscraper and one exotic-looking gas station.
Overwhelmingly, though, they were houses, residences, shelters for mankind. Not quite half of all his drawings and designs and studies were realized, and about 400 still come magically out of the American ground looking for the light. This book isn't intended as a Frank Lloyd Wright biography, not in any conventional sense. Depending on how you count, there are about eight or nine of those and never mind how many hundreds of historical studies, monographs, coffee table treatments, scholarly examinations of specific Wright buildings or houses or periods.
The Wright industry from calendars to place mats to bathroom glow lights to keychains, to books themselves, just churns on year after year. Rather, this book is meant to be a kind of Schenectady with selected pockets in a life standing for the oceanic hole of that life. The aim is to move the narrative backward and forward in time through these nonlinear pockets or storytelling boxes, trying not to confuse you while also taking things in a general chronological direction and arc from east to west that is from June 8, 1867, when Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Wisconsin to April 9, 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright died in his sleep one morning, two months from his 92nd birthday.
All right. So that is from the prologue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is, Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, and it was written by Paul Hendrickson. Okay. Before I jump into the rest of the book, I found Frank Lloyd Wright so fascinating, so interesting, so unique that not only did I read what -- this is close to like a 600-page biography that I'm holding in my hand, but I also watched several documentaries this week on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright.