Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (review)

Abstract

362 biography Vol. 2, No. 4 concern: "this is one of those letters, characteristic of Hamilton, which seem rational on the surface, but if dug into reveal ideas far from rational" (p. 319). Mr. Flexner seems to have little conception of genre. He looks down into Hamilton, but neglects to look across the bridge of common form—love letters, denunciations, claims for preferment and so on—to others trapped as well as liberated by the limits of language and the constraints of custom. I would suggest, too, that Hamilton's reflective letters of self-justification, which are crucial to Mr. Flexner's interpretation, deserve more cautious treatment than he accords to them—especially those sent to Schuyler and to McHenry on the occasion of the break with Washington. That Hamilton was an outsider is obvious, but important. It raises questions about the relationship of Hamilton's character and upbringing to West Indian society as a whole that cannot (in the present under-developed state of Caribbean social history) be fully answered. It also leads one to ask: who were insiders? Robert Calhoon ends his review of Shaw's book on John Adams with the comment that Adams was "a misfit . . . doomed to be deeply involved and slightly out of step." Surely very much the same could be said for Hamilton. Perhaps Hamilton's separateness consists not in his psychological troubles , but rather in his lack of a saturation in a didactic and moral culture , whether of the kind in which Adams, or Franklin, or Jefferson had been immersed. Mr. Flexner is helpful in provoking renewed thought about the relationship between the characters of the Founding Fathers, and the social and cultural matrix from which they grew. And he reminds us, by default, that it is a part of the biographer's task to establish what men have in common as well as what they bring uniquely to bear from their personal circumstances. Mr. Flexner is liable to submerge the achievements in the man; Broadus Mitchell is more likely to err in the opposite direction. But it is Mitchell's two-volume biography (1956) that remains the essential reading. The Hamilton presented to us by Mr. Flexner I do not find believable. Colin Brooks University of Sussex Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture . New York: Wiley Interscience, 1979. 444 pp. $20.00. A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright should be an important event. Unquestionably the greatest American architect, he had a long reviews 363 and extraordinary life, and has yet to inspire a biography that could in any sense be called definitive. Robert Twombly's new book adds to the store of information but fails significantly to do justice to the man and his work. An architect's biography, if it is to be more than a catalog of events or a critical analysis of his work, must address how the work came to be. A major reason why architecture is called "the social art" is that, to exist, it requires an interchange between architect and client. With an architect of the stature of Wright, this interchange is of crucial importance to understanding the work, particularly because Wright himself did so much to obscure its nature. He would have us believe that only his genius and eloquence convinced clients to accept his revolutionary architecture. In fact, there is every indication that, except when his personal behavior was so outrageous that it drove clients away, he enjoyed broad and loyal support from architects, critics and laymen. In Wright's case, there is extreme difficulty in separating the myth from reality, but this is only a heightened example of a problem common enough in the lives of artists; if the artist himself does not create the myth, then critics and the public will, because society demands that its major artists be eccentric. It is essential, then, that the biography of an artist be something of a cultural history, setting artist and work in a broader context. Because in architecture there is no work without clients, they are a crucial part ofthat context. In Twombly's book, we find scarcely a mention of clients. This might be expected...