‘I chose honest arrogance’

Frank Lloyd Wright’s tumultuous life is just as captivating as his buildings, finds Ivan Hewett

‘EPLAGUED BY FIRE by Paul Hendrickson 624pp, Bodley Head, £25, ebook £14.99

arly in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance, and have seen no occasion to change – even now.”

So said Frank Lloyd Wright, genius of American architecture. Reading this vast biography, one sometimes wishes he’d opted for a little humility, hypocritical or not. It might have smoothed his path on occasion, made life a little more bearable for the many who were caught up by his charisma, gave him their loyalty and adoration, and received only crumbs of affection in return.

Paul Hendrickson, Wright’s latest biographer, wants to persuade us that behind the braggadocio was a sensitive human being who felt the scars of his tumultuous life. As Wright himself wrote: “I’ve met with terrible misfortunes and accidents… there is a good deal of sadness back of all the bravado.” Given that he also confesses to having fatherly feelings only for his buildings, never for his children, one wonders whether this is a creature that would even recognise sympathy, let alone benefit from it. Hendrickson’s previous books include biographies of Hemingway and McNamara, so he’s clearly drawn to the troubles and emotional inadequacies of the titanic male ego.

Hendrickson tells us his book is not intended as a biography “in any conventional sense”. Rather it is meant to be “a kind of synecdoche, with selected pockets in a life standing for the oceanic whole of that life”. Chief among these

“pockets” is the murder of seven people by a black servant at Wright’s country house, Taliesin, in 1914, including the woman he left his first wife for, Mamah Borthwick Chaney, and her two children. Hendrickson begins here, and returns to the topic at intervals with ghoulish persistence, sparing us no details of the frenzy of

financial desperation, sexual intrigue, unsolvable riddle and last but not least the determination to survive – no, to triumph.”

That is typical of Hendrickson’s sentences in the way it accumulates weight like an incantation, piling up epithets and adjectives in a gathering wave, until it collapses at last in a sonorous cadence. It can make for a wearying read. Hendrickson’s determination to read tragic significance into every coincidence seems forced at times. Is it really so surprising that out of the hundreds of houses Wright designed, some were owned by clients who met with spectacular tragedy?

And yet the man at the centre shines out in all his maddening contradictions and vanities. Hendrickson has a very sharp ear for the tone of Wright’s diary entries, and an equally sharp eye for the subtleties of expression in a family photo (many of which are reproduced in the book), and he teases significances from them. A fond glance in an old photo and a remark in a diary convince the author that this priapic heterosexual (Wright’s third wife, the Montenegrin-born Olgivanna Lazovic Hinzenberg, complained that into his eighties he would pester her for sex two or three times a day) may in his youth have nursed romantic feelings towards male colleagues and friends.

The most touching chapters in the book are the ones devoted to Wright’s father, an itinerant preacher and musician, who the son in his autobiography cruelly accused of walking out on the family (he was more likely thrown out by their half-crazed mother). In later life – as if from a halfconscious desire to make amends – he would praise his father at the gatherings of his eager live-in apprentices, saying he taught him “how a building could be understood musically, as if it were a Beethoven symphony”.

Hendrickson discusses enough major works, plus a sprinkling of his favourite minor ones, to give the novice reader a sense of what made Wright special. He finds in the work the same generosity of spirit, the same vaulting ambition, and sometimes the same absurdity and kitschiness, that he finds in the man.

The real achievement of this painstakingly researched, hugely digressive, wildly overwritten but ultimately moving book is that it persuades us that this vastly gifted but desperately flawed man might actually have been loveable. Given the titanic scale of his failings, that is quite something.