The Wright Stuff : FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: A Biography, <i> By Meryle Secrest (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 564 pp.)</i>

When Frank Lloyd Wright was born, Emerson and Whitman were still alive, and Thoreau but a stone’s throw into death. America was pioneer in promise, but rural in realization, with life centered around the small town and the farm. Forests were cleared, streams dammed, fields cultivated.

It was this tamed land which was called “Nature” and revered, not the wilderness, which was a generally feared place of mystery, hardship, lawlessness, danger, malarial and other bug-borne diseases. When one speaks of Wright’s hunger for extracting Nature’s secrets, for finding “tongues in trees” and “books in the running brooks,” then, it is the significant outcrop, the contrived view, the meadow with its stream and slow hill, the shrewdly placed tree, the walled garden, that should be meant. Wright’s attraction was to Mother Nature, the symbolic figure who teaches us our lessons gently, who nurtures and provides, whose directness and simplicity is presumably a moral standard, and who stands in for all those actual mothers who can’t compete with Her scope and Her grandeur.

There were many mothers in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life: actual, substitute, and symbolic. His is a familiar, almost mythological, story: His biological mother, brimming with expectations, marries, only to become deeply disappointed in her husband, an itinerant musician and preacher who fails to provide and ceases to satisfy. She thus begins to focus her attention, rest her hopes, and place her trust, upon her son, to whom she gives her love as she might have shared her soul and its vicissitudes with another husband. Although her son’s misfortunes will indeed be hers, his successes will also be shared, since his strength will redeem the early error she made in casting her lot with weakness, and his accomplishments will be her vindication, his triumphs, her eventual revenge.

The benefit of a bitter mother’s bitter love is ambiguous. Such a son often has a solid sense of his own worth, for the whole of the world which matters to him in his growing moments has supported, consoled, and encouraged him. But how can he avoid the sense that to some degree he is a surrogate, to some extent a tool, or feel his mother’s will working its way through his, to wonder how much of his metal is her ore? If, in addition, the son supplants his father in the politics of the family, then perhaps he will have to rebel as his mother did, opposing every misguided, uncaring, and benighted authority, sending them away like unwanted relatives, and assuming, for himself, the patrimonial position.

But to do so he will also have to free himself, if he can, from the hand that has handed him so much, forgiven him everything, given him its guidance if not his genius. Consequently, every natural act of opposition will be essentially dialectical, for he will be grateful to what has bound him, a rebel against his own first cause, dependent upon feminine devotion, and suspicious of the fidelity and competence of the masculine world, while working in a realm men thought of as their own, even when they were designing a house that would be curtained, cooked in, and called by a missus, “her home.”

Young Frank Lloyd Wright must have been insufferable to those who were allowed to see how insufferable he really was. He had the most grandiose conception of himself and his abilities (furnished by the manias of his mother, Anna, whose models for him were Lincoln to begin with and then Christ), yet he had done nothing to give substance to these dreams. He performed poorly in school, dropped out of a university he never should have been admitted to in the first place, ran up debts like his dad, put on arrogant airs, dressed like a dandy, played every card whose surface was slick, and like his dad, too, jumped from task to task, abandoning any activity which began to make serious demands, and probably getting his first office by pull as well as push.

Yet, however much his behavior belied them, Wright deeply believed in the ideals he’d been brought up to revere: that nobility, sacrifice, and service were due society; that individuality, liberty, and achievement were essential for the self. Poor, ignorant, imprudent, he complained if someone more deserving received a better wage. At the same time, when he was suddenly surrounded by superior skills and better training (in Joseph Sillsbee’s architectural office, where he fell like some coin tossed in a fountain), he energetically strove to close the gap.

It is here (and in the firm of architect Louis Sullivan as well) that Wright--though still faking, still conniving--began to acquire that education he had always claimed to believe in: disciplining the hand, stocking the mind, returning from storage all the old memories of the eye, committing the whole of one’s soul to the least line. It was here, too, that he began to slap the dust from his rural seat, eventually adding Europe to the coats he wore to cover the country rube. All the same, he soon moved his studio into the protective confines of his home; sought, all his life, familiar and safe surroundings for his work; and eventually returned to the Wisconsin farm and valley he loved, remaining there even when it paid him off in tragedy.

Soon, after living and learning in the wicked city, and despite his birth mother’s frantic opposition, Wright acquired another “mother.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s first wife was dutifully adoring, even after having borne him six children and given him that many excuses to enlarge and redesign his studio and their Oak Park residence.

In a new biography of Wright, Meryle Secrest provides us with some decent word-pictures of Wright’s work and handles with skill and grace the data recently made available through the Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and The Getty Center for the Study of the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica. All the same, her build-up of his family background and her rich account of his many marriages may seem to overwhelm every purely professional connection, leaving the architect and artist, even if bulky enough as a private person, still looking like a public shadow. I think that this disproportion, especially for Wright’s early years, is due to a decided lack of information, and I suspect that the absence of this material informs us of her subject’s own disconnection from much office camraderie and competition. Wright may have strutted on one stage, but he fretted on another.

The many scandals and tragedies of Wright’s life are familiar, but here we relive them fully, and Meryle Secrest treats each player fairly, restraining her prose, even in the face of bloodshed, to achieve a powerful effect. Any life is made of details, and few of these are dull. An artist like Wright, who will have a long life and an esteemed career, probably has to begin that life more than once. In any case, he leaves his first wife for the wife of a client, Mamah Cheney, who can aid him in his European education as well as mother him better than his actual mother, who has to love, cherish, and nurture six others. Wright erases the Celtic Cross from his architectural logo, so that only an empty square remains, an unusual symbol for the man who sought in his work a harmony with nature and the destruction of the box.

A servant whom disgruntlement has driven mad murders Mamah Cheney, her children, and several others, to the sum of seven, with an ax, in the meantime burning Taliesin and their bodies. This catastrophe, not the last to befall Wright’s tribute to his roots in Wisconsin, might have broken a less selfish man, or might have seemed the vengeance of God to someone more genuinely religious. Instead, it seems to have allowed Wright to fall into the arms of yet another woman, Miriam Noel, who represented even more of the wide world, and matched him, crochet for crochet, pose for pose, while offering the usual self-engulfing adoration . . . but only while high life in Japan was going on (Wright was building the Imperial Hotel, his great Japanese building).

Their relationship grew darker when she found herself sequestered in the rebuilt Taliesin, sniffed at by the country ladies of Spring Green, far from all artistic culture and the sources of her morphine. In a desperate letter to Noel, Wright was moved to confess this frank and accurate assessment of his character (as Meryle Secrest sums it up):

”. . . he had no personal culture . . . he was selfish and made everyone else suffer . . . he was self-deceptive . . . he would always ‘slip and slide and cheat’ to escape censure . . . he would not hesitate to ‘slay or betray or desert’ . . . he was ‘crooked’ . . . he was weak . . . he had pet vanities and . . . was a hypocrite.”

This evaluation ought to have troubled Wright, and did--but not sufficiently to support a change. He also understood something else about himself--his genius.

Once Noel drew a knife on him. At least once, he beat her.

Omitted from his list of failings, possibly because he was writing to a mistress, was Wright’s habit of dismissing his talented young associates as soon as their skills and ambitions seemed ready to rival his. He accused Rudolf Schindler, among the more accomplished, of trying to take credit for the unshakeability of the Imperial Hotel, and dismissed Antonin Raymond when he set up an office of his own, “betraying” Wright, as Wright had betrayed Sullivan earlier with his own moonlighting.

Of Wright’s many surrogate mothers, none succeeded so well as Olgivanna Lazovich in the arena of wifely devotion, but Wright had barely installed his new love and his new love’s daughter at Taliesin when an electrical short occurred and Taliesin burned its second time, a Phoenix of flame. The deity did not appear to condone Frank Lloyd Wright’s habit of adultery, even if Wright did end by licensing his mistresses, thus allowing them a color more salmon than scarlet. Olgivanna was certainly as stalwart as he. “Taliesin lived wherever I stood,” she said to brace him. And one day she would own it and its Arizona double: lock, stock, and spirit.

Shadowed by the FBI for “un-American” activities such as opposing U.S. entrance into World War II, harassed by his second wife, broke but rebuilding Taliesin anyway, threatened with warrants, suits, and writs, finally, for a brief time, jailed, and forced to auction off his prized collection of Japanese prints at a fraction of their value, Wright displays once again his enviable ability to design under duress, to conceive originally, clearly, wonderfully with one self, while the other self is under siege, to allow his buildings to possess an integrity he knew best only in their bricks. The brilliance of these buildings, both built and merely inked, is, by even the finest history of his life, inexplicable. The opera, in every sense of that word, goes on, in all its glorious detail and vulgar incident, nearly to the end, and Meryle Secrest keeps every instrument in tune to play the tale according to the score.

At last, around Wright swam a school, and soon there was a school that Olgivanna presided over, too. Wright still designed, but now his sketches were submitted to the inevitable dilutions of a team. Team . To an artist a terrible word. Driven by admiration, and, one supposes, some understanding, to seek the master, apprentices were then led by the nose through the routines of dreary imitation. Wright was eased into idolatry, and his hubris, always huge, was slowly covered with gilt until it gleamed. In his niche, he was not required to move. He would not be the first sinner to see sainthood. Mother was to make him, eventually, the father, son, and holy spirit, even after he became a ghost.