These days it is difficult to think of Frank Lloyd Wright as other than a star architect and commercial box office hit.  The Guggenheim museum broke some of its own attendance records with its recent exhibition,  and an endless supply of books cater to the public’s interest in pictures of his work and sensational accounts of his life.  This review looks at a manifestations of the phenomenon, two books that focus on a tragic moment in Wright’s life.

In Loving Frank Nancy Horan, a journalist from Oak Park, Illinois, recounted the love affair between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright that began in the mid-1900s and culminated in her murder in 1914 when Julian Carlton, a servant working for Wright and Mamah, murdered her and six others at their home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  Using the work of scholars, but altering historical fact and inventing dialogue as well as letters, Horan created a romance novel that became a New York Times bestseller. Critics, particularly newspaper journalists,  have widely praised the book, and it has sold thousands of copies.  So what is wrong with historical fiction that takes liberties to produce a popular novel?

 Before answering that question I should disclose that I am one of the scholars whose work Horan has purloined. I suppose I should be thankful that Horan cited my book, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years  as “invaluable” (361).  Indeed, her book could not exist without it as she appropriated for her book not only the chronology I published, but also the preponderance of details about Wright and Borthwick in Europe.[1]  None of this material was cited, and the details were often mangled.  It is always strange to see years of research and writing lifted and presented as original work in someone else’s book, but we seem to live in age of such “borrowing.”  Much posturing about the book’s originality emerged both from the author and from general reviewers who know little about Frank Lloyd Wright.  Horan implies that in 2001 she learned about the cache of letters in Sweden between Mamah and Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist, but she neglects mentioning that Alice T. Friedman discussed and published excerpts of the letters in the JSAH in 2002.[2]

It’s a good thing that the book claims to be historical fiction because as history it is redolent with factual errors.  These vary from minor to major.  The accuracy of most of the minor details may be irrelevant to average readers of romance novels, but meaningful to scholars.  There is, however, a major distortion of historical fact that is so egregious as to be travesty: the motive for the murders themselves.  In the final scene when Carlton has gone berserk and sets Taliesin on fire with Mamah and others inside, Horan writes, “Julian was upon her. Grabbing her throat. Hands reeking of gasoline. ‘Whore!’ He was screaming, eyes insane. ‘Whore!” (337)  He may have been insane, but there is no evidence he thought Mamah was a whore or that moral condemnation of her relationship with Wright was a factor in the tragedy.  If Horan had spent time looking at the extant archival documents surrounding these events, she could have discovered the real motivations for the murders.  Carlton was suffering from paranoid delusions and had a violent, ongoing conflict with Emile Brodelle, one of Wright’s draftsmen. When Brodelle called Carlton “a black son of a bitch,” Carlton snapped and began his plan of murderous revenge.[3]  Brodelle was the target, but Borthwick and the others, including two of her children, more likely innocent bystanders.  Horan’s version makes sensational melodrama, but she has done Borthwick and Wright as well as her readers a disservice.   In an interview Horan stated “I think fiction can get at some truths that strictly historical accounts cannot.”[4]  But in this instance the real historical account provided the truth, and her account, a falsification.  This was indeed a tragedy of lovers who sought a life outside social convention, but even as a romance novel the story deserved more nuance and sensitivity.

If the book cannot be read as history, then why has it been so successful and how does it fare as a fiction? Much of the book’s success arises from its appeal to that core American value of not merely relishing the revelation of scandal, particularly sexual misconduct, but in seeing it punished.    Wright and Borthwick’s tragedy provided the fodder for a true morality play that parallels today’s media events, which range from exposés of sports figures to politicians and clergy. We love titillating accounts of salacious behavior and seeing sinners who defy social conventions get punished by an avenging angel representing moral rectitude.  More often than not that avenger is a journalist.    Horan tapped into this base, prurient tendency to produce the most successful exploitation of Wright’s life’s so far. 

I enjoy reading historical fiction when it is done well, but Horan’s book is a disappointing example of the genre. She misses capturing the atmosphere of the period, a necessity for all romantic treatments, and provides instead a mood that is too contemporary.  Horan’s casual diction adds to this defect: the characters appear as if they have just emerged from the 1990s  instead of being personalities from the turn of the twentieth century.  Wright sounds particularly unfamiliar. Contrary to what Horan states in a post script interview published in her book, Wright had written a great deal by 1909 and certainly had found his voice. Horan completely misses the character that emerges from how he spoke and what he wrote.

The problematic diction contributes to the rendering of the characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. Mamah comes off as a flawless saint, a good and noble post-Victorian heroine who succumbs to passion and discovers women’s liberation.  Ellen Key comes off as tawdry, even crude.  Anyone who has seriously read her books and letters would not recognize the personality Horan has drawn. When HoranAra has Key asking Mama “Does he give you good sex?”( 133), the phrasing so stilted that it is risible; Key was a distinguished, sophisticated and articulate person who certainly could speak idiomatic English. Wright, of course, gets major drubbing. Horan’s portrayal of his persona confoms to the standard line in current use: he may be a genius, but he is a selfish cad and an egomaniac. Horan renders him as sloppy and slattern, even vulgar. A friend of mine who read the book asked me asked how could Mama Borthwick love such a man. A good question indeed, and clearly there was more to the man than revealed here.  If Horan been more diligent in her research, she might have produced a richer book in which we would have an encountered in Wright a more complex figure.  Again, contrary to Horan’s claims, numerous letters between Wright and his closest allies—Charles Robert Ashbee, Darwin D. Martin, and William Norman Guthrie—reveal in this fraught period a sensitive and conflicted human being, not a cartoon figure. Utilizing this material would have complemented the story, but Horan never consulted the original documents.

Despite Horan’s claim of ennobling the condition of women and her publisher’s pitching  women’s issues to book groups, this journalistic venture was written for the sole purpose of making money, and the characters and scenography were constructed with movie rights dangling in the author’s peripheral vision.  We can only speculate now on which Hollywood stars will fill the main roles. 

William R. Drennan’s  Death  in a Prairie House focuses on the murders that culminate Horan’s novel. Drennan, a professor of English at  the University of Wisconsin—Baraboo/Sauk County, took, however, the opposite tact of attempting to recreate the Taliesin murders from factual sources in the format of a crime story.  His set up of Wright’s life prior to 1909 is conventional and derivative, introduces new errors and repeats old ones, including ones that have been long corrected.  (There is no evidence that Kuno Francke recommended Wright to the Wasmuth Verlag.)   He relies too heavily on secondary sources, particularly out of date biographies and an antiquated bibliography. Some of his deductions are dubious.  Like Horan, he cannot resist sensationalizing the story and stroking the prurient interest of the reader.  But unlike Horan, Drennan he did make an effort to visit the Wright Archives at Taliesin West to conduct research and examine documents, and he correctly identified the real motives for the murders: psychosis and revenge.  His contribution is to confirm unequivocally the motives for the murders. 

Drennan’s and Horan’s books may increase the public’s awareness of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dramatic life, but they do little in providing a general understanding of Wright’s major objective: the creation of an organic architecture that represents American democracy.  For that understanding the public and scholars will need to look elsewhere.  

BOOKS REVIEW:

Nancy Horan, Loving Frank. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007, 377 pp, unillustrated, paperback ed. 2008, $14 ISBN 978-0345495006.

William R. Drennan,  Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, c. 2007, 218 pp, 6 b/w illus. ISBN 0299222101; $16.95 paperback ed, 2008. ISBN 978-0299222147.