UBC: Drennan
Drennan, William R. Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. Madison, WI: Terrace Books-University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
I first learned of the terrible death of Mamah Borthwick because of the fuss over her gravestone. (And I swear I read an article about her original gravestone and the question of who placed it--certainly not FLW as one internet source claims: he would never have put her married name on it--but I can't find the dang thing.) I was intrigued, and thus pleased to come across Death in a Prairie House.
This is an excellent book. Drennan has a lovely prose style, he puts his narrative together cogently, and while he is sympathetic to his protagonists, he is dryly unimpressed with their rhetoric. And he has no illusions about Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was not a monster, but he was a narcissist of an exceptionally exalted degree. Anyone who can convince himself that in deserting his wife and six children he is actually doing what's best for them is a person with a gift.
It's difficult to get any sense of Mamah Borthwick herself, and I'm not entirely sure if that's because she left none of her own writing except her translations or if the black hole of Wright's ego drained all the individuality out of her--or if Drennan, for all his careful distance, got sucked in, too, and couldn't manage to see Borthwick around Wright. Or some combination thereof. But she is definitely an absence at the center of the book, seen only from Wright's solipsistic perspective. In talking about Wright's first marriage, Drennan quotes Wright's autobiography: "Frank had long dreamed of an ideal mate, some 'intimate fairy princess,' as he put it, a 'muse [and] selfless helpmate' who would unconditionally adore him . . . and spur him on to professional glory" (Drennan 27). His first wife failed by doing exactly what he asked of her: "Catherine bored him: no longer the golden girl of the 1890s, she had made the fatal error of becoming a matron. While her love for and devotion to Frank remianed steadfast, the demands of childrearing and Oak Park social life had left her, Frank reckoned, intellectually moribund" (Drennan 39). So what he wanted was a woman who was his intellectual equal, but also a muse and selfless helpmate. And, unbelievable though I frankly find it, Mamah Borthwick seems to have been exactly that. She was working on translating a Swedish feminist named Ellen Key in the last three years of her life, which gives us a clue about both her intellectual abilities and her philosophical position, but she also seems to have been perfectly content to abandon her own children and to let Wright install her at Taliesin, to be there whenever he wanted her but uncomplaining (as far as we know from Drennan) when he wasn't, even though her life cannot have been comfortable, given the reaction in Spring Green and surrounding communities to learning that Wright had built a house for his mistress in their midst.
Drennan analyzes what happened on the day of the murders (August 15, 1914) carefully and with an excellent eye for detail. It's odd that in every murder I've ever read about, there's always something that doesn't fit or can't be explained or doesn't seem to be possible. Either Julian Carlton was able to teleport, or he went without a pause from murdering Borthwick and her two children to serving soup to the six men who, in another moment, he would attempt to kill. He can't have followed the orthodox timeline of locking the six men in and setting the room on fire, then killing Borthwick and the children, then coming back to attack one of the men who had jumped out the window. As Drennan explains, the geography of Taliesin and the testimony of Herbert Fritz (one of the two survivors) make it physically impossible. But Drennan's alternate scenario requires, as he says, "a level of self-control in Carlton that is not so much inhuman as superhuman" (100). The facts we have can't be made into a story that makes sense. And yet it happened, whether we understand it or not. Seven people murdered and Taliesin burned (for the first time, but not the last).
Drennan is also very careful and thorough in his discussion of the murderer Julian Carlton, who had been hired as Taliesin's butler that summer. After he finished butchering his victims, he hid in the asbestos-lined furnace, and when he was discovered, he drank hydrochloric acid, presumably in the belief it would kill him quickly. It didn't. He lingered in miserable agony for seven and a half weeks before he died, unable either to breathe or eat through the acid-eaten tissues of his throat. Carlton did not explain his motive before his death, but Drennan makes some good speculations. What we know about him before he came to Taliesin tells us that he was paranoid and prone to fits of violent rage. His wife was terrified of him. He hated Taliesin (ironically, he and his wife had given their notice and August 15 was their last day of work), and he seems to have clashed more than once with the draftsmen who also lived at Taliesin. One of them called him a "black son of a bitch" three days before the murders (Carlton was of African or West Indian descent), and Carlton did tell the sheriff that in a later confrontation the same man struck him. Although Drennen doesn't quite go so far as to hypothesize explicitly that that man, Emil Brodelle, was Carlton's intended target and the rest of it--the murder of Borthwick and her children, the setting of the fire, the murder of the other draftsmen and workmen--was simply an effort not to leave any witnesses, he certainly lays all the pieces out for that speculation to be made. But whether it was that or something else, the crime was clearly disproportionate to the motive. John Cheney was 12; his sister Martha was 8. Whatever may have sparked Carlton's fury, there's no way to make their murders anything but psychotic rage.
The night after the murders, Frank Lloyd Wright buried Mamah Borthwick in the Unity Chapel cemetery. That sentence is literal. Although he had workmen dig her grave, he and he alone filled it in. He was buried next to her, according to his wishes, after his death in 1959. (He's not there any longer. When his third wife died in 1985, their daughter Iovanna had him exhumed, cremated, and interred with her mother's ashes in Arizona.)
But he refused to put a marker on her grave. "'All I had left to show for the strugle for freedom of the five years past that had swept most of my former life away, had now [itself] been swept away,' Wright said. 'Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?'" (Drennan 156). He claimed that Taliesin II was a "'memory temple' . . . dedicated to Mamah Borthwick" (Drennan 125), but it isn't. Mamah Borthwick is a footnote and Taliesin is a shrine to the glory of Frank Lloyd Wright. He considered her death only as it affected him--and his grief was sincere and devastating, no doubt about that--and apparently there was no one to protest. Both her children were dead (not buried with her, though they died with her--their father had them cremated at Graceland Cemetery), her ex-husband was starting a family with his new wife, and whether her parents and two sisters were still alive or not, they seem to have lodged no comment of any kind. Borthwick's existence separate from Wright had been entirely expunged.
As an epigraph to his last, brief chapter--the history of Wright's life after Borthwick--Drennan quotes Ken Burns, "At some point, you have to forgive Frank Lloyd Wright for his excesses, his ego, his sensitivities, his horrible relations with his kids, and realize, on balance, that here was an extraordinary contribution to human history" (Burns qtd. in Drennan 154), and I'm sorry, but no you don't. Being a genius does not excuse anyone from the responsibility of being a decent human being. I agree that Wright was a genius and his influence on American art and architecture enormous, and I certainly don't think that we should go raze his buildilngs and ban his work from museums and libraries because he was a irresponsible narcissist. (Drennan's discussion of the Wright buildings that have been torn down, particularly the Imperial Hotel and the Midway Gardens, makes me want to cry.) But that doesn't mean we have to forgive him. We have to see him clearly.
If the living don't remember the dead, who will?
It's not clear when or how Mamah Borthwick's grave got its current marker. We don't know who felt strongly enough about her excision from history to make that very material protest. (John Ottenheimer, the man who designed and forcibly donated the second stone, said that in his seventeen years of residence at Taliesin, he never heard anyone mention her name. So much for the memory temple.) But someone did. That person--like John Ottenheimer, who is worried that the first stone is going to become illegible in another decade or so--is (or was) fighting uphill to remember the dead. And I feel strongly and irrationally that they are doing the right thing.
I first learned of the terrible death of Mamah Borthwick because of the fuss over her gravestone. (And I swear I read an article about her original gravestone and the question of who placed it--certainly not FLW as one internet source claims: he would never have put her married name on it--but I can't find the dang thing.) I was intrigued, and thus pleased to come across Death in a Prairie House.
This is an excellent book. Drennan has a lovely prose style, he puts his narrative together cogently, and while he is sympathetic to his protagonists, he is dryly unimpressed with their rhetoric. And he has no illusions about Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was not a monster, but he was a narcissist of an exceptionally exalted degree. Anyone who can convince himself that in deserting his wife and six children he is actually doing what's best for them is a person with a gift.
It's difficult to get any sense of Mamah Borthwick herself, and I'm not entirely sure if that's because she left none of her own writing except her translations or if the black hole of Wright's ego drained all the individuality out of her--or if Drennan, for all his careful distance, got sucked in, too, and couldn't manage to see Borthwick around Wright. Or some combination thereof. But she is definitely an absence at the center of the book, seen only from Wright's solipsistic perspective. In talking about Wright's first marriage, Drennan quotes Wright's autobiography: "Frank had long dreamed of an ideal mate, some 'intimate fairy princess,' as he put it, a 'muse [and] selfless helpmate' who would unconditionally adore him . . . and spur him on to professional glory" (Drennan 27). His first wife failed by doing exactly what he asked of her: "Catherine bored him: no longer the golden girl of the 1890s, she had made the fatal error of becoming a matron. While her love for and devotion to Frank remianed steadfast, the demands of childrearing and Oak Park social life had left her, Frank reckoned, intellectually moribund" (Drennan 39). So what he wanted was a woman who was his intellectual equal, but also a muse and selfless helpmate. And, unbelievable though I frankly find it, Mamah Borthwick seems to have been exactly that. She was working on translating a Swedish feminist named Ellen Key in the last three years of her life, which gives us a clue about both her intellectual abilities and her philosophical position, but she also seems to have been perfectly content to abandon her own children and to let Wright install her at Taliesin, to be there whenever he wanted her but uncomplaining (as far as we know from Drennan) when he wasn't, even though her life cannot have been comfortable, given the reaction in Spring Green and surrounding communities to learning that Wright had built a house for his mistress in their midst.
Drennan analyzes what happened on the day of the murders (August 15, 1914) carefully and with an excellent eye for detail. It's odd that in every murder I've ever read about, there's always something that doesn't fit or can't be explained or doesn't seem to be possible. Either Julian Carlton was able to teleport, or he went without a pause from murdering Borthwick and her two children to serving soup to the six men who, in another moment, he would attempt to kill. He can't have followed the orthodox timeline of locking the six men in and setting the room on fire, then killing Borthwick and the children, then coming back to attack one of the men who had jumped out the window. As Drennan explains, the geography of Taliesin and the testimony of Herbert Fritz (one of the two survivors) make it physically impossible. But Drennan's alternate scenario requires, as he says, "a level of self-control in Carlton that is not so much inhuman as superhuman" (100). The facts we have can't be made into a story that makes sense. And yet it happened, whether we understand it or not. Seven people murdered and Taliesin burned (for the first time, but not the last).
Drennan is also very careful and thorough in his discussion of the murderer Julian Carlton, who had been hired as Taliesin's butler that summer. After he finished butchering his victims, he hid in the asbestos-lined furnace, and when he was discovered, he drank hydrochloric acid, presumably in the belief it would kill him quickly. It didn't. He lingered in miserable agony for seven and a half weeks before he died, unable either to breathe or eat through the acid-eaten tissues of his throat. Carlton did not explain his motive before his death, but Drennan makes some good speculations. What we know about him before he came to Taliesin tells us that he was paranoid and prone to fits of violent rage. His wife was terrified of him. He hated Taliesin (ironically, he and his wife had given their notice and August 15 was their last day of work), and he seems to have clashed more than once with the draftsmen who also lived at Taliesin. One of them called him a "black son of a bitch" three days before the murders (Carlton was of African or West Indian descent), and Carlton did tell the sheriff that in a later confrontation the same man struck him. Although Drennen doesn't quite go so far as to hypothesize explicitly that that man, Emil Brodelle, was Carlton's intended target and the rest of it--the murder of Borthwick and her children, the setting of the fire, the murder of the other draftsmen and workmen--was simply an effort not to leave any witnesses, he certainly lays all the pieces out for that speculation to be made. But whether it was that or something else, the crime was clearly disproportionate to the motive. John Cheney was 12; his sister Martha was 8. Whatever may have sparked Carlton's fury, there's no way to make their murders anything but psychotic rage.
The night after the murders, Frank Lloyd Wright buried Mamah Borthwick in the Unity Chapel cemetery. That sentence is literal. Although he had workmen dig her grave, he and he alone filled it in. He was buried next to her, according to his wishes, after his death in 1959. (He's not there any longer. When his third wife died in 1985, their daughter Iovanna had him exhumed, cremated, and interred with her mother's ashes in Arizona.)
But he refused to put a marker on her grave. "'All I had left to show for the strugle for freedom of the five years past that had swept most of my former life away, had now [itself] been swept away,' Wright said. 'Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?'" (Drennan 156). He claimed that Taliesin II was a "'memory temple' . . . dedicated to Mamah Borthwick" (Drennan 125), but it isn't. Mamah Borthwick is a footnote and Taliesin is a shrine to the glory of Frank Lloyd Wright. He considered her death only as it affected him--and his grief was sincere and devastating, no doubt about that--and apparently there was no one to protest. Both her children were dead (not buried with her, though they died with her--their father had them cremated at Graceland Cemetery), her ex-husband was starting a family with his new wife, and whether her parents and two sisters were still alive or not, they seem to have lodged no comment of any kind. Borthwick's existence separate from Wright had been entirely expunged.
As an epigraph to his last, brief chapter--the history of Wright's life after Borthwick--Drennan quotes Ken Burns, "At some point, you have to forgive Frank Lloyd Wright for his excesses, his ego, his sensitivities, his horrible relations with his kids, and realize, on balance, that here was an extraordinary contribution to human history" (Burns qtd. in Drennan 154), and I'm sorry, but no you don't. Being a genius does not excuse anyone from the responsibility of being a decent human being. I agree that Wright was a genius and his influence on American art and architecture enormous, and I certainly don't think that we should go raze his buildilngs and ban his work from museums and libraries because he was a irresponsible narcissist. (Drennan's discussion of the Wright buildings that have been torn down, particularly the Imperial Hotel and the Midway Gardens, makes me want to cry.) But that doesn't mean we have to forgive him. We have to see him clearly.
If the living don't remember the dead, who will?
It's not clear when or how Mamah Borthwick's grave got its current marker. We don't know who felt strongly enough about her excision from history to make that very material protest. (John Ottenheimer, the man who designed and forcibly donated the second stone, said that in his seventeen years of residence at Taliesin, he never heard anyone mention her name. So much for the memory temple.) But someone did. That person--like John Ottenheimer, who is worried that the first stone is going to become illegible in another decade or so--is (or was) fighting uphill to remember the dead. And I feel strongly and irrationally that they are doing the right thing.
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