Tim Samuelson
Hendrickson, right, has penned a biography that reads like a thriller.
How do you create a portrait? I have been thinking a lot about this lately. Whether it’s visual — a painting or photograph — or a written portrait in the form of a biography or newspaper profile, should the artist or writer tidy up the subject, tie up all the loose ends to make a coherent package? Or does it make more sense to admit that no matter how long or how hard we observe or research a person, we will never really know all the answers?
This tension is at the heart of Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright (Knopf), Paul Hendrickson’s new biography of the great American architect and son of the Driftless. Hendrickson’s work is perhaps the Serial of Wright biographies, as much the story of the author’s own dogged research into the many mysteries of Wright’s long and eventful life as it is a chronicle of the architect. Hendrickson’s hand is everywhere in this, with plenty of commentary on why the story is being told the way it is, warnings that this or that will be explained several hundred pages later. I understand why devotees of conventional biography would object to this approach, but in Hendrickson’s hands, it is often thrilling.
There is, truly, never a dull moment in this examination of Wright’s life. Hendrickson begins with the tragic day of August 15, 1914, at Taliesin, when a servant named Julian Carlton attacked and killed Wright’s romantic partner, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two children, and several workmen, then set fire to the house. For max drama this is clearly the moment to begin, but Hendrickson also uses it as a fulcrum for Wright’s entire life (as evidenced by the title, Plagued by Fire). It is almost as if Julian Carlton had not existed, Wright would have had to invent him. If that sounds like an outrageous statement, Hendrickson’s book is full of them (that one, however, is mine).
However freewheeling Hendrickson’s approach, he is not always more successful than other Wright biographers in capturing an elusive personality. Here, Wright seems overwhelmed by the tumultuous details of his own life. Who is Frank Lloyd Wright? A wounded soul, or a man always looking to blow his own horn? I think the answer is supposed to be “both,” but it’s hard to feel that.
Yet Hendrickson’s encompassing gaze takes in important aspects of Wright’s times. He follows what may be blind alleys for whole chapters, and covers seeming tangents (like the career of Wright’s cousin, newspaperman Richard Lloyd Jones, or the life of Madison Usonian house owner Herbert Jacobs) at length. All important context. Even if Hendrickson doesn’t have all the answers, this is a valid approach. In these new contexts, Wright becomes more a man, and more a man of his time, rather than the unapproachable architectural genius.
And as the architect appears in these contexts, Wright — so often portrayed as timeless — takes his place in his own time.
Paul Hendrickson will appear at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Oct. 20 at the Central Library at noon.
